“Just started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car,” Elon Musk wrote on X last Thursday. That post embedded a second post from the Tesla enthusiast account @TSLA99T saying “I am in a robotaxi without safety monitor,” with a video showing the interior of a Tesla stopped at a red light. No one was in the driver’s seat, and the video was taken from the back seat. The video seemed to prove that what Elon Musk was saying was true: Tesla robotaxis are truly driverless now, like Waymo rides.
Tesla’s vice president of Software, Ashok Elluswamy, also posted on January 22 that Tesla was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors.”
Since that day, small fish Tesla fans have posted on X about hoping to find unsupervised Tesla robotaxis. And it’s possible unsupervised rides for paying customers are happening anonymously, but it looks more like the company is providing preview rides to extremely loyal Tesla influencers, and perhaps only with a human-driven Tesla right behind the robotaxi every step of the way.
For instance, since unsupervised rides were announced, Tesla influencer David Moss, notable for claiming (with some actual evidence) that he took a coast-to-coast trip in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, has been hard at work trying to find one.
42 Tesla Robotaxi Rides 42 L’s 1 goal of finding an unsupervised Model Y
It’s tough to get a ride on the app & every ride I take one I see legitimately 4-5 cars mapping the area that could be on the app
According to an X post on Tuesday—five days after Musk’s announcement—Moss had taken 42 Tesla robotaxi rides, which is more than eight per day, and all of them had supervisors not just up front, but behind the wheel. Tesla moved these handlers from the passenger seat to the driver seat back in September.
It’s not clear if TSLA99T was claiming to have received an unsupervised Tesla robotaxi ride as a paying customer. On the same day as TSLA99T’s ride, Joe Tegtmeyer—a noted Tesla super-obsessive—also rode in one of these “unsupervised” Teslas, but revealed that it was actually supervised by a chase car. This would certainly be an unwieldy way to run an app-based robotaxi operation.
According to Electrek (who first reported on this story) Tesla stock climbed 4% on the news of unsupervised robotaxis. Some headlines have seemingly also taken the bait, giving the impression that truly driverless rides are available to the public.
But, as Gizmodo wrote the day after Musk’s announcement, it appears that the rare “chase car” version of a theoretically unsupervised robotaxi may be the only version of an unsupervised Tesla robotaxi currently on the road, but paying customers can’t even seem to access those anyway.
As of this writing on Wednesday night, Moss was claiming to have unsuccessfully taken 54 robotaxi rides in pursuit of one unsupervised one.
54 was not my magic number as I had to get one more ride in a Tesla Robotaxi before bed lol pic.twitter.com/rgEMIXRbig
On the Tesla earnings call that happened while Moss was still on his quest, Elon Musk mentioned unsupervised driving, saying testing is occurring in multiple cities, and that he and his company are “actually just being paranoid about safety.”
Gizmodo reached out to Tesla for information about whether or not any unsupervised rides have been given to paying customers, and whether or not any such rides involved a chase car. We will update if we hear back.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!
It’s been a minute, folks! As you might recall, the newsletter took a little holiday break. We’re back and well into 2026. And a lot has happened since the last edition.
I spent the first week of the year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while I wrote about this last January, it’s worth repeating: U.S. automakers have left the building.
What has filled the void in the Las Vegas Convention Center? Autonomous vehicle tech companies (Zoox, Tensor Auto, Tier IV, and Waymo, which rebranded its Zeekr RT, to name a few), Chinese automakers like Geely and GWM, software and automotive chip companies, and loads of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls “physical AI.”
The term, which is sometimes called “embodied AI,” describes the use of AI outside the digital world and into the real, physics-based one. AI models, combined with sensors, cameras, and the motorized controls, allow that physical thing — humanoid robot, drone, autonomous forklift, robotaxi — to detect and understand what’s in this real environment and make decisions to operate within it. And it was all over the place from agriculture and robotics to autonomous vehicles and drones, industrial manufacturing, and wearables.
Hyundai had one of the busiest and largest exhibits with a near-constant line wrapped around the entrance. The Korean automaker wasn’t showing cars. Nope, it was robots of various forms, including the Atlas humanoid robot, courtesy of its subsidiary Boston Dynamics. There were also innovations that have come out of Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB, including a robot that charges electric autonomous vehicles, and a four-wheel electric platform called the Mobile Eccentric Droid (MobEd) that is going into production this year. It seems everyone was embracing and showcasing robotics, particularly humanoids.
The hype around humanoids, specifically, and physical AI, in general, was palpable. I asked Mobileye co-founder and president Amnon Shashua about this because his company just bought his humanoid robotics startup for $900 million: “What do you say when people tell you humanoid robots are all hype?”
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“The internet was also a hype, remember in 2000, the crisis of the internet,” Shashua said. “It did not mean that [the] internet is not a real thing. Hype means that companies are overvalued for a certain period of time, and then they crash. It does not mean that the domain is not real. I believe that the domain of humanoids is real.”
President Trump made comments this week at a Detroit Economic Club meeting about welcoming Chinese automakers into the United States that did not sit well with many in the auto industry, according to insiders I have spoken to. Specifically, I have been told the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (the industry lobbying group) is “freaking out,” one DC insider told me.
“If they want to come in and build a plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that’s great, I love that,” Trump said, according to reporters in attendance. “Let China come in, let Japan come in.”
A couple of notes. Japanese companies like Toyota are already very much in the United States. The bigger hurdle, beyond protests from within the boardrooms of U.S. automakers, is existing law. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued a rule that restricts the import and sale of certain connected vehicles and related hardware and software linked to China or Russia. This essentially bans the sale of Chinese vehicles in the country.
Avery Ash, who is CEO of SAFE, a nonpartisan organization focused on securing U.S. energy, critical materials, and supply chains, weighed in about the dangers of allowing Chinese automakers to sell their vehicles in the United States. Side note: Ash was on my podcast, the Autonocast, which touches on some of this subject.
“Welcoming Chinese automakers to build cars here in the U.S. will reverse these hard-won accomplishments and put Americans at risk,” he said. ”We’ve seen this strategy backfire in Europe and elsewhere — it would have potentially catastrophic impacts on our automotive industry, have ripple effects on our entire defense industrial base, and make every American less secure.”
Meanwhile, Canada is opening the door to Chinese automakers. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced his country will slash its 100% import tax on Chinese EVs to just 6.1%, Sean O’Kane reports.
Dealerware, which sells software services to automotive OEMs and retailers, was acquired by a group of investors led by Wavecrest Growth Partners and Radian Capital. Automotive Ventures and automotive industry executives David Metter and Devin Daly also participated. The terms were not disclosed.
Long-distance bus and train provider Flixacquired the majority share of European airport transfer-platform Flibco. Luxembourg company SLG will retain some ownership stake in Flibco. Terms weren’t disclosed.
JetZero, the Long Beach, California, startup developing a midsized triangular aircraft designed to save on fuel, raised $175 million in a Series B round led by B Capital, Bloomberg reported.
Joby Aviation, a company developing electric air taxis, reached an agreement to buy a 700,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Dayton, Ohio, to support its plans to double production to four aircraft per month in 2027.
Luminar has reached a deal to sell its lidar business to a company called Quantum Computing Inc. for just $22 million. If that seems low, you’re right. Luminar’s valuation peaked in 2021 at $11 billion.
The Federal Trade Commission finalized an order that bans General Motors and its OnStar telematics service from sharing certain consumer data with consumer reporting agencies. Read the full story on what that means.
InDrive, the company that started as a ride-hailing platform that lets users set the price, is diversifying and starting to execute on its “super app” strategy. That means more in-app advertising across its top 20 markets and expanding grocery delivery to Pakistan. Read the full story here.
Motional, the majority Hyundai-owned autonomous vehicle company, has rebooted. When Motional paused its operations last year, I wasn’t sure it was going to survive. Other AV companies with big backers have seen their funding disappear in a blink, so it was certainly plausible. But the company is here and with a new AI-first approach. Before you roll your eyes at that term, take a read of my article, which includes a demo ride and an interview with CEO Laura Major. Then feel free to hit my inbox with your thoughts.
New York governor Kathy Hochul plans to introduce legislation that would effectively legalize robotaxis in the state with the exception of New York City. No details on this yet; I’ve been told it will all be revealed in her executive budget proposal next week. What we do know is the proposal is designed to expand the state’s existing AV pilot program to allow for “the limited deployment of commercial for-hire autonomous passenger vehicles outside New York City.” My article delves deeper into what she shared and gives an update on Waymo’s NYC permit.
Tesla is ditching the one-time fee option for its Full Self-driving (Supervised) software and will now sell access to the feature through a monthly subscription.
On-demand drone delivery company Wing is bringing its service to another 150 Walmart stores as part of an expanded partnership with the retailer.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul plans to introduce legislation that would effectively legalize robotaxis in the state — except for its most populous metropolis: New York City.
Hochul, who made the comments Tuesday during her State of the State address, said the legislation would advance the next phase of the state’s autonomous vehicle pilot program.
Details on the proposed legislation and when it might be released are thin. However, there are some hints contained within a document that outlines an array of proposals and promises Hochul made in her State of the State address.
Among them is language to expand the state’s existing AV pilot program to allow for “the limited deployment of commercial for-hire autonomous passenger vehicles outside New York City.”
The document goes on to say companies that want to operate robotaxi services commercially will have to submit applications that “demonstrate local support for AV deployment and adherence to the highest possible safety standards.”
It’s not clear what “limited deployment” or “highest possible safety standards” mean. Nor does the document outline how the state will track or make judgments on a company’s safety record, except that multiple agencies will be involved, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Transportation, and New York State Police.
The governor’s office told TechCrunch more will be shared in the governor’s executive budget proposal that is set to be released on January 20.
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Still, the remarks were enough of an opening to make Alphabet-owned Waymo cheer.
“Governor Hochul’s proposal to legalize fully autonomous vehicles is a transformative moment for New York’s transportation system,” Justin Kintz, Waymo’s head of global public policy, said in an emailed statement.
“With the Governor’s leadership, New York has the opportunity to pair its investments in slower speeds, better traffic enforcement, and first-in-the-nation congestion management strategies with Waymo’s demonstrably safe technology, creating a future where living in New York is safer, easier, and more accessible. We’re ready to work with leaders around the state to make this future a reality, and bring new infrastructure, career opportunities, and investment to the Empire State,” said Kintz.
Waymo and other companies have tried for years to enter New York state with limited success. Current New York state law mandates that drivers keep one hand on the wheel at all times. That poses a problem for robotaxi operators like Waymo since no human is behind the wheel — if there is a steering wheel at all.
The state’s AV pilot program has provided an exemption to that rule, theoretically allowing companies to develop and test autonomous vehicles in the state.
Still, there are significant hurdles, particularly in New York City. Last August, city regulators granted a permit to Waymo to test its robotaxis in the densely populated city. Under that permit, Waymo can deploy up to eight of its Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn with a human safety operator behind the wheel. A Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch that the permit has been extended until March 31.
Even with the permit, Waymo can’t carry passengers or operate a commercial robotaxi service without getting separate licenses from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.
And while legislation was introduced last year to create a framework for driverless operation, it has languished in the state Senate’s transportation committee. The governor’s proposal could help loosen that bottleneck.
Waymo is shipping a software update to help its robotaxis navigate disabled traffic lights during power outages “more decisively,” the company said Tuesday in a blog post that explains why its self-driving vehicles got stuck at intersections during a blackout in San Francisco this past weekend.
Waymo said the self-driving system in its robotaxis treats dead stop lights as four-way stops, just like humans are supposed to. That should have allowed the robotaxis to operate normally in spite of the massive outage.
Instead, many of the vehicles requested a “confirmation check” from Waymo’s fleet response team to make sure what they were doing was correct. All Waymo robotaxis have the ability to make these confirmation checks. With such a widespread outage on Saturday, there was a “concentrated spike” in these confirmation requests, Waymo said, which helped create all the congestion caught on video.
Waymo said it built this confirmation request system “out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment” but that it is now refining it to “match our current scale.”
“While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the [self-driving software] with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively,” the company wrote.
The software update will add “even more context about regional outages” to the company’s self-driving software. Waymo also said it will improve its emergency response protocols by “incorporating lessons from this event.”
While a lot of focus has been placed on the instances where Waymo’s robotaxis got stuck during the power outage, the company shared that its vehicles “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday.”
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“Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology,” the company wrote.
Saturday’s mess is the latest example of how Waymo is still uncovering unforeseen issues with its software and its approach to designing a reliable fleet of self-driving vehicles. The company already had to ship multiple software updates to make its robotaxis wait for stopped school buses, which prompted a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation and led to a recall.
Waymo appears to be testing adding Google’s Gemini AI chatbot to its robotaxis in an effort to integrate an AI assistant that would accompany riders and answer their queries, according to findings by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.
“While digging through Waymo’s mobile app code, I discovered the complete system prompt for its unreleased Gemini integration,” Wong wrote in a blog. “The document, internally titled ‘Waymo Ride Assistant Meta-Prompt,’ is a 1,200+ line specification that defines exactly how the AI assistant is expected to behave inside a Waymo vehicle.”
The feature hasn’t shipped in public builds, but Wong says the system prompt makes it clear that this is “more than a simple chatbot.” The assistant is said to have the ability to answer questions, manage certain in-cabin functions like climate control, and, if required, reassure riders.
“While we have no details to share today, our team is always tinkering with features to make riding with Waymo delightful, seamless, and useful,” Julia Ilina, a spokesperson for Waymo, told TechCrunch. “Some of these may or may not come to our rider experience.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Gemini has been integrated into the Alphabet-owned self-driving company’s stack. Waymo says it has used Gemini’s “world knowledge” to train its autonomous vehicles to navigate complex, rare, and high-stakes scenarios.
Wong writes the assistant is instructed to possess a clear identity and purpose: “a friendly and helpful AI companion integrated into a Waymo autonomous vehicle” whose primary goal is “to enhance the rider’s experience by providing useful information and assistance in a safe, reassuring, and unobtrusive manner.” The bot is directed to use clear, simple language and avoid technical jargon, and is instructed to keep its responses succinct to one to three sentences.
According to the system prompts, when a rider activates the assistant via the in-car screen, Gemini can choose from a set of pre-approved greetings personalized with the rider’s first name. The system can also access contextual data about the rider, like how many Waymo trips they’ve been on.
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The prompts currently let Gemini access and control in-car features, like the temperature, lighting and music. Notably absent from the function list are volume control, route changes, seat adjustment, and window control, Wong pointed out. If a rider asks for a feature that Gemini can’t control, the bot is to reply with “aspirational phrases,” like, “It’s not something I can do yet.”
Interestingly, the assistant is directed to maintain a clear distinction between its identity as Gemini the AI bot and the autonomous driving technology (the Waymo Driver). So when replying to a question such as, “How do you see the road?” Gemini shouldn’t say “I use a combination of sensors,” and instead should reply, “The Waymo Driver uses a combination of sensors…”
The system prompts include a range of compelling tidbits, such as how the bot is meant to handle being asked questions about competitors like Tesla or the now-defunct Cruise, or which trigger keywords will get it to stop talking.
The assistant is also directed to avoiding speculating on, explaining, confirming, denying, or commenting on real-time driving actions or specific driving events. So if a passenger asks about a video they saw of a Waymo hitting something, the bot is instructed to not answer directly and deflect.
“Your role is not to be a spokesperson for the driving system’s performance, and you must not adopt a defensive or apologetic tone,” the prompt reads.
The in-car assistant is allowed to answer general knowledge questions like about the weather, the height of the Eiffel Tower, what time the local Trader Joe’s closes, and who won the last World Series. It is not allowed to take real-world actions like ordering food, making reservations, or handling emergencies.
Waymo isn’t the only company integrating AI assistants into driverless vehicles. Tesla is doing something similar with xAI’s Grok. The two different car assistants serve different functions, however. Gemini appears to be programmed to be more pragmatic and ride-focused, while Grok is pitched more as an in-car buddy that can handle long conversations and remember context from previous questions.
There was a power outage in San Francisco on Saturday, initially leaving 124,000 of 414,000 customers—about 30%—in the dark. It also caused a widespread Waymo meltdown, with apparently all active Waymo robotaxis in the affected parts of the city stuck in robotic comas, blocking intersections and choking traffic on some streets.
Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion issued a statement at approximately 7:00 p.m., saying service had been “temporarily suspended” due to the outage. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work,” Philion said.
6 Waymo’s parked at a broken traffic light blocking the roads. Seems like they were not trained for a power outage pic.twitter.com/9fBkoxgKwe
As of Sunday morning there wasn’t yet an update from Waymo on whether the company’s robotaxis were still out of commission, nor on what had caused the problem in the first place.
Gizmodo asked Waymo if the vehicles had trouble traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the issue had something to do with data reception or transmission. We also asked the company if any Waymo vehicles were still blocking the streets. We will update if we hear back. (Update: Waymo provided a statement, which has been appended to the end of this article)
Until there’s some kind of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned company, there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the problem wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type situation, in which the nerve center of the robot hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, causing all the robots to drop dead.
Companies like Waymo hold themselves up as harbingers of a safer future on the roads, touting statistics like 82% fewer crashes in which an airbag deployed, and 92% fewer pedestrian collisions with injuries when compared to human drivers.
But, like when a San Francisco Waymo fatally ran over a locally famous cat named Kit Kat in October, the issue may be less about Waymos being better or worse than humans in aggregate than the fact that robots fail in unpredictable, alien ways. The actual footage of Kit Kat’s fatal injury shows one such example. A human driver probably wouldn’t do what seems to happen in the video: start from a dead stop while a person is actively trying to coax a cat out from under their car.
Similarly, human drivers tend not to suddenly go offline en masse when there’s a blackout.
Updated at 7:12 p.m. ET. A Waymo spokesperson provided the following statement:
“We are resuming ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yesterday’s power outage was a widespread event that caused gridlock across San Francisco, with non-functioning traffic signals and transit disruptions. While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.
“Throughout the outage, we closely coordinated with San Francisco city officials. We are focused on rapidly integrating the lessons learned from this event, and are committed to earning and maintaining the trust of the communities we serve every day.”
A parenthetical has also been added above indicating that Waymo replied to Gizmodo.
A pregnant woman in San Francisco gave birth inside a Waymo robotaxi Monday night en route to UCSF Medical Center, marking the latest milestone in the driverless car saga that no one saw coming — except everyone with more than six months of experience behind the wheel of a ride-share vehicle.
According to The SF Standard, Waymo’s remote team detected “unusual activity” and called 911, though the vehicle beat emergency services to the hospital.
Some traditions, it seems, are immune to disruption. For decades, expectant mothers have been racing against biology in the back seats of taxis and Ubers from London to Los Angeles. There was the mother in India who named her son Uber after giving birth to him en route to the hospital (the driver reportedly helped in the delivery). There was also the California couple in 2017 who welcomed their baby in an Uber during Shabbat.”Everyone is telling us to name the baby Uber,” the father joked, before adding, “But we can’t do that.” (Ah, though, they could have!)
The stories go on and on. Now, Silicon Valley has automated the experience, at least partially.
The vehicle in San Francisco was promptly removed for cleaning. Further, this wasn’t Waymo’s first birth — the company told the Standard that a Phoenix baby got there first. “While this is a very rare occurrence,” a Waymo spokesperson deadpanned, “some of our newest riders just can’t wait to experience their first Waymo ride.”
On Tuesday, Zoox debuted a program called “Zoox Explorers” that invites users in San Francisco to download the Zoox app, and get on the waitlist to potentially take a free ride in one of these—I guess you could call it a “buggy,” since Zoox doesn’t want us to call it a car. Using the app could already get you a free ride starting in September, but only if you were going up or down the Las Vegas Strip.
The Zoox vehicle has a plausible reason for looking so cutesy. It’s a purpose-built robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. It resembles nothing so much as certain ferris wheel gondolas—an interior that only has room for two bench seats at opposite ends, where passengers face one another instead of all looking forward.
San Francisco’s Mission, SoMa, and Design District neighborhoods will be covered by the Zoox Explorers program—areas where a Zoox could plausibly encounter a competing Waymo, and there’s simply no telling what would happen then.
Once you’re on the waiting list, according to Zoox, the company will “notify you when you can join the preview and request a ride.” Also, according to the Zoox site, the rider “can’t take over the driving,” but is provided controls for the temperature and music. You can also “initiate an emergency stop if you must exit the robotaxi.” I can only assume this last feature is known as the “puke button” around the Zoox office.
When Google’s self-driving car project began testing in the Bay Area back in 2009, its engineers focused on highways by sending its sensor-laden vehicles cruising down Interstate 280, which runs the length of Silicon Valley’s peninsula.
More than 15 years later, the cars are back on the freeway—this time without drivers. On Tuesday, the project, now an Alphabet subsidiary we all know as Waymo, announced that its robotaxi service would now drive on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
The new service marks another technical leap for Waymo, whose robotaxis currently serve five US metros: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company says it will launch in several other US and international cities next year, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville, Las Vegas, Detroit, and London.
Waymo also announced Wednesday that it would begin curbside pickup and drop-off service at San Jose Mineta International Airport, allowing passengers to, theoretically, travel autonomously all the way from San Francisco to San Jose—a service area of some 260 square miles. Waymo has been offering its autonomous taxi service on area service roads since the summer of 2023, but the new freeway service could cut in half the time it takes for a robotaxi to travel from San Francisco to Mountain View, Waymo user experience researcher Naomi Guthrie says.
“Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told reporters last week. Highways are predictable, with (mostly) clear signs and lane lines, and a limited set of vehicles and players (trucks, cars, motorcycles, trailers) that a vehicle’s software must learn to recognize and predict. But Waymo executives said that, despite a year of employee- and guest-only highway testing, safety emergencies on highways are relatively rare, so the team was unable to collect as much real-world data as it needed to train its vehicles to operate safely there. Complicating the project was the fact that highway crashes, at high speeds, are subject to the laws of phsyics—and so more likely to maim or kill.
To get ready for highways, Waymo executives say, engineers supplemented real-world driving data and training with data collected on private, closed courses, and data created in simulations. Two onboard computers help create system “redundancies,” meaning the vehicles will have computer backup if something goes wrong. The vehicles have been trained to exit highways in the case of emergencies, but will be able to pull over as well. Waymo execs also say they have and will work with law enforcement and first responders, including highway patrols, to create procedures for vehicles and riders stranded on highway shoulders, where hundreds of Americans are killed every year.
In between trying to become the world’s first trillionaire, expanding his defense contracting business, fighting the “woke mind virus,” feuding with Sam Altman, and overseeing half a dozen tech companies, Elon Musk has somehow found the time to wade into the debate over whether it’s good or bad that a rogue Waymo robotaxi (by the company’s own admission) seems to have run over and killed a beloved bodega cat in San Francisco.
In case you somehow missed it, a cat was run over earlier this week, leading to ongoing anger against the reputed culprit (Waymo). The feline, whose name was KitKat—but who also went by the moniker “the mayor of 16th street”—was a longtime staple of Randa’s Market in the city’s Mission neighborhood. KitKat’s owner, Mike Zeidan, told The San Francisco Standard that his pet was hit by a robotaxi late Monday night. “Honestly, man, it’s difficult,” Zeidan said. “He was a one-of-a-kind cat. He brought joy to so many people. People loved him.”
Waymo seems to have admitted that its vehicle did, indeed, run over KitKat. “We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away,” a company spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him.”
On Friday, as a means of adding his two cents, Musk retweeted an account that had defended driverless cars as being a savior, not a killer, of neighborhood pets. “5.4 million cats are hit by cars every year in the U.S., and 97 percent of those cats die from their injuries,” @WholeMarsBlog wrote. “Autonomy will dramatically reduce that number.”
“True, many pets will be saved by autonomy,” Musk commented.
It’s great that Elon could take time out of his busy schedule to participate in the discourse around KitKat. Big picture, Musk is launching a robotaxi service, so we all know which dog he has in this fight. But the truth of the matter is, we don’t really know if autonomous cars would reduce the number of feline deaths.
One of the primary selling points for robotaxis has been that human drivers are notorious for running into things, crashing, and otherwise causing dangerous mayhem on America’s roadways. And it’s true that human drivers can be absurdly dangerous. That said, the jury is still out on whether robotaxis are actually that much safer than human drivers. Speed is a factor in a significant portion of traffic fatalities, and robotaxis have so far steered clear of those speeds. At the same time, there’s also the fact that, whether robotaxis are safer or not, part of living in a free society involves accepting a certain amount of risk attached to that freedom. Currently, anyone can get into a car and drive it where they want to go, regardless of what the software in the car is programmed to do. That won’t necessarily be the case in a world governed by robotaxis.
“How do we break down the journey into bite-sized pieces, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming or insurmountable?” says Jesse Levinson, the cofounder and CEO of Zoox. “This moment is a huge one, but the service is still unpaid and fairly limited.” Zoox launched in 2014, and though it’s been testing its technology in San Francisco, at its Foster City, California, headquarters, and in Las Vegas for years, this will be the first time it’s allowing anyone willing to download an app to ride. The company was acquired by Amazon in 2020 for a reported $1.2 billion.
Olsen, the May Mobility CEO, says he is comfortable with the company’s slower launch process after watching others rush to put self-driving cars on the road. “One of the things we’ve seen across the industry is that a vehicle might perform brilliantly some of the time, but then will do wildly inappropriate things in the edge cases,” Olsen says. He declines to say exactly when the firm would remove the safety drivers from its vehicles, or when it might expand its Lyft partnership to other areas or cities, but he says any moves the company makes will be tested and validated with real-world and simulated data. The service will scale more quickly as time goes on, he says.
May Mobility offers rides through Lyft.
COURTESY OF Lyft and May Mobility
Climb in, Lyfters.
COURTESY OF Lyft and May Mobility
Two US self-driving vehicle firms shut down this past decade after their robotaxis were involved in serious road accidents. In 2018, a testing self-driving vehicle operated by Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Uber sold off its self-driving technology to a competitor in 2020. In 2023, General Motors subsidiary Cruise struck a pedestrian in San Francisco after the person was thrown into the empty robotaxi’s path by a collision with another car; state regulators later learned that the Cruise dragged the person 20 feet while it attempted to move out of traffic, and revoked the company’s permit to operate. General Motors got out of the robotaxi business a year later, citing high development costs and a desire to focus on personal vehicles.
Keep On Robotaxiing
Still, robotaxi companies say they have plenty more public deployments on the horizon. Zoox says it will start picking up public riders in San Francisco later this year, and will then launch in Austin and Miami. May Mobility plans to deploy robotaxis in Arlington, Texas, before the end of the year, this time on the Uber platform. Waymo has announced future service in several US cities, including Miami, Washington, DC, and Dallas. Tesla is running a small, invite-only ride-hail service in the California Bay Area with drivers behind the wheel using its more limited Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech, which requires the person up front to stay alert at all times. Musk plans to move quickly: He said this spring that the company would have “millions” of vehicles operating autonomously by the second half of next year.
Vegas residents can download Zoox’s app.
Chris Noltekuhlmann
Rides are free for the time being.
COURTESY OF ZOOX
Developers of self-driving vehicles have argued that their tech will increase safety and ride efficiency, bringing down prices in the long term. (Of course, these companies will also no longer have to pay a cut of each ride to human drivers.) But even in Phoenix and San Francisco, where Waymo has been running public robotaxis for years, cities have yet to catch a clear glimpse of how the expensive-to-develop technology might transform residents’ lives.
“It’s not at the scale yet where it’s really dramatically changing anything,” says Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning professor who directs the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.
Robotaxi services will likely have to get much bigger, Millard-Ball says, before they can prove out their expansive visions. Waymo has released studies suggesting that its tech is safer than human drivers in many situations, but some experts still argue that it’s hard to compare robots’ performance to humans’ given the still-limited number of miles the cars have driven.
“Can this make the rideshare industry grow the pie?” asks Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s executive vice president of driver experience, who collaborated with May Mobility on the Atlanta launch. Bird says Lyft has studied data from where autonomous vehicles have already been deployed, and he thinks the answer is yes. But when robotaxis will become a moneymaking venture is still a big question mark. Clearly, though, plenty of people are still working to find out.
Tesla launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, earlier this summer, but it’s unclear whether the vehicles driving around the city are technologically advanced enough to count towards that 1 million robotaxi goal. (The proposal specifies that the robotaxis must not have a “human driver,” and the vehicles in Texas have safety monitors sitting in their front passenger seats for city rides, and in the driver’s seats for highway trips.)
Meanwhile, the company is reportedly falling well short of its current goal to produce 5,000 units of Optimus, its humanoid robot, by the end of this year, having only produced a few hundred. Musk has said that Optimus could one day revolutionize the global economy by replacing the majority of human labor, but The Information reported in July that the Optimus team was having particular trouble with the robot’s hands. The company’s vice president of Optimus robotics, a nine-year Tesla veteran, left in June.
“For Musk to receive the full pay package, Tesla will need to be the leader of autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots in a number of countries,” says Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, a financial services firm.
Musk’s past pay packages have been unconventional, and controversial. Unlike other CEOs, Musk does not receive annual compensation or incentives, but is instead paid according to Tesla’s long-term performance. His 2018 pay package, worth more than $50 billion, is still in legal limbo after a shareholder lawsuit accusing the Tesla board of insufficient transparency and independence led to a Delaware judge striking it down last year. (Tesla responded by reincorporating in Texas.) The board granted Musk an interim $29 billion stock award last month.
The proposal demonstrates that, despite his controversial moves, Tesla’s board sees Musk as a crucial part of the automaker’s success, and that the Musk era is far from over. “This new pay package should keep Elon Musk at Tesla for at least the next decade,” says Goldstein.
The package’s goals double down on the messages of Tesla’s “Master Plan Part IV,” a lofty mission statement posted this week exclusively on X, Musk’s social platform. Tesla’s Master Plans were once cheeky blogs posted directly by Musk onto Tesla’s website, complete with back-of-the-envelope energy cost calculations. The new plan points to Tesla’s more civilizational ambitions. “Autonomy must benefit all of humanity,” one section reads; “Greater access drives greater growth,” reads another, complete with renderings of Optimus robots serving cocktails and watering plants.
But if Musk wants to change the world and make his trillion, he’ll have to stay in his lane—and out of President Donald Trump’s, for whom he once served as “First Buddy”. The board-run committee that put together the pay proposal has met with Musk 10 times since February, the Tesla board wrote in its filing. Among other things, the filing reads, the committee received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner.”
Waymo announced Tuesday that it’s going to bring both of its vehicles — the Jaguar I-Pace SUV and the Zeekr van — to Denver and Seattle starting this week, the latest move in a continued expansion across the United States.
The vehicles will be manually driven to start, before the company starts testing its autonomous tech in both cities. Waymo told TechCrunch that it hopes to start offering robotaxi trips in Denver next year and the Seattle metropolitan area “as soon as we’re permitted to do so.” Denver and Seattle will be two of the most extreme-weather cities that Waymo is feeling out, giving it a chance to test out its tech in snow, wind, and rain that is harder to come by in places like Phoenix.
The new cities join a growing list of places where Waymo is operating in the U.S. Just last week the company announced that it has more than 2,000 robotaxis in its commercial fleet countrywide, with 800 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 500 in Los Angeles, 400 in Phoenix, 100 in Austin, and “dozens” in Atlanta. Waymo has also announced plans to launch a commercial robotaxi services in Dallas, Miami, and Washington, D.C., next year, and recently received a permit to start testing in New York City.
That’s not to mention the other cities where Waymo has dipped its toes. It’s brought vehicles on “road trips” to places like Philadelphia and plans to do the same in Las Vegas, San Diego, Houston, Orlando, and San Antonio.
Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s autonomous robotaxi, now known as the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California on Thursday night. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the billionaire Tesla CEO says it’s coming in two or three years.
The Cybercabs are two-seater vehicles with no steering wheel or pedals, and Musk billed them as “individualized mass transit.” Musk promised inductive charging, meaning the vehicle won’t need to be plugged in like a traditional electric car, but didn’t provide any details on how that would work.
Musk started the highly anticipated show by walking out of a Warner Bros. studio building into a Cybercab that drove him to the audience. It made for quite a splashy presentation, complete with the glitz and glitter of Hollywood, and Musk is nothing if not a showman. The only question is whether he can actually deliver something he’s been promising is just “two years away” every year for the past decade.
GIF: Tesla
A concept video for the vehicle was playing behind the Tesla CEO as he was speaking on stage and he claimed “we expect the cost to be below $30,000,” to a large swell of cheers from the audience. But it wasn’t long after naming the price that he was interrupted by someone in the crowd who shouted out to ask when the Cybercabs were going to be available for purchase.
“We do expect actually to start fully autonomous, unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year,” Musk said to even more cheers.
But then Musk finished his sentence, making it clear he was just talking about the existing Teslas on the road that would presumably need local government permission to operate without drivers.
“And that’s obviously… that’s with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport, in probably… well, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026,” Musk said stammering with a laugh.
“So, yeah. Before 2027, let me put it that way. And we’ll make this vehicle in very high volume,” Musk claimed, to a much more subdued crowd response.
Amusingly, some of the graphics playing behind Musk still called the vehicle a “robotaxi,” and whoever’s running the X account for Tesla also didn’t get the memo that they’re called Cybercabs now, not robotaxis:
Robotaxi is premium point-to-point electric transport, accessible to everyone pic.twitter.com/oLykwaaTHm
Twenty of the Cybercabs were available for special guests to try out at Thursday night’s event in Burbank. Musk predicted that autonomous cars would become ten times safer than a human and a big selling point is the idea that people who buy Cybercabs would be able to rent them out when the owner isn’t using them like a driverless Uber.
Notably, Musk didn’t say that Tesla was pursuing the regulatory approvals needed for any of the things he was mentioning. And as we’ve seen with other companies, that’s a huge hurdle.
Musk also showed off a Robovan, with a sleek futuristic style, but didn’t give any indication when that might be a reality. “We’re going to make this. And it’s going to look like that,” Musk insisted, with a tone betraying the fact that he perhaps didn’t even believe it himself.
The Robovan will supposedly fit 20 people (four more people than the futuristic Loop vehicles he promised and never delivered on back in the 2010s).
The billionaire CEO also showed off the Optimus robot, which he says will mow your lawn, get your groceries and watch your kids. Musk said he thought Optimus would be “the biggest product ever of any kind.”
Musk claimed the robot would cost “$20-30,000 long-term,” but didn’t give details we hadn’t heard before. Many experts are skeptical that Musk could meet that price point if he gets Optimus into mass production.
But the robots were on hand during the event, supposedly mixing drinks for guests, though it’s not clear how “autonomous” the robots were in reality. Musk has tried that sleight-of-hand before, with a human operator controlling things just out of frame.
The event was titled “We, Robot” and livestreamed on YouTube, but it’s likely to be a huge disappointment to many people who were probably hopeful that Musk would promise something that was actually coming soon.
CNBC’s Squawk on the Street asked a bullish analyst on Thursday morning whether we’d get any info on cost per mile, scaling the cybercab, a ridesharing app, or insurance costs. We didn’t hear anything even approximating those kinds of details on Thursday.
Companies are already doing driverless taxis out in the real world. Alphabet’s Waymo is operating in markets like Los Angeles and San Francisco. GM’s Cruise operates in Phoenix, Dallas, and Houston and recently announced the company will be launching a partnership with Uber in 2025. Cruise temporarily suspended operations in California after an incident in October 2023 where a self-driving vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian who was jaywalking in San Francisco, but resumed in three cities in June 2024.
The big difference between the existing technology of Waymo and Cruise compared to Tesla is that Musk’s company isn’t using Lidar technology. And many experts think that’s a mistake.
Musk has become a lightning rod of controversy over recent years, buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into a hotbed of far-right extremism and conspiracy theories. Musk also came out as a Republican in 2022, coincidentally just a day before an unflattering story alleging he offered to buy a flight attendant a horse in exchange for sexual favors, according to Business Insider. The billionaire denied that story.
The American oligarch has fully embraced Trumpism, despite previously calling the Trump too old to run again, and has even started a Super PAC that’s trying to get the neo-fascist former president back into the White House. But Trump may not be the good friend in business that Musk is hoping for, if Trump’s own words can be believed.
Trump gave a speech in Detroit on Thursday where he rambled about a number of topics, even touching on autonomous vehicles, which he doesn’t like.
“Chinese and other countries produced automobile and autonomous vehicles,” Trump said. “Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? You know what that is, right? When you see a car driving along.”
“Some people do, I don’t know,” Trump continued. “A little concerning to me, but the autonomous vehicles, we’re going to stop from operating on American roads.”
TRUMP: “Other countries produced auto-mo–bile and autonomous vehicles. Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? You know what that is, right?”
But who knows if Musk can even deliver on the things he promised on Thursday. We’ve heard all of this before in some version or another. Musk has been saying for years that fully autonomous vehicles will be delivered so very soon. Someone even created a video a couple years ago collecting all his promises since 2014.
“In 2020, we expect to have a million robotaxis on the road,” Musk said on an earnings call in 2019, as just one example.
Nobody knows what the future holds, and Musk does have a habit of delivering products very late. But there are certainly times when his promises simply didn’t happen or the finished product was so unlike what he promised that it’s just downright comical.
Do you remember the 16-person vehicles he was promising various municipalities like Chicago and Las Vegas? Musk called it The Loop, not to be confused with the Hyperloop.
The Boring Company was going to build it and transport passengers in a tunnel covering the 18 miles between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport. The whole ride would take about 12 minutes, according to Musk, and it looked pretty futuristic, as you can see in a portion of the concept video below.
The concept video for Elon Musk’s 16-passenger The Loop vehicle that never came into being.
That video has since been scrubbed from the internet. Musk never did deliver on a futuristic version of The Loop for Chicago or any other city. Instead, he built a tunnel in Las Vegas with human drivers who are operating normal Teslas at slow speeds. It was very disappointing, to say the least.
What are the odds that Musk’s new Cybercab becomes The Loop? We don’t know. But that two or three-year timeframe doesn’t make us very optimistic about the Cybercab’s future.
Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post. The catch? The cars will be in so-called “manual mode,” so they won’t be driving themselves.
Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The General Motors subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi.
Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. Critics accused the company of expanding too fast and cutting corners on safety.
Today, we’re taking an important next step in returning to our mission: we’re reintroducing a small fleet of human-driven vehicles in select cities – starting in Phoenix. These vehicles will create maps and gather road information, a critical step for validating future…
Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company was pursuing just last year. During its pause, Cruise continued testing its autonomous vehicle technology in simulation and on closed courses. Creating high-quality maps and gathering road information yet again should allow Cruise to meet elevated safety and performance targets, the company said in its blog post.
Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023. Alphabet’s Waymo — Cruise’s main competitor that’s still active in San Francisco — has operated a paid, driverless robotaxi service in the area since 2020 and last year doubled its service area in downtown Phoenix and launched driverless rides to the airport.
This news is developing. Check back in for updates.
