Top Story of the Week

Lyft riders can now hail Waymo robotaxis in Nashville (link, no paywall).

Through the partnership, Lyft customers may be matched at no additional cost with a Waymo autonomous vehicle when they order a regular ride. In order for a match to happen, the desired route must start and end within Waymo’s existing service area. Users can decline a driverless ride or opt out entirely.

I’m bullish on this model. Waymo can keep serving customers who specifically want a Waymo and may be willing to wait longer or pay more for the experience, while still tapping into Lyft’s larger customer base during lower-demand periods. That feels like a win-win, and it solves a lot of the issues we’ve highlighted with the “Waymo on Uber” model.

The main downside for Lyft though is what I like to call the Trojan horse problem: a Lyft customer gets matched with a Waymo, has a great experience, and then decides to start booking directly through Waymo instead.

But I think that’s a risk Uber and Lyft are going to have to live with. It’s tough for them to compete with Waymo on the actual ride experience, so their advantage needs to come from lower prices, shorter ETAs and better reliability.

Other Stuff

Self-Driving Firm PlusAl to Go Public Via Yorkville SPAC Merger (link, no paywall).

The transaction values Santa Clara, California-based PlusAI at $800 million on an equity basis before the merger with the SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp… The deal is expected to provide up to about $300 million in capital, mostly from the SPAC’s trust of about $236 million. The deal also includes more than $60 million of fully committed financing.

Tesla is asking people if they want to buy and run Cybercab fleets (link).

The robotaxi interest form, which was released ahead of the company’s Cybercab event in Austin, is not definitive proof that Tesla will sell its autonomous vehicles to third-party operators. But it’s certainly an indicator of where the company’s longer-term plans lie. Tesla wants to scale and it doesn’t seem to want to do it alone.

‘Unfinished business’: Travis Kalanick revisits robotaxis with new start-up (link, no paywall).

Pony.ai and Verne Kick Off Fully Driverless Robotaxi Test Rides in Zagreb (link, no paywall). This is a nice step up from their initial launch, where they still had a safety driver onboard. And it’s a meaningful milestone now that the vehicles are operating fully driverless, a first for Europe. But the deployment still looks more like a limited-corridor robotaxi service than a true citywide deployment.

One framework I’ve been thinking about for AV launches is whether the main barrier is technological or regulatory. In Europe’s case, this increasingly looks like a regulatory challenge. We already know Pony.ai’s technology can operate driverlessly from its operations in China, so the question is less whether the system can drive and more how quickly regulators will allow that capability to be deployed more broadly.

The test rides take place along a 22-kilometer route linking Verne's headquarters and one of Zagreb's main business districts with Franjo Tuđman Airport Zagreb. The fully driverless routes will be further expanded in the next few months, with the aim to cover the whole operating area in Zagreb.

Related: INTERVIEW With Pony AI CEO James Peng: “In two years, we’ll be bigger than Waymo on fleet size” (link).

Poseidon Aerospace lands $60M ahead of first pilotless test flight (link). I’ve always been skeptical of the economics of autonomous aircraft since pilots are only a small portion of airline costs. But Poseidon’s thesis is broader: going pilotless can improve utilization, eliminate crew constraints, reduce aircraft weight by removing the cockpit and life support systems, and make it easier to operate in higher-risk environments where you may not want to put a pilot in harm’s way.

The startup is embracing autonomy and remote piloting, but it’s not bothering with the vertical takeoff and landing tech that is de rigueur among so many aviation startups. There’s also no hydrogen or electric powertrain to be found. Egret and its seaplane variant, Heron, are fixed-wing aircraft powered by regular old combustion engines.

Related: Morgan Barrett interviews Sam Rohr of JAWS, one of Poseidon Aerospace’s new investors (link).

Faster Data Off the Vehicle—Faster AI on the Road

Virewirx’s VX60 High Performance Wireless System has piqued our interest—that’s why we’re partnering with them this week to share their unique millimeter wave system built to move massive AV fleet data quickly and reliably. Reach out to Brian Lee at info@virewirx.com to learn more.

Minneapolis may require driverless vehicles to have someone in the driver’s seat (link, no paywall). Not a big surprise here. Minneapolis has a large and well-organized rideshare driver community, including many immigrant drivers, and the city and state have already been at the forefront of pushing for higher pay and stronger protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.

WeRide, Uber Win Spain’s First L4 Permit for 20-Vehicle Madrid Fleet (link).

The companies target commercial robotaxi service on the Uber app by the end of 2026, which depends on further regulatory and operational milestones the permit does not itself grant. Vehicles will carry an in-car specialist during the initial phase. Mapping, route validation, and operational readiness testing begin immediately.

Can Zoox’s ‘Toaster on Wheels’ Conquer the Self-Driving Car Capital of America? (link, no paywall).

‘One side says Tesla will kill Uber. The other says Uber owns the customer relationship and can just aggregate competing robotaxi fleets. I think both miss what changes when you remove the human driver’ (link).

‘Waymo is changing multi-stop behavior. Now when you make stops, you can only chill for 5 minutes, and then must continue’ (link). Waymo’s stop product works fine if you’re picking someone up or dropping someone off. But if you’re riding solo and want to make a quick stop, you can’t really use it that way. If you get out of the vehicle, the car leaves, and you have to request another Waymo when you’re ready to continue.

That always felt like a strange product experience to me. If I add a stop, I’d expect the same car to wait for a few minutes while I run inside somewhere. A five-minute limit seems totally reasonable, but the product should actually let solo riders use those five minutes. And I’d be happy to pay for the waiting time too. I wouldn’t expect the car to sit there for free.

Tesla Cybercab doesn’t have any manual controls — but it does have a virtual joystick (link, no paywall). This could be a good solution for first responders who need to move the vehicles out of the way although it sounds like they already have some concerns.

Related: Tesla Cybercab draws concern from Texas fire department over lack of steering wheel (link, no paywall).

‘Wayve doing testing in downtown San Jose tonight at 10:13pm’ (link).

‘Younger bro follows Big bro’ (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

How to Get Hired at Waymo (link). Our latest piece where we put together a practical guide to finding the right role, getting noticed, networking with employees and making it through the interview process at Waymo. This was a lot of fun to write and a Waymo employee already told me “building something definitely stands out”.

Building and Scaling AV Depots with Voltera CEO Frank Reig (link). My latest podcast where we discuss what actually goes into setting up an AV depot, the potential challenges in AV depot operations, and how Voltera is building the infrastructure needed to support AV fleets at scale, among other things.

AV Events

-1 to Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov, presented by South Park Commons. Happening on Monday, September 21 in San Francisco (link).

AVs behaving badly

‘Tesla Cybercab injures passenger, and then drops them off at wrong location’ (link). Obviously not a great experience, but I’ve been surprised by how few videos we’ve seen so far of Cybercabs behaving badly. There have been some awkward drop-offs and other quirks, but given how closely these vehicles are being watched, the relative lack of major incidents caught on video feels like a mildly positive signal.

Still early and purely anecdotal though.

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers David C and Micah for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Multiple roles at Rocsys (link) via Rombout Heesterman.

Senior Software Engineer - Mapping Web at Zoox (link) via Cameron Drake.

Field Support Operations Launch Lead, AV CommOps at Uber (link) via Adriana Peth.

Staff Software Engineer, Fleet Optimization at Waymo (link) via Jamelia Quiet.

Job Moves

Christian Potthast: Woven by Toyota -> Neros Technologies (link).

Maoz Friedman: Rivian -> Bedrock Robotics (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

It’s easy to understand why. Waymo is widely considered the top company in the autonomous vehicle industry. It is the largest player and clear leader in the US robotaxi race, with a proven product and the deep pockets of Alphabet behind it.

The compensation doesn’t hurt either. This Principal Software Engineer role in California, for example, lists a base salary range of $349,000 to $431,000.

None of us here at The Driverless Digest have ever worked for Waymo, but enough readers have asked us how to get through the door that we decided to dig into it.

So here’s our practical guide to landing a job at Waymo.

The Waymo Appeal

First up, beyond the salary and the name on your resume, what is the real appeal of working at Waymo?

For many candidates, it is the chance to work on problems that simply do not have an existing playbook. Waymo is trying to deploy autonomous driving at scale in the real world, which means tackling some of the hardest problems across AI, robotics, software and engineering.

There is also the opportunity to work on technology that millions of people could eventually use, while helping shape an industry that is still relatively early in its development.

How To Land An Interview

The majority of Waymo’s open roles are based in the US, where the company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. But Waymo is also hiring internationally, with roles across the UK, Poland, Japan, Taiwan and India.

So, where do you start?

Find the Right Role

The obvious place to start is Waymo’s careers page. And at the time of writing, their site lists around 345 open roles.

Linkedin can also be helpful, and at the time of writing, they list 543 Waymo job postings. The difference is likely because some Waymo roles can be based in multiple cities, and LinkedIn surfaces those as separate location-specific listings. So 543 postings doesn’t necessarily mean 543 unique jobs.

One advantage of LinkedIn is that it makes it easy to spot jobs almost as soon as they’re posted. We regularly see new Waymo openings show up within hours. And while there’s no guarantee that applying early gives you an advantage, with popular roles attracting a lot of interest quickly, it certainly can’t hurt.

Linkedin also allows you to set up a Waymo job alert so you’re notified when new roles go live.

Pay attention to what Waymo employees and hiring managers are posting on Linkedin, too. This can help you identify not just open roles, but the people building out particular teams and the areas where Waymo is actively hiring.

And since we’re talking about finding jobs, a quick plug for ourselves: every Friday we run Neat Jobs in The Driverless Digest, where we highlight interesting openings across the AV industry, including plenty from Waymo.

Here’s a short list of recent and interesting Waymo roles we’ve spotted, directly from hiring managers and team leads:

• 2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, Data Science - Commercialization Testing at Waymo (link) via Sophia Valdez.

• EMobility Deployment Lead at Waymo (link) via Sara Tanner.

• Director, Global Operations Control at Waymo (link) via Greg A.

• Product Manager, Driving Performance Expansion at Waymo (link) via Jacopo Sannazzaro.

• Multiple Strategic Partnerships roles at Waymo, via Jimmy Lyons.

• Staff Tech Lead Manager at Waymo (link) via Claire Yan.

• Staff Product Data Scientist, Paid Media at Waymo (link) via Hongying Z.

• UK Operations Lead at Waymo (link) via Leticia Cavalcante.

• System Disruption Manager at Waymo (link) via Jackie Lindsey.

Apply Online

Yes, once you’ve found a role (or multiple roles), the boring answer still matters: apply through Waymo’s careers page.

But recognize what you’re up against. Waymo doesn’t disclose how many applications it receives, but many of its LinkedIn job postings rack up hundreds of people clicking to apply within days, and sometimes within hours. So while you should absolutely apply online, your odds of standing out through the application alone are probably not great.

Make sure your resume is tailored to the specific role rather than firing off the same application to a dozen openings. If the job description emphasizes a particular technical skill, project or type of experience, make it easy for the recruiter to see where you’ve done that work.

And applying online gives you something specific to work with when you start reaching out to people at Waymo.

That’s where the rest of this guide comes in. If you really want to improve your chances, you probably need to do more than hit “Apply” and hope for the best.

Networking

This one is obvious, but it works. A lot of potential candidates like to aim high and ask the CEO or other prominent executives for help or advice on getting hired, but they are often flooded with requests.

Instead, look for product managers, engineers and others working in the area you’re targeting and see if you have a genuine connection. Maybe you went to the same college, worked at the same company, grew up in the same hometown or have a mutual connection. It would be hard for me to turn down a college or high school alumni if they made a reasonable request or ask of my time.

And remember, networking doesn’t have to mean immediately asking someone for a referral. Sometimes the better approach is simply learning more about their team, what they work on and what Waymo looks for in candidates more broadly.

Get Yourself Into the Room

Another way to meet people from Waymo is to go where the autonomous driving, robotics and mobility industries gather in person. This is obviously a lot more work but because of the high barrier to entry, not many people do it. So I think it’s a great way to stand out.

Keep an eye out for conferences, trade shows, technical events and local meetups where Waymo employees might be speaking, exhibiting or attending.

A few events worth considering:

• CES: one of the world’s biggest tech events, with a huge automotive and mobility presence. Waymo exhibited at CES 2026, so it’s one to watch if you want to meet the company in person.

• CVPR: particularly relevant if you work in computer vision, perception or machine learning. It’s a good place to meet researchers and engineers working on the technical building blocks of autonomy.

• ATS: Our own Harry Campbell spoke at this event last year and told me, “I’ve never met or seen so many Waymo people in one room before”.

• Actuate, Long Horizon and TechCrunch Disrupt all take place in San Francisco, the first two focus on physical AI while Disrupt covers the wider tech ecosystem.

• Our Urban Autonomy Summits are also worth looking into, as you’re likely to bump into at least a few people from Waymo.

  • The next Summit is in Austin on October 14, so apply now to secure your spot before registration fills up! (link).

• Local robotics and autonomy meetups: don’t overlook the smaller stuff. A 50-person technical meetup can actually be more useful for networking than a 20,000-person trade show because you have a much better chance of having a proper conversation.

Mobility expert Barak Sas has also put together a handy little guide to the biggest mobility events each year.

Essentially, pick the events that line up with the type of role you want. If you’re a computer vision engineer, CVPR makes more sense than a general mobility conference. If you’re interested in autonomy operations or mobility policy, an event like ITS World Congress could be more useful.

Wow Waymo With A Project

Finally, there is perhaps the most ambitious option: build something that gets noticed.

This could be a product, research project, piece of content, open-source tool or anything else that demonstrates what you are capable of. It is way more work than sending in a resume but it can also make you much harder to ignore.

Our friend Jackson Lester is a good example. Before joining Waymo, he built AV Map, which tracks autonomous vehicle deployments around the world. He also made a few great contributions to The Driverless Digest - such as the 15 Charts That Explain The Autonomous Vehicle Industry and his piece I Lost My Wallet in a Waymo...and Tracked It All Night - which we like to think helped a little (if you’re interested in contributing an article to TDD, feel free to reach out).

Ethan McKanna is another interesting example. He built Robotaxi Tracker and later landed an internship at Tesla.

In other words, don’t just tell Waymo you’re interested in autonomy. Show them.

The Hiring Process

The process starts with a review of your resume by Waymo’s recruiting team. If your experience matches what they are looking for, you will have an initial conversation with either a recruiter or a sourcer. This first call is also your chance to ask about the role, the timeline and what comes next.

From there, things get a little more serious. Candidates move on to one or two behavioral or technical interviews, either over the phone or by video, with a potential manager or colleague. Expect questions around your knowledge of the role, as well as behavioral, hypothetical and case-based questions.

If you make it through that stage, you’ll be invited to a virtual onsite. This means meeting with up to five interviewers, including potential teammates and people from other teams you would work with. Each session is expected to last around 45 minutes.

At this point, if Waymo decides you are the right person for the job, your recruiter will make the offer. Once you accept, the recruiting team will take you through your compensation, benefits and everything you need to know to get started.

There is one particularly important point for anyone applying to Waymo right now. The company says technical assessments and coding challenges must be completed independently unless the instructions specifically say otherwise. AI tools and LLMs are not permitted during live interviews either. You can use AI to polish the grammar or clarity of your resume, but the application itself needs to represent your own work and professional history.

Interview Tips and Tidbits

Waymo is pretty open about what it wants to see from candidates, and its interview tips give a useful idea of how to approach the process.

Ask clarifying questions

Waymo asks open-ended questions to understand how you approach and solve problems. If a question is deliberately broad, do not jump straight into an answer. Ask clarifying questions first to make sure you understand the problem and avoid making incorrect assumptions.

Define the problem

Before explaining the solution, take a moment to define and frame the problem as you see it. If it is a big one, break it down into smaller pieces and work through them logically.

Show your thinking

Waymo says it is not looking for perfect answers. Talk through your thought process and show how you use data to make decisions.

Connect the dots

When talking about past experience, Waymo says to pick examples that show how you have dealt with “ambiguity, complexity and prioritization”. These experiences can help showcase your ability to thrive in its working environment.

The overall message is pretty simple. Waymo wants to see how you think, not just what you know. Ask questions, frame the problem, explain your reasoning and show how you have handled complexity in the past.

An Anonymous Engineer’s Perspective

We recently spoke with an anonymous AI and machine learning engineer who gave us a rare candidate’s perspective on the interview process at Waymo.

He explains the types of questions candidates can expect. “Most of the questions that I always got asked were like an open book solution. So there’s no right or wrong solution. It’s just how you present it and how you think about it.”

He describes one of the questions as “literally so unheard of”, saying it felt less like a test of technical knowledge and more like a test of ingenuity. The question asked how he would design a system so that, no matter how many cars Waymo added to a particular location, it would still have immediate observability and statistics on what was happening. Any takers?

He also advises candidates to: “Ask questions as you might be thinking something, but the interviewer might have something else on their mind, so it’s about having to and fro, asking clarifying questions, narrowing the problem down and setting realistic constraints.”

In general, this engineer told us, Waymo wants candidates to be “very, very specific. They don’t like abstract ideas.”

Other Resources/Ideas

/Waymo

Reddit is another useful place to dig into firsthand experiences from Waymo candidates and employees. There are plenty of threads covering the application process, recruiter screens, technical interviews, interview questions and what candidates wish they had known beforehand.

A few worth checking out:

• What to expect for an upcoming interview for Waymo Business Intelligence Analyst Role

• Waymo technical interview

• How to get a job at Waymo?

• Post interview timeline at Waymo

• Waymo BI Analyst Final Loop – Recruiter Not Responding, Is This Normal?

Just keep in mind that these are individual experiences, and Waymo’s process can vary significantly depending on the role and team.

Work your way up

If you can’t get into Waymo today, another option is to build relevant experience elsewhere in the autonomous vehicle industry first.

That could mean joining another AV developer like Zoox, Wayve or Avride, but it could also mean working at a fleet operator like Moove, an autonomy supplier like NVIDIA, simulation company, OEM, mapping company or one of the many startups supporting AV deployment.

Even a year or two working directly in the industry can make a big difference. You’ll understand the terminology, the technical and operational challenges, how AV deployments actually work and, just as importantly, you’ll start building relationships with people across the industry.

When you apply to Waymo again, “I want to work in autonomous vehicles” is one thing. Being able to point to actual experience helping deploy, operate or build them is a much stronger story.

Best of luck with the application, and happy job hunting! And if you do end up getting hired, please reach out and let us know.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Frank Reig, CEO of Voltera. Frank explains how the merger between Voltera and Revel came together and how the combined company is building the infrastructure needed to support autonomous vehicle fleets at scale.

We discuss where the industry currently stands in the AV deployment timeline, what has surprised Frank since entering the fleet-charging space, and why AV infrastructure development often takes much longer than vehicle deployment. Frank also breaks down what goes into developing a full-stack AV depot, from finding suitable real estate and securing power to providing charging, maintenance, and operational support. He explains how Voltera evaluates potential locations, works with customers to plan their infrastructure needs, and differentiates itself from other charging and depot providers.

We also explore the operational challenges these facilities will face, how depots can adjust to shifting ride-hail demand, and what AV fleets could look like as they reach greater scale. Finally, Frank shares the trends he expects to shape AV infrastructure and what’s next for Voltera.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Frank Reig

• (01:45) The Voltera-Revel merger and how it came together

• (04:26) Voltera’s footprint, operating domain, and current focus

• (05:13) What phase are we in the AV deployment timeline?

• (06:38) What has surprised you since entering the AV fleet charging space?

• (07:30) What actually goes into setting up an AV depot?

• (10:04) How AV vehicle and infrastructure deployment timelines differ

• (10:43) How Voltera supports its AV fleet partners with full-stack AV depots, including charging, maintenance, and operations

• (12:04) The unexpected challenges of building out AV depots

• (13:21) What factors do you consider before developing an AV depot at a location?

• (16:01) How customers typically approach AV depot development with Voltera

• (17:30) The strategy behind selecting the best sites for AV depots

• (20:42) How Voltera stands out among its competitors

• (22:30) Potential challenges in AV depot operations

• (24:19) What Voltera does and what it doesn’t do

• (25:50) What will AV fleets of the future look like, and what are the benefits of scale?

• (28:02) Future trends in AV depot development

• (29:30) How AV fleet infrastructure adjusts for shifting ridehail demand

• (31:03) Voltera’s roadmap and future plans

• (32:10) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Frank Reig on LinkedIn.

• Voltera’s website (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Tesla Begins Offering Rides in a Car Without a Steering Wheel (link, no paywall). First impression: impressive, and I’m excited to try it when we head to Austin for our Urban Autonomy Summit on 10/14. I like the way the doors open vertically, although I’m not sure how practical they’ll be in the real world. There’s also a ton of trunk space, but only having two seats still feels a little strange for a robotaxi.

On Thursday, Tesla said on its website that people could hail the Cybercab and “use it for errands, commuting and more.” The company said that in addition to two passengers, the vehicle would have room for “luggage, golf clubs, scooters and more.”

‘My First Ride in the Cybercab’ (link).

My Cybercab rides are more than 50% cheaper than Uber rides (link). Pricing doesn’t mean much yet but interesting to see where Tesla is starting at.

‘I Made a Bet with Tesla’ (link).

‘Feds launch investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab deployment’ (link).

NHTSA said Friday that Tesla told the agency it self-certified the Cybercab as being compliant with all of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). Automakers traditionally self-certify whether their vehicles comply with FMVSS rules. In the filing, the agency said it was opening the investigation to “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”

Other Stuff

Uber, Wayve Unleash Supervised Robotaxis on London’s Winding Streets (link, no paywall). This is a cool milestone, and kudos to Bloomberg for getting the headline right. It still bothers me every time I see people celebrating the launch of “autonomous vehicles” when the vehicles are, in fact, not autonomous yet lol.

Passengers who order a ride through Uber may be offered a trip in one of 15 Wayve-powered Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles.A trained safety driver holding a private hire license from Transport for London will sit behind the wheel and take control of the vehicle if needed.

Bloomberg took a test drive in one of the Wayve-powered robotaxis. Over roughly 40 minutes, the car showed human-like nudging behavior to cut into a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic, handled tight lane changes, a protest in Parliament Square and pedestrians stepping out erratically into the road.

The safety driver took over twice. Once when the vehicle was trying to merge into gridlock and was briefly blocking oncoming traffic, and again to switch lanes to get around a few stationary cars. The rest of the time, his hands hovered just below the steering wheel as it turned on its own.

Avride: Following 100,000+ autonomous rides on Uber, we’ve expanded our Dallas robotaxi area to 31 square miles, more than tripling in size since launch (link). And it also sounds like they’re on track to remove the safety driver in H1 2027.

Waymo expands driverless robotaxi service to 3 major US cities (link).

Waymo on Tuesday began welcoming its first public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, expanding its fully autonomous ride-hailing service to 14 cities. The Alphabet-owned self-driving car company said tens of thousands of people in each newly launched market have already signed up for access. The company plans to gradually add riders before eventually opening the service to all users.

Zoox: Next stop: Houston and San Diego! (link).

Waymo Taps Pimco, Blackstone for $3 Billion in First Debt Deal (link, no paywall).

Atlanta rideshare drivers push back against robotaxis (link). I’m not a fan of protectionist policies like prohibiting Waymo from picking up and dropping off at airports, but I do like the idea of a worker transition fund that could help drivers retrain or otherwise adjust as autonomous vehicles take on a larger share of rides.

Powering the Future of Autonomous Mobility for Cities and Businesses, Today

MOIA America develops autonomous mobility solutions designed to help transform how people move through cities and communities. The MOIA brand’s turnkey autonomous mobility platform combines a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, an integrated self-driving hardware and software system, and a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that enables operators to launch and scale autonomous transportation services. MOIA America is currently testing in U.S. markets, including Los Angeles, Austin, and Orlando.

Amazon’s Zoox expands its robotaxi service to Las Vegas airport (link).

Uber and Big Taxi unite in battle against Waymo (link, no paywall). Let’s be real, Uber hasn’t suddenly become a champion of driver protection. The company is in a real bind because Waymo is effectively the only AV operator in town right now. Until more of Uber’s AV partners are ready to compete in the United States, trying to slow Waymo down may be the only meaningful near-term move Uber has. The irony of Uber teaming up with the taxi industry it spent years disrupting is rich though.

Related: Uber Wants It Both Ways With Autonomous Vehicles (link).

Saudi AI Firm Humain, Applied Intuition Partner on Self-Driving Trucks (link, no paywall). Stay tuned for our podcast interview (subscribe here) with Applied Intuition CTO and Co-founder Peter Ludwig!

Robotaxis Are the Next Dystopian Villain (link, no paywall).

Waymo goes on offense ahead of Tesla’s Cybercab launch (link). I’m team LiDAR, but that doesn’t mean cameras can’t work. Tesla should be behind Waymo at this point since it’s taking more of a bottom-up approach, while the knock on Waymo has always been cost. Tesla has already proven it can build and sell cars profitably, while Waymo has proven it can do autonomous driving. Now Tesla needs to prove it can be as safe as Waymo, and Waymo needs to prove it can turn all of this into a profitable business. Time will tell.

TaskUs: New speaker alert! Tom Tang from May Mobility is joining Forward ‘26. Be in the room to hear his take on scaling AV operations, global expansion and the future of transportation networks (link). I’m also excited to be moderating this panel!

Introducing Waymo’s brand store (link). I bought the car and the pin set but will gladly take a free water bottle 😂

‘Normal day in Phoenix’ (link).

Waymo’s cheaper robotaxis collide with China crackdown (link).

‘Waymo fleet breakdown update as they expand in 14 cities in the US (San Diego, Denver, Tampa live for select riders today)’ (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

Why Crash Rate Only Tells Half of the AV Safety Story (link). Former Lyft safety leaders Yarin and explain why crash rates alone are an incomplete measure of AV safety and why autonomous vehicles need to be evaluated across a broader range of risks and real-world interactions.

Scaling Autonomous Trucking with Gatik CEO Gautam Narang (link). Our latest podcast where TDD Editor sits down with Gautam to discuss Gatik’s focus on middle-mile freight, how it measures safety, and what it takes to turn contracted revenue into driverless deployments at scale, among other things.

Across the First Million by Christian Adelsberger, featuring Eduardo Rojas: #3 - “The physical world is hard” (link).

Urban Innovate TALKS by Henriette Cornet: How Austin Is Preparing for Robotaxis | Rachel Castignoli (link).

Related: It’s almost 30 days to our Urban Autonomy Summit Austin, presented by Nexar, happening October 14, and it’ll bring together some of the brightest minds in the AV industry in one of the most tech-forward cities in the U.S. Apply now to secure your spot before registration fills up! (link).

Voltera CEO, Frank Reig: Voltera Is Powering the Growth of Robotaxis (link).

Platform Aeronaut by : Everyone Is Playing a Different Robotaxi Game (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘In Pakistan, a man crashed into a police car while testing a driverless car he developed himself’ (link).

‘So.. Who got hungry for an I pace passenger side curtain airbag?’ (link).

‘Kilroy wuz here’ (link).

‘Waymo’s out here causing pile ups’ (link). More like Waymo rear-ended..

AV behaving “goodly” :)

‘One advantage of mounting sensors high on the Zoox robotaxi is a better view of the world around it’ (link). Wow, this is impressive!

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at TaskUs, and to Calla S and Kara K for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, Data Science - Commercialization Testing at Waymo (link) via Sophia Valdez. Summer internships already?!

Lead Technical Program Manager, Platform Integration at Waabi (link) via Aaron Sullivan.

Learning Experience Designer at Applied Intuition (link) via Ani Chakraborty.

Job Moves

Allison Rose: HonorHealth -> Waymo (link).

Derek Mulvey: Rivian (link).

Elizabeth Gibbons: Aurora -> Waabi (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Driverless cars are winning the safety argument on the only terms the industry currently measures: they crash less than human drivers do. That’s a real achievement. Waymo, for example, claims over 90% fewer collisions than humans. That means significantly fewer people get hurt. But crashes are only part of the safety story.

We’ve each spent a decade building safety systems, including leading safety product strategy at Lyft. This work taught us that keeping a car from crashing and keeping its riders safe are two different disciplines: Road Safety and Community Safety. Road Safety is about how the car moves through the world. Community Safety is about the people a ride touches: the riders inside, and everyone the car passes on the road and the curb. Robotaxis are winning on Road Safety, but we feel that they have quietly set Community Safety aside. That’s incomplete. Rebuilding Community Safety without a driver is still an unsolved problem of the driverless era.

What Crash Rates Don’t See

The Community Safety failures are already here – you can read about them in the last year of headlines and they fall into four patterns.

The first is the cars getting in the way of help. Robotaxis stall during power outages, when they run out of charge, or when a rider won’t get out. Each time, first responders have to come move them, pulling city resources toward a stuck car instead of a real emergency. Most of that is cost and nuisance. But the same stalling turns dangerous the moment it blocks a first responder: one Waymo held up an ambulance during a mass-shooting response until a police officer climbed in to move it. Enough incidents like that have piled up that federal regulators recently told the industry, in writing, to stop AVs from interfering with emergency responders. A car frozen in an intersection isn’t just an inconvenient delay, it’s seconds taken from someone who needs help.

The second failure is riders who can’t protect themselves. In Waymo’s first nine months in Austin, the company called 911 nearly 99 times for passengers who’d passed out or couldn’t get out of the vehicle. In another case, teens hung out of windows of a moving robotaxi while the car just kept driving. These are situations a human driver would have noticed, and done something about.

The third failure is riders with no safe way out. A robotaxi’s answer to trouble is almost always the same: stop, wait, and contact Support. Whether the problem is a flooded street, a railway crossing the AV can’t read, or a threat outside the vehicle. Either way the rider is stuck, with riders feeling like “sitting ducks.”

The fourth failure is the hardest to see, because it’s an absence. What keeps a street safe isn’t only police or cameras. It’s ordinary people looking out for one another. Eyes on the street. Every human driver was a pair of them; a robotaxi is not. We saw it with the burglar who used one as a getaway, with no driver to notice. Or when there’s no one inside the vehicle to offer help to the person walking home at 2am. As driverless cars replace the drivers who once filled these streets, the informal watch thins out, and legal scholars have warned for years that driverless vehicles can be an invitation to the very things drivers used to deter, from petty crime to trafficking.

Here’s what the industry keeps skipping. Taking the driver out removes real risks, and that’s a genuine gain we don’t discount. Many riders, women especially, say they feel safer without a stranger at the wheel.

But the driver was never only a risk. They were also a safeguard, and pulling one out takes both: the potential danger and the thing that was holding other risks in check. The risks didn’t disappear; they transferred, and no one is designing for that handoff. That was survivable when robotaxis were a novelty. At the scale they’re reaching now, it’s no longer an edge case.

Rebuild The Safeguards

The four patterns look like four problems. They’re really one, traced back to a single cause: the driver is gone, and no one is left to deter, monitor, or step in.

So you can apply the same framework to solve all of them. However, before you can build anything, you have to be able to measure it, and before you can measure it, you need a shared way to name the harms, a taxonomy that captures these vectors precisely enough to count. You can’t build for, or show improvement on, a harm that you can’t name.

Rideshare has done this before. A few years ago there was no agreed way to even describe in-ride sexual harm; definitions varied by state and stopped at what was criminal. So Uber worked with the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and the Urban Institute to build a 21-category taxonomy of misconduct, which any company could use. Robotaxi Community Safety needs the same foundation.

But naming and counting is only the ground floor. The driver did something more active, moment to moment. Rebuilding it means building evaluations for three distinct things a driver used to do without thinking:

• Detect. Notice the thing going wrong: the passenger gone quiet, the argument in the back, the car getting boxed in, the siren up ahead.

• Interpret. Figure out what it means. Asleep and okay, or asleep and not breathing. Rowdy, or dangerous. This is the judgment layer, and it’s the hard one.

• Respond. Do the right thing, at the right level. A cabin check-in for the small stuff, a trusted contact or a live agent when it’s more, emergency services only when it’s truly an emergency. The response is a ladder, and today most cars only have the top rung.

The tools to close that gap already exist, better than they did with a driver. The car sees the whole cabin, controls the vehicle, and applies every policy the same way on every ride. That consistency is the foundation Community Safety needs, and it’s the one thing a driverless fleet does that a human one never could.

You can already see it in the small stuff: riders lose over a million items in rideshares a year, and an AV can solve that issue because it notices what’s left behind and tells you before driving away. You can see an example here.

Run the four patterns through those three stages and they stop being four problems:

It's the discipline the industry already applies to Road Safety. Now it’s time to aspire for the passenger instead of the pavement: name the harm, define a good response at each rung, and measure how often the car gets there.

Don’t Leave It Just To The Companies: Create A Public Scorecard

And it can't be left to each company to grade itself. Whether a city gets a fleet that clears the lane or one that sits in it comes down to internal policy, not any shared standard. The companies can measure Community Safety and publish it. The cities and regulators that let them operate can require it. Road Safety became a number everyone could see. Community Safety has to become one too.

For a deeper dive on AV Safety, we are doing a dedicated series on our personal Substacks.

We start where the pressure is highest, with first responders: a concrete protocol for what an AV should have to prove, from reading a scene, to clearing a lane, to a two-week safety trial with local emergency services before it ever carries a paying rider. Follow along over on Substack.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, The Driverless Digest Editor Ben Hubbard speaks with Gautam Narang, CEO & co-founder of Gatik. Gautam explains what fuels his passion for autonomous trucking and introduces Gatik’s approach to driverless freight, including its current fleet, commercial deployments, and areas of focus. He also discusses Gatik’s contracted revenue and what differentiates the company from other autonomous trucking developers.

They take a closer look at why Gatik chose to focus on middle-mile, dock-to-dock routes and how its fleet management platform, Gatik Omni, allows customers to interact with and manage their autonomous freight operations. Gautam also breaks down the edge cases Gatik’s trucks encounter, some of the most complex scenarios they have successfully navigated, and the four core pillars underpinning the Gatik Driver.

Finally, they discuss how Gatik measures autonomous vehicle safety, the company’s safety record, and the current state of autonomous vehicle safety standards in the United States. Gautam also explains how autonomous trucks could help address the freight industry’s labor shortage, why Gatik has attracted significant investor interest, and how the company is approaching capitalization, customer partnerships, and contracted revenue. He closes by sharing what’s next for Gatik as it works to expand its fleet and scale driverless freight operations.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Gautam Narang and what fuels his passion

• (02:20) Introduction to Gatik, fleet size, driverless deployments, and focus areas

• (05:25) Gatik’s contracted revenue

• (06:30) How Gatik stands out from competition

• (07:45) How Gatik came to focus on middle-mile dock-to-dock operations

• (11:16) How Gatik’s fleet management platform, Gatik Omni, facilitates customer interaction

• (13:41) What kind of edge cases Gatik experiences, and how it handles them

• (18:35) What are the most complex scenarios Gatik’s trucks have dealt with well?

• (20:22) Gatik’s vehicles specifications

• (21:10) The four pillars of the Gatik Driver

• (24:07) How Gatik measures AV safety, and the current state of AV safety standards in the US

• (28:04) Gatik’s safety record and how the company assesses incidents

• (30:13) Filling the labor shortage in the freight industry with autonomous trucking

• (34:20) Investor interest in Gatik’s business, its capitalization, contracted revenue, and partners

• (36:25) Gatik’s future plans

• (37:30) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Gautam Narang on LinkedIn and X.

• Gatik’s website (link).

Top Story of the Week

Gatik AI Raises $200 Million in Its Largest Funding Series (link, no paywall).

Gatik will use the cash infusion to grow in regions where the self-driving trucking company runs freight trucks, expanding routes and courting new business, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Gautam Narang said in an interview.

Watch out for our TDD podcast on Monday where we’ll be having Gatik CEO Gautam Narang as a guest on the show. Subscribe now so your feed updates automatically!

Other Stuff

Waymo picks Munich for first EU robotaxi launch (link, no paywall).

The Alphabet-owned company announced on Tuesday that it aims to start commercial ride-hailing services in the German city towards the end of 2027 as it steps up its international push.

Related: London rollout of robotaxis delayed amid lack of guidance for firms to follow (link).

Amazon’s Toaster-Shaped Robotaxis Are Hitting the Road (link, no paywall).

Robotaxis are real now — so is the pushback (link, no paywall).

Waymo: 10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles (link).

They were Lyft drivers. Now they’re cleaning Waymos (link).

London cabbies plot ‘skulduggery’ to take on robotaxis (link, no paywall).

‘Welcome to the ultimate home tour, Ojai edition. Join Martha Stewart as she highlights what makes this cabin special, featuring spacious seating and intuitive technology’ (link). Interesting collaboration here..lol.

Designing Energy Infrastructure for Autonomous and Electric Fleets

MN8 Energy is one of the largest renewable energy and infrastructure owners in the U.S., supporting fleet operators as they scale electrification and autonomy. With expertise in delivering custom, turnkey solutions tailored to each fleet’s duty cycle and operational needs, bringing reliability, uptime guarantees, and long-term operational ownership, MN8 is the choice partner for fleets as they transition to electric and autonomous operations.

To learn more about MN8’s work with fleet and infrastructure partners, reach out to the Distributed Energy Solutions team at DES@mn8.com

Uber and Waymo Have Spent More Than $15M This Year Lobbying New York Pols (link). That sounds like a lot, but Uber does around 495,000 trips per day in NYC at an average fare of $34.61. That’s more than $17 million in gross fares per day, or nearly $120 million per week.

So the more than $15 million Uber and Waymo have spent lobbying New York this year is less than a single day of Uber’s current NYC gross fares. Just a drop in the bucket. And it also shows why NYC is such an important AV market.

Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy: Last week, RJ Scaringe gave me a preview of the upcoming Rivian Autonomy+, and it flawlessly drove from Sunnyvale to Cupertino and back! Today, I traded in my car for a Launch Edition R2. Super excited about the progress here! (link). I was impressed with this until I mapped the route 😂. But in all seriousness, Rivian’s UHF product is objectively years behind Tesla today, so I’m really rooting for them to deliver point-to-point by the end of the year.

Related: Rivian’s CFO is leaving the company (link).

‘The Waymo Mafia. Alumni of the Waymo program who have gone on to found their own companies over time, cumulatively valued at over $10.5B today’ (link).

Avride: 2 hours of autonomous driving through Austin. From quiet neighborhoods to busy downtown streets (link). There’s no driver, but a vehicle observer is sitting in the front passenger seat. Still, this is neat, and I appreciate Avride’s transparency:

Technically supervised. The VO is still on board of the vehicle, but yes, we are getting closer to fully driverless operations, which we expect to begin in first half of 2027.

‘I exported all my Waymo receipts since Aug 2025’ (link).

‘A Model T waiting at a light with a driverless Waymo’ (link).

Waymo Speaks: We Have More In Common With Urbanists Than You Might Think (link). An op-ed by Waymo arguing that cities should create a formal process for “staging” - letting AVs park at the curb between rides instead of continuously circling.

Because AVs spend much of their time providing trips, the cumulative value generated by staging far exceeds that of a curb space occupied by a privately owned vehicle. For a commercial district, this means that local businesses could receive eight to 10 times as many potential customer visits than if the space were designated for private vehicle storage only.

Op-Ed: San Francisco Should Not Give Free Curb Space to Waymo (link). A rebuttal to Waymo’s op-ed was also published.

I don’t see how an empty Waymo idling outside a storefront generates more value than a parked private car, whose owner at least has some chance of being a customer. The argument rests entirely on total curb turnover, as more vehicles cycling through a spot, in theory, means more potential trip origins and destinations nearby. But that’s a claim about vehicle throughput, not foot traffic to any specific business the AV happens to be parked in front of.

This isn’t a new problem and based on my experience with ride-hail drivers, cities have never done a great job figuring out where Uber and Lyft drivers should wait between trips, especially because there is often nowhere to park in the busiest places and at the busiest times. That means both human drivers and AVs end up driving around empty while waiting for their next trip. Is it better for them to park instead? Probably, but Waymo or anyone else should have to pay for the right to use that space. That is why we have parking meters in busy commercial areas.

At the same time, if curb prices are too high, driving around could become the cheaper option for Waymo, even though it creates more congestion. The answer is complicated but probably a combination of paid staging, fees for empty miles or congestion, and greater use of private parking lots for off-street staging. Any dedicated curb spaces should also be shared among AVs, taxis, and human ride-hail drivers rather than reserved exclusively for Waymo.

‘4 months since Waymo “paused” in San Antonio’ (link).

‘It’s building season, and we have a ton of projects in active construction. Coming live soon, they can each power hundreds of EVs - supporting Terawatt’s journey to electrify all miles for a cleaner, safer planet’ (link).

Gemini in Waymo is now available to all riders in the Ojai (link).

Autonomous Vehicles predictions & odds on Polymarket (link). Lots of interesting markets to wager on if that is your thing 🙂. You can sign up using my referral link here and you’ll get a $20 bonus.

What else we're reading/listening to

Waymo’s California Trips Are Falling, But Its Ambitions Are Growing (link). Our latest analysis piece where TDD Editor examines why Waymo’s paid trips in California declined in May and June, whether the freeway pause or slowing demand is responsible, and how the dip may reflect the company’s growing focus on expansion beyond California. It’s raised some discussions on Reddit too (link).

Balancing AV Innovation and Regulation with CalSTA’s Emily Warren (link). My latest podcast where I sit down with CalSTA’s Deputy Secretary for Innovative Mobility Solutions to discuss California’s new AV regulations, how the state balances innovation and safety, and what the new rules mean for robotaxis and driverless trucks, among other things.

‘A Wayve summer reading/watching/listening list for your weekend’ (link), featuring our recent podcast episode with Wayve VP of Engineering Brandon Basso (link).

Charge Talk by Diana Cwick: Robots That Charge Electric Vehicles: No Human Needed! Erin Galiger, ROCSYS (link).

Aurora Retail Investor Town Hall | August 20, 2026 (link).

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) by Harry Stebbings: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald (link).

The Skip Podcast by Nikhyl Singhal: To Invent Waymo, They Had to Reinvent PM (link).

AV Events

Our Urban Autonomy Summit Austin, presented by Nexar, happening October 14, is right around the corner, and it’ll bring together some of the brightest minds in the AV industry in one of the most tech-forward cities in the U.S.

Big thanks to our presenting sponsor Nexar, and our amazing lineup of partners, including Verizon, Terawatt, Voltera, Autolane, TaskUs, The Ride Platform, Gridwise, EVKON, and CharterUP.

Apply now to secure your spot before registration fills up! (link).

YPT-DC is holding a conversation featuring David Zipper on Thursday, September 10, 2026, at 6 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, 401-A Conference Room, 901 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20001. The conversation will focus on the safety, congestion, and autonomous vehicle policy challenges cities are facing (link).

Related: David Zipper on AVs, Congestion, and the Future of Cities (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

Watch Tesla FSD v14 Lite drive over a giant log without stopping (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at Cabify, Uber, and to Hannah S for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

EMobility Deployment Lead at Waymo (link) via Sara Tanner.

Staff Software Engineer, Operational Applications & Platforms at Zoox (link) via Zoox.

People Partner - Engineering at Wayve (link) via Charlie Cox.

Job Moves

Rachel Cohen: NVIDIA (link).

Gabriel Agapiou: BMW Group -> Wayve (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

The latest data from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), covering the second quarter of 2026, shows Waymo doing approximately 315,000 paid trips per week in California in June. That is still a huge number by any measure, but the direction of travel is now harder to ignore.

This is the third time we have looked at the question of whether Waymo’s growth in California is flattening. The first analysis showed a deceleration in the pace of growth through the first quarter of 2026. A follow up analysis argued that the underlying growth curve was indeed flattening, but that the picture was more complicated than simply saying Waymo had run out of demand.

The latest data adds another wrinkle.

First though, it is important to note that there is little doubt that Waymo is the dominant player in the U.S. robotaxi market, even though the industry remains in its early stages. The company currently operates in 11 U.S. cities and is delivering around 500,000 paid robotaxi rides per week.

This makes what is happening in California particularly interesting. Waymo is still growing rapidly overall, but its home market is showing signs that the growth strategy may be changing.

California Trips Are Now Falling

Waymo’s California paid weekly trip count grew in April to 330,400 and then went backwards to 328,500 in May and 314,700 in June.

There is an important caveat, however. Waymo paused freeway operations across the United States on May 21 while it worked on software improvements around construction zones and flooded roadways. Freeway service had become an increasingly important part of Waymo’s California operation, particularly in the Bay Area, where it allowed the company to connect parts of the Peninsula and cut journey times substantially, as well as in Los Angeles, where freeways are especially important given the city’s size and sprawl.

The freeway pause therefore overlaps with the period in which the California trip numbers started moving lower. So this may be one potential cause for the dip in paid rides.

The latest data also gives us another useful clue.

Average miles per paid trip fell slightly from 4.0 miles in May to 3.9 miles in June. This is only a small change, but it is notable because the longer term trend since July 2024 has been upwards. The freeway pause appears to have played a role in the June decline in trip length as well.

So we have fewer trips and slightly shorter trips in June. But the longer term picture remains one of passengers taking longer journeys than they were previously.

This Is Still A Slowdown

Even with that caveat, I think it would be wrong to dismiss the latest numbers.

In our previous analysis, the argument was that Waymo’s California business appeared to be following a fairly typical maturation curve. Growth accelerated rapidly as the service expanded, then began to flatten as Waymo became more established. The latest data does not prove that, but it does make the question harder to ignore.

There is also a more important point hiding underneath the headline trip numbers. Waymo does not necessarily need California to keep growing at the same rate. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that California may not be the market Waymo is most focused on maximising right now.

Waymo Has Bigger Ambitions

Waymo has been expanding aggressively outside California, with operations now stretching across a growing number of U.S. cities.

The company has been preparing for international expansion, and today announced that Munich will be its first mainland European market. It has also introduced its next generation robotaxi, the Ojai.

If Waymo already has a substantial presence in San Francisco and Los Angeles, adding another few percentage points of market share in those markets may be less valuable than proving it can reproduce the same playbook in a dozen other cities.

We made a similar point recently when looking at Uber’s claim that it is gaining market share from Waymo in San Francisco.

Waymo has already demonstrated that it can enter a mature rideshare market and take meaningful volume. The next question is whether it can do that everywhere.

This makes fleet allocation an important part of the story. Every vehicle deployed in a new market is a vehicle that cannot be used to squeeze more trips out of an existing market. And Waymo is now trying to do both.

The Next Quarter Will Be Much More Interesting

The June number of roughly 315,000 weekly paid trips should therefore not be treated as evidence that Waymo’s California business is collapsing. It is not. Three hundred and fifteen thousand weekly paid trips is still an enormous operation, and it represents years of growth from the relatively small service Waymo was running in California just a few years ago.

The freeway pause gives Waymo a perfectly plausible explanation for at least some of the recent decline. And because freeway service resumed gradually, we should get a much cleaner read on the underlying demand in the next set of data.

The average trip length will be worth watching too. If weekly trips rebound and average miles per trip return to their previous level or move higher, the May and June declines will look more like an operational blip than a demand problem.

If trips stay flat or keep falling, it will be harder to argue that Waymo’s California growth is anything other than a slowdown.

We know Waymo has been expanding aggressively beyond California, building a growing network of robotaxi services across Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, with further launches planned in cities including Denver, Las Vegas and Tampa. The bigger question then may be whether Waymo will continue growing by taking its playbook into new markets, or will it go back to adding vehicles and growing market share in California.

Either way, the next CPUC release should tell us a lot.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Emily Warren, Deputy Secretary for Innovative Mobility Solutions at the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA). Emily explains CalSTA’s role overseeing California’s transportation agencies, how the state balances innovation with regulation, and what she has learned since transitioning from the private sector into public service.

We also take a closer look at California’s newly updated autonomous vehicle regulatory framework, including how the DMV’s rulemaking process unfolded, what has changed, and how public feedback shaped the final regulations. Emily breaks down the respective roles of CalSTA, the DMV, and the California Public Utilities Commission in overseeing AV deployment, as well as how California approaches safety, data sharing, and coordination among local, state, and federal regulators.

Finally, we discuss what the new rules mean for robotaxis and autonomous trucks, how driverless trucking could scale in California, and where the state’s AV regulations may still need to evolve, including the possibility of personally owned autonomous vehicles.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Emily Warren

• (02:20) Background on CalSTA, the agencies they oversee, and Emily’s role

• (05:00) How CalSTA balances transportation innovation and regulation

• (07:05) What Emily has learned from transitioning from the private sector to public service at CalSTA

• (09:20) The roles of CalSTA, the DMV, and the CPUC in California’s AV permitting process

• (10:33) California’s new AV regulatory framework, how long it took, and what’s new

• (13:40) Public feedback on the new AV regulatory framework

• (16:46) Behind the scenes of the California DMV rulemaking process

• (21:01) The right cadence for reviewing California’s AV regulations

• (21:42) Areas for improvement in California’s AV regulations, including personal AV ownership

• (23:01) How AV trucking could scale in California

• (25:23) How CalSTA thinks about AV safety

• (29:25) The differences between AV trucks and robotaxis in the new AV regulations

• (32:56) AV regulation and coordination between the local, state, and federal regulators

• (37:30) Data sharing between cities and state regulators

• (40:04) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Emily Warren on LinkedIn.

• CalSTA’s website (link).

• My podcast episode with CPUC Deputy Executive Director Pat Tsen, mentioned at the 09:24 timestamp (link).

• California’s new AV regulatory framework, mentioned at the 10:42 timestamp (link).

-Harry

Waymo in the News

Alphabet’s Waymo Has Built a Custom Chip for Its Robotaxis (link, no paywall).

Its fleet has largely relied on Jaguar vehicles retrofitted with autonomous-driving technology and chips from others. But it recently launched a robotaxi with Zeekr, an arm of China-based automaker Geely Automobile Holdings, that is now being equipped with the new custom chip.

Related: A look under our trunk: what’s in our compute (link).

Waymo’s cheaper, next-gen robotaxi [Ojai] is now open to all riders in these three cities (link).

Waymo has opened its next-generation robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. For now, customers in these markets may be matched with the new robotaxi, called the Ojai (pronounced oh-hi) when they hail a ride. Once Waymo has enough Ojais in its fleet, riders will be able to choose between the new vehicle and the older Jaguar I-Pace robotaxi.

Waymo: Big news for the Golden State — we have received the CPUC’s approval to expand our autonomous ride-hailing service across the SF Bay Area and LA, and bring our service to Sacramento and San Diego (link).

Designing Energy Infrastructure for Autonomous and Electric Fleets

MN8 Energy is one of the largest renewable energy and infrastructure owners in the U.S., supporting fleet operators as they scale electrification and autonomy. With expertise in delivering custom, turnkey solutions tailored to each fleet’s duty cycle and operational needs, bringing reliability, uptime guarantees, and long-term operational ownership, MN8 is the choice partner for fleets as they transition to electric and autonomous operations.

To learn more about MN8’s work with fleet and infrastructure partners, reach out to the Distributed Energy Solutions team at DES@mn8.com

Uber Partnerships and Announcements

Uber, Zipline Partner With Goal of Hitting 1 Million Drone Deliveries a Day (link, no paywall). Good news for Uber’s autonomous delivery ambitions after its Serve partnership unraveled last week. Zipline is one of the more impressive companies in the space, so I’m excited to see what they can do at Uber scale.

Under the partnership, Uber Eats will start deliveries with Zipline’s drone network in Dallas and Houston by the end of the year. The companies plan to expand the offering across the U.S. as Zipline grows its footprint, targeting one million Uber Eats deliveries via drone a day by the end of 2029. Uber is also investing an undisclosed amount in Zipline, the companies said.

Pony.ai: Autonomous rides are now live on Uber in Zagreb. For the first time in Europe, riders can book an AV through Uber, bringing together Pony.ai’s Gen-7 Robotaxi technology, Verne’s local operations and Uber’s platform (link). Of course they’re not actually driverless, but at least they show the safety driver at the end. #TDDnotapproved

Uber: Uber Eats is bringing robot delivery to the EU! Next week, Finland will become the first EU market where Eaters can get their orders delivered by autonomous robots, starting in central Helsinki through our partnership with Coco Robotics (link).

Baidu’s Apollo Go Goes Live on Uber in Dubai, Offering a New Way for Users to Hail Fully Driverless Rides (link). Now this is driverless. #TDDapproved

Wayve: Early access rides on Uber are now underway in London, giving a select few the chance to experience a trip with the Wayve AI Driver ahead of public launch (link). Not driverless but still cool :)

Other Stuff

Tesla, Uber, and Waymo all get the OK to operate thousands of robotaxis in Nevada (link).

Las Vegas specifically — is shaping up to be a major robotaxi battleground, with Tesla, Uber (via its autonomous vehicle partners Motional and Zoox), and Waymo all competing for the same riders.

Rivian spinout Also raises another $150M (link). I haven’t been following Also closely, but apparently they’ve got some big AV ambitions. Definitely a company to watch.

The new capital will be used to “accelerate the development” of the company’s autonomous driving technology and the “simultaneous progression of multiple autonomous form factors,” according to the company. These future vehicles will use the same electric architecture developed for its consumer electric pedal-assist bike and commercial electric delivery quad.

‘I drove Tesla FSD, Rivian Autonomy+ ‘hands-free’ driving systems. Here’s how they compare’ (link). This is a fair assessment of Rivian’s UHF capabilities. Rivian makes a great car, but its driver-assistance system still feels about 5–7 years behind Tesla FSD Supervised today. But that doesn’t mean it will take Rivian another 5–7 years to close the gap. Rivian is working with a more robust sensor stack, cheaper and more powerful compute, and the benefit of years of industry-wide advances in AI and autonomy. The bigger question is how quickly Rivian can turn those advantages into a system that actually matches Tesla on the road.

“I hope that we can even exceed the Tesla system because of our investments in a more robust sensor stack,” Rivian’s Philbin said. “We’re actually a big believer in multimodal imaging, so cameras and radars, and later on, early next year, lidar as well on the R2.”

‘Waymo is now open to everyone in Space City [Houston]. Download the Waymo app and ride today!’ (link).

Einride to deploy 500 Tesla Semis in biggest electric truck order yet (link).

Einride is putting 500 Tesla Semis on US roads. That will take the Swedish freight company from roughly 250 deployed electric trucks to about 750. First deliveries start next month, with the rest arriving in phases over 24 months. Five states are in scope: California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Georgia. Amazon is the named customer, and every truck gets managed through Saga, Einride’s software platform for routing and charging windows.

Related: Einride’s Autonomous Freight Strategy with CTO Henrik Green (link).

Amazon to expand drone service to nearly 500 cities after targeting 1 million deliveries this year (link).

‘Waymo CPUC Data Update Q2’2026 - Reaching 315K weekly trips in June in CA’ (link). Waymo’s California trip count ticked down in May and June, although the freeway pause may have played a role. But I’m not sure Waymo is actually focused on gaining market share in its mature California markets. The bigger priority seems to be geographic expansion, and launching and testing in a growing number of new cities. They’ve already shown they can quickly gain meaningful share in a market like San Francisco. At this point, proving they can replicate that across the country may be more valuable than squeezing out a few more points of market share in SF.

Related: ‘A few hidden gems in the CA CPUC data’ (link).1

Bedrock Robotics deploys fully autonomous excavators on jobsites (link).

Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub after Uber exit (link, no paywall).

The Waymo Wipeout of Uber Shares Has Gone Too Far (link).

Related: ‘$UBER is starting to remind me a little of $GOOGL in 2024’ (link).

Self-driving trucks are officially testing on California highways (link).

Aurora Innovation and Kodiak AI, two companies developing self-driving trucks, have received permits from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test their autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. And Kodiak has already started.

Related: Scaling Driverless Trucking with Kodiak AI CEO Don Burnette (link).

Democrats Are Failing the Waymo Test (link, no paywall).

‘Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event’ (link).

‘Waymo is now worth nearly as much as Uber.’ (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

Uber Wants It Both Ways With Autonomous Vehicles (link). Our latest guest piece from University of San Francisco Professor William (Billy) Riggs argues that Uber’s newfound defense of drivers and concerns over AV displacement are difficult to square with its own aggressive push into autonomy, and questions whether Uber is really protecting drivers or simply protecting its business.

Scaling Driverless Trucking with Kodiak AI CEO Don Burnette (link). My latest podcast where I sit down with Kodiak AI founder and CEO to discuss how autonomous trucking has moved from R&D into real-world commercialization, how Kodiak is taking a vehicle-agnostic approach to physical AI, and what it will take to scale fully driverless long-haul trucking, among other things.

Autonomy Insiders by : How WeRide Built a Global Robotaxi Business in 9 Years | Tony Han, CEO WeRide (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘An Amazon customer in Texas was not enthused when her first drone-delivered order was dropped into her swimming pool’ (link).

‘Man successfully raids Coco delivery robot’ (link).

‘Tesla Robotaxi Rams through several Bollards and keeps going’ (link).

‘BREAKING: Official update from Waymo on the incident..’ (link). Nice airbags!

A Waymo vehicle in autonomous mode with two trained specialists in the car entered an intersection on a green light and collided with a coach bus that ran a red light.

AV/Human behaving “goodly” :)

‘New York Ave is not the place, Coco’ (link). But ‘She Made It’ (link).

‘Yesterday, on Union Street in SF, I noticed a Waymo with its built-in LED display showing, “Help close door”... I decided to be a good Samaritan and help out’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at Cabify for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Director, Global Operations Control at Waymo (link) via Greg A.

Senior / Staff Connectivity Integration Lead at Zoox (link) via Radhakrishnan Suryanarayanan.

Full Stack Software Engineer, Evaluation Tools at Wayve (link) via John M. Wyrwas.

Job Moves

Michał Śniady: Goldman Sachs -> Waymo (link).

Antoine Delorme: Daimler Truck North America -> Waabi (link).

Charles Paul: Sentry -> Waymo (link).

Brent Kent: Lyft -> Wayve (link).

Jack Mitchell: Lucid Motors -> Waymo (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

For more than a decade, Uber built one of the most valuable transportation platforms in the world by redefining labor as software-mediated flexibility. Drivers supplied the vehicles, absorbed the depreciation, paid for fuel, maintenance, insurance, financing, downtime, and risk, while the tech platform did the coordination. But now, as autonomous vehicles begin to mature commercially, even as it continues to do business with many AV companies, Uber has repositioned itself as a defender of drivers and equitable mobility, with stated concerns about the impact of automation on workers. This narrative deserves scrutiny.

Uber’s recent white paper, “Unlocking the Promise of Autonomy,” presents the company as a pragmatic middle ground between rapid automation and social responsibility. The report argues for a “hybrid” transportation future where human drivers and autonomous vehicles coexist and warns against a future in which robotaxis create unequal systems of mobility. But the argument is difficult to separate from Uber’s own strategic vulnerability and efforts to slow Waymo and Tesla, as signaled by their recent divorce from the company in Phoenix. Research showing that 55% of AV rides come directly from people who otherwise would have taken a rideshare trip indicates that efforts to slow down automation may be more about platform preservation than social good1.

And more importantly, the irony is hard to ignore: the same company that normalized gig work is now not only glamorizing the quality of that work, but framing the preservation of it as a form of worker protection.

The contradiction becomes even more egregious when viewed alongside Uber’s broader strategy to launch its own autonomous vehicles and avoid liability from things like assaults and sexual harassment from its non-employee driver-partners. The company has aggressively expanded partnerships and investments in autonomous mobility while simultaneously signaling caution about displacement and over-automation. It has done things like launching “Uber Autonomous Solutions” (a division specifically designed to accelerate commercialization of autonomous fleets through financing, fleet operations, support infrastructure, and platform integration), and putting more than $10 billion toward autonomous partnerships with Rivian, Nuro and Lucid.

Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s President and COO, recently stated that the technical hurdles for AVs have “largely been solved” and that commercialization is now the central challenge. At the same time, Uber executives have also been publicly criticizing AV-only operators like Waymo as inequitable, less scalable, or disconnected from broader transportation needs.

Given all of these signals, it starts to look like Uber is using the same old strategy they have employed for years to avoid regulation and beat out competition. And in this case they want to occupy both sides of the argument. They say they want to scale automation, but also protect society from it. They say they want to protect labor while exploiting it.

And this labor contradiction is the core issue. The uncomfortable reality is that Uber’s rideshare model is built on a deeply asymmetrical labor structure. Research going back to 2018 suggested that Uber and Lyft drivers only take home $3.37 per hour after taking into account vehicle costs. While these numbers were revised to a median of $8.55 after receiving pressure from the company and a Medium post from Uber’s Chief Economist, the fact remains—the majority of drivers are never compensated for the full operating cost of their vehicles.

Harry Campbell, Founder of The Rideshare Guy, validated this for me in one of our recent discussions, saying:

Uber shifts a lot of the burden of vehicle maintenance and insurance to unsuspecting drivers. For example, drivers can sign up to drive with personal insurance but there’s a coverage gap during Period 1 (driver online, but waiting for a request). If they get into an accident, many are surprised to find out that there’s a $2,500 deductible which is much higher than the average personal insurance deductible.

Rideshare platforms externalize large portions of the operational expense of vehicles; placing these costs onto workers themselves. This includes maintenance, insurance, idle time, fuel costs, financing, depreciation, and more… while Uber extracts monetary value from its app, at a fair “take rate” of more than 50%—meaning that the driver often gets less than 50% of what the rider pays. While these figures continue to be disputed by Uber, when factored alongside increases in costs related to vehicle operations in recent years, it is likely that raw take-home wages for drivers is lower than the $30/hour median that Uber claims–and this may be much higher that actual driver earnings because it does not account for down time when drivers are online but waiting for a ride.

Comparing this to Waymo and other vertically integrated AV operators, there are key structural differences. Most importantly, the operational costs are internalized into the service itself. The vehicle, software stack, fleet maintenance, sensors, remote operations, and liability structure are all folded into the economics of the ride. The fares increasingly reflect the real or actual cost of delivering a ride to a customer.

That distinction is important. Rideshare platforms have historically obscured the true economics of transport because the drivers themselves absorbed the substantial share (if not all of) the operational cost and financial burden for the vehicle. The drivers, in essence, subsidize the ride. The low apparent price of many trips is a product of drivers using their own vehicles (assets Uber or Lyft do not own or maintain) and agreement to precarious labor standards. In 2025 Human Rights Watch provided research that showed that 67% and 75% of rideshare drivers struggled to afford food and housing respectively. Many were subject to accidents and exposure to violent crime. In the most simple terms autonomous vehicles threaten to expose the economic exploitation and poor workplace conditions. They reveal the resource that rideshare companies have long exploited—drivers.

For years the growth of the rideshare industry has been subsidized by privately owned vehicles and contingent labor. [Note that in most cases rideshare drivers are independent contractors that receive limited benefits.] I have argued before that the concept of “human dignity” in labor matters, and that gig work is a toxic labor system that perpetuates a “Dickens Economy” that does not value labor fairness, workplace safety or health. The same Human Rights Watch report in 2025 found that 50% of drivers experienced wage instability week-to-week and a shocking 70% were worried about being deactivated or suspended by app algorithms. This is confirmed by medical journal articles identifying occupational health issues related to gig driving and other peer reviewed work that underscores the “lack of social protections, algorithmic control, intense competition, and downward pressure on wages.” This is important in the current context as Uber begins to reposition itself as a defender of drivers, reframing gig work as socially beneficial employment worth preserving against automation and autonomous vehicles.

In evaluating this position (that we should preserve the value of gig labor) however, we should be asking honest questions: what exactly are we preserving? Gig drivers lack long-term wage stability, healthcare, retirement benefits, predictable scheduling, labor protections, or meaningful economic mobility. And Uber has made clear that drivers are independent contractors and not employees so that they could avoid awarding corporate benefits to their large “driver partner” labor pool. Yes, it may be an easy job. Yes, it may be a job that is flexible and easy to access. But that doesn’t mean that gig driving jobs are somehow worth retaining or that the ride-hailing labor model is some kind of social compact we made to preserve low-skilled driving. And this is what Uber is trying to position; that gig jobs are dignified labor that should be protected. But consumers should not be deceived; this is not worker advocacy—it’s self-serving as the company is aggressively pursuing its own self-driving car initiatives.

Given that it’s not clear that companies like Uber have a legitimate claim to push back against automated vehicles when they are ending their partnership-with and looking to compete-with Waymo, and after more than a decade of aggressively restructuring transport jobs into a gig economy that supports precarious and unstable work conditions for drivers. This is not being a principled guardian of jobs or transportation equity; it is simply a ploy to slow down other autonomous vehicle companies, while they scale their own technology, reducing their reliance on gig labor. Put simply, to redefine low-quality, contingent, “gig” labor as socially valuable employment at precisely the moment you are trying to reduce reliance on this form of labor, and at the exact time when automation promises to unlock economic advantages, allowing for upskilling and retraining, is disingenuous.

And all this is not to argue that job displacement concerns in an autonomous vehicle future are unimportant. Technological transitions driven by AI and automation will undoubtedly produce disruptions for workers and communities. History suggests as much. But history also suggests these transitions rarely unfold as simple stories of mass unemployment. Most credible research now points toward widespread job transformation, gradual displacement, and the creation of entirely new categories of work alongside productivity gains. For example, The World Economic Forum projects roughly 92 million jobs displaced but 170 million created, for a net gain of about 78 million jobs by 2030. The Chamber of Progress estimates that, “for every 1,000 AVs produced and deployed annually, approximately 190 workers will be needed for manufacturing and servicing these vehicles.”

Yes, some of the concerns Uber highlights are very real government questions that need honest dialogue and decisive policy: from curb management and accessibility, to public transit integration, and equitable deployment. Uber is right that companies and policymakers absolutely should think seriously about workforce transition, retraining, and economic adaptation as well as the build-out. But after years of normalizing the gig economy, arguments about labor feel more self-serving than social responsibility. And the conversation about worker transitions in light of automation deserves more attention than to romanticize today’s gig economy.

If Uber wants to lead the next chapter of mobility, it should do so honestly: not by romanticizing the labor conditions that made its original business model possible, but by acknowledging the economic contradictions that autonomy is beginning to expose. They should be focused on retraining and upskilling, not keeping the same old systems that hold workers back. The future transportation debate should not be framed as humans versus robots. It should be framed around labor transition and how automation helps reshape the dignity of work in mobility.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak AI. Don shares what has kept him motivated after more than a decade in the autonomous vehicle industry, why he remains confident in the future of AVs, and how the space has evolved from years of R&D into real-world commercialization.

We also dive into what Kodiak AI is building and its vehicle-agnostic physical AI approach, which spans long-haul trucking, industrial applications, defense, and more. Don explains why long-haul trucking remains such a large opportunity, what it will take to reach fully driverless operations at scale, and why highway-only autonomy isn’t enough to make the product viable.

Finally, we discuss the differences between highway and city-street autonomy, how Kodiak approaches proving safety, and what it has learned from earlier deployments. Don also shares his perspective on scaling KPIs, the competitive landscape, Kodiak’s experience as a public company, and whether autonomous trucking could ultimately be a larger market than robotaxis.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Don Burnette

• (01:30) What’s kept Don going in the AV space for over a decade

• (02:15) Why Don is confident in the future of AVs, and some of the challenges the industry faces today

• (04:09) How AVs have moved from R&D to commercialization

• (06:30) What Kodiak AI does

• (07:55) Kodiak AI’s generalized physical AI and how it’s vehicle agnostic

• (10:07) Kodiak AI’s verticals: including long-haul trucking, industrial trucking and defense

• (18:03) The role of robotaxis in propagating autonomy to the general public

• (19:50) Why long-haul trucking has a bigger total addressable market than industrial trucking

• (21:30) Steps to reaching full driverless operations in long-haul trucking, and how Kodiak AI is approaching it

• (23:44) Why highway-only autonomy isn’t enough

• (25:10) Highway vs. city-street autonomous driving

• (26:59) Public perception of accidents and proving the safety case in AV trucking vs. robotaxis

• (30:20) Learning from the experiences of earlier, broader AV deployments

• (33:10) Experience operating as a publicly listed company

• (34:50) KPIs for autonomous truck deployments and which ones Kodiak AI focuses on

• (37:42) Competition in the AV trucking space and Kodiak AI’s position

• (39:25) How individual incidents affect the general perception of autonomy

• (41:50) Is autonomous trucking’s total addressable market bigger than robotaxi’s?

• (43:41) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Don Burnette on LinkedIn and X.

• Kodiak AI’s website (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Uber Exits Serve Robotics Stake as Delivery Alliance Unravels (link, no paywall). I was surprised by this one, since you don’t see many Uber partners walk away, especially smaller ones, and Serve was also born inside the Uber/Postmates ecosystem. Now Uber has sold its stake and Serve doesn’t plan to renew their agreement when it expires next year. The disagreement seems to be less about the robots themselves and more about how to actually operate and scale them. Interestingly, Serve says its experience with DoorDash has been much better, which shows that Uber’s aggregator model isn’t as simple as plugging autonomous supply into the platform. Uber does still have several other delivery robot partners, but with both Waymo and Serve moving away from Uber, it will be interesting to see if this becomes a broader trend.

“Our extensive discussions with Uber since the emergence of this trend in Q2 have clarified that we really have differing views about the operating model to scale our shared autonomous fleet,” Kashani said on the call, adding that those differences span areas like fleet coordination and merchant integration.

Other Stuff

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald: We’re teaming up with Hinomaru Kotsu as our fleet partner to launch our robotaxi pilot in Tokyo later this year with Wayve and Nissan (link). Not sure how I feel about this car.

Waymo expands in Phoenix area with new East Valley territory (link), they also expanded in Orlando to include more of Taft (link). Congrats JJ Ricks!

The company announced Thursday that it's adding 55 square miles of the East Valley to its service area. That includes Gilbert and more of Chandler.

Avride CEO Dmitry Polishchuk: Just crossed 100,000 autonomous rides with Uber in Dallas! (link). *With a safety driver but nice to see them progressing.

Waymo enters second phase of testing in Denver (link).

Waymo has moved to the next phase of testing in Denver by removing the backup drivers. Denver is an important testing ground for Waymo. It’s the company’s only test city that regularly sees snow and ice. The company hopes to eventually expand into the metro area and Denver International Airport.

Uber partners with China’s Pony.ai for 2,000 robotaxis in Europe (link). Europe still hasn't approved driverless robotaxis so while this is interesting, it doesn't mean much yet.

The companies plan to deploy 2,000 of Pony.ai’s self-driving taxis across Europe, and expand the robotaxi partnership to the Middle East, they announced Friday.

Designing Energy Infrastructure for Autonomous and Electric Fleets

MN8 Energy is one of the largest renewable energy and infrastructure owners in the U.S., supporting fleet operators as they scale electrification and autonomy. With expertise in delivering custom, turnkey solutions tailored to each fleet’s duty cycle and operational needs, bringing reliability, uptime guarantees, and long-term operational ownership, MN8 is the choice partner for fleets as they transition to electric and autonomous operations.

To learn more about MN8’s work with fleet and infrastructure partners, reach out to the Distributed Energy Solutions team at DES@mn8.com

Waymo registers Swiss entity in Zurich (link). Interesting how many new entities Waymo has been forming around the globe lately. Sure seems like they’re keeping their options open for a much broader international expansion.

Take a peek inside a Tesla Cybercab (link).

Waymo is proud to partner with the Las Vegas Raiders and Allegiant Stadium to bring autonomous rides to Las Vegas (link). Paint that Ojai black!

‘Former Waymo employee thoughts on ride-sharing’ (link). I don’t agree with the Uber analysis here at all. Air travel is a poor analogy since it’s a large, infrequent purchase. Ridehail is all about increasing frequency and building loyalty. Waymo still doesn’t have a great answer for peak demand, which is exactly where a broader marketplace like Uber can be valuable.

Imagry and UNVI Announce Partnership to Offer Fully Integrated Autonomous Driving Buses (link).

Together, the companies have integrated Imagry’s field-proven AI-based autonomous driving technology into UNVI’s M3-category electric buses to address the growing market demand for safe, reliable, and sustainable public transportation solutions.

‘Waymo soon to be available via the Lyft app in Nashville’ (link).

‘Nearly one year ago, Kodiak rang the Nasdaq Opening Bell as a newly public company. Since then, we’ve grown our customer-owned driverless fleet from 8 to 35 trucks, increased paid driverless operations from 3,000 cumulative hours to more than 40,000, and introduced the seventh generation of the Kodiak Driver’ (link). Had a great conversation with Kodiak CEO Don Burnette about this milestone and a lot more. Listen in on Monday when the episode goes live!

Zoox Safety Case Framework (link).

‘Lovely to see Waymo’s partnership with TechForce out in the wild’ (link). This is a neat partnership, and I’d love to see Waymo team up with Lyft on something similar in Nashville, where over 50% of the full-time roles Lyft has filled at its AV depot have gone to current or former Lyft drivers. Programs like this may only appeal to a relatively small share of drivers, but for the people who do participate, they can be hugely impactful by creating a real pathway into new AV-related jobs. Grab has done a good job here too, including training existing driver-partners to become safety operators through programs like GrabAcademy.

Teamsters sue California DMV over driverless truck rules (link). This seems like a weak argument considering the DMV spent years developing these rules, held multiple public comment periods and a hearing, and the Teamsters themselves participated in the process.

Filed Wednesday in Alameda County Superior Court, the lawsuit alleges the DMV failed to conduct a legally required economic review and did not give the public enough information about the rules' potential effects on jobs and safety.

Waymo back on freeways! My first ride (link).

The Fifth Layer: Why Infrastructure Is AV Rideshare’s Missing $200B Opportunity (link).

Waymo Factory August Update - 953 Ojai, 72% finished. + 12 IONIQ 5s (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

Uber Says It’s Gaining Market Share from Waymo in San Francisco. I’m Not So Sure (link). My latest piece where I take a closer look at Uber’s claim that it’s gaining market share against Waymo in San Francisco, why Waymo’s expanding operating domain complicates the Yipit data, and what CPUC trip data tells us about whether Uber is actually taking share back from Waymo. It’s been generating some buzz on Reddit too (link).

Wayve’s GAIA-4 and the Future of AV Simulation with Brandon Basso (link). Our latest podcast where TDD Editor sits down with Wayve’s VP of Engineering to discuss how world models are being used to train and validate autonomous vehicles, what GAIA-4’s closed-loop simulation capabilities unlock, and the challenges of validating a generalizable AI driving system, among other things.

Autonomy Insiders by : The Hidden Human Layer Making Autonomous Vehicles Scalable | Nick Allen, TaskUs (link).

TITV by The Information, featuring Lyft CEO David Risher: Why Lyft is Betting Big on Waymo (link).

Related: Lyft’s Hybrid Approach to Autonomy with CEO David Risher (link).

30 Minutes by ADSN: Self-Driving Cars Are Here And What It Means for You ft. Harry Campbell (link).

The Curbivore by : Let Them Linger? The Surprising Case for Robotaxis at the Curb (link). Interesting study that looks at AV’s impact on VMT when they park after a ride vs cruising around. Also echoes some of the discussion I had with on a past podcast (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

Dallas pedestrian dies after being struck by SUV, thrown into Waymo (link). I saw some criticism of Waymo over this, but they were literally driving the other direction. The pedestrian was first hit by a human-driven SUV and thrown into the opposite lane before colliding with the Waymo. Hard to see how this is really a Waymo safety story.

‘Autonomous delivery van in China drives straight into ditch’ (link). Who left that gate open?

AV behaving “goodly” :)

‘Not all road users follow a predictable path’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at Moove, and to Jennifer P, Jake F, and Lars B for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Product Manager, Driving Performance Expansion at Waymo (link) via Jacopo Sannazzaro.

Software Engineer - Driving Behavior at Zoox (link) via Mingfeng Zhang.

Sensing Systems Engineer at Wayve (link) via Irene Perali.

Director, Autonomy Perception at May Mobility (link) via May Mobility.

Job Moves

Congrats to friend of TDD Offer Grembek on the move from Kinetic Logic -> Atoms (link). Atoms sure is making a lot of moves lately!

Travis Kalanick’s robotics startup Atoms taps former Uber finance chief as CFO (link).

Omar Mahboob: General Motors -> Motional (link).

Scott Sheridan: Humanoid -> Wayve (link).

An Li: Meta -> NVIDIA (link).

Brianna Swanson: Ocado Technology -> Waabi (link).

We’re now at 11,000+ subscribers! Interested in advertising with TDD? Check out our media kit here and reach out to us. Newsletter spots are currently sold out until September but we do have podcast advertising opportunities available.

Reach out

Until next week :)

-Harry

It’s been a while since I’ve seen updated Yipit market share data for San Francisco, so it was nice of Uber’s CFO, Balaji Krishnamurthy, to share the latest numbers on Twitter recently, even if he was doing it to roast me.

Since Waymo, Uber and Lyft don’t share their city-by-city breakdown of rides publicly, Yipit data gives us one of the clearest looks at how the three are actually stacking up against each other within a given operating area.

Balaji’s reason for sharing the chart was to bolster Uber’s claim on their recent earnings call, that “in more mature AV markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix, Uber’s category share, both citywide and in AV operating zones, is higher today than it was a year ago.”

Initially, I was skeptical of this claim since Waymo famously gained a ton of market share in San Francisco when they launched. But Uber is arguing that while Waymo may have gained market share quickly after launching in these three markets, it hasn’t continued taking share from Uber over the past year.

The citywide part of that claim isn’t especially surprising. Uber’s operating domain is much larger than Waymo’s, it can serve airports, and it has fewer geographic restrictions overall. And since Uber is still growing its ride volume every quarter, it’scplausible that its growth across the broader market could outpace Waymo’s growth within a much smaller operating area.

But the second part of Uber’s claim, that its market share has also increased within Waymo’s operating zones, is more interesting and deserves a closer look.

Zooming In

We covered Waymo’s rise from 0% market share in SF in August of 2023 to equaling Lyft’s market share of 20% in November of 2024.

Waymo continued on that growth trajectory and things were looking good in April of 2025. If you were to extrapolate their growth rate, Waymo was even ‘on track’ to pass Uber in 12 months.

But that obviously never happened and this is the crux of Balaji’s argument.

Yipit Data Caveats

From the looks of the latest Yipit chart, Waymo’s market share actually went down from 20% in June 2025 to 15% as of June 2026, while Uber’s ticked slightly up. Great news for Uber right? Not so fast.

As Twitter user m0xt pointed out, there is an important caveat with the Yipit data. It only measures trips that start and end within Waymo’s operating domain, and that domain expanded substantially over the past year, first farther down the Peninsula in June 2025 and then to a 260+ square-mile Bay Area service area stretching from San Francisco to San Jose in November.

That matters because every time Waymo expands, Yipit adds a bunch of new territory where Uber is already well established and Waymo is starting from scratch. So you would naturally expect Uber’s share within the newly expanded operating zone to jump and Waymo’s to fall, even if Waymo is still gaining share across the Bay Area overall.

You can see this clearly around Waymo’s June and November 2025 expansions, when Uber’s share jumps and Waymo’s falls. In other words, some of what looks like Uber regaining market share may simply be an artifact of Waymo expanding its service area.

CPUC Data Also Bolsters This Narrative

Although Yipit data is nice to have, California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) data gives us another important piece of the puzzle since it represents the actual number of paid trips Waymo is doing across California (Los Angeles and San Francisco).

And if we look carefully at the chart above, we see Waymo at 200,000 trips per week as of May 31, 20251 and by November 30, 2025, they were at 300,000 trips per week, a 50% increase.

Yet over roughly the same period, the Yipit chart shows Waymo’s market share within its operating zone declining.

Those two things aren’t necessarily contradictory. Waymo expanded its operating domain twice during this period, meaning Yipit was measuring Waymo against Uber and Lyft across an increasingly large geography. Waymo could therefore be doing significantly more rides overall while holding or even losing share within the much larger area it now serves.

It would be interesting to see Yipit run the same analysis using a fixed geography, for example, Waymo’s original San Francisco operating zone. That would give us a much better apples-to-apples comparison of whether Waymo has actually gained or lost share against Uber over the past year.

So while Uber’s statement appears to be technically correct, it leaves out some pretty important context: Waymo increased its California ride volume by 50% during this period while also significantly expanding its operating domain.

My Takeaway

I’ve been covering Uber for over a decade, so I’m pretty familiar with the linguistic gymnastics they sometimes use to make their position look as strong as possible. And I don’t blame them. It’s their job to make the case to investors, and it’s my job to call them out when the data deserves a closer look.

And I actually think this is a perfect example of what my original tweet was getting at, even though I was mostly joking.

Yes, Uber has maintained or even increased its market share within the AV operating zones where it competes with Waymo. But during that same period, Waymo grew from roughly 200,000 to 300,000 paid trips per week in California and significantly expanded where it operates. That’s hardly evidence that Waymo has stopped growing or that it isn’t taking meaningful ride volume.

The ironic part is that CPUC data does suggest Waymo’s growth may have started slowing by Q1 2026. So Uber’s argument would have been more convincing if it looked back over the past six months instead of the past year.

San Francisco is obviously an especially good market for Waymo. It’s a dense 7-by-7-mile city with lots of tech evangelists and early adopters, and those dynamics won’t necessarily translate to every market. But I think Waymo has already demonstrated that it can enter a major rideshare market and gain meaningful share relatively quickly. And as it adds airport access and re-starts freeway service, the gap between what Waymo and Uber can offer gets smaller.

If anything, the bigger question is whether Waymo can scale supply fast enough to actually compete head to head with Uber. Vehicle availability has arguably been a bigger constraint than demand, and Waymo is still priced at a premium to Uber. If Waymo can add vehicles, expand its operating domains and eventually bring prices down, there’s still plenty of room for it to take additional share in my book.

Readers, what do you think? Are you Team Balaji or Team Harry on this one now that I’ve had my coffee?

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, The Driverless Digest Editor Ben Hubbard speaks with Brandon Basso, VP of Engineering at Wayve. Brandon breaks down the role of world models in autonomous driving and how Wayve is using them to train, test, and validate its AI Driver.

He explains what problems world models can solve, where their limitations still lie when it comes to rare edge cases, and how Wayve’s latest model, GAIA-4, advances the company’s approach to simulation. The conversation dives into GAIA-4’s closed-loop capabilities, how it can simulate multiple sensor modalities, and why closed-loop testing could give Wayve an edge in virtual testing and validation.

Brandon also explains the distinction between “AV 1.0” and “AV 2.0,” including how an AI-first approach changes the role of data, development, and validation. Ben and Brandon also discuss the challenge of optimizing autonomous vehicles for passenger comfort, what it takes to validate a more generalizable AI driving system, and how Wayve sees GAIA-4 playing a central role in the future of AV development and validation.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Brandon Basso

• (02:20) Brandon’s day-to-day role at Wayve

• (03:00) What is the Wayve AI Driver?

• (04:05) What is a world model, and why is it used to teach an AI how to drive?

• (05:11) What problem does the world model solve?

• (08:04) How some edge cases constrain what can be tested using world models

• (09:21) How far off are we from capturing all edge cases using world models?

• (11:35) GAIA-4, Wayve’s latest world model and its new features

• (12:06) Closed-loop vs. open-loop testing with GAIA-4

• (14:30) Multimodality and how GAIA-4 simulates different sensors

• (15:27) How closed-loop simulation gives an edge in virtual testing

• (17:38) The difference between AV 1.0 and AV 2.0

• (26:13) How difficult is it to optimize for comfort in the AV industry?

• (27:02) How important data is to the AI Driver

• (27:38) The challenges of developing and validating an AV 2.0 system

• (30:55) The future of validation and GAIA-4’s central role

• (32:18) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Brandon Basso on LinkedIn.

• Wayve’s article about GAIA-4 (link).

• The diagram explaining the difference between closed-loop and open-loop, mentioned in the 12:08 timestamp (link).

• Check out Harry’s earlier interview with Wayve CEO Alex Kendall (link).

Top Story of the Week

Moove raises $250M to become the backbone of the robotaxi industry (link).

Moove is the fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, and in the future, London… This latest funding will be used to scale the company’s autonomous vehicle fleet management business, including hiring about 350 people.

Related: My podcast interview with Ming Maa - Moove AV CEO (link).

Other Stuff

Waymo autonomous rides now open to public in Dallas as waitlist ends (link).

Anyone can download the Waymo app and request a driverless ride within the company's Dallas service area as Waymo says nearly 150,000 people rode in its autonomous vehicles during the invitation-only phase.

Uber is building an autonomous vehicle empire, and here’s every company it’s using to do it (link). Comprehensive list, if anyone wants to help me rank all of Uber’s AV partners, please reach out.

Atoms and Joby Aviation Partner to Build Nationwide Vertiport Network (link, no paywall). Interesting to see Travis Kalanick move into transportation infrastructure through Atoms, with plans for vertiports that connect air taxis, AVs and rideshare.

Uber and Wayve get TfL approval for supervised robotaxi service in London (link).

TfL confirmed that the vehicles have been licensed as PHVs, not as automated vehicles. The approval allows supervised passenger trips with a licensed PHV driver present, but does not permit fully driverless passenger services.

Amazon’s Zoox to launch paid robotaxi service in Las Vegas on Monday Aug. 10 (link).

Faster Data Off the Vehicle—Faster AI on the Road

Virewirx’s VX60 High Performance Wireless System has piqued our interest—that’s why we’re partnering with them this week to share their unique millimeter wave system built to move massive AV fleet data quickly and reliably. Reach out to Brian Lee at info@virewirx.com to learn more.

Uber CEO brushes off reports of a Waymo break-up (link, no paywall). Sometimes I forget how good Dara is with his words. Calling the “on-the-ground partnership” with Waymo “very strong” gives him some plausible deniability, but it still feels rosy given the recent reports of tensions between the two companies. Uber also seems increasingly eager to point out that robotaxis still account for less than 0.5% of rides on its platform. But that only tells you how many AV rides happen on Uber. It says nothing about all the Waymo rides happening outside Uber, which is kind of the whole point.

“Waymo is a very important partner of ours, and we continue to operate in Austin and Atlanta,” Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call today. “We believe we’ll continue to operate next year in those marketplaces. It’s a terrific product, and the on-the-ground partnership continues to be very strong.”

‘AVs were back at the center of Uber’s Q2 earnings call. 75% of analyst questions included autonomous vehicles as a central topic, the highest share since I started tracking these calls four years ago..’ (link).

“Importantly, in more mature AV markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix, Uber’s category share, both citywide and in AV operating zones, is higher today than it was a year ago.” I initially misread this tweet and was skeptical of the claim, but after Balaji dropped the hammer and shared the latest Yipit market share data (come on, you guys know I can’t afford Yipit data), it makes a lot more sense. Waymo quickly took share from Uber and Lyft in San Francisco, but over the past year its share has actually fallen while both Uber and Lyft have gained ground.

The chart isn’t quite as bad as it looks for Waymo though (link), since Yipit only counts rides that start and end inside Waymo’s operating zone. Waymo expanded its ODD in June and November 2025, which means the denominator suddenly included a bunch more Uber and Lyft rides in areas Waymo had only just entered. Too late though, damage done to my ego. Balaji wins this round, maybe next quarter he’ll come on the podcast.

Related: Lyft Q2 2026 Earnings Prepared Remarks (link).

We believe the future is hybrid and as AVs scale the market will expand. Take San Francisco, where Lyft Rides within the Operational Design Domain (ODD) grew approximately 20% year over year, the strongest growth across all current markets with AVs.

Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short (link). FSD Supervised is an amazing product, but I’m Team Waymo on this debate. Now that LiDAR and radar costs have come down sharply, it’s hard for me to see the argument against using more sensors and more types of data when you’re trying to build the safest possible driver.

His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. “Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there’s that proof of existence,” he said. “If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that’s a very reasonable way to go.” Then the catch. If you’re targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, “you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.”

Related: Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work (link).

A London Taxi Family Confronts the Driverless Future (link, no paywall).

‘Few words on $UBER: It actually started to look like a no-brainer’ (link) via .

Zipline CEO Keller Cliffton: Zipline update, from our command center (link). Looking forward to our interview!

• Just crossed 2.5 million deliveries.

• Completed 140 million+ commercial autonomous miles.

• Certain individual aircraft have flown 1 million+ autonomous miles.

• Businesses delivering with Zipline increased 13x in H1 2026.

Within Uber-Waymo split, a key labor battle over AVs is being waged in the nation’s capital (link).

Zoox’s regulatory win is a win for Tesla, too (link).

In other words, exemption decisions must be focused narrowly on vehicle performance, not the overall safety of the self-driving technology… That regulatory limitation will make it easier for Tesla to self-certify the safety of its camera-only driving system, which has been heavily scrutinized.

Uber’s Robotaxi Ambition to Face Scrutiny as Shares Languish (link, no paywall). Nice chart ;)

Inside the Luxury Robotaxi Uber, Lucid and Nuro Are Testing (link).

Engineering Tour: Motional IONIQ 5 Robotaxi (link).

Portland moves to regulate robotaxis (link). Requiring a human driver in an AV defeats the point, but I think concerns about displaced rideshare drivers are legitimate. Personally, I like the idea of a small fee on AV trips to support affected drivers. Cities should also have more say and access to AV data, especially when these vehicles are operating on their streets.

‘Americans Can’t Buy Chinese EVs. Waymo Is Importing Thousands’ (link). Great breakdown from Alan Ohnsman at Forbes (got me to pay for a subscription!). The Ojai deal was done well before the huge tariffs on Chinese EVs, so Waymo is now kind of stuck with them. They’ve already imported 3,200+, which is a big number, but with the tariffs and the vehicles coming over stripped down, it’s hard to see Ojai as a great long-term vehicle solution for Waymo.

Related: ‘Just spotted upwards of 500 yes 500 Waymo Ojai today in Mesa, AZ’ (link).

Deep Dive: What Happens When Cars Drive Themselves (link).

Atlas, Kodiak grow autonomous truck fleet in Permian Basin (link).

Atlas now runs driverless trucks concurrently from depots in Texas and New Mexico, roughly 90 minutes apart, widening its delivery reach across one of the world’s most active oil and gas basins. Since deployments began in 2024, the fleet has completed around 7,000 loads across 15 routes, hauling more than 450,000 tons of sand and logging over 23,500 driverless hours in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

RoboDock CEO Zinny Weli: Big milestone: we moved into our own lab space. Building, testing, and iterating all under one roof has been a game changer for how quickly we can move (link). Is that a Jaguar I-Pace I see? 👀

Waymo expands D.C. footprint amid lobbying for council bill (link).

NVIDIA Alpamayo 2 Super, the Frontier Open Model for Robotaxis and Autonomous Vehicles, Now Available for Commercial Use (link).

Related: How NVIDIA Alpamayo Is Accelerating Autonomous Driving with Matt Cragun (link).

‘Zoox updated its Terms of Service today’ (link).

‘Autolane just launched in Austin. It’s 13 Tesla Model Ys making autonomous restaurant deliveries, and it’s live now with Tso Chinese Takeout & Delivery’ (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

Why Waymos Keep Driving Into Floods (link). Our latest guest piece where founder of DeterministicAI.tech Sanjay Kumar explores why flooded roads expose one of autonomous driving’s biggest blind spots, breaking down the sensor limitations behind recent Waymo incidents and the technologies that could eventually solve them. It’s already getting some love on Reddit.

Building the Energy Infrastructure for Autonomous Vehicles with Alex Pischalnikov (link). My latest podcast where I sit down with MN8 Energy’s Senior Director of Strategy to discuss why charging and energy infrastructure are becoming critical enablers of autonomous vehicles, how depot design and charging strategy impact robotaxi and autonomous trucking economics, and what the AV industry can learn from years of EV charging deployment, among other things.

Qasar Younis, Applied Intuition & Mamoon Hamid, Kleiner Perkins | RAISE Summit 2026 (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘Ojai continues to scrape on this hill - sf’ (link). Turn sound on.

‘Cracked Ojai Screen - LA’ (link).

‘Man smoking on top of Waymo with rider inside’ (link).

‘Another Robotaxi Supervisor Intervention: Hate to put these videos out but after being dropped off at SFO airport on my ride that had an intervention at the end, the driver leaving took over as well to leave departures drop off’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at Kindred Ventures for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Multiple Strategic Partnerships roles at Waymo, via Jimmy Lyons.

Program Manager, Contingent Workforce at Zoox (link) via Steven Kekich.

HR Generalist at Atoms (link) via Chord Fonvielle.

Job Moves

Kimberly Wasiljew: Google -> Waymo (link).

Philip Reinckens: Atoms (link).

Ryan Wallace: FlexAI -> Waabi (link).

We’re now at 11,000+ subscribers! Interested in advertising with TDD? Check out our media kit here and reach out to us. Newsletter spots are currently sold out until September but we do have podcast advertising opportunities available.

Reach out

Until next week :)

-Harry

Imagine you are cruising down an Atlanta thoroughfare in the middle of a sudden, blinding downpour. The rain is drumming on your windshield, and up ahead, the asphalt vanishes beneath a deep, murky pool of rushing water.

As a human driver, your brain instantly fires off basic survival instincts: “Turn around, don’t drown.” You scan the surrounding environment, measuring how high the water is rising against the curbs, watching the cars ahead of you, and feeling the sheer force of the storm. You press the brakes.

Now consider the Waymo robotaxi pictured above. Backed by millions of miles of autonomous training data, a suite of custom-engineered microchips, and a physical array of cutting-edge sensors, the vehicle approaches the exact same hazard - and drives straight in.

This dramatic scene isn’t a one-off stunt. It is a real-world snapshot of a fascinating, high-stakes edge case in autonomous vehicle (AV) perception. Following a series of incidents - including a vehicle being swept off a roadway into Salado Creek in San Antonio and cars getting stranded mid-flood in Austin - Waymo officially issued a voluntary recall with NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) covering 3,791 of its driverless vehicles.

How does a multimillion-dollar supercomputer on wheels fail a test that a teenager with a fresh driver’s license could pass? Let’s explore the autonomous systems engineering behind why this happens - and how the industry plans to fix it.

1. Physics vs. LiDAR: Water Acts Like a Mirror

To understand why a self-driving car struggles in a deluge, we have to look at how it sees the road. Waymo’s vehicles rely on sensor fusion, combining cameras, radar and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).

LiDAR is the crown jewel of AV tech. It fires millions of invisible infrared laser pulses every second, measuring how long they take to bounce back to construct a highly detailed 3D point cloud of the vehicle’s surroundings. But fluid physics has a way of breaking lasers:

• Specular Reflection (The Mirror Effect): When a laser hits dry, rough asphalt, the light scatters in all directions, sending a strong return signal back to the car's sensors. However, when water covers the road, it acts like a mirror. The laser hits the flat surface of the water and reflects away from the car.

• The "Disappearing" Road: Because laser light never bounces back, LiDAR receives zero return data. To the car's perception stack, a deep body of water can register as a flat, empty, clear road. If the car's high-definition (HD) maps say a road should be there, and the sensors detect no obstacles, the computer assumes the path is clear.

2. The Depth Blind Spot

Even if the vehicle’s onboard cameras detect a change in road texture or notice a glossy surface, current computer vision models cannot inherently calculate water depth.

Distinguishing between a harmless one-inch puddle and a catastrophic two-foot torrent requires contextual reasoning. Humans naturally look for physical reference points - how high the water is on a nearby fire hydrant, whether the tires of the car ahead are submerged, or how fast the current is moving. Current vision stacks struggle to compute these abstract, real-time comparisons.

3. The False Positive Dilemma

Every autonomous vehicle programmer must solve a delicate equation: balancing safety with traffic flow.

If a robotaxi executed an emergency stop, swerved, or triggered its hazards every time it encountered a shiny patch of road, a minor puddle, or a wet metallic construction plate, it would cause a nightmare of constant “phantom braking.”

In high-traffic environments, phantom braking is incredibly dangerous, frequently causing human-driven vehicles behind the AV to rear-end it. To keep the ride smooth and predictable, the software is tuned to tolerate minor surface anomalies - which means deep water sometimes gets incorrectly bucketed as an ignorable puddle.

4. The Logic Gap: "Decelerate and Proceed"

The physics of water is only half the story. The trigger for Waymo’s voluntary recall was a specific software logic error.

According to the NHTSA filings, Waymo’s system was designed with a specific instruction for higher-speed roadways (like 40+ mph highways). When the vehicle did detect an untraversable, flooded lane, its programming prioritized keeping traffic moving safely rather than locking up the brakes in the middle of a highway.

The system’s compromise? Decelerate, and attempt to proceed through the water anyway.

This exact logic is what caused an unoccupied Waymo to slow down and then slowly, methodically crawl directly into a high-water area in San Antonio - leading to it being swept away.

The Operational Workarounds - and Why They're Not Enough

While Waymo was quick to respond to the issue, it has not yet solved the fundamental physics problem of water. Instead, the company deployed a combination of operational workarounds and interim measures.

The Final Remedy Is Still Under Development

According to official NHTSA safety recall reports, Waymo's final remedy to resolve how its 5th- and 6th-generation automated driving systems (ADS) handle flooded lanes is still in active development. Because teaching an AI to instantly measure the physical depth of mud-opaque water in real-time is an incredibly complex engineering challenge, there is no set release date for a permanent sensor-based patch.

The Current Workaround

To keep cars out of deep water in the meantime, Waymo implemented an interim remedy:

• Dynamic Map Bans: Waymo has updated its high-definition maps to completely block off areas known to be prone to flash flooding.

• Weather-Alert Geofencing: The fleet's dispatch system is tied to local National Weather Service (NWS) alerts. If a severe storm or flood warning is issued, robotaxis are restricted from operating in those zones.

The catch: this approach is only as fast as the weather reports. If a sudden cloudburst floods a street before the NWS can issue an official flash flood warning, the geofence won't trigger - leaving the vehicle entirely dependent on its onboard sensors, which, as we've seen, are blind to standing water.

Service Pauses and Current Operations

Following these flood incidents, Waymo has had to temporarily pause services in affected cities during severe weather threats. Yet, despite these weather vulnerabilities, Waymo continues to scale up its operations aggressively, choosing to manage flood risk through strict operational shutdowns rather than a vehicle-level sensory fix.

How Engineers Plan to Fix the "Drowning Robotaxi"

To truly make autonomous vehicles flood-proof, engineers are targeting the physical and computational roots of the problem with three emerging technologies:

1. High-Resolution LiDAR-Like Radar

While LiDAR’s infrared lasers are physically blocked or reflected away by water, millimeter-wave radar can easily penetrate rain, fog and water surfaces.

Researchers are developing systems using multiple, widely spaced radar sensors on the vehicle’s front end. By overlapping the fields of view of two or more radar sensors and applying noise-filtering algorithms, the vehicle can generate a highly detailed 3D imaging point cloud - similar to LiDAR - but unaffected by wet road surfaces. This allows the car to effectively see through the water’s surface to scan the structural roadbed beneath.

2. Relative Contextual Vision (Landmark Comparison)

Since cameras cannot directly measure depth like a ruler, software engineers are training neural networks to infer water depth indirectly using the surrounding environment - a technique called Visual Depth Inference via HD Map Anchors.

The vehicle compares its real-time camera feeds against its highly detailed, pre-loaded dry HD maps. If the camera detects water and notices that a physical landmark - like a curb, a fire hydrant, or a traffic sign - is partially submerged compared to its dry baseline map coordinates, the algorithm can calculate the exact height of the floodwater based on how much of the reference object has disappeared beneath the surface.

3. In-Sensor Edge Computing

Currently, self-driving cars stream massive amounts of sensor data from cameras, LiDAR and radar to their onboard computing platform. However, standard LiDAR pulses bounce off wet surfaces like a mirror, as mentioned, returning empty signals that the car’s software incorrectly interprets as a completely clear, dry road.

To solve this visual blind spot, scientists are developing smart optoelectronic sensors using advanced materials, such as rhenium disulfide. These sensors detect the polarization, the specific angle, of reflected light rather than just brightness, allowing them to physically distinguish between dry asphalt and standing water with over 95% accuracy. By analyzing light behavior directly at the hardware layer via in-sensor computing, the device can flag a flooded surface to the central processor before the vehicle enters a danger area.

The "Matrix" Solution: Waymo Is Simulating the Flood

If you can’t safely teach a physical robotaxi to navigate a flood in the real world without drowning it, how do you fix its brain? You build a virtual world and flood it.

In early 2026, Waymo and Google DeepMind unveiled the Waymo World Model (WWM), built upon DeepMind’s ultra-advanced Genie 3 generative AI engine. WWM acts as a generative simulator for self-driving cars. Rather than relying on simple pre-programmed track scenarios, this model can ingest ordinary 2D video footage - such as a passenger’s phone video or dashcam footage of a flooded street - and convert it into a fully interactive, multimodal 3D simulation.

The key breakthroughs of this simulated training ground include:

• Multi-Modal Realism: The model doesn't just generate realistic camera images; it simultaneously synthesizes physically correct LiDAR point clouds. This allows the virtual Waymo Driver to learn exactly how laser light reflects off water surfaces.

• Controlling the Uncontrollable: Engineers can use language prompts to instantly manipulate the layout, control traffic, or summon extreme weather events - including massive flash floods, heavy snowstorms, or even tornadoes.

• Zero-Risk "What-If" Training: Waymo uses this system to safely run thousands of "counterfactual" scenarios. They can ask: "What if the driver didn't decelerate on this flooded highway lane?" or "How would the LiDAR react if the water rose by six more inches?" All of this training happens in the safety of a server rack, without risking a single scratch on their real-world vehicles.

Building an AI that can handle 99% of predictable, dry-weather driving is incredibly difficult. But solving for the fluid, unpredictable physics of the real world - where a road can transform into a river in a matter of minutes - is the true engineering frontier.

-Sanjay

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Alex Pischalnikov, Senior Director of Strategy at MN8 Energy. Alex explains how MN8 has grown into one of the country’s largest renewable energy infrastructure companies and why its experience building and operating energy assets positions it to play a critical role in the AV ecosystem. We discuss the company’s business across renewable generation, battery storage, EV charging, and energy management, along with what differentiates MN8 in an increasingly competitive market.

We also dive into the growing intersection between energy infrastructure and autonomous vehicles. Alex explains why charging is becoming one of the most important considerations for commercial AV deployments, how the needs of robotaxi and autonomous trucking fleets compare to large data centers, and why the location, design, and operation of depots can have a major impact on fleet economics. We discuss deadheading, charging strategies, fleet utilization, and the operational challenges companies face as they scale from hundreds to thousands of autonomous vehicles.

Finally, Alex shares lessons the AV industry can learn from years of EV charging deployment, how MN8 works with autonomous vehicle companies to accelerate commercialization, and what the next generation of AV fleet hubs could look like as autonomous transportation scales over the coming decade.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Alex Pischalnikov and MN8 Energy

• (03:05) What verticals is MN8 Energy focused on?

• (03:58) MN8 Energy’s unique differentiator in the energy sector

• (06:00) Inside MN8 Energy’s renewable energy infrastructure business

• (07:33) The different types of customers MN8 Energy caters for

• (10:00) Similarities between powering data centers and AVs

• (11:45) How early are we in the AV cycle?

• (14:25) The importance of charging to AV deployments

• (16:20) The major cost factor in AV deployments

• (18:52) How MN8 Energy helps AV companies deploy better

• (21:40) The importance of different depot layouts for effective fleet management

• (23:15) How to locate depots effectively to balance costs and reduce deadheading

• (25:45) The biggest fleet management challenges when scaling AV fleets from hundreds to thousands of vehicles

• (29:44) Lessons the AV fleet charging industry can learn from EV customer charging

• (32:27) The future of AV fleet hubs and what they might look like

• (35:40) Conclusions and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Alex Pischalnikov on LinkedIn.

• MN8 Energy’s website (link).

• MN8 Energy’s article about AV fleets: Autonomous Fleets May Be Self-Driving, But They’re Not yet Fully Self-Reliant (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Amazon’s Zoox wins first US approval for paid robotaxis without human controls (link).

Zoox has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, ​a first for the autonomous ride industry, the U.S. auto safety agency said on Thursday… NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison told Reuters that Zoox had received clearance to commercially deploy up to 2,500 ​vehicles in each of the next two years… All remote operators must be located in the United States, NHTSA said, and Zoox must publish maps of areas indicating where the vehicles are operating.

“We can say pretty clearly that the systems in place on the Zoox exceed the equivalent performance ​requirements of a compliant vehicle,” said NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison. “But we still want to make sure that the automated driving system will operate appropriately.”

Other Stuff

Baidu’s Apollo Go begins London robotaxi testing with Uber and Lyft (link).

The London deployment comes out of two separate deals Baidu signed in 2025. The Lyft partnership is meant to scale thousands of Apollo Go vehicles across key European markets. The Uber partnership targets thousands of vehicles on Uber’s platform across global markets outside the US and mainland China.

The move highlights London's growing role as a neutral testing ground for US and Chinese autonomous vehicle companies. It also reinforces the increasingly two-horse nature of the global robotaxi race, with Waymo leading commercial deployments in the US while Baidu has quietly built the broadest international footprint, spanning China, Hong Kong, the UAE, Switzerland and now the UK.

Waymo robotaxis are starting to return to freeways (link).

Waymo announced Wednesday that it would gradually add freeway routes, starting with Phoenix — the company’s first driverless ride-hailing market. More cities, including Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, would follow in the coming days.

DoorDash is building its own drone delivery business (link). This was a big announcement, and I’m bullish on drone delivery over the long term. The technology already seems to be working well and if the regulatory hurdles can be cleared, I think drones have the potential to become the fastest and lowest-cost way to get small orders to customers.

I also find it interesting that DoorDash is pursuing both a partnership strategy and a build-it-yourself strategy. The company already works with Coco and Serve on sidewalk robots while also developing its own Dot autonomous delivery vehicle. On the drone side, it partners with Wing and Flytrex but is now adding DoorDash Air to the mix. Rather than picking a single winner, DoorDash seems content to partner where it makes sense while building its own capabilities in parallel.

The question is what that means for partners over the long run. If DoorDash builds strong in-house robots and drones, does it keep relying on partners or start shifting toward its own tech?

The company unveiled the new business, called DoorDash Air, after receiving a Part 135 air carrier certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The certification allows the company to legally operate a commercial drone delivery service in the United States…If DoorDash wants its drones to fly autonomously over longer distances, it will need the FAA to approve its Beyond Visual Line of Sight technology, a certification that companies like Amazon, Wing, and Zipline have received in recent years.

‘A few months ago I had an idea to build a self-driving golf cart’ (link).

Waymo explores split with Uber as robotaxi tensions deepen (link, no paywall).

The self-driving car company has held internal talks about ending its current deals with the ride-hailing group, which operates services in Austin and Atlanta, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Waymo has already notified Uber that it plans to enter these markets independently in January 2028 when their contract allows, the ride-hailing group said in a statement.

Designing Energy Infrastructure for Autonomous and Electric Fleets

MN8 Energy is one of the largest renewable energy and infrastructure owners in the U.S., supporting fleet operators as they scale electrification and autonomy. With expertise in delivering custom, turnkey solutions tailored to each fleet’s duty cycle and operational needs, bringing reliability, uptime guarantees, and long-term operational ownership, MN8 is the choice partner for fleets as they transition to electric and autonomous operations.

To learn more about MN8’s work with fleet and infrastructure partners, reach out to the Distributed Energy Solutions team at DES@mn8.com

China Resumes Issuing Robotaxi Licenses After Long Freeze (link, no paywall). I’ve been critical of Waymo for their lack of transparency around the recent July 4 issues but we still have no idea what happened with this much more serious incident in China.

Neither the government nor Baidu has publicly disclosed details of the cause of the Wuhan robotaxi outage in March, which triggered the halt in licenses.

Waymo Is Racking Up Thousands of Dollars of Parking Fines in Austin (link, no paywall). Just a drop in the bucket considering Waymo has hundreds of vehicles operating in the city. But it does make me wonder: is Waymo paying those tickets, or is Uber getting the bill?

In Austin, Texas, Waymo’s robotaxis have struggled to follow parking rules. Since the company came to town in 2024, its vehicles have been fined $9,325 in parking tickets, according to documents The Wall Street Journal obtained through an open-records request.

‘In hindsight it was a huge mistake for Rivian to commit to deploying their Robotaxis exclusively on the Uber network’ (link). Of all Uber’s AV partners, Rivian has the furthest hill to climb. As a happy R1S owner, I can confirm they make a great vehicle, but the autonomy features are the same as what you’d find on any other average car (lane keep and adaptive cruise control). We’ll see if all the hype and investment translate into a better product though over time.

Japanese AV truck startup T2 raises $30M (link, no paywall).

Momenta wins Germany-wide level 4 testing approval (link).

Waymo Registers Korean Subsidiary as Asia-Pacific Push Accelerates (link).

Wayve CEO Alex Kendall: A frontier ecosystem for embodied AI (link).

Say hi to the new Ojai in-car experience (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

The AV Market Strategist by : Tesla Q2 2026: 3 New Robotaxi Markets, 36% Fewer Paid Miles & Waymo Puts a Date on the Uber Divorce (link).

The InEVitable on MotorTrend: The Rideshare Guy: How Uber Drivers Make Money—and When Robotaxis Take Over (link).

Electrons & Asphalt by Josie-Dee Li: EV/AV Learning Resources (link). Cool list of electric & autonomous mobility resources, featuring The Driverless Digest newsletter and podcast.

TBPN: Inside Travis Kalanick’s Wild New Al Company (link).

Autonocast by , , and Kirsten Korosec: #368: How Aseon Labs Is Solving AV Operations, w/CoFounder George Kalligeros (link).

AVs Are Coming to Southeast Asia. The Global Playbook is Not (link). Our latest guest piece where Grab’s GM for AVs, Dominic Ong, explores why he thinks the future of ride-hailing in Southeast Asia will not be fully autonomous, but rather a hybrid fleet.

A single monsoon downpour can spike ride requests 9-10x within ten minutes. This is a bind for a standalone robotaxi fleet. If you build your capacity for the peak monsoon surge, you risk underutilizing cars. And if you build for the quiet average, you fail your riders whenever demand surges around events.

How NVIDIA Alpamayo Is Accelerating Autonomous Driving with Matt Cragun (link). My latest podcast where I sit down with NVIDIA's Director of Product for AVs to discuss the company's AV strategy, how its open-source Alpamayo models are helping developers accelerate autonomous driving, and why NVIDIA is combining end-to-end AI with more classical autonomy approaches, among other things.

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘First public-road accident involving Bliq’s remotely driven passenger car – an important learning opportunity for the entire industry’ (link).

2 hurt after Waymo driverless car catches fire in Atlanta (link).

Data from Waymo shows the autonomous vehicle was turning left off Cheshire Bridge Road when the other car rammed it from behind at 33 miles per hour. The impact triggered a rapidly growing fire in the back of the Waymo.

‘Wrong Way Driving in SF’ (link).

‘Waymo, doing waymo things’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at NGV Talent, Uber and to Li X for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

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Neat Jobs

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Andrew Beck: Perplexity -> Bedrock Robotics (link).

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-Harry

Today, the autonomous vehicle industry has an established model for how adoption unfolds. Deploy in a geo-fenced suburb. Improve the operator-to-vehicle ratio. Ride the unit economics down the curve. Reach parity with human drivers. Scale until the robot wins.

And it seems to be working. Waymo proved it in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Baidu is proving it in Wuhan. Investors are pricing in its replication across every major city.

But after a decade of mobility experience in Southeast Asia – including introducing some of the region’s first autonomous vehicles – my view is that this playbook won’t apply here; not because autonomous technology won’t arrive, but because this model was built for conditions that simply don’t exist on our shores. Global ridesharing platforms had already tried and failed to run a one-size-fits-all template here. Now, autonomy faces that gauntlet too.

Fixed Fleets vs Fluid Markets

The global playbook assumes a predictable environment where mobility players gain market share with a standardized fleet of readily deployable vehicles. But Southeast Asian cities demand an elasticity that a fixed autonomous fleet alone cannot provide.

Consider Singapore. During normal peak hours, ride requests can increase up to 4-5x that of quiet hours, according to our 2026 data. Human supply matches this chaos dynamically, with 3-4x more drivers logging on precisely when the city needs them. It’s a remarkably capital-efficient system: human drivers absorb the spikes and log off when things quieten down, rather than idling an expensive asset.

Equatorial weather exacerbates this volatility. Singapore is 12x wetter than Phoenix and 3x wetter than Seattle. Here, torrential rain isn’t an edge case, it is the baseline environment. A single monsoon downpour can spike ride requests 9-10x within ten minutes. This is a bind for a standalone robotaxi fleet. If you build your capacity for the peak monsoon surge, you risk underutilizing cars. And if you build for the quiet average, you fail your riders whenever demand surges around events.

Furthermore, human knowledge is often required to navigate extreme, fast-changing, driving conditions. Flash flooding in megacities – urban metropolises of over 10 million people, like Jakarta, Manila, and Bangkok – can affect routing on short notice, breaking an autonomous vehicle’s Operational Design Domain (ODD) and turning pre-mapped data obsolete. Ride-hailing drivers can better handle unexpected driving conditions, like navigating floodwaters, or even bypassing mosquito-fogging trucks which can confuse vehicle sensors without warning.

In Southeast Asian cities, the backbone of urban mobility is the two-wheeled motorbike. Millions of commuters rely on these to lane-split through traffic gridlocks where larger vehicles sit paralysed. Because autonomous motorbikes do not yet exist – nor are they coming soon – any global playbook built exclusively around four-wheeled vehicles completely misses how the region actually moves.

And, finally, some transport needs should never be left to a pure autonomous fleet. Wheelchair users need help from door to car. Elderly riders need support while heading alone to hospital appointments. Or, imagine a family of five with a stroller and seven bags at Changi Airport. Some trips will always require a person, not just a vehicle.

This is why a hybrid model – autonomous vehicles paired with a flexible human network – is the steady-state model for Southeast Asia. Here, the autonomous playbook cannot be about replacing human supply; it must be about the orchestration layer that unites them.

The Winning Formula Is About Orchestration

When an operating environment is defined by radical fluidity, the competitive advantage belongs to the platform that can coordinate the chaos.

This begins with predictive marketplace intelligence. Even in structured Western markets, early data shows that plugging autonomous vehicles into an established marketplace can deliver more trips per vehicle per day than running them standalone. That’s because these platforms already know where demand pools and how to route into it. After many years of operations, regional mobility incumbents like Grab have accumulated an irreplaceable operational memory. A platform with scale and hyperlocal operating data doesn’t just react to live traffic; its routing infrastructure anticipates these shifts. Global AV providers can plug into these local networks and get an efficient fleet from day one.

Multi-service flexibility will also be important to optimize supply elasticity. An autonomous vehicle fleet can manage predictable volumes, while human drivers can work across services, from delivering food during the lunch lull to carrying passengers in the evening rush. Being able to orchestrate a hybrid fleet across different services will best maximize utilization across the entire network.

Furthermore, real scale means being tightly woven into the local economy. In Southeast Asia, ride-hailing is a primary income source for millions of people everyday. Their economic stability is a priority for every government here. And government permission – the slowest asset to build, and the easiest to lose – is earned by doing right by citizens, drivers and cities over many years. So, a mature AV strategy has to drive a deliberate transition that works with and for local gig workers. This includes preparing them for specialist AV roles – including fleet operations and depot management roles, like safety and remote operators. By integrating these citizens into the backbone of deployment, you turn potential public friction into real operating strength.

Rewriting The Global Playbook

The prize for the next generation of mobility belongs to platforms that run the orchestration layer autonomous vehicles need to locally work in.

The dense, informal, chaotic, reality of Southeast Asian cities is arguably more of a global rule – closer to the conditions of Lagos, São Paulo, and Mumbai, than outliers of urbanization like Phoenix. By building a marketplace that masters these conditions, you aren’t just solving for one region. You’re building a hybrid model that could eventually determine how autonomy scales across much of the world.

So, to me, the common question: “When will Southeast Asia be ready for autonomous vehicles?” is backwards. The real question is whether the autonomous vehicle industry is ready to be changed by the operating realities of regions like Southeast Asia. It is critical for platforms to lean into local and cultural complexities to translate the promise of autonomy into practical, real-world mobility.