#autonomous-vehicles

#autonomous-vehicles

The agency said the incident occurred close to a school within regular drop-off hours, with other children and a crossing guard nearby. The child ran from behind a double-parked SUV into the path of a Waymo Driver. Waymo said its vehicle detected the child immediately as they emerged and that the robotaxi braked hard to lower its speed from around 17 mph to under 6 mph at the time of impact.

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has long garnered a reputation for being massively wrong in his promises and predictions about the future. In 2024, for instance, he said that AI would become "smarter than the smartest human" by 2025. He said his company's SpaceX Starship rocket, which is still exploding during test flights, will land on Mars this year. Like clockwork, he's predicted that self-driving cars will become a reality "next year" every year for well over a decade now.

Holon, the autonomous mobility subsidiary of Benteler Group and Tasaru Mobility Investments (Saudi investor) rebranded in 2022, presented its driverless shuttle for the first time at CES 2023 in Las Vegas. and is now preparing for series production and market rollout of its first fully electric autonomous shuttle, the Holon Urban, showcased at UITP Summit in Hamburg in June. It features design by Pininfarina and sees Beep and Mobileye as development partners.

One size does not fit all.Even if Waymo's claim that its driverless cabs are involved in 80-percent fewer crashes per mile traveled is true, we still must take all necessary steps to encourage the use of AVs. Given the hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries annually in New York City, driverless cars have the potential to provide a huge safety dividend with far-reaching effects on hospitals, health, and individual finances - perhaps as much as $10 billion annually.

As we contemplate a future of self-driving cars, Cameron Clarke finds out that there's still some way to go in convincing the public to cede control to machines. John Reynolds explores the almost unimaginable opportunities a driver-free society presents for advertisers. Design will play a large role in gaining public acceptance and mass adoption of driverless technology, so The Drum takes a look at some of the weird and wonderful concepts seen so far, and asks designers what challenges remain.

The company's couriers, known internally as " dashers," are a common sight as they zip around the US delivering food, groceries, and other goods to customers. Now, DoorDash is investing in new tech, including autonomous vehicles, as it looks to the future. CEO Tony Xu said on an earnings call in November that DoorDash would invest hundreds of millions of dollars this year in key initiatives, including a global tech platform for all its brands and autonomous tech.

"It always felt like it was three years out," he said of autonomous driving. "And then every year it shifted by a year. So we wanted to have self-driving cars everywhere in 2020 at Zoox. And then it was 2021 and so forth." Von der Ohe left Zoox in 2018. Instead of fixating on robotaxis, von der Ohe wanted to stay in mobility but work on something that could be faster to bring to market

At those jobs, Puchalski developed deep connections in the automotive industry, and we crossed paths all week. There he was at an industry networking party one night. On another night, in my hotel lobby at 10 p.m., he was debating how to balance quality and manufacturing yield with Sanjay Dastoor - founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which also got off the ground at YC.

The new law, if passed, would loosen the state's restrictions on self-driving car companies by forming a pilot program that would allow for "the limited deployment of commercial for-hire autonomous passenger vehicles outside New York City." Applicants to the pilot program would need to demonstrate that they have "local support for [autonomous vehicle] deployment" and prove their "adherence to the highest possible safety standards" to be considered.

Lucid Motors closed out 2025 with some very encouraging news. The automaker had avoided the slump in sales that affected other electric vehicle manufacturers while also reaching a manufacturing goal that some observers had viewed with skepticism. The company had another big announcement to make to start off the new year, and this one had to do with a different aspect of their business - and one that doesn't factor in human drivers at all.

Once a customer bought a car, that software could stay locked in a box and never need to be updated unless something was wrong (and then it was a trip to a dealership). That strategy worked great right up until cars became rolling data centers on wheels. Now automakers are starting to stare down the reality of what complex hardware and connected software really meanboth the advantages and disadvantages. And the consensus? Maybe platform sharing and open-source software was the right idea all along.