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Source: The Verge It’s a familiar frustration for ridehail users: you open the Uber or Lyft app, enter your destination, and discover that your intended trip costs several times more than expected. The culprit is surge pricing, one of ridehail’s most important and controversial innovations. Customers grumble about higher fares, but Uber and Lyft executives…
Source: The Verge Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired about 30 members of the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in February, and many of them were part of a department that assesses the risks of self-driving cars, according to the Financial Times. One worker laid off from the NHTSA’s so-called “office…
Source: The Verge Next week, Waymo’s driverless vehicles will begin testing on public roads in Japan for the Alphabet company’s first international trip. Waymo has yet to confirm whether it will eventually launch a commercial robotaxi service in the country, but the company is still celebrating the excursion as a “significant milestone.” Waymo describes it…
Source: The Verge Waymo has “no plans” to use footage from cameras inside its robotaxis to train AI models for targeted ads, spokesperson Julia Ilina said in an email to The Verge. Ilina was responding to an unreleased page from Waymo’s privacy policy that appears to offer customers the ability to opt-out from having their…
Source: The Verge Waymo announced that Washington, DC will be its next robotaxi city. The company aims to launch its Waymo One ridehailing service in the nation’s capitol in 2026 — though it acknowledged that it will first need to change the city law prohibiting fully autonomous vehicles without safety drivers. Currently, companies that want…
Source: The Verge Someone has responded to YouTuber Mark Rober’s Tesla fake wall test with a video that also tries to address the question of whether the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features would detect a Wile E. Coyote-style road obstruction in the real world. Creator Kyle Paul posted his video Thursday and included two Teslas…
Source: The Verge Lyft will let users in Atlanta catch robotaxi rides starting this summer, as reported by NBC News. “Atlanta riders will have the opportunity to be matched with a fleet of autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans equipped with May Mobility’s autonomous technology, a deployment that Lyft and May Mobility aim to scale over time…
Source: The Verge Family members of people who died in Tesla crashes are urging the US Department of Transportation not to scrap a Biden-era rule requiring companies to report crashes that involve fully or partially autonomous vehicles. They also say they are worried that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s influence in the Trump administration may lead…
Source: The Verge With its new permit, Tesla can transport its own employees as passengers in Tesla vehicles on a pre-arranged basis, according to CPUC. It can then transition to using the permit to transport members of the public, but will need to notify the agency first before initiating that step. TCP permits are different…
Source: The Verge At Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, Calif. today, the chipmaker announced it was teaming up with General Motors to develop next-generation cars, robots, and factories. GM says it will apply several of Nvidia’s products to its business, such as the Omniverse 3D graphics platform which will run simulations on virtual…
