Autonomous imperfections
Before we get to the news, don’t forget that CoMotion MIAMI ‘26 is coming up and tickets are 30% off for those who register by April 7!
Autonomous vehicles could very well make the world’s roads much safer. That is certainly what Waymo’s crash data suggests. The public and leading political figures, however, remain wary. And tales of people in China getting trapped in unmoving robotaxis for hours are not bound to inspire confidence. Nor will the fact that America’s leading AV firms declined a request to provide data on how often their vehicles are relying on human assistance.
Also, will food delivery get cheaper if DoorDash gets rid of drivers?
What you need to know
Baidu’s system failure: 100 robotaxis operated by Chinese tech giant Baidu stall in Wuhan, leaving some people trapped in vehicles for up to two hours. A “system failure” caused the vehicles to immediately stop –– in one case in a highway fast lane. This is reminiscent of the problems Waymo has encountered, like during a power outage in California last year … or when its vehicles are attacked by AV haters. But in this instance it appears Baidu doesn’t have an outside actor to blame. The system failure was self-inflicted.
AV firms refuse to disclose data on human assistance: U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., calls for robotaxi providers to report how often their vehicles require assistance from humans (either on-board or remote). All seven companies he requested data from –– Zoox, Tesla, Waymo, Aurora, May Mobility, Nuro, Motional –– have so far declined to provide it. If the companies are eventually forced to disclose, that could introduce a new metric for assessing AV companies. Right now we’re mostly going off crashes.
Momenta preps IPO: The Chinese AV startup backed by GM files to list publicly in Hong Kong. It follows WeRide and Pony.ai, two other Chinese robotaxi firms, into Hong Kong’s capital markets. While Alphabet’s Waymo is the only robotaxi service operating commercially in a meaningful way in the U.S., there are a number of very promising players operating in China.
Driverless Doordash Also: Rivian e-bike spinoff Also agrees to manufacture autonomous delivery vehicles for DoorDash. This is the young company’s second foray into delivery -– it also builds pedal-assisted delivery vehicles for Amazon that can operate in bike lanes, a useful option in cities where car parking is sparse and expensive. There are no clues yet about what the autonomous vehicles will look like. Are we talking sidewalk robots or highway robots?
London’s housing emergency: Homebuilding in the British capital is far behind population growth due to a “perfect storm” of conditions, including a sharp uptick in the cost of materials and overbearing government bureaucracy.
What we’re reading
How did we screw up cities this bad? An interview with Bruno Carvalho, author of The Invention of the Future: The History of Cities in the Modern World, about the history of city-building and why some well-intentioned ideas, like the Garden City, turned out terribly.
