All posts tagged: Autonomous Vehicles

Monarch Tractor’s collapse ends with an acquisition by Caterpillar

Monarch Tractor’s collapse ends with an acquisition by Caterpillar

Published by skeptic

Monarch Tractor’s assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar, after struggling to pivot to a software services business, according to filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The acquisition, first reported by Bloomberg, caps a few tough years for Monarch as it went through multiple rounds of layoffs, was sued by three different dealers, and lost a major contract manufacturing partner in Foxconn. It also comes just a few weeks after co-founder and wine scion Carlo Mondavi said he was “pushed out” after disagreeing with CEO Praveen Penmetsa’s software-forward approach. Mondavi couldn’t be immediately reached for comment. Penmetsa declined to comment beyond a statement Monarch issued last week, which said its technology had been acquired by an unspecified “large global equipment manufacturer.” Caterpillar didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Monarch raised more than $200 million over the last eight years. It was founded in 2018 by Mondavi, Penmetsa, and former Tesla executive Mark Schwager. The goal was to build “driver optional” electric tractors that were also capable of autonomously navigating …

A self-driving car in Texas hit and killed a mother duck, sparking neighborhood outrage

A self-driving car in Texas hit and killed a mother duck, sparking neighborhood outrage

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The death of a duck in the Austin, Texas enclave of Mueller Lake has neighbors raising concerns about autonomous vehicles and whether they belong there. While humans are responsible for killing animals with their cars all the time, this incident has brought negative attention to the new technology. Local media picked up on the duck incident after a resident posted in a Mueller neighborhood Facebook group that an Avride autonomous vehicle (with a human safety operator behind the wheel) ran over and killed a duck, and did not stop afterwards. “It didn’t slow down or hesitate at all, just steamrolled through,” the post, which KXAN reported on, reads. Residents’ familiarity with this particular duck, which was nesting in a pot located outside of a local Italian eatery, has added to the outrage and mistrust of the autonomous vehicle technology. For those concerned about the future of the duck’s eggs, local residents have them in an incubator, Axios’ Austin reports. An Avride spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch that the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time. …

Tesla Says Its Robotaxis Are Sometimes Driven by Remote Humans

Tesla Says Its Robotaxis Are Sometimes Driven by Remote Humans

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A series of letters sent by autonomous-vehicle (AV) developers to Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts sheds the most light yet on the human side of robot vehicle operations. In the documents, submitted to Markey as part of an investigation into self-driving-vehicle technology and released on Tuesday, seven companies, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and Uber- and Nvidia-funded Nuro, released new details about their “remote assistance” programs. All the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants—humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company’s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that’s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely. In a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. “Every autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]—hiding key information from the public about their AV’s true level of autonomy,” …

A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work

A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work

Published by skeptic

One of the purported advantages of self-driving car tech is that every car can learn from one vehicle’s mistakes. Here’s how Waymo puts it on its website: “The Waymo Driver learns from the collective experiences gathered across our fleet, including previous hardware generations.” But in Austin, Waymo’s vehicles struggled for months to learn how to stop for school buses as drivers picked up and dropped off children. An official with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) alleged that the vehicles had, in at least 19 instances, “illegally and dangerously” passed the district’s school buses while their red lights were flashing and their stop arms were extended rather than coming to complete stops, as the law requires. In early December, Waymo even issued a federal recall related to the incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of them to federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. According to federal filings, engineers with the self-driving vehicle company had “developed software changes to address the behavior” weeks before. But even after the recall, …

The Deceptively Tricky Art of Designing a Steering Wheel

The Deceptively Tricky Art of Designing a Steering Wheel

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Cars didn’t always have steering wheels. The very first car—the 1885 Benz Patent-Motorwagen, invented by Karl Benz—used a tiller system: a horizontal bar with a handle mounted to a vertical bar. The lever-like handle was similar in many respects to a boat’s rudder. Amazingly, it would be another nine years before French engineer Alfred Vacheron saw sense and fitted the first known steering wheel to his 4-horsepower Panhard for the Paris-Rouen race. Just four years later, in 1898, Panhard made the infinitely preferable and safer steering wheel standard on all its cars. And we’ve been using them ever since. “A car is the aggregation of multiple products, and, in many ways, we’re designing furniture.” Jony Ive, designer Hans-Peter Wunderlich is Mercedes’ creative director of interior design. He has been designing steering wheels for 35 years. “I started in 1991 on my first,” he tells me. “A steering wheel is really the most challenging and difficult element to sculpture, to design, to develop in the car.” It is so difficult that Wunderlich has used the wheel …

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

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Waymo is now providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 U.S. cities, the company shared in a post on X this week. The eye-popping figure is reflective of the Alphabet-owned company’s accelerated commercial expansion. But it’s Waymo’s rate of growth in ridership and markets that offers a more compelling story.  In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. Over that same two-year timespan, Waymo has expanded within its initial markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and beyond them to Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. Those seven cities in the Sun Belt were all added in just the past year. Waymo’s robotaxi fleet has also grown, although the company has guarded those numbers and rarely provides updates. Data provided in December 2025 to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows the company had 3,067 robotaxis equipped with its 5th generation self-driving system. The company still uses that …

The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’

The Tesla Influencers Leaving the ‘Cult’

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She thinks some of these individuals will never stop running cover for the company because of their long-term investments. “To me it’s a lot about the money, more about the money than it is Elon—even though they say it’s Elon,” she says. No one, however, provokes the wrath of the Tesla swarm like Dan O’Dowd. A tech billionaire who founded Green Hills Software and serves as its CEO, he, too, was once a great proponent of Tesla vehicles and Musk’s leadership. In 2016, he owned two Roadsters and a Model S. “Big fan,” he says. That year, he was thrilled to hear Musk proclaim that a Tesla would autonomously drive itself across the US from Los Angeles to Times Square in Manhattan by the end of 2017. “He wanted people to believe that, but there was no truth to it at all,” says O’Dowd. At that time, he still argued that Musk was a “genius.” But as the 2017 deadline went by and Musk stopped bothering to offer new time frames for the cross-country drive, …

Travis Kalanick launches a new company called Atoms focused on robotics

Travis Kalanick launches a new company called Atoms focused on robotics

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Uber founder Travis Kalanick has a new company called Atoms focused on robotics that, according to its website, will operate in the food, mining, and transportation industries. Kalanick is rolling his existing ghost kitchen company, CloudKitchens, into Atoms. It’s not immediately clear how he plans to tackle mining and transportation. Atoms’ website says it will build a “wheelbase for robots,” and Kalanick said in a live interview with TBPN on Friday that his company will apply this wheelbase to “specialized robots” — not humanoids. “Humanoids have their place, but there’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient, sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” he said. To support the mining business, Kalanick said Friday that he’s on the precipice of acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former Uber colleague, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick revealed Friday that he is already the “largest investor” in Pronto. “The industrial thing is sort of like, probably, our …

Travis Kalanick launches a new company called Atoms focused on robotics

Travis Kalanick reportedly starting a new self-driving company backed by Uber

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Travis Kalanick is reportedly starting up a new self-driving vehicle company with “major backing” from Uber, according to The Information. He has reportedly told people he “wants to be more aggressive in rolling out self-driving technology than Waymo,” per the report. The Uber founder is also considering acquiring Pronto, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites that was created by his former colleague at the ride-hailing company, Anthony Levandowski. Last year, Kalanick was said to be interested in buying the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving vehicle company Pony AI with backing from Uber, though The Information said Friday that those talks ended. Uber didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Kalanick resigned from Uber in 2017 after a confluence of crises at the ride-hail company. At the time, the company was plagued by complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, which sparked an external investigation that resulted in more than 20 employees being fired. Before that, Kalanick had created a self-driving division at Uber in 2015. Levandowski played a big role in …

Nuro is testing its autonomous vehicle tech on Tokyo’s streets

Nuro is testing its autonomous vehicle tech on Tokyo’s streets

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Nuro, the Silicon Valley-based startup backed by Nvidia, Uber, and SoftBank, is testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Japan. Toyota Prius vehicles equipped with Nuro’s self-driving software — and human safety operators behind the wheel as backup — began testing on public roads in Tokyo last month. The testing marks the first overseas expansion for the startup, which upended its business model two years ago. Nuro said testing in Japan introduces a number of new challenges and different driving styles and rules. For instance, vehicles drive on the left side of the road, and Tokyo’s streets have dense traffic. Road signs and lane markings are also different in Japan. The company, which opened offices in Tokyo last August, did not disclose how many test vehicles are in its fleet or when it might remove the human safety operator from the vehicles. The company did suggest, in a blog post announcing the testing in Japan, that there will be future expansions. “Our autonomous operations in Tokyo are the beginning of the compounding benefits of global deployment,” …