Autonomous driving has reached the point where the question is no longer whether the technology can work. The harder question is whether it can work safely, reliably, and affordably—in real cities, with real passengers, on real ride-hailing networks. That is the frontier Laura Major is working to cross. As President and CEO of Motional, Major is leading one of the most difficult transitions in mobility: moving Level 4 autonomous vehicles from development programs into commercial operation. Her career has been built around human-autonomy interaction and advanced autonomous systems across space, air, ground, and sea. At Motional, that experience now converges on one mission: turning autonomous-driving technology into a system passengers, cities, communities, and ride-hailing partners can trust. From her perspective, autonomy is not finished when it works in controlled environments. It is finished when it performs safely and predictably on public roads. Laura Major’s career has been defined by one central question: how humans and autonomous systems learn to work together. That focus began at Georgia Tech and MIT, where she earned a Master of Science degree, and continued at Draper Laboratory, where she led teams developing advanced autonomous solutions across space, air, ground, and sea. The work was never confined to one type of machine. Major helped develop new capabilities for special operators conducting advanced battlefield missions. She later became CTO of Aria Insights, where she worked on unmanned aerial vehicles for indoor inspection. Her path then led to Aptiv, where she took on the CTO role and helped form the joint venture that established Motional. At Motional, she continued as CTO, leading the delivery of the company’s first-generation autonomous-driving system. After five years in that role—and after delivering Motional’s second-generation autonomous system and integrating it with Hyundai Motor Group for the IONIQ 5 robotaxi, including pilot deployments with