I tested Waymo’s automated taxis during a Phoenix vacation. I found Waymo’s service comparable to Uber’s/Lyft’s, slightly cheaper, and user-friendly, despite minor pickup inconveniences. Waymo’s driving matched Tesla FSD V13’s best performance—confident yet cautious—but excelled as a consumer experience, allowing passengers to relax without supervising the vehicle. Tesla FSD, while … [continued]
I knew it was coming. Waymo has been expanding faster and faster in the past couple of years, and it seemed certain that the company would bring its robotaxis to a new major market in 2025. In fact, I think it will expand into more than one city, but today … [continued]
Hyundai is planning to bust the US robotaxi scene wide open with an assist from its popular IONIQ 5 EV, leaving Tesla behind in the dust.
Waymo One is providing hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous trips each week in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, where residents are integrating Waymo One into their daily lives. At the same time, out of town visitors are opting to use Waymo One to experience even more of … [continued]
Waymo continues to expand its robotaxi service. While it’s been in San Francisco for a while, Waymo just extended its services down the region into the heart of Silicon Valley, where it all started. As of yesterday, Waymo is offering its Waymo One robotaxi services in Mountain View (the home … [continued]
There’s been a lot going on in the advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) industry in the past couple of weeks. BYD has announced it’s including advanced driver-assist systems in all of its new models for free. Several Chinese automakers are partnering with DeepSeek, which may well have an autonomous driving component … [continued]
A couple of weeks ago, Michael Barnard published a great article on Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving, what he thought about it a decade ago, what’s happened since then, and whether Tesla can ever achieve robotaxi-level self-driving. There were a lot of great comments under the article. A few articles … [continued]
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]
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]
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]
