This week’s edition is brought to you by Terawatt – purpose-built charging for autonomous vehicle fleets.
Top Story of the Week
Mercedes-Benz aims to close AI gap with China rivals through Wayve deal (link, no paywall). Wayve is building an impressive roster of major OEM partners, with Mercedes-Benz joining Nissan and Stellantis, and all three have now invested in the company too. That’s a pretty strong vote of confidence in Wayve’s approach, especially considering its technology hasn’t been deployed and validated at scale yet. Its end-to-end, mapless system is designed to generalize across different vehicles and geographies, so in theory, once the tech is ready, Wayve should be able to scale quickly across its OEM partners without having to map and engineer every new market from scratch.
Of course, there’s still a ways to go. Mercedes’ first product will be Level 2, Stellantis is targeting Level 2++ in 2028, and even Kendall acknowledges that getting from an impressive demo to a production-ready automotive product is a huge step. Still, Wayve is putting a lot of the right pieces in place and it’s impressive to watch.
Mercedes-Benz said it planned to integrate Wayve’s autonomous driving system into at least one model that it will deploy in the next two years, offering “advanced urban point-to-point driving assistance”.
Related: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall: Building Scalable, Mapless and End to End AI (link).
Other Stuff
Waymo’s driverless cars continue to crash less often than people (link, no paywall).
Waymo says after 271 million driverless miles, its vehicles were involved in 82 percent fewer injury-causing crashes as compared to human drivers.
‘Climate Week feels like the right moment to share where our impact stands. Here’s what the activity at Terawatt charging depots has added up to’ (link).
Waymo offers new incentives for commuters on public transit (link, no paywall).
It will start in Northern California and expand to other cities. Waymo employees will be the first to access the program. To earn ride credit, or Waymo Cash, customers will have to link their Visa card to the Waymo app and use it to take an autonomous trip and public transit within two hours of each other. For each connected trip on public transit, riders will earn $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of transit fare in San Francisco.
MOIA America welcomes its first riders in autonomous ID. Buzz vehicles with Beep (link).
Invited riders can experience the service by requesting trips directly through the Beep mobile app and providing feedback to help inform future operations. They will board and depart self-driving ID. Buzz vehicles at dedicated pickup and drop-off locations along three planned routes within the Lake Nona community. During this phase, the vehicles will operate with highly trained onboard human operators.
Waymo expands Austin robotaxi service to area freeways (link).
Joby Aviation’s 3,100-mile autonomous flight signals its push beyond electric air taxis (link).
Joby Aviation said the cross-country trip, which it described as the “first-ever autonomous flight across the United States,” included autonomous taxiing, takeoffs, navigation, and landings. The aircraft was remotely supervised from Joby’s headquarters in California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. A pilot was on board for compliance, but Joby said the aircraft performed the entire operation autonomously.
Waymo to launch robotaxis in Singapore, its first Southeast Asia market, by 2028 (link, no paywall).
Designing Charging Hubs for Autonomous Fleets
We are excited to partner with Terawatt this week, one of the leading charging infrastructure providers. To learn more about Terawatt’s nationwide real estate portfolio and track record of cutting cost per mile for AV fleet operators, reach out to Peter Cohen at peter@terawattinfrastructure.com
What to do when your Waymo holds up a Secret Service motorcade (link, no paywall).
The company’s press office later provided a more fulsome account of what went wrong. Apparently, the car had recognised and understood the officers’ hand gestures, but because the diversion required turning right across multiple lanes of traffic, it was programmed to wait for remote assistance. Said assistance was activated within seven seconds but was escalated to a team that deals with emergency personnel — hence the delay.
Hyundai Prepares to Supply Waymo Robotaxis This Year (link). Waymo’s fleet today is still mostly Jaguar I-PACEs, with Ojai starting to ramp, but the IONIQ 5 could eventually become one of its highest volume vehicles. And Waymo isn’t alone. Motional and Avride are also building robotaxis on the IONIQ 5, while Uber AV Labs is using 500 of them to collect AV training data.
As the IONIQ 5 becomes a go-to AV platform, the base vehicle itself becomes less of a differentiator. The real moat shifts toward the autonomous driving software and everything behind the scenes: safety, fleet operations, utilization, and ultimately the cost and ETA of the ride.
Nuro’s bet on becoming the “Android” for autonomous vehicles (link).
New Waymo swag has arrived! (link).
Zoox grounds Atlanta test fleet after workers report toxic gas exposure symptoms (link).
‘Great Waymo feature’ (link).
Einride to Build Next Autonomous Truck System on NVIDIA’s Hyperion (link).
Related: Einride’s Autonomous Freight Strategy with CTO Henrik Green (link).
Related: How NVIDIA Alpamayo Is Accelerating Autonomous Driving with Matt Cragun (link).
Waymo expands teen accounts to Nashville (link).
Amazon-owned Zoox’s 100-robotaxi limit in Nevada is about to disappear (link).
Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana to Keynote at CES 2027 (link).
What else we're reading/listening to
The Robotaxi Curb Dilemma: Park, Cruise or Return to the Depot? (link). Our latest piece where Ben Hubbard interviews Michael Hyland, Associate Professor at UC Irvine, about a new study examining the impact of restricting robotaxi curb access in San Francisco. It raised a lot of good discussion on Ben’s Linkedin post also (link).
The Road to Driverless Robotaxis with Nuro Co-CEO Dave Ferguson (link). My latest podcast, where we discuss Nuro’s first decade, its partnership with Lucid and Uber, the uniqueness of their approach to autonomy, and how the Nuro Driver generalizes and transfers between different vehicle platforms, among other topics.
The “Waymo Will Make Transit Obsolete” Argument (link).
Autolane: Building Plaid for the Autonomy Economy (link).
AV Events
TaskUs: Our team is heading to the Urban Autonomy Summit in Austin. We’ll share real-world insights on how behind-the-scenes fleet operations keep autonomous vehicles running safely at scale. Planning to attend? Drop us a DM! (link).
‘Join us in San Francisco on Oct 6 for an exciting TECH WEEK by a16z event where US and Swedish transportation experts will discuss “Autonomous Vehicles and Public Transit: Bridging the Gap for Sustainable Urban Mobility” featuring William Riggs, Emily Warren, Suany Chough, Per Nyrenius, Hans Nordin and Sven Beiker’ (link).
IROS 2026 is coming to Pittsburgh Sept. 27–Oct. 1, and a few familiar AV names will be there. Nuro ML recruiter Vincent Bui says he’s attending, Motional will be at Booth 735, and Waymo’s Dr. Scott Schnelle will speak about AV safety at the PPNIV workshop on Sept. 27. Wayve’s Director of Robotics David Silver says he’ll be there too.
AVs/Humans behaving badly
‘Waymo vs water’ (link).
Related: Why Waymos Keep Driving Into Floods (link).
‘Zoox robotaxi crash caught on Tesla dashcam’ (link). Maybe not the best place to stop but it seemed like the human driver had plenty of time to stop.
‘Comma’s hands-off driving tech under investigation after 2 fatal crashes’ (link).I’ve been thinking about trying Comma’s product on my Rivian R1S, but might wait a bit now.
AV behaving “goodly” :)
Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy says Motional is preparing to launch driverless rides on Uber in Las Vegas in Q4 (link). According to the executive, Motional is already testing without a safety driver in a limited part of the city; elsewhere in Las Vegas, its safety observer rides in the passenger seat. Krishnamurthy says he spent over an hour in Motional vehicles, including a fully driverless ride, with no interventions or issues. He didn’t specify whether the Uber launch will begin without a safety driver, but Motional appears to be getting close.
‘Fun new video from Alex Kendall & Wayve driving down SF’s famous Lombard Street fully autonomously’ (link).
Zoox: This is a scenario that might surprise human drivers, even in daylight. A wrong-way cyclist was barely visible, but our robotaxi saw them coming from a distance and veered smoothly to let them pass (link).
Shout-outs
Big thanks to TDD readers at L-Charge and to Pat O 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.
Neat Jobs
Senior Global Experiential Marketing Manager at Waymo (link) via Kandra Lopez.
Multiple Safety roles at Atoms, via Offer Grembek.
2027 Summer Intern, BS/MS, Embedded, Software Engineer at Waymo (link) via Jason Cisneros Jr.
Technical Program Manager, Manufacturing at Zoox (link) via Harry Chang.
System Safety Engineer, Strategic Programs & Integration at Waymo (link) via Thomas Zipfel.
Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead Manager at Waymo (link) via Iulia Ene.
Job Moves
David Damato: Lucid Motors -> Moove (link).
Nikolaos Sarafianos: Meta -> Waymo (link).
Gabe MacFarlane: IMMI -> Kodiak (link).
Pureun Kim: Cochl -> Tesla (link).
Mwiti Murungi: Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging -> Voltera (link).
Jingyu Qiao: Amazon -> Applied Intuition (link).
Vivian Luu: Forever Labs -> Atoms (link).
Until next week :)
-Harry