Updating a few stories reported before (including Monday) I note that Scale.AI has launched their mapping service, which helps people tag and label maps more efficiently. Pony.AI shows off they are doing taxi tests with no safety driver in China, where roads are more complex than in Fremont, California. And Waymo shows off its Pride.

Read about these in this Forbes.com article Scale Mapping; Pony.AI driving in China; Waymo Pride

Last week saw a flurry of robocar news. The most significant was the deployment of no-safety-driver testing by Pony.AI in Fremont, CA, but there's also big funding news for Waymo, Cruise and Kodiak, Deepmap is sold to Nvidia, new taxis for Baidu, deals for Nuro and a collision between a Waymo and a scooter in SF -- in manual mode. Read all about it in my round up at:

Robocar News Roundup

Two major virtual self-driving conferences scheduled themselves for June 9. So I went to both, of course. Interesting news tidbids came from Argo, Starship, Scale, Chinese robotaxi makers, Zoox and many others. I summarize it here:

Summary of interesting headlines from The Information and TechCrunch simultaneous conferences

Cruise has been granted a permit to begin unmanned robotaxi tests in California. But they aren't allowed to charge, which forbids a lot of useful research, and explains why Waymo hasn't bothered with that permit yet. I discuss why it's so useful to experiment with payment in this Forbes site article at:

Cruise gets vacant robotaxi test permit for California

For a long time, Tesla refused to implement driver gaze monitoring with Autopilot. Now, quietly, the new release does it, though with no other changes as yet.

But it's quite a shift in their actions.

See the details at this Forbes.com story at

Tesla activates driver watching camera

Some buzz has arisen due to photos of a Tesla with a LIDAR on it, and hints that Tesla is dropping radar from their cars in a hurry. Is this a major change of heart, par for the course, or a response to the chip shortage.

See analysis of that at this new Forbes site article:

Teslas with LIDARs and no radar -- it's not what you think.

Governor Inslee of Washington has refused to sign a bill he says he supports, which bans new fossil cars by 2030. He refused to sign it because it ties it to creating a road use tax system for EVs, which he says he also supports, but not in the same bill.

He might be right, but the reality is that having a road use tax system is a pretty trivial thing for the cars of 2030. In fact the Teslas of 2018 could do it with a software update.

A recently released video shows Waymo having some real problems when it encounters a construction zone it doesn't understand (that's expected) but then the remote ops team gives the wrong instructions and a comedy of errors follows. I discuss it here:

Waymo Peforms Embarrassingly In Construction Cone Situation

A VW executive suggested they might sell you a real self-driving function (when they have it) for around $8.50 per hour, as opposed to paying for it in a lump sum when you buy the car as Tesla plans.

What are the economics like of buying self-driving by the hour?

Read about that in my Forbes.com article at VW will sell you self-driving for $8.50/hour some day. Too high or too low?

The controversial Tesla crash in Texas is probably not so controversial. The NTSB's preliminary report only releases a few tidbits of information, but they point to Autopilot not being involved.

Read NTSB early report on Tesla crash has just a few more details

For the past year, we've had nothing but virtual conferences. Soon, we'll get out of that, but there are a lot of lessons about how to do virtual events right, which I summarize in a new Forbes site article at:

How to do a virtual conference right

The new services keep coming, and now Baidu/Apollo has opened up a robotaxi service in outer Beijing, at an industrial park. While they call it fully driverless, they still have an employee in the passenger seat who is told to do nothing. This is in contrast with AutoX's service near Shenzhen and a few others, as we move closer to a true robotaxi service.

Details, and contrast with AutoX are in my new Forbes site article at:

Tesla released some important new details on the Texas crash that everybody's talking about (but probably shouldn't be talking that much about.)

The new details are not enough, though. Information is now contradictory until we learn more. Was there somebody in the driver's seat or not? We've learned that cruise control did play a role, but are told it brought the car to a stop, which it clearly didn't.

Read more details in this piece at:

There has been much coverage about a fatal Tesla crash in Texas because police say the car didn't have anybody in the driver's seat. Elon Musk says Autopilot was not engaged, though of course the dead men may have been trying to pull a stunt hoping they could engage it in an area it isn't supposed to work. It didn't work.

So here's my analysis of what we know and don't know and why there probably is no big new story here.

Some announcements of hard ship dates for robotic vehicle deployments -- 2022 in Israel for shuttles, 2023 in USA for delivery vans using MobilEye and 2023 in Dubai for GM/Cruise Origin shuttle.

A few more details in new Forbes site post at MobilEye and GM/Cruise announce production ship dates in 2022 and 2023

President Biden has proposed massive spending on electric vehicle infrastructure, including 500,000 charging stations. Yet the first 100,000 stations were deployed for the wrong reasons, and many sit mostly unused. We do want lots of charging stations, but they don't need to be very expensive at all. I outline how in this new Forbes site article at:

Waymo self-driving's CEO, John Krafcik, has stepped down. More interesting is the two new co-CEOs appointed from inside (one from the original founding team that I worked with) have no automotive industry background. Having worked at Waymo and followed it more closely than almost anybody, I have some thoughts on the shift in this Forbes site column:

Read Waymo CEO Krafcik Steps Down; New Co-CEOs Come From Tech, Not Auto

Over a decade ago I started advocating for having a large public library of simulation scenarios to test self-driving cars. Today, Deepen.AI, a company I am an investor/advisor to announces it has built such a library, in cooperation with the World Economic Forum and WMG University of Warwick and with involvement from many companies and government agencies. In the Safety Pool, people can build and contribute test scenarios, and in return get back manyfold from the contributions of other members.

Right now Waymo One only serves suburban Phoenix. How hard is it going to be for self-driving companies to expand to new cities, new countries, new conditions and new rules of the road? Some think very hard -- and it's not trivial. But it's likely they can afford it just fine. I explore why is this new article on Forbes.com:

Will It Be Hard Or Easy For Self-Driving Cars To Expand Their Territory?

A modest change at Waymo -- allowing you to do multi-stop trips where the vehicle waits around for you (physically or virtually) at no charge gives us a taste of the different economics of robotaxis compared to Uber, since no driver has to be paid. I discuss these changes in a new Forbes site article at:

Waymo Lets You Make Multiple Stops On A Robotaxi Trip, But Not Leave Your Stuff