People claim its an easy pivot all the time but these sorts of industries just do not seem to overlap, and these companies today seem to have zero interest making a go at this sector. There is no tesla articulated bus or a ford articulated bus. Maybe driverless busses will happen, but will it be waymo or anyone available on the market today? I doubt it. I would think it would be whoever makes an articulated bus today licensing that tech from whoever based on the fact that no one in the car market cares to bother with the articulated bus market today.

Whether it’s the specific car companies that exist now is sort of uninteresting to me, I guess. Once AVs are deployed, the whole sector becomes way less risky because there is an example of a successful business model, and more funding can be attracted by various parties to support more AV development, both by startups and governments.

Either way, the exact vendor of the vehicle is a matter of trivia to the AV company, since the majority of the hard work goes into the software. Private companies have been servicing government contracts for decades, so I think it would happen if a government wanted it to.