Elon Musk did not make it to Tel Aviv, but he still opened one of Israel’s most visible mobility events of the year. Tesla’s CEO appeared by video call at the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit 2026 after Transportation Minister Miri Regev said the security situation prevented him from coming to Israel. Musk spoke from Austin, Texas, where he said it was around 2:30 a.m., and took questions on autonomous driving (AD), artificial intelligence, and Tesla’s vision for the future of transportation.

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His appearance gave the summit an immediate global name, but the spotlight in Tel Aviv was less about celebrity than about the difficult work behind smart mobility: getting autonomous systems, drones, air taxis, safety software, and new transit ideas out of pilot mode and into public use.

The most direct moment for the Israeli audience came when Musk turned to the country’s technology sector in a moment of appreciation: “I have to say, you know, I’m a huge admirer of the innovation coming out of Israel,” he said.

“Honestly, I think objectively true that Israel punches far above its weight for population. I think probably number one, honestly, in the world,” adding, “My hat is off to Israel for just how much incredible innovation. I say innovation per capita. Israel must be number one by far in the world.”

Asked about Tesla’s approach to self-driving technology, Musk said the company was making “steady progress” toward making AD widely available, relying on “AI and cameras” rather than radar or light detection and ranging (LiDAR), a technology that uses laser pulses to measure distances and create precise 3D maps of objects, terrain, or spaces. “It’s really trying to drive the car in the same way that a human drives the car,” he said.

The summit’s broader focus, however, was not Musk himself, but the point at which smart mobility stops being a promise and starts becoming infrastructure. The exhibition floor moved quickly from one version of the future to another: autonomous sensors, drone companies, air taxi models, road-safety systems, and urban transit proposals. Some technologies were already looking for customers. Others still depended on regulation, infrastructure, or public trust before they could move beyond the demonstration stage.

That was the real tension inside the summit. Smart mobility was everywhere, but deployment remained the hard part. Regev used her address to connect that challenge to Israel’s national transportation agenda, including infrastructure, security, and the effort to move more people out of private cars and into public transport.

Speaking in Hebrew, she said Israel’s current situation had not stopped the country from investing in future transportation systems. “The State of Israel, despite the complex period we are in, continues to think ahead, invest in infrastructure, and develop the next generation of startups and technologies,” Regev said. She pointed to Israeli-developed companies that have already changed global mobility, saying that “millions of drivers around the world use Waze every day,” that “millions of public transport users use Moovit,” and that Mobileye’s technologies, “born in Jerusalem, save lives on roads around the world and advance the autonomous driving revolution.”

Speaking with The Media Line after her remarks, Regev said Israel’s transportation and technology sector now faces two major challenges: security, especially the threat posed by low-altitude aerial systems, and traffic management in a dense country with limited land and rising private vehicle ownership. “The biggest at the moment is the security challenge of low-altitude aerial systems,” she said. “We saw them in the Russia-Ukraine war, and we also see them today in Lebanon.”

On congestion, Regev said, “Our goal is to move people from private cars to public transportation,” adding that for that to happen, public transportation must be fast, efficient, and accessible.

That transition from private cars to connected public systems was one of the summit’s clearest through lines. Regev said transportation affects the cost of living, access to the periphery, employment, education, and basic services, and described the ministry’s policy as built around “Connecting Israel.” Her message was that transportation policy can no longer be separated from technology. Roads and railways are still part of the story, but so are data systems, connected vehicles, autonomous platforms, and the regulation needed to let them operate outside a controlled pilot.

On the exhibition floor, those issues took different forms depending on the technology. For some companies, the challenge was sensor reliability. For others, it was airspace, urban design, or immediate vehicle safety.

That question was especially clear at the Innoviz booth. Anna Michlin, VP of product management at the Israeli LiDAR company, said autonomous mobility depends on perception systems that can work when road conditions are far from ideal. Innoviz is working with Volkswagen Group and Mobileye on the ID. Buzz autonomous shared mobility project, and with Daimler Truck on autonomous trucking.

Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz AD autonomous shared mobility project uses fully electric vans designed to drive themselves without a human actively controlling the vehicle in most urban situations, as part of planned ride-pooling and ride-hailing services in cities including Hamburg, Berlin, Oslo, and Los Angeles.

Michlin told The Media Line that the path to safer autonomous systems depends on combining different sensors rather than relying on a single approach. “In order to enable safe autonomous mobility, you need to have an ecosystem of sensors that can have reliable sensing in all conditions,” she said. “This is why cameras, radars, and LiDAR together, when combined, can elevate the safety of the transportation.”

She said the point is not that one sensor solves everything. Cameras, radar, and LiDAR each see the road differently. Cameras depend on light; LiDAR creates its own illumination; radar, based on radio waves, has important advantages but lower resolution. “They can see larger objects, but not the very small ones,” she said. For Michlin, Israel’s role is not only to produce individual technologies but to accelerate the wider automotive ecosystem through engineering talent, academic expertise, and the startup model that has shaped much of the country’s high-tech sector.

The summit also looked above the road, toward drones, aerial logistics, and air taxis. Ghil Harly, VP business development at Cando Group, said the drone industry is real and advancing, but warned against pretending that urban skies are already full of commercial drones. “I always tell my friends, it’s a big hype, right? Because everybody’s talking about drones and what’s happening with drones,” Harly told The Media Line. “But to be fair, let’s be honest, if you look outside of your window, and I dare every one of the viewers to do so, you won’t see a lot of drones in the air.”

Still, he insisted the technology is not a bubble. “Will our kids see? Of course,” he said. “It’s here, and it’s here to stay. And it’s advancing. However, it’s still something that is in the works, and it will take time.” Harly said the most visible large-scale use of drones today remains military, particularly for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, but Cando is trying to show how the same platform can serve civilian life.

Harly said that municipalities have pushed the technology into uses beyond homeland security and public order, including event monitoring, crowd counting, construction site supervision, safety, traffic mapping, and agricultural analytics. “Your customer teaches you the use that you didn’t even think of,” he said. “It started by counting people, identifying changes, supervising construction sites, safety. It’s a world that never ends.”

Maxim Levy, COO of Dronery, brought that idea into the logistics space. Standing beside an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, Levy described Dronery as a service company for aerial logistics and aerial transportation, focused on autonomous operations. “We give services here in Israel for logistic operations, like delivering medical equipment and medicines between hospitals and between clinics and other complex missions that drones can give the extra advantage that maybe a vehicle will not give it,” he told The Media Line.

The aircraft displayed at the summit, he said, had already flown in Israel several times, including in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Caesarea, though not yet with passengers. “We didn’t fly it with people yet, but we are in the process of that,” he said. Levy said the aircraft takes off and lands vertically, requires less space than a regular airplane, and includes redundancy systems such as 16 motors and three flight computers.

He estimated that commercial operation in Israel could be possible within several years, but tied that timeline to security conditions and airspace restrictions. “I think that in three or four years we will see them already operating commercially here in Israel,” he said. “In other countries in the world, this specific aircraft already operates as a commercial service, but I think when we still have this war here, and we have a lot of restrictions that are concerning the navigation and the communication in the air, it’s still a little bit dangerous.”

If drones and air taxis raised questions about the skies, other speakers pushed the conversation back to the structure of cities themselves.

Saul Singer, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Line Mobility and co-author of best-sellers Start-Up Nation and The Genius of Israel, argued that the mobility debate should not be reduced to whether cars become smarter or more autonomous. Singer told The Media Line that the deeper problem is that cities remain organized around cars, and that existing approaches have not solved congestion. “Our cities are car-centric,” he said. “They’re full of traffic, and it’s just getting worse.”

His company is developing elevated, autonomous mass transit systems designed to move on a dedicated track above street level, with the goal of creating a transportation alternative that is faster than cars while freeing ground space for public life. “You need to be fast, non-stop,” Singer said. “You need your own right-of-way, which is elevated. And you need to be autonomous, and it has to be a mass transit system.”

For Singer, the purpose of lifting transportation above the street is not only efficiency, but a different idea of urban design. “When transportation’s in the air, so people can have the ground,” he said. “More bike paths, more trees, more space for people. That’s the dream, to have people-centric cities, not car-centric cities.” Singer said he hoped Israel would be among the first places to pilot the system, though he added, “We’ll see.”

Other companies focused not on long-term urban transformation, but on immediate safety problems inside the car itself.

Adam Tannenbaum, co-founder of TAKY Tech, presented a system designed to prevent children from dying or suffering severe injury after being left or trapped inside overheated vehicles. He told The Media Line that the company’s Athena product uses sensor fusion from systems already built into vehicles, combined with what he called “escalation decision resolution.” If the vehicle becomes dangerously hot, the system can turn on the air conditioning, open a window slightly, and activate the lights.

If the driver does not respond, the system escalates by contacting the driver and then additional preselected contacts. “Ten seconds or so later, we call the driver, and maybe the driver cannot respond,” he said. “He can’t pick up the call. We call five more people that they’ve selected.”

Tannenbaum noted that the issue goes beyond kids being left in cars in the morning. He said that about 20% of children who die from heatstroke in vehicles enter the car later in the day on their own, often while playing games like hide-and-seek, and that his company is also addressing this scenario. He said the company has spoken with major automotive suppliers and sees a path toward deployment through software, including in vehicles already on the road if the necessary hardware exists.

The summit did not offer one clear picture of the future. It offered several. For Innoviz, the future begins with safer perception systems. For Cando and Dronery, it moves into the air. For Line Mobility, it requires taking transit above the street to free up space for people on the ground. For TAKY Tech, it starts with using technology to prevent children from dying in vehicles.

That mix was the real story of the summit. Smart mobility is no longer one field with a single timeline. Some technologies are close to deployment. Others still need regulation, infrastructure, public trust, or calmer skies. In Israel, the issues are sharpened by the war, which has made airspace, security, and infrastructure part of the same conversation.

Musk gave the summit its most visible international moment, and his praise for Israeli innovation carried obvious weight in the room. But the future of smart mobility will be tested far beyond the stage: in licensing offices, city halls, road trials, emergency services, investment meetings, and the daily choices of passengers who will decide whether these systems are useful and enticing enough to trust.