LAS VEGAS — In a vision of the near future shared at CES, a girl slides into the back seat of her parents’ car and the cabin instantly comes alive. The vehicle recognizes her, knows it’s her birthday and cues up her favorite song without a word spoken.
“Think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family,” Sri Subramanian, Nvidia’s global head of generative AI for automotive, said Tuesday.
Subramanian’s example, shared with a CES audience on the show’s opening day in Las Vegas, illustrates the growing sophistication of AI-powered in-cabin systems and the expanding scope of personal data that smart vehicles may collect, retain and use to shape the driving experience.
Across the show floor, the car emerged less as a machine and more as a companion as automakers and tech companies showcased vehicles that can adapt to drivers and passengers in real time — from tracking heart rates and emotions to alerting if a baby or young child is accidentally left in the car.
Bosch debuted its new AI vehicle extension that aims to turn the cabin into a “proactive companion.” Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom, announced Alpamayo, its new vehicle AI initiative designed to help autonomous cars think through complex driving decisions. CEO Jensen Huang called it a “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.”
But experts say the push toward a more personalized driving experience is intensifying questions about how much driver data is being collected.
“The magic of AI should not just mean all privacy and security protections are off,” said Justin Brookman, director of marketplace policy at Consumer Reports.
Unlike smartphones or online platforms, cars have only recently become major repositories of personal data, Brookman said. As a result, the industry is still trying to establish the “rules of the road” for what automakers and tech companies are allowed to do with driver data.
That uncertainty is compounded by the uniquely personal nature of cars, Brookman said. Many people see their vehicles as an extension of themselves — or even their homes — which he said can make the presence of cameras, microphones and other monitoring tools feel especially invasive.
“Sometimes privacy issues are difficult for folks to internalize,” he said. “People generally feel they wish they had more privacy but also don’t necessarily know what they can do to address it.”
At the same time, Brookman said, many of these technologies offer real safety benefits for drivers and can be good for the consumer.
On the CES show floor, some of those conveniences were on display at automotive supplier Gentex’s booth, where attendees sat in a mock six-seater van in front of large screens demonstrating how closely the company’s AI-equipped sensors and cameras could monitor a driver and passengers.
“Are they sleepy? Are they drowsy? Are they not seated properly? Are they eating, talking on phones? Are they angry? You name it, we can figure out how to detect that in the cabin,” said Brian Brackenbury, director of product line management at Gentex.
Brackenbury said it’s ultimately up to the car manufacturers to decide how the vehicle reacts to the data that’s collected, which he said is stored in the car and deleted after the video frames, for example, have been processed. “
“One of the mantras we have at Gentex is we’re not going to do it just because we can, just because the technology allows it,” Brackebury said, adding that “data privacy is really important.”
LONDON — Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft plan to bring robotaxi services to London next year in separate partnerships with Chinese tech giant Baidu, the companies said Monday.
Uber said it’s teaming up with Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicle service to take part in a pilot program for self-driving taxi services that the British government is planning for next year.
Testing is expected to start in the first half of 2026, the two companies said in social media posts.
Lyft is also partnering with Baidu for the robotaxi trials using Apollo Go RT6 vehicles that are “purpose-built for rideshare,” CEO David Risher said in a post on X.
“We expect to start testing our initial fleet with dozens of vehicles next year – pending regulatory approval,” Risher said. The company “plans to scale to hundreds from there,” he added.
Britain is emerging as a frontline for the global rollout of self-driving taxi services after the government decided over the summer to speed up its pilot program by moving the start date up by a year.
Baidu is racing against rivals including Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, which said in October it plans to take part in the U.K. trials as part of its global expansion.
Wayve, a U.K. homegrown startup that’s developing its own artificial intelligence technology for self-driving cars, has also teamed up with Uber to bring robotaxi service to the British capital.
SAN FRANCISCO — California regulators are threatening to suspend Tesla’s license to sell its electric cars in the state early next year unless the automaker tones down its marketing tactics for its self-driving features after a judge concluded the Elon Musk-led company has been misleading consumers about the technology’s capabilities.
The potential 30-day blackout of Tesla’s California sales is the primary punishment being recommended to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles in a decision released late Tuesday. The ruling by Administrative Law Judge Juliet Cox determined that Tesla had for years engaged in deceptive marketing practices by using the terms “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” to promote the autonomous technology available in many of its cars.
After presiding over five days of hearings held in Oakland, California in July, Cox also recommended suspending Tesla’s license to manufacture cars at its plant in Fremont, California. But California regulators aren’t going to impose that part of the judge’s proposed penalty.
Tesla will have a 90-day window to make changes that more clearly convey the limits of its self-driving technology to avoid having its California sales license suspended. After California regulators filed its action against Tesla in 2023, the Austin, Texas, company already made one significant change by putting in wording that made it clear its Full Self-Driving package still required supervision by a human driver while it’s deployed.
“Tesla can take simple steps to pause this decision and permanently resolve this issue — steps autonomous vehicle companies and other automakers have been able to achieve,” said Steve Gordon, the director of the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The automaker has already been plagued by a global downturn in demand that began during a backlash to Musk’s high-profile role overseeing cuts in the U.S. government budget overseeing the Department of Government that President Donald Trump created in his administration. Increased competition and an older lineup of vehicles also weighed on Tesla sales, although the company did revamp its Model Y, the world’s bestselling vehicle, and unveil less-expensive versions of the Model Y and Model X.
Although Musk left Washington after a falling out with Trump, the fallout has continued to weigh on Tesla’s auto sales, which had decreased by 9% from 2024 through the first nine months of this year.
Despite the slump and the threatened sales suspension in California, Tesla’s stock price touched an all-time high $495.28 during Wednesday’s early trading before backtracking later to fall below $470. Despite that reversal, Tesla’s shares are still worth slightly more than they were before Musk’s ill-fated stint in the Trump administration — a “somewhat successful” assignment he recently said he wouldn’t take on again.
The performance of Tesla’s stock against the backdrop of eroding auto sales reflects the increasing emphasis that investors are placing on Musk’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence technology to implant into humanoid robots and a fleet of self-driving Teslas that will operate as robotaxis across the U.S.
Musk has been promising Tesla’s self-driving technology would fulfill his robotaxi vision for years without delivering on the promise, but the company finally began testing the concept in Austin earlier this year, albeit with a human supervisor in the car to take over if something went awry. Just a few days ago, Musk disclosed Tesla had started tests of its robotaxis without a safety monitor in the vehicle.
California regulators are far from the first critic to accuse Tesla of exaggerating the capabilities of its self-driving technology in a potentially dangerous manner. The company has steadfastly insisted that information contained in its vehicle’s owner’s manual on its website have made it clear that its self-driving technology still requires human supervision, even while releasing a 2020 video depicting one of its cars purportedly driving on its own. The video, cited as evidence against Tesla in the decision recommending a suspension of the company’s California sales license, remained on its website for nearly four years.
Tesla has been targeted in a variety of lawsuits alleging its mischaracterizations about self-driving technology have lulled humans into a false of security that have resulted in lethal accidents. The company has settled or prevailed in several cases, but earlier this year a Miami jury held Tesla partly responsible for a lethal crash in Florida that occurred while Autopilot was deployed and ordered the automaker to pay more than $240 million in damages.
Self-driving taxis from the Alphabet-owned company Waymo are coming to the streets of Orlando early next year, the company announced in a news release. This will make Orlando one of the first 10 cities in the country to offer the autonomous vehicle service.
“The future of transportation is accelerating, and we are driving it forward with a commitment to quality and safety,” the company stated. “Our rigorous process of continuous iteration, validation, and local engagement ensures that we put communities first as we expand.”
Waymo vehicles, powered by artificial intelligence technology, are fully self-driving, so don’t expect to see a driver or human supervisor behind the steering wheel of one of these suckers. Waymo’s so-called “robotaxis” are already in operation in Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. As of May, the AI company — owned by Google’s parent company — has provided more than 10 million rides since it launched driverless trips for the public in 2020.
“We’re thrilled that Waymo plans to bring its fully autonomous ride-hailing service to Orlando, and to the tens of millions of visitors we host each year,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said in a statement, adding that he plans to be “one of the very first” riders. “Waymo will be another exciting transportation option for the region that will enhance the investments we are already making in reducing congestion and increasing road and pedestrian safety,” he said.
According to a city spokesperson, Waymo “has been keeping the city in the loop about their plans” to expand to the City Beautiful, but said that there are no city approvals needed for them to operate.
The company, at the same time, announced plans to expand to Dallas, Houston, Miami and San Antonio in the “coming weeks.” The cost of a Waymo ride can vary based on factors such as distance and duration.
A reporter for Business Insider found that his 12-minute Waymo ride in San Francisco was pricier at $16 than a ride using the same route through Uber and Lyft. However, since no tip to a driver is necessary with Waymo, the cost for an Uber leveled out to be about the same. The trip through Lyft was still a few dollars cheaper — even with a 20 percent tip included.
Is Waymo safe?
Waymo has received criticism elsewhere for risks to public safety and for its potential to undermine publicly owned and operated transit systems (despite incentives Waymo has offered for people to use both).
Labor unions such as the Teamsters and Transport Workers Union, both of which represent professionals in the trucking and transportation industries, have similarly called out Waymo for threatening their members’ jobs.
“New Yorkers be warned, Waymo will turn pedestrians into cannon fodder and will block streets for emergency responders,” said Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen in a recent statement on Waymo’s expansion to New York City. “Waymo isn’t ready for NYC’s streets and the end goal is to replace rideshare drivers, taxi drivers, and transit workers with robots.”
Waymo, just one of several companies that have rolled out autonomous vehicles, has faced protests from drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft in cities such as in Seattle, where Waymo has also looked to expand.
A Teamsters local in Boston last month joined a labor coalition in support of a city ordinance there that would regulate and study the potential impact of autonomous vehicles. “I regularly transport patients to Boston hospitals, and if robotaxis block us, freeze in place, or don’t know how to yield, they could kill people,” said Abby O’Brien, a Teamster and paramedic for a local ambulance company.
Waymo for its part has pushed back on critical assessments of its safety and its potential impact on the transportation workforce. “Transportation is a team sport, and we believe autonomous vehicles, professional drivers, and the wider ecosystem will thrive together as we increase transportation options for everyone,” Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher told Axios in a statement. Driving and trucking is one of the most common occupations among young men without a college degree, a 2024 analysis from the Pew Research Center found.
As far as safety, Waymo has faced its fair share of concerns — even recalling some 1,200 of its vehicles last year after “minor collisions” — yet has continued to defend the safety and integrity of its software. The company recently released the results of an independent safety audit that determined Waymo’s procedures for determining the safety of their vehicles met industry standards.
A probe by the federal government, launched last May to investigate a “series of minor collisions and unexpected behavior” from Waymo vehicles, concluded this past July with federal safety regulators reportedly opting not to take any further action.
However, as of last month, the company is once again under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over reports that its vehicles may not be complying with traffic safety rules around stopped school buses. A Waymo spokesperson told news service Reuters that they had “already developed and implemented improvements related to stopping for school buses and will land additional software updates in our next software release.”
An independent analysis of federal crash data by the Substack publication Understanding AI found that, from February to August of this year, most of the 41 crashes that reportedly involved Waymo’s robotaxis weren’t the fault of Waymo’s software itself, but rather actions by other drivers or — as The Atlantic put it — “seemingly an act of God.”
Waymo has argued that its robotaxis are actually safer than vehicles with human drivers, stating their “Driver” (unlike actual humans) is “always alert, follows speed limits, promotes seat belt use, and operates some of the safest vehicles on the road.”
Orlando has been working toward eliminating all traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries in the city through its “Vision Zero” plan by 2040. And city officials say they’ve already made progress.
According to a recent news release, Orlando has already seen a 40 percent reduction in “deadly and serious-injury crashes” since 2019. The city credits this progress to, among other things, their red light camera program (which fines drivers who run red lights), the completion of more than 100 “safety projects” along roads citywide, and improving the city’s emergency response through better coordination with Orlando’s police and fire departments.
“Every life lost on our roadways is one too many,” Mayor Dyer said in a recent statement. “By designing safer streets, using technology to improve enforcement and working closely with our first responders and residents, we’re proving that traffic deaths are preventable and that together, we can make Orlando’s streets safe for everyone.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon’s Zoox will start giving free robotaxi rides through parts of San Francisco as it accelerates its attempt to challenge Waymo’s early lead in the race to transport passengers in self-driving vehicles.
The expansion announced Tuesday will be confined to a few major San Francisco neighborhoods and limited to people who signed up on a waiting list to ride in Zoox’s gondola-shaped robotaxis, which have no steering wheel. The San Francisco launch comes less than three months after the Amazon-owned robotaxi company launched its first ride-hailing service along the Las Vegas strip.
But Zoox still doesn’t charge people to ride in its robotaxis, something Waymo has been doing since its debut in Phoenix five years ago. The free rides are the next major milestone before charging fares like Waymo and traditional ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, as Amazon tried to make inroads in autonomous driving — a journey that began in 2020 when the e-commerce Goliath bought Zoox for $1.2 billion.
California regulators still have to approve Zoox’s application to charge for rides in San Francisco — a clearance that Waymo received in August 2023 after overcoming safety concerns raised by city officials. Since then, Waymo’s robotaxis have become a familiar sight throughout San Francisco, where some tourists now make a point of hitching a ride in a self-driving car along with hopping on one of the city’s fabled cable cars that have been operating for 152 years.
Waymo, which started as a secret project within Google in 2009. also operates its robotaxis in San Jose, California, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, with plans to expand into several other U.S. cities next year. In another sign of Waymo’s accelerating growth, its robotaxis began extending their routes beyond city streets and onto highways in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Just as Waymo has already been doing, Amazon is gearing up to bring Zoox’s robotaxis to other major cities, including Austin and Miami. To help Zoox realize its ambitions, Amazon converted a former bus factory into a high-tech robotaxi plant in Hayward, California — about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco. Zoox eventually hopes to make as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually at the plant.
On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk. The full compensation plan will go into effect by 2035—assuming Musk and the company successfully hit ambitious financial and production targets. If that happens, Musk will also get control of some 25 percent of the business, up from the 12 percent he controls currently. More than 75 percent of Tesla shareholders approved the move in a preliminary vote.
Musk celebrated the news onstage at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, appearing alongside two dancing humanoid robots, the company’s Optimus products. “Look at us, this is sick,” he said.
To meet its goals, however, Tesla will have to lead in industries well beyond electric cars—and guarantee that Optimus can do much more than dance. It will also have to beat all competitors in autonomous driving technology and robotics. “Tesla will have to be the market leader not just in the US but also Europe and other regions,” says Seth Goldstein, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, a financial services firm.
Specifically, Tesla needs to hit an$8.5 trillion valuation over the next 10 years, deliver 20 million vehicles to customers, send out 1 million robots, operate 1 million robotaxis, and sell 10 million subscriptions for its “Full Self-Driving” software over a three-month period—in addition to other financial targets.
Still, the vote marks a win for Musk, whose previous package, a $50 billion payday laid out in 2018, has been caught up in litigation after a shareholder alleged that the CEO had too much influence over the company’s board and that Tesla was therefore failing to uphold its legal obligations to shareholders. The lawsuit, brought in Delaware’s Chancery Court, led to Tesla reincorporating in Texas. A panel of judges heard the case on appeal in October; they’ll likely make a final decision in the coming months.
Before the vote, Tesla’s board argued the sky-high pay package was necessary to retain Musk as CEO—and keep him focused on the car company. In a call with investors last month, Musk suggested that he would have a hard time pushing Tesla ahead in robotics and autonomy if he didn’t have a strong sway over the automaker. “If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army?” he asked. “I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”
Following Thursday’s vote, Musk told investors gathered in Texas that production of the Cybercab, a self-driving vehicle that lacks a steering wheel or sideview mirrors, would begin in April. The company will need permission from the federal government to put the unconventionally designed car on the road.
Waymo co-CEO Takedra Mawakana believes other companies working on autonomous vehicles need to do more to prove their technology is safe, she said during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
Mawakana had just been asked who she considered to be on the list of companies trying to make roads safer during Monday’s interview.
“I don’t know who’s on that list, because they’re not telling us what’s happening with their fleets,” she said.
Prioritizing safety while scaling operations was a big topic during the interview, and Mawakana was sure to cite the data Waymo recently released that shows, by its count, that the company’s vehicles are five times safer than human drivers and 12 times safer with respect to pedestrians.
Mawakana declined to say whether she was specifically talking about Tesla, but there are only a few companies in the U.S. right now claiming to be working on robotaxi tech.
Tesla publishes quarterly “vehicle safety reports.” But that data only focuses on the use of the company’s Autopilot driver assistance technology, which is designed to be used on highways, where the rate of crashes is lower than on surface streets. (And the latest report shows an uptick in crashes.) Tesla has not released any public data about the safety of its nascent robotaxi pilot program in Austin, Texas.
Other companies in the space are early in the deployment phase or still testing their technology. Zoox has only just begun offering rides in its purpose-built AV in Las Vegas, Nevada. Companies like May Mobility and Pony AI have yet to launch commercially in the U.S. Aurora, the self-driving trucks company, has published a safety framework.
“I think there is a responsibility, if you’re going to put vehicles on the road, and you’re going to remove the driver from behind the wheel, and you’re going to have someone in some other room observing the fleet who can take over their vehicles, it is incumbent upon you to be transparent about what’s happening,” she said. “And if you are not being transparent, then it is my view that you are not doing what is necessary in order to actually earn the right to make the road safer.”
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — If someone left a government job with a black eye, literally, ran a company with shrinking profits, and suddenly had federal investigators crawling over their business, you might say they’re having a bad year.
But most people are not Elon Musk.
The world’s richest man has only gotten richer this year and shareholders at Tesla, his electric car company, may make him wealthier yet by approving a trillion-dollar pay package in a bet he will succeed with new plans for a “robot army” and other technological breakthroughs even as some past promises remain unfulfilled.
“The genius of Elon Musk is keeping investors focused on what the company might look in like 5 or 10 years — while ignoring very near-term challenges,” marvels Garrett Nelson of CFRA Research. Or put more bluntly by Zacks Investment’s Brian Mulberry, “Your average CEO would likely not survive this.”
Musk started out the year with a side hustle — promising to cut $2 trillion in government spending as head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, before cutting that pledge in half. In the end, DOGE posted only $240 billion in savings, according to its own notoriously unreliable estimates, and it’s not even clear those savings will hold as the Trump administration scrambles to refill many essential jobs DOGE cut that it shouldn’t have.
“There is a pattern of them announcing great big firings, and then turning about and saying, ’No, that’s a mistake,’” said Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institute senior fellow who has compiled a list of 17,000 positions being refilled. “They cut without a plan, without regard to function.”
Musk used the same slash-and-burn tactics after he took over Twitter and evidence of that backfiring has emerged this year, too.
In the past two months, he’s settled a pair of lawsuits filed by 2,000 former Twitter employees and executives alleging that they were pushed out under false pretenses or never given severance as promised. The amount the ex-workers got was undisclosed, but if they received even a fraction of the combined $628 million they were demanding, the cost will cut deeply for a company whose advertising has plunged since his takeover.
More bad news for Musk came Wednesday when Tesla announced earnings had plunged 37% in the third quarter. Vehicle sales rose 6% as customers rushed to take advantage of a federal tax credit before it expired last month, but the figure for the full year is expected to drop significantly as car buyers turned off by Musk’s right-wing political stances have boycotted the business.
The stock fell earlier this year as the bad news piled up. But after Musk appeared in the Oval Office in May for his farewell to DOGE sporting a shiner, it has doubled and is now posting a year-to-date gain of nearly 9% after the close of regular trading Wednesday. His net worth has also jumped — up $62 billion this year to $483 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
Investors are mostly buying Musk’s line that plunging car sales don’t matter as much now because the future of the company lies more with his new driverless robotaxis service, the energy storage business and building robots for the home and factory. To make his task worth while, Tesla’s directors are asking shareholders to sign off on his enormous new pay package at an annual meeting next month.
But there are big questions surrounding these endeavors, particularly the driverless cabs.
Musk’s robotaxis, which began picking up passengers in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco this summer, can’t yet be called driverless because they still require “safety monitors” who are ready to seize control in case something goes wrong, which occasionally happens. One of them drove down the opposing lane, for example.
The robotaxi plans need approval from regulators in various states even as the ones in Washington have swarmed the company.
They’ve opened four investigations into Tesla so far this year, including one into why it hasn’t reported accidents involving its self-driving software quickly to the government as required. Another launched earlier this month is looking into dozens of reported accidents in which Teslas using self-driving software ran red lights and broke other traffic rules, occasionally crashing into other vehicles and causing injuries.
Musk has disappointed before, talking big and missing deadlines repeatedly, only to deliver for shareholders eventually. Tesla investors who held on through a tough 2018 as the company struggled to produce its Model 3 vehicle at a profit, eventually saw their stock soar as sales jumped.
One money manager who rode that earlier surge then bought again earlier this year, says she’s confident Musk’s magic is still there and he can pull off the seemingly impossible again.
“He frequently teeters on the edge of disaster,” said Nancy Tengler in a statement, “and then pulls back just in the nick of time.”
One difference now is most other Tesla investors also believe this and have bought up the stock, leaving little room for error.
Shares of U.S. companies in the S&P 500 index are valued at 24 times what investors expect them to earn next year. By contrast, Tesla is trading at 250 times expected profits, enough to make you believe that Musk, instead of having a very bad year is having a spectacular one.
Police in Northern California were understandably perplexed when they pulled over a Waymo taxi after it made an illegal U-turn, only to find no driver behind the wheel and therefore, no one to ticket.
The San Bruno Police Department wrote in now viral weekend social media posts that officers were conducting a DUI operation early Saturday morning when a self-driving Waymo made the illegal turn in front of them.
Officers stopped the vehicle, but declined to write a ticket as their “citation books don’t have a box for ‘robot’.”
“That’s right … no driver, no hands, no clue,” read the post, which was accompanied by photos of an officer peering into the car.
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Officers contacted Waymo to report what they called a “glitch,” and in the post, they said they hope reprogramming will deter more illegal moves.
The department’s Facebook post has generated more than 500 comments, with many people outraged that police didn’t ticket the company. People also wanted to know how police got the car to pull over.
But San Bruno Sgt. Scott Smithmatungol said they can only ticket a human driver or operator for a moving violation, unlike parking tickets that can be left with the vehicle.
A new state law that kicks in next year will allow police to report moving violations to the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is figuring out the specifics, including potential penalties, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina told the LA Times that the company’s autonomous driving system is closely monitored by regulators. “We are looking into this situation and are committed to improving road safety through our ongoing learnings and experience,” Ilina said.
Waymos currently operate in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco and in areas south of the city, including the suburb of San Bruno.
“It blew up a lot bigger than we thought,” Smithmatungol said of the viral post to The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We’re not a large agency like San Francisco.”
San Bruno has about 40,000 residents and a sworn police force of 50 officers, he said.
Waymo is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Amazon’s Zoox on Wednesday launched its robotaxi service in Las Vegas, offering free rides through parts of the entertainment mecca for anyone willing to gamble on the safety of a driverless vehicle.
The Las Vegas debut of Zoox’s long-planned ride-hailing service reflects Amazon-owned robotaxi maker’s confidence in the safety of its boxy vehicles after two years of testing them in the city.
The robotaxis initially were only available to employees in Las Vegas before gradually expanding to friends and family members. Now, anyone with the Zoox app will be able to request a ride to five designated locations, including Resorts World, the Luxor hotel and the New York-New York hotel. The longest distance the Zoox robotaxis will travel is about three miles (4.8 kilometers) while carrying up to four passengers.
All rides will be provided for free for at least the first few months to help promote the existence of the service in the perennially popular travel destination. Once it begins charging for rides in Las Vegas, Zoox says its prices will be comparable to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
Zoox can afford to give free rides largely because of Amazon’s deep pockets. The e-commerce powerhouse, currently worth $2.5 trillion, bought Zoox for $1.2 billion five years ago as part of its efforts to establish a foothold in other fields of technology.
The Las Vegas market marks Zoox’s first step in its attempt to catch up with robotaxi leader Waymo, a Google spin-off that offers that already provides driverless rides in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin, Texas (where Tesla is still in the testing phase of a robotaxi service that its CEO, Elon Musk, has been hyping for the past decade).
While Waymo implants its driverless technology in vehicles built by traditional automakers, Zoox is manufacturing its distinctively designed robotaxis in a former bus factory located in Hayward, California — about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco.
In a sign of its ambitions, Zoox hopes to manufacture as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually as it expands into other markets. While the company is currently testing its vehicles in San Francisco, it hopes to open up its service to all passengers next year.
Zoox is currently operating about 50 vehicles in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with most of them in Nevada for now. After it starts charging for rides in San Francisco, Zoox hopes to expand to Austin and Miami next.
Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, could become the first trillionaire after the Tesla board unveiled a massive new pay package for its CEO to keep his focus on the troubled EV maker.The package would grant him additional shares of Tesla stock if the company is able to grow far beyond its current value, with a market capitalization far greater than any company has ever approached. Musk’s previous pay package, which added significantly to his massive wealth, also laid out ambitious growth plans that once appeared to be a reach – but which Tesla proved able to reach easily.The new pay package could grant Musk 423.7 million additional shares of Tesla stock. Those shares would be worth $143.5 billion at today’s stock value.But Musk would get those shares only if the value of Tesla stock increases significantly in coming years. The company stock would need to reach an overall value of $8.5 trillion for Musk to get all the shares, significantly above the current market capitalization of $1.1 trillion and roughly double the current market value of Nvidia (NVDA), the current most-valuable company on the market.The company’s proxy statement that laid out Musk’s payment plan also included a shareholder proposal that Tesla take a stake in privately-held xAI, the artificial intelligence company that Musk also owns. That could help Elon Musk further consolidate his growing business empire.XAI recently purchased X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion of his own money in 2022. The company did not take a position for or against that shareholder proposal, which does not give any details of how large a stake Tesla should take in xAI, and at what price.Musk currently owns 410 million shares of Tesla shares, worth $139 billion at Thursday’s closing price. That stake, along with his stakes in xAI, rocket company SpaceX, and several other companies he has started and runs, have made him the richest person on the planet, worth $378 billion according to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker.He currently has options to buy an additional 304 million shares of Tesla, but a judge in Delaware has twice struck down that 2018 pay package that granted him those options as illegal. Those rulings came despite overwhelming approval by Tesla shareholders – twice. The company again has tried to grant those options to Musk this year, and adding in those options, he now owns 18% of the company’s shares.Tesla shares nearly doubled in value to a record-high price for its shares between election day and mid-December 2024, as investors bet that his close ties to President Donald Trump would be a boon for Tesla. But as Tesla faced protests and dropping sales and falling profits in backlash to those ties (before he had a falling out with Trump), all those things resulted in Tesla’s stock losing those gains. The shares have recovered some of those losses, but they are still down 26% from the December peak.Still, Musk and his fans on Wall Street have insisted the company is well positioned to grow even larger and more successful in the future. He has continued to predict that his plans for self-driving cars – including a robotaxi service – will create massive profits and value for shareholders. The robotaxis would provide rides to passengers and also allow Tesla owners to rent out their cars for driverless rides when not in use.Musk has also promised a line of humanoid robots that could bring in even more sales than Tesla’s car business.“It’s a big pay package but Tesla needs to keep its biggest asset in Musk as CEO,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told CNN Friday. Ives is one of the bigger Tesla bulls on Wall Street.“In this AI era Musk now will drive its next leg of growth,” Ives added. “The Board had a $1 trillion dollar decision and made the right one.”The board’s proxy statement spoke of the importance of keeping Musk focused on Tesla going forward. In addition to his many business interests, he remains active in politics, despite his falling out with President Trump. He has announced plans to form a third political party.Tesla, in its proxy statement, warned that it needed to incentivize Musk to focus his attention on growing the company. It said that during the negotiations on the pay package, “Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”The board said it “believes that Mr. Musk singularly possesses the leadership characteristics necessary to transform Tesla and realize its long-term mission at an unparalleled level.”But, so far, those big ambitions have all been grand claims from a man and company that have often fallen short of their promises. Tesla is facing growing competition from Chinese EV makers. BYD, one of those Chinese automakers, is poised to pass Tesla for the most EV sales worldwide, even though it is not available for sale in the United States.Tesla also faces competition from other companies that are ahead of it in providing robotaxi services, including Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Google parent Alphabet, which has its own service and has partnered with Uber in some cities.Shares of Tesla (TSLA) were slightly higher in premarket trading on the news.
Elon Musk, already the world’s richest person, could become the first trillionaire after the Tesla board unveiled a massive new pay package for its CEO to keep his focus on the troubled EV maker.
The package would grant him additional shares of Tesla stock if the company is able to grow far beyond its current value, with a market capitalization far greater than any company has ever approached. Musk’s previous pay package, which added significantly to his massive wealth, also laid out ambitious growth plans that once appeared to be a reach – but which Tesla proved able to reach easily.
The new pay package could grant Musk 423.7 million additional shares of Tesla stock. Those shares would be worth $143.5 billion at today’s stock value.
But Musk would get those shares only if the value of Tesla stock increases significantly in coming years. The company stock would need to reach an overall value of $8.5 trillion for Musk to get all the shares, significantly above the current market capitalization of $1.1 trillion and roughly double the current market value of Nvidia (NVDA), the current most-valuable company on the market.
The company’s proxy statement that laid out Musk’s payment plan also included a shareholder proposal that Tesla take a stake in privately-held xAI, the artificial intelligence company that Musk also owns. That could help Elon Musk further consolidate his growing business empire.
XAI recently purchased X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion of his own money in 2022. The company did not take a position for or against that shareholder proposal, which does not give any details of how large a stake Tesla should take in xAI, and at what price.
Musk currently owns 410 million shares of Tesla shares, worth $139 billion at Thursday’s closing price. That stake, along with his stakes in xAI, rocket company SpaceX, and several other companies he has started and runs, have made him the richest person on the planet, worth $378 billion according to Bloomberg’s billionaire tracker.
He currently has options to buy an additional 304 million shares of Tesla, but a judge in Delaware has twice struck down that 2018 pay package that granted him those options as illegal. Those rulings came despite overwhelming approval by Tesla shareholders – twice. The company again has tried to grant those options to Musk this year, and adding in those options, he now owns 18% of the company’s shares.
Tesla shares nearly doubled in value to a record-high price for its shares between election day and mid-December 2024, as investors bet that his close ties to President Donald Trump would be a boon for Tesla. But as Tesla faced protests and dropping sales and falling profits in backlash to those ties (before he had a falling out with Trump), all those things resulted in Tesla’s stock losing those gains. The shares have recovered some of those losses, but they are still down 26% from the December peak.
Still, Musk and his fans on Wall Street have insisted the company is well positioned to grow even larger and more successful in the future. He has continued to predict that his plans for self-driving cars – including a robotaxi service – will create massive profits and value for shareholders. The robotaxis would provide rides to passengers and also allow Tesla owners to rent out their cars for driverless rides when not in use.
Musk has also promised a line of humanoid robots that could bring in even more sales than Tesla’s car business.
“It’s a big pay package but Tesla needs to keep its biggest asset in Musk as CEO,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told CNN Friday. Ives is one of the bigger Tesla bulls on Wall Street.
“In this AI era Musk now will drive its next leg of growth,” Ives added. “The Board had a $1 trillion dollar decision and made the right one.”
The board’s proxy statement spoke of the importance of keeping Musk focused on Tesla going forward. In addition to his many business interests, he remains active in politics, despite his falling out with President Trump. He has announced plans to form a third political party.
Tesla, in its proxy statement, warned that it needed to incentivize Musk to focus his attention on growing the company. It said that during the negotiations on the pay package, “Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board said it “believes that Mr. Musk singularly possesses the leadership characteristics necessary to transform Tesla and realize its long-term mission at an unparalleled level.”
But, so far, those big ambitions have all been grand claims from a man and company that have often fallen short of their promises. Tesla is facing growing competition from Chinese EV makers. BYD, one of those Chinese automakers, is poised to pass Tesla for the most EV sales worldwide, even though it is not available for sale in the United States.
Tesla also faces competition from other companies that are ahead of it in providing robotaxi services, including Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Google parent Alphabet, which has its own service and has partnered with Uber in some cities.
Shares of Tesla (TSLA) were slightly higher in premarket trading on the news.
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.
Could humanoid robots get a lot more human? Nvidia may have made that possibility a bit realer today with a smarter robot brain that has less energy demands.
The tech giant’s latest robotics offering is Jetson Thor, a super computer built for real-time AI computation on humanoid robots and smart machines alike, Nvidia announced in a press release on Monday.
The new module is built to handle larger amounts of information at less energy than previous model Jetson Orin. Powered by the latest Blackwell GPUs, Jetson Thor has more than seven times the AI compute power and twice the memory at more than three times speed and efficiency than its predecessor, Nvidia claims.
All this new power is supposed to unlock higher speed sensor data and visual reasoning that can help humanoid robots get better at autonomously seeing, moving, and making decisions.
“Jetson Thor solves one of the most significant challenges in robotics: enabling robots to have real-time, intelligent interactions with people and the physical world,” the company wrote.
It’s a considerable performance leap that Nvidia hopes will appeal to engineers. The company says early adopters include Amazon, Meta, Caterpillar, and Agility Robotics, a startup that makes commercially available humanoid robots for warehouses and other manufacturing facilities. The model is being considered for adoption by John Deere and OpenAI.
It’s also being adopted by research labs at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Zurich, to power autonomous robots in medical research settings and more, Nvidia said in a blog post on Monday.
The developer kit Jetson AGX Thor, which includes the Jetson T5000 module plus a reference carrier board, power supply, and an active heatsink with a fan, is now on sale on the company’s website starting at $3,499.
Coming soon—and available now on pre-order—is Nvidia Drive AGX Thor, a developer kit using the same technology but for autonomous vehicles instead. Deliveries for that are slated to start in September, the company said.
“This is going to be the decade of AV [autonomous vehicles], robotics, autonomous machines,” CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC in an interview in June.
Huang elaborated on his trust in just how much the robotics industry can scale at the company’s annual shareholders meeting later that month.
Along with AI, Nvidia expects robotics to provide the largest growth for the company, and combined, the two represent “a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang told investors.
Earlier this year, the company also released a family of AI models that can be used to train humanoid robots, called Cosmos.
Huang’s bet isn’t an empty one. Humanoid robots are advancing.
Just last week, China, one of the key players in the global robotics race, hosted its first-ever robot Olympics, World Humanoid Robot Games. At the three-day spectacle, companies showcased robots that can complete a 1,500-meter race in just a little over six seconds and achieve practical job skills like sorting medicine or taking food orders.
But still, the technology is hugely limited and far from widespread adoption. Even at the great robotics showcase in China, many of the robots suffered technical difficulties. One robot in the track and field race even ran straight into and knocked over a bystander walking off-course.
Big week ahead for Nvidia
Nvidia made the announcement at a rather convenient time for the company. The tech giant is reporting fiscal second quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon, and the market is buzzing already.
Nvidia dominates the AI market, so the company’s earnings always draw huge speculation, but the importance this week is boosted by volatile policy changes and questions around the economic value of wide-scale AI adoption.
The company has been on a policy rollercoaster ride in its efforts to sell AI chips in China amidst the escalating trade war between Beijing and Washington. China is a major market for Nvidia, and the uncertainty is keeping company investors at the edge of their seats.
Also keeping investors occupied is a concerning new AI report from MIT researchers. The report found that despite the bold bets on AI in the corporate world, fewer than one in 10 AI pilot programs have translated to real revenue gains.
Nvidia just hit $4 trillion market value last month, becoming the first public company to achieve the feat. Now, the stakes are high, as it’s up to the tech giant to prove that it’s valuation is not just built on AI hype.
NEW YORK — Federal auto safety regulators are investigating why Tesla has repeatedly broken rules requiring it to quickly tell them about crashes involving its self-driving technology, a potentially significant development given the company’s plans to put hundreds of thousands of driverless cars on U.S. roads over the next year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing on Thursday that Tesla’s reports on “numerous” incidents involving its driver assistance and self-driving features were submitted far too late — several months after the crashes instead of within five days as required.
The probe comes two months after the electric vehicle maker run by Elon Musk started a self-driving taxi service in Austin, Texas, with hopes of soon offering it nationwide. The company also hopes to send over-the-air software updates to millions of Teslas already on the road that will allow them to drive themselves.
Investors enthusiastic about such plans have kept Tesla stock aloft despite plunging sales and profits due to boycotts over Musk’s support for U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right politicians in Europe.
The safety agency said the probe will focus on why Tesla took so long to report the crashes, whether the reports included all the necessary data and details and if there are crashes that the agency still doesn’t know about.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency noted that the company has told it the delays were “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection,” which Tesla says has now been fixed.
The new investigation follows another probe that began in October into potential problems with Tesla’s self-driving technology in foggy weather and other low visibility conditions, which has been linked to several accidents including one death. That probe involves 2.4 million Tesla vehicles.
The crash reporting rule for vehicles using Level 2 driver-assistance software, or those that require drivers to pay full attention to the road, was implemented in 2021. Since then Tesla has reported 2,308 crashes when the software was used, the vast majority of the more than 2,600 reported by all automakers, according to agency data. The numbers are skewed by the fact that Tesla is by far the dominant maker of partial self-driving vehicles in the U.S.
The company has been offering robotaxi rides in Austin to only a select group of riders, but said it will allow any paying customer to hail its cabs starting sometime in September, according to a Musk post on X earlier this month. Tesla has also begun allowing limited robotaxi service in San Francisco with a driver behind the wheel as a safety check to conform with California rules.
Investors in Tesla were initially cheered after Trump won the presidency in hopes he would reward his biggest financial backer, Musk, by getting safety regulators to go easier on the company. Now that isn’t so certain given Musk’s falling out with the president in recent months after Musk called Trump’s budget bill an “abomination” that would add to U.S. debt and threatened to form a new political party.
Tesla stock fell less than 1% in afternoon trading Thursday to $321.
DETROIT — The U.S. government’s road safety agency is investigating Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Thursday after the company reported four crashes when Teslas encountered sun glare, fog and airborne dust.
In addition to the pedestrian’s death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said.
Investigators will look into the ability of “Full Self-Driving” to “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes.”
The investigation covers roughly 2.4 million Teslas from the 2016 through 2024 model years.
A message was left early Friday seeking comment from Tesla, which has repeatedly said the system cannot drive itself and human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times.
Last week Tesla held an event at a Hollywood studio to unveil a fully autonomous robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals. Musk, who has promised autonomous vehicles before, said the company plans to have them running without human drivers next year, and robotaxis available in 2026.
The agency also said it would look into whether any other similar crashes involving “Full Self-Driving” have happened in low visibility conditions, and it will seek information from the company on whether any updates affected the system’s performance in those conditions.
“In particular, this review will assess the timing, purpose and capabilities of any such updates, as well as Telsa’s assessment of their safety impact,” the documents said.
Tesla has twice recalled “Full Self-Driving” under pressure from the agency, which in July sought information from law enforcement and the company after a Tesla using the system struck and killed a motorcyclist near Seattle.
The recalls were issued because the system was programmed to run stop signs at slow speeds and because the system disobeyed other traffic laws. Both problems were to be fixed with online software updates.
Critics have said that Tesla’s system, which uses only cameras to spot hazards, doesn’t have proper sensors to be fully self driving. Nearly all other companies working on autonomous vehicles use radar and laser sensors in addition to cameras to see better in the dark or poor visibility conditions.
The “Full Self-Driving” recalls arrived after a three-year investigation into Tesla’s less-sophisticated Autopilot system crashing into emergency and other vehicles parked on highways, many with warning lights flashing.
That investigation was closed last April after the agency pressured Tesla into recalling its vehicles to bolster a weak system that made sure drivers are paying attention. A few weeks after the recall, NHTSA began investigating whether the recall was working.
The investigation that was opened Thursday enters new territory for NHTSA, which previously had viewed Tesla’s systems as assisting drivers rather than driving themselves. With the new probe, the agency is focusing on the capabilities of “Full Self-Driving” rather than simply making sure drivers are paying attention.
Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, said the previous investigation of Autopilot didn’t look at why the Teslas weren’t seeing and stopping for emergency vehicles.
“Before they were kind of putting the onus on the driver rather than the car,” he said. “Here they’re saying these systems are not capable of appropriately detecting safety hazards whether the drivers are paying attention or not.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tesla unveiled its long-awaited robotaxi at a Hollywood studio Thursday night, though fans of the electric vehicle maker will have to wait until at least 2026 before they are available.
CEO Elon Musk pulled up to a stage at the Warner Bros. studio lot in one of the company’s “Cybercabs,” telling the crowd that the sleek, AI-powered vehicles don’t have steering wheels or pedals. He also expressed confidence in the progress the company has made on autonomous driving technology that makes it possible for vehicles to drive without human intervention.
“We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving. where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” he said. “It’s going to be a glorious future.”
Tesla expects the Cybercabs to cost under $30,000, Musk said. He estimated that the vehicles would become available in 2026, then added “before 2027.”
The company also expects to make the Full Self-Driving technology available on its popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in Texas and California next year.
“If they’re going to eventually get to robotaxis, they first need to have success with the unsupervised FSD at the current lineup,” said Seth Goldstein, equity strategist at Morningstar Research. “Tonight’s event showed that they’re ready to take that step forward.”
When Tesla will actually take that step, however, has led to more than a little anxiety for investors who see other automakers deploying similar technology right now. Shares of Tesla Inc. tumbled 9% at the opening bell Friday.
Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Alphabet Inc., is carrying passengers in vehicles without human safety drivers in Phoenix and other areas. General Motors’ Cruise self-driving unit had been running robotaxis in San Francisco until a crash last year involving one of its vehicles.
Also, Aurora Innovation said it will start hauling freight in fully autonomous semis on Texas freeways by year’s end. Another autonomous semi company, Gatik, plans to haul freight autonomously by the end of 2025.
“Tesla yet again claimed it is a year or two away from actual automated driving — just as the company has been claiming for a decade. Indeed, Tesla’s whole event had a 2014 vibe, except that in 2014 there were no automated vehicles actually deployed on public roads,” Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies automated vehicles, told The Associated Press in an email. “Now there are real AVs carrying real people on real roads, but none of those vehicles are Teslas. Tonight did not change this reality; it only made the irony more glaring.”
Tesla had 20 or so Cybercabs on hand and offered event attendees the opportunity to take rides inside the movie studio lot — not on Los Angeles’ roads.
At the presentation, which was dubbed “We, Robot” and was streamed live on Tesla’s website and X, Musk also revealed a sleek minibus-looking vehicle that, like the Cybercab, would be self-driving and can carry up to 20 passengers.
The company also trotted out several of its black and white Optimus humanoid robots, which walked a few feet from the attendees before showing off dance moves in a futuristic-looking gazebo.
Musk estimated that the robots would cost between $28,000-$30,000 and would be able to babysit, mow lawns, fetch groceries, among other tasks.
“Whatever you can think of, it will do,” he said.
The unveiling of the Cybercab comes as Musk tries to persuade investors that his company is more about artificial intelligence and robotics as it labors to sell its core products, an aging lineup of electric vehicles.
Tesla’s model lineup is struggling and isn’t likely to be refreshed until late next year at the earliest, TD Cowen analyst Jeff Osborne wrote in a research note last week.
Osborne also noted that, in TD Cowen’s view, the “politicization of Elon” is tarnishing the Tesla brand among Democrat buyers in the U.S.
Musk has endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and has pushed many conservative causes. Last weekend he joined Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.
Musk has been saying for more than five years that a fleet of robotaxis is near, allowing Tesla owners to make money by having their cars carry passengers while they’re not in use by the owners. Musk said that Tesla owners will be able to put their cars into service on a company robotaxi network.
In addition, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration forced Tesla to recall Full Self-Driving in February because it allowed speeding and violated other traffic laws, especially near intersections. Tesla was to fix the problems with an online software update.
Last April in Snohomish County, Washington, near Seattle, a Tesla using Full Self-Driving hit and killed a motorcyclist, authorities said. The Tesla driver told authorities that he was using the system while looking at his phone when the car rear-ended the motorcyclist. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
NHTSA says it’s evaluating information on the fatal crash from Tesla and law enforcement officials.
Movie studios are where Hollywood spins fantastical worlds out of fancy camera angles and special effects. So where better to show off the Tesla Cybercab, a two-door self-driving taxi that CEO Elon Musk says will be in production in just three years—but that’s still fascinatingly short on firm detail?
Almost an hour after Tesla had said the debut event would begin, Musk was escorted by a man dressed as an astronaut to the butterfly doors of the silver prototype. He took a quick, seemingly driverless jaunt through the dark, ghostly streets of the Warner Bros. Studios in Southern California, before emerging from the car to take the stage.
Later, in front of an audience of excited Tesla fans and shareholders, Musk referred to the entire setup as a “set”—far from the messy, busy streets where an eventual autonomous vehicle might one day be challenged to drive.
Tesla also showed off a “Robovan” designed to autonomously move up to 20 people. Like the Cybercab, the van did not appear to have pedals or a steering wheel, just seats.
Musk, an admitted collector of missed deadlines, has been promising Tesla self-driving tech since 2016. On Thursday evening, he made a few more promises. Full self-driving (unsupervised), a technology meant to be autonomous, will be available in California and Texas next year, Musk says. He says the Cybercab will go into production in 2026, and will eventually cost less than $30,000.
“I think it’s going to be a glorious future,” he said.
The Robovan.
Photograph: WIRED Staff/Tesla
The interior of the Robovan. It holds up to 20 humans.
Photograph: WIRED Staff/Tesla
Musk repeated a vision he’s articulated before: that one day, Tesla owners may be able to send their vehicles off to offer rides on their own, driving others around to increase each individual vehicle’s utility by five to 10 times. In the future, one person might own a fleet of autonomous taxis and “take care of them like a shepherd tends to their flock,” Musk said. Tesla has shown off mock-ups of an Uber-like app that might allow a rider to hail an autonomous Tesla cab. But Musk didn’t articulate new details about the service Thursday.
Video renderings showed robots cleaning out the interior of a Cybercab, pointing to a solution to an oft-cited autonomous taxi problem—how to keep the things clean without the assistance of a human driver. The robotaxi would also be charged wirelessly, through inductive charging, Musk said. But a timeline for both tech features went unmentioned.
The event concluded with Optimus, a humanoid robot that Musk has said could eventually make the automaker some $25 trillion dollars by becoming “the biggest product ever, of any kind.” The robot was making progress, Musk said. To prove it, five bots illuminated by lights danced in a nearby gazebo. More Optimus bots mingled with the crowd after the presentation, serving drinks at the bar and posing for photos.
Optimus dances.
Photograph: WIRED Staff/Tesla
It’s your “humanoid friend.”
In April, Musk seemed to beat back concerns that Tesla was losing its EV edge by insisting autonomy and robotics would live at the center of Tesla’s mission. “The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy,” Musk told investors this summer. He also encouraged non-believers to sell their Tesla stock.
The event comes at a critical time for Tesla, which faces increased competition in electric vehicles not only from legacy automakers, but upstart firms in China, which are exporting inexpensive vehicles overseas like never before. Tesla deliveries are down globally this year, and the automaker last quarter underperformed compared to analysts’ expectations. The automaker laid off some 14,000 employees earlier this year, many working on the core competencies of electric vehicle production, including batteries and charging infrastructure. A series of top executives have departed the automaker in just the past few weeks.
DETROIT — Expectations are high for the long-awaited unveiling of Tesla’s robotaxi at a Hollywood studio Thursday night. Too high for some analysts and investors.
The company, which began selling software it calls “Full Self-Driving” nine years ago that still can’t drive itself, is expected to show off the so-called “Cybercab” vehicle, which may not have a steering wheel and pedals.
The unveiling comes as CEO Elon Musk tries to persuade investors that his company is more about artificial intelligence and robotics as it struggles to sell its core products, an aging lineup of electric vehicles.
Some analysts are predicting that it will be a historic day for the Austin, Texas, company as it takes a huge step toward a long-awaited robotaxi service powered by AI.
But others who track self-driving vehicles say Musk has yet to demonstrate Tesla’s system can travel safely without a human driver ready to step in to prevent crashes.
“I don’t know why the headlines continue to be ‘What will Tesla announce?’ rather than ‘Why does Tesla think we’re so stupid?’” said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles.
He doesn’t see Tesla having the ability to show off software and hardware that can work without human supervision, even in a limited area that’s well-known to the driving system.
“We just haven’t seen any indication that that is what Tesla is working toward,” Walker Smith said. “If they were, they would be showcasing this not on a closed lot, but in an actual city or on an actual freeway.”
Without a clear breakthrough in autonomous technology, Tesla will just show off a vehicle with no pedals or steering wheel, which already has been done by numerous other companies, he said.
“The challenge is developing a combination of hardware and software plus the human and digital infrastructure to actually safely drive a vehicle even without a steering wheel on public roads in any conditions,” Walker Smith said. “Tesla has been giving us that demo every year, and it’s not reassuring us.”
Many industry analysts aren’t expecting much from the event either. While TD Cowen’s Jeff Osborne expects Musk to reveal the Cybercab and perhaps the Model 2, a lower-cost electric vehicle, he said he doesn’t expect much of a change on self-driving technology.
“We expect the event to be light on details and appeal to the true long-term believers in Tesla,” Osborne wrote in a note. Musk’s claims on the readiness of Full Self Driving, though, will be crucial “given past delays and ongoing scrutiny” of the system and of Tesla’s less-sophisticated Autopilot driver-assist software.
Tesla’s model lineup is struggling and isn’t likely to be refreshed until late next year at the earliest, Osborne wrote. Plus, he wrote that in TD Cowen’s view the “politicization of Elon” is tarnishing the Tesla brand among Democrat buyers in the U.S.
Musk has endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and has pushed many conservative causes. Last weekend he joined Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.
Musk has been saying for more than five years that a fleet of robotaxis is near, allowing Tesla owners to make money by having their cars carry passengers while they’re not in use by the owners.
However, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who is bullish on Tesla stock, wrote in an investor note that robotaxi event, dubbed “We, Robot,” by the company, will be a new chapter of growth for Tesla.
Ives expects many updates and details from Tesla on the robotaxi, plus breakthroughs in Full Self Driving and artificial intelligence. He also is looking for a phased-in strategy for rolling out the robotaxis within the next year, as well as a Tesla ride-sharing app, and demonstrations of technology “designed to revolutionize urban transportation.”
Ives, whose organization will attend the invitation-only event at the Warner Bros. studio, wrote that he also expects updates on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which the company plans to start selling in 2026.
“We believe this is a pivotal time for Tesla as the company prepares to release its years of Robotaxi R&D shadowed behind the curtains, while Musk & Co. lay out the company’s vision for the future,” Ives wrote.
In addition, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration forced Tesla to recall Full Self-Driving in February because it allowed speeding and violated other traffic laws, especially near intersections. Tesla was to fix the problems with an online software update.
Last April in Snohomish County, Washington, near Seattle, a Tesla using Full Self-Driving hit and killed a motorcyclist, authorities said. The Tesla driver told authorities that he was using the system while looking at his phone when the car rear-ended the motorcyclist. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.
NHTSA says it’s evaluating information on the fatal crash from Tesla and law enforcement officials.
Soon you could see Waymo self-driving tech in Hyundai cars. The autonomous driving tech developer Waymo said this week that it would partner with the Korean automaker Hyundai to equip a fleet of its electric vehicles with self-driving technology. The vehicles, modified Ioniq 5s, will hit the road as part of Waymo’s self-driving ride-hail service in late 2025, the companies said.
In a statement, Hyundai Motor Company president and global COO José Muñoz called the agreement a “first step” in the two firms’ partnership. “We are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration,” he said—opening up the possibility that Waymo self-driving tech could one day be installed on Hyundai passenger vehicles.
However, the multinational partnership is the latest to prompt questions about how Waymo, arguably the world’s most successful autonomous-driving company, will handle a global realignment of the automotive industry.
The US Commerce Department also last month proposed a rule that would ban some Chinese- and Russian-made automotive hardware and software from the US, with an emphasis on technology that enables autonomy. Just this week, the European Union voted to hike tariffs against Chinese-made electric vehicles.
Interestingly, Waymo insists that a partnership with Chinese-owned automaker Zeekr is still on. The deal, announced in late 2021, has seen Zeekr purpose-build roomier autonomous minivans for the Alphabet subsidiary that are also less expensive to manufacture. The Zeekr vehicle officially made its debut in San Francisco in June, though Waymo says it’s still in testing and is not yet part of its public ride-hail fleet.
Zeekr is owned by Chinese automaker Geely, though its design center and one of its research and development facilities are in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Swedish city is also the headquarters of majority Geely-owned automakers Volvo and Polestar, an all-electric premium automaker.
In an email on Friday, Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli wrote that the Hyundai Ioniq 5s “will not replace any of our other vehicle platforms,” and said the company is “hard at work validating” the latest version of Waymo’s tech on the Zeekr platform.
In proposing new rules targeting Chinese-made auto software and hardware, the US government argued that such tech installed on US vehicles could create a long-term national security issue. “Imagine if there were thousands or hundreds of thousands of Chinese-connected vehicles on American roads that could be immediately and simultaneously disabled by somebody in Beijing,” US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said earlier this year.
But in public comments submitted to the Commerce Department in April, Waymo representatives insisted that, despite its partnership with the Chinese automaker, China has nothing to do with the vital tech of the Zeekr-made robotaxi. “The AV-ready base vehicles being provided to Waymo have no driving automation or telematics capabilities built into them,” the company wrote, saying that only US-based Waymo personnel install autonomous technology onto vehicles at an American factory. The company said that, once operating in the US, the vehicles cannot remotely communicate with the vehicle’s manufacturer—Zeekr.
A select number of all-electric Tesla Cybertrucks now have the ability to drive on US highways hands-free, after the automaker pushed an update to vehicles this morning. Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy wrote on X that Cybertrucks will be the first Tesla vehicles to receive the “end-to-end on highway” driving feature, which the company says uses a “neural net” to navigate all parts of highway driving.
“Nice work,” Tesla CEO (and X owner) Elon Musk responded to his AI chief.
The feature appears to be in “early access,” meaning it’s available only to some Cybertruck owners who purchased the feature. It’s unclear when the automaker will release the feature more widely. Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Tesla owners’ manuals maintain that the full-self-driving feature, or “FSD (Supervised),” should be used only if drivers are paying attention to the road. The feature reportedly turns off if it detects that drivers are looking elsewhere. Critics have argued that Tesla’s marketing incorrectly leads drivers to assume that FSD can truly drive itself and that the automaker hasn’t been proactive in preventing driver misuse.
Customers who purchased base model Cybertrucks early, at preorder, paid $7,000 for access to the driving feature, with some waiting almost a year for it to be available on their trucks. Tesla owners can now subscribe to the FSD (Supervised) feature at $99 per month.
One Cybertruck driver reported on X that, based on driving this morning, the feature is “working well.”
The feature’s introduction is some much-needed good news for the Cybertruck, which has faced a rocky introduction into Tesla’s lineup. The vehicle was delayed for years by the Covid-19 pandemic and by engineering issues. (A leaked “alpha” briefing on the vehicle, first reported by WIRED, found that the truck had serious issues with braking, handling, and noise.)
The all-electric truck has also been subject to a handful of safety recalls, including one in which the company had to repair or replace accelerator pedals that had gotten stuck.
As more automakers rush into the electrification race, and Tesla’s huge lead in electric cars has been eroded by other manufacturers, Musk and company seem to believe that “self-driving” features enabled by AI will help Tesla regain its edge. “The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy,” Musk told investors this summer.
The US road safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has found that Tesla’s Autopilot feature, an older and less sophisticated version of FSD, didn’t sufficiently prevent drivers from misuse—and was involved in 13 fatal crashes between 2018 and 2023. After a years-long investigation into Autopilot, last year Tesla recalled 2 million vehicles with Autopilot. (The automaker said it did not agree with the government’s conclusions.)
Earlier this year, Tesla settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a Northern California man who died while using Autopilot on his Model X.
Tesla also faces a class action lawsuit alleging it misled customers who purchased Teslas after Musk promised the cars had everything they needed to drive autonomously. Eight years later, Tesla has made significant improvements to its driverless features and has plans to make big bucks off the feature—but still hasn’t produced self-driving technology.
That could change this month. Musk has promised that Tesla will unveil a self-driving taxi, calling it a Cybercab, at an event in Southern California on October 10.
