Waymo continues to expand its service and testing, and in 2025, that’s going to include a road trip to more than 10 additional cities. Note that we have no idea how many cities Waymo will begin robotaxi service in this year, if any, but I do presume it will roll … [continued]
During the Tesla conference call for shareholders this week, where Tesla reportedly some not entirely positive financial results (and bad financial trends), there had to be a big announcement, right? Aside from Elon Musk thinking out loud that Tesla might be worth more than the next 5 most valuable companies … [continued]
Yesterday, I wrote about Elon Musk’s long history predicting robotaxi-capable Tesla Autopilot/Full Self Driving. We then got another update from Tesla, stating: “2025 will be a seminal year in Tesla’s history as FSD (Supervised) continues to rapidly improve with the aim of ultimately exceeding human levels of safety. This will … [continued]
It’s a longstanding and vigorous debate — will robotaxis need lidar, or are cameras alone adequate? Of course, we have several companies now operating robotaxis in China, the US, and elsewhere. Those all use lidar. However, Elon Musk has said for about a decade that robotaxis shouldn’t need lidar, and … [continued]
Much of the discussion around robotaxis these days is focused on how well they work and how quickly they can scale up and reproduce. However, some of the initial premises on why robotaxis could be good and helpful have probably not gotten enough attention. Bloomberg recently interviewed former director of … [continued]
I just wrote about interesting new research finding that 25% of Americans are completely avoiding Tesla products because of Elon Musk. It’s a big deal, whether many Tesla fans want to acknowledge it or not. In theory, that’s 1.5 million sales rather than 2 million. But that’s not what most … [continued]
Pony.ai Robotaxis Gallop to Hong Kong Pony.ai currently has 250+ robotaxis in operation in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen (without safety drivers). It’s now looking to expand into Hong Kong, following somewhat more mature rival Baidu there. In particular, Pony.ai will be operating robotaxis at the Hong Kong International Airport as … [continued]
Swiss Re, a top reinsurer globally, has analyzed a lot of data, and it has determined that Waymo’s robotaxis are safer than human drivers, and even safer than human drivers of new cars with the latest advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Swiss Re has more than 500,000 liability claims and … [continued]
New regulations and big regulatory changes take a long time to develop and roll out in the US government. They need to be super carefully developed and every single punctuation mark needs to be examined by the lawyers to make sure the regulations will hold up if challenged in the … [continued]
Waymo has been on a roll this year. Without a doubt, in my humble opinion, this has been the company’s best year. I don’t just mean that every year is better than the last, and so this is its best year. I mean that the company seems to have leapt … [continued]
