The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Friday proposed a new national framework that could make it easier for companies to deploy at scale autonomous vehicles without traditional manual driving controls — like steering wheels, pedals, and sideview mirrors. The guidelines also require AV companies to share a whole lot more safety data with […]
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Tesla is evaluating multiple Texas cities where it wants to test a long-promised robotaxi service, including Austin, according to emails obtained by Bloomberg News. An employee has apparently been in touch with Austin officials since May, and recently held an event in December to “train first responders on how to best work with Tesla’s autonomous […]
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Waymo will begin testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Tokyo in early 2025, the first time the Alphabet company’s robotaxis have driven on public roads outside the U.S. The move to Japan is part of Waymo’s “road trips,” a development program that involves bringing its technology to a variety of cities and testing it — […]
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Roundabouts. They trapped Clark Griswold in “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” and now they’ve tripped up a Waymo robotaxi. A video is circulating on social media showing a Waymo robotaxi going round and round on a roundabout — as if it is stuck in a loop. A Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch there were no passengers onboard […]
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Tesla's executive exodus is showing no signs of slowing down.
Zheng Gao, Tesla's director of engineering for Autopilot hardware and an eight-year veteran at the Elon Musk-run automaker is departing for rival robotaxi builder Zoox, the Amazon-backed company announced on Wednesday.
Gao, who led hardware design for Tesla's Autopilot assisted-driving system, is the latest senior employee to leave the company.
Four of CEO Elon Musk's direct reports previously announced their departures the week before Musk unveiled Tesla's Cybercab robotaxi in a glitzy Los Angeles event.
Those departures included Tesla's global vehicle automation and safety policy lead, Marc Van Impe, and Chief Information Officer Nagesh Saldi.
Musk has lost at least eight of his direct reports at the company this year.
The billionaire has radically overhauled Tesla in 2024, cutting more than 10% of its global workforce in April.
Senior Vice President Drew Baglino and Rebecca Tinucci, the head of Tesla's supercharging division, left around the time of those layoffs.
The departures have come as Musk increasingly pivots the company toward autonomous vehicles.
The Tesla chief has said the automaker hopes to have fully self-driving vehicles on the road in California and Texas next year, and is planning to begin mass producing the self-driving Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals, by 2027.
Experts have warned that Tesla faces an uphill struggle to make Musk's robotaxi dreams a reality, and the company faces competition from fellow robotaxi firms Waymo and Zoox.
Google-backed Waymo says its fleet of driverless Jaguar I-Paces is now doing 150,000 paid rides a week. At the same time, Zoox, which was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2020, has begun rolling out its toaster-shaped robotaxi in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment, sent outside normal US working hours.
Do you work at Tesla or have any information to share? Get in touch with this reporter via email at [email protected].
Honda Motor Co. will stop funding a joint venture with General Motors and Cruise to launch a robotaxi service in Japan, now that GM has pulled the plug on Cruise and its commercial robotaxi ambitions, reports The Nikkei. GM said Tuesday it would cease funding Cruise and instead absorb the company and combine it with […]
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General Motors has a patent that outlines a detection system for robotaxis that can respond to "adversarial behavior" or "bullying" from pedestrians.
The patent, which was published in November by the US Patent and Trademark Office, shows how a robotaxi could asses the threat level from a pedestrian and respond accordingly.
A spokesperson for GM did not respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.
According to the patent, the detection system involves an "adversarial intent algorithm" that determines whether a pedestrian presents a risk to the autonomous vehicle.
Depending on the level of the risk, the robotaxi could resort to several actions, including "visual and auditory warnings" to the offending pedestrian or finding a different route, the patent said. The system could also alert authorities, the patent said.
The filing is an apparent response to a recurring issue for robotaxi companies operating in busy urban areas such as San Francisco or Phoenix.
In recent years, videos of robotaxis owned by GM's Cruise or Alphabet's Waymo have surfaced online, showing pedestrians taking a hammer to the autonomous vehicles or setting one on fire.
In June, over a dozen Waymos had their tires slashed by a 36-year-old woman, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office said.
"With the introduction of automated driving vehicles, adversarial behaviors by pedestrians and other vulnerable road users toward autonomous vehicles is becoming an issue, particularly in urban environments," GM's patent said. "Adversarial behaviors, often in the form of bullying, come from both pedestrians and other road users."
Waymo has a similar system in which the vehicle can warn a pedestrian, emit a siren, or take evasive maneuvers, such as finding a different route.
GM's Cruise faced a major roadblock last year. It suspended its operations nationwide after California regulators deemed the vehicles dangerous to public safety and revoked Cruise's license. The move came after a pedestrian was dragged underneath a Cruise robotaxi in 2023.
The company said in June that it will restart testing operations in Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix.
Meanwhile, Waymo has opened its service to the public in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, providing over 100,000 paid rides a week as of October, the company said.
The Alphabet-owned company said it plans to expand its service to the public in Miami by 2026.
Waymo is partnering with Moove, an African mobility fintech that offers vehicle financing to gig workers, to handle fleet management operations for its robotaxi service in Phoenix and, soon, Miami. The partnership marks several firsts. It will signal Waymo’s entry into Miami. And it’s also the first time Moove will enter the U.S. market and […]
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As Tesla gears up to launch a robotaxi service in the coming years, the automaker looks like it’s building out a teleoperations team. According to a recent job listing, Tesla is hiring a software engineer to help develop a teleoperations system that will allow human operators to remotely access and control the company’s upcoming robotaxis […]
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Pete Davidson? Kanye West? Step aside. Kim Kardashian’s new beaux is a Tesla bot named Optimus. The fashion mogul got some hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal, humanoid robot, which is not yet available to the general public. In Kardashian’s videos with the robot — posted to X and her Instagram story — she prompts Optimus […]
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