What if fatal robotaxi crashes trigger a fleet-wide grounding?
A fatal robotaxi recall freezes AV capex sentiment — short the AV-levered silicon (NVDA auto/DRIVE, MBLY) and broaden to a modest AI-capex sentiment fade, but this is a sector event, not a market event. The Uber Tempe fatality (Mar-2018) is the analogue: it grounded Uber's program and chilled AV funding for a year without a broad tape impact. The crypto/Nasdaq legs here overstate spillover; keep the trade contained to autonomy names and their suppliers.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A software fault causes multiple fatal robotaxi crashes, triggering a fleet grounding and autonomous-vehicle investment freeze. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.