2026 Will Be Breakout Year For Autonomous Driving And Humanoid Robots; Deutsche Bank
In a note out this week, analysts from Deutsche Bank led by Edison Yu said the global auto and mobility industry is entering a pivotal transition year, with 2026 shaping up as a major inflection point for both autonomous driving and humanoid robotics following the CES technology conference in Las Vegas.
“We attended CES in Las Vegas last week and sensed a meaningful surge in enthusiasm and relevance,” the analysts wrote. “Vehicle autonomy (robotaxi + consumer L4), and most notably, humanoids took center stage at the show, illustrating the spread of AI to the physical world.”
They said they expect self-driving vehicles to move beyond pilot programs and into full-scale commercial deployment, while humanoid robots transition from research labs into early real-world use. “Overall, we predict 2026 is a year where self-driving cars increasingly transition from testing/validation to scaling, and humanoids move from lab experiments to small deployments.”
The analysts highlighted the emergence of a new humanoid robotics supply chain, with traditional automotive suppliers repositioning themselves to serve what could become a massive new market. “While early innings, we see suppliers trying to pivot toward the humanoid supply chain in hopes of enabling large volumes in the future.”
Nvidia continues to dominate the computing backbone of this ecosystem. “Nvidia continues to be the dominant onboard processor seemingly due to performance and ease-of-use,” the team wrote, noting that most major humanoid developers are relying on Nvidia’s Jetson Orin and Thor platforms.
They also described a major shift in how robots are trained, away from rigid programming toward systems capable of reasoning through complex tasks. “There is a concerted move away from ‘pre-programmed’ or ‘scripted’ actions toward vision-language-action (VLA) where the robot ‘reasons’ its way through a variety of tasks.”
Commercial deployment of humanoids is initially focused on narrow, task-specific roles. “In the near term, we think the ‘general purpose’ humanoid is mostly being funneled into specific use cases to prove commercial viability before truly going into the home,” the analysts said.
Cost reduction will be driven by scale. “Increasing volume to improve overhead absorption was cited as the main cost driver,” the report noted, adding that one company on the tour has already reduced unit costs from $200,000 to $100,000, with a roadmap toward $50,000 as volumes rise.
On autonomous driving, the analysts said robotaxi programs are now entering a new phase of momentum. “With Tesla launching Robotaxi in 2025, we expect further commercial momentum from multiple players in 2026,” they wrote, citing expansion efforts by Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, and partnerships involving Mobileye, Volkswagen, Uber and others.
They also pointed to Nvidia’s new autonomous driving platform as potentially transformative. Nvidia is “attempting to make it easier for automakers to deploy high level capabilities at scale” by providing both the “brain” and the “skull” of autonomous systems, reducing the need for automakers to build full AI stacks from scratch.
Among suppliers, the team said companies such as Aptiv and Visteon are entering critical execution years as they roll out next-generation AI-powered vehicle systems. In the case of Visteon, the company is “effectively democratizing the software-defined vehicle,” extending advanced computing and connectivity features into lower-cost vehicles and emerging markets.
Taken together, the analysts concluded that CES 2026 marked a turning point for the industry, with artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving shifting decisively from experimentation into early commercialization.