All posts tagged: self-driving cars

Why do self-driving cars crash? King’s College London researchers think they have the answer

Why do self-driving cars crash? King’s College London researchers think they have the answer

Published by Jenni Sidey

A self-driving car can make a mistake in seconds, but the reason it happened may stretch far back through a long chain of decisions. That is part of what makes autonomous vehicle crashes so hard to explain, and so hard to prevent. A team at King’s College London says it has developed a new way to tackle that problem. Instead of only estimating how likely a failure is to happen again, the approach is designed to work backward through a crash and identify why a specific failure occurred. That distinction matters as autonomous vehicles appear more often on public roads, including in cities such as London and San Francisco. Collisions and serious road safety breaches have sharpened pressure on manufacturers to explain what went wrong when these systems fail. Current methods can offer only limited answers. They tend to rely on failure statistics, which are useful for measuring risk but weaker at explaining one concrete event. Autonomous vehicles appear more often on public roads, including in cities such as London and San Francisco. (CREDIT: Zoox) …

Uber to put 500 data-collection vehicles on the road this year

Uber to put 500 data-collection vehicles on the road this year

Published by skeptic

Uber revealed on Wednesday a prototype car that it plans to use to scoop up real-world driving data for its growing roster of autonomous vehicle partners, including Avride, Waymo, and WeRide. The vehicle is not some radical design. Rather, it’s a Hyundai Ioniq 5 fitted with an incredible number of sensors on the top and sides, as the company first told TechCrunch back in January. The sensor-laden vehicle may not look particularly groundbreaking, but it does mark a few milestones for the company. This is the first vehicle Uber has assembled itself (with help from a partner) since the company sold its autonomous vehicle division to Aurora in 2020. It also represents progress on Uber’s new AV Labs division, which launched earlier this year to use sensor-equipped Uber cars to collect and then share data with its 30-and-counting autonomous vehicle technology partners. Uber said Wednesday that it plans to roll out 500 of these kitted-out Hyundai EVs globally this year. That fleet will be able to collect “2 million miles per month of high-fidelity data” …

Here Comes Ojai, Waymo’s New Chinese-Made Robotaxi

Here Comes Ojai, Waymo’s New Chinese-Made Robotaxi

Published by skeptic

There’s a new autonomous vehicle in town, or at least in the towns of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Starting today, Alphabet self-driving vehicle developer Waymo will start picking up members of the public in its new Ojai vehicles (pronounced “oh hai”)—pale blue boxy minivans studded with sensors and complete with steering wheels, even though they’re designed to travel without drivers. For now, the rides in these new cars, which can be summoned through Waymo’s app, will be free. It’s been a long road for the vehicle, first announced by Waymo in 2021 and tested on public streets since 2024. It’s also a weird time for Waymo: The self-driving-vehicle company, which is trying to expand quickly across the US and the world, shut down service in six US cities last week due to issues with how its vehicles react to flooding. It has also suspended its highway driving program due to concerns about operations near construction zones. WIRED breaks down what’s new and interesting about Ojai, and the complex system that powers it. Why? …

Waymo Takes Its Self-Driving Cars to Virginia

Waymo Takes Its Self-Driving Cars to Virginia

Published by skeptic

Self-driving cars aren’t yet permitted to operate in Virginia. But Alphabet-owned Waymo began transporting its cars to the state last week, a Waymo representative told Virginia officials, to map Arlington and Alexandria, in the northern part of the state. For most autonomous vehicle companies, mapping, or the creation of sensor-aided and ultra-precise digital representations of streets and the features around them, is the first step required to launch a local robotaxi service. Drivers will operate the mapping vehicles for now, Waymo says. Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo, confirmed the move to WIRED and called it “an important preparatory step should the Commonwealth authorize fully autonomous ride-hailing.” Still, he said, the company does “not currently have plans for a commercial service there.” In a public meeting last week with a Virginia Department of Transportation working group, Waymo policy adviser Rich Harrington said that Waymo vehicles had touched down in Alexandria and would soon come to Arlington, both just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. Moving from mapping to a full-blown robotaxi service takes 12 …

Tesla Reveals New Details About Robotaxi Crashes—and the Humans Involved

Tesla Reveals New Details About Robotaxi Crashes—and the Humans Involved

Published by skeptic

For more than a year, Tesla has shielded details about its robotaxi crashes from public view. Now, the company has published new details in a federal database about 17 incidents, which took place between July 2025 and March 2026. In at least two of them, Tesla’s human employees appear to have played a hand in the crashes by remotely driving the otherwise autonomous cars into objects on the street. In both crashes, which happened in Austin, “safety monitors” were in the vehicles’ passenger seats to oversee the still-fledgling self-driving tech, and no passengers were riding in the cars. Both crashes occurred at speeds below 10 miles per hour. The new details were first reported by TechCrunch. In one incident, which took place in July 2025, the safety monitor experienced “minor” injuries after a remote worker drove the Tesla up a curb and into a metal fence at 8 mph. The monitor, who had requested help from Tesla’s remote driving team after the car stopped on the side of a street and wouldn’t move forward, was …

Tesla’s Latest Recall? Wheels May Fall Off Cybertrucks

Tesla’s Latest Recall? Wheels May Fall Off Cybertrucks

Published by skeptic

Last year, nearly all Cybertrucks had to be recalled because Tesla used the wrong glue on a steel trim panel that the carmaker said could become detached while driving. Now, yet another embarrassing recall exposes that the electric pickup could see wheels come off certain models due to the use of the wrong grease. In what is the 11th Cybertruck recall so far, alongside concerns that the stainless steel trucks could be rusting, Tesla is recalling its Rear Wheel Drive (RWD) Cybertruck Long Range over faulty brake rotors. In a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Tesla states that “brake rotor stud holes may crack and allow the stud to separate from the wheel hub.” Tesla’s description of the defect is as follows: “On affected vehicles, higher severity road perturbations and cornering may strain the stud hole in the wheel rotor, causing cracks to form. If cracking propagates with continued use and strain, the wheel stud could eventually separate from the wheel hub.” In which case, some RWD Cybertruck owners merrily driving …

Uber partner Avride is under investigation for self-driving crashes

Uber partner Avride is under investigation for self-driving crashes

Published by skeptic

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation into Avride, a robotaxi company that has partnered with Uber, after identifying more than a dozen crashes and one minor injury. The safety regulator’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) said all 16 crashes that it has identified have to do with “the competence of” Avride’s self-driving system, which has apparently struggled with changing lanes, responding to other vehicles in the same lane, and responding to stationary objects. All of the crashes have come while the Avride vehicles were under the supervision of a safety monitor in the driver’s seat. Reached for comment, Avride declined to explain why the safety monitors did not intervene in these crashes. The company pointed out that it reported these crashes to the NHTSA as required by the agency’s 2021 Standing General Order on automated driving. “We have implemented targeted technical and operational mitigations to address our findings from each reported incident between December 2025 and March 2026, and have further enhanced overall system capabilities,” the company said in a …

Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

Published by skeptic

By law, autonomous vehicles aren’t allowed to carry unaccompanied minors in California. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving-car company, doesn’t allow kids under 18 to ride alone anywhere outside of metro Phoenix, Arizona. But that hasn’t stopped some time-strapped parents from using their own accounts to transport their kids to school, extracurricular activities, and even social outings. Some have reported that the lack of drivers makes them feel safer. Waymo is working to crack down on the practice, the company confirmed Friday, after reports of new mid-ride age-verification checks began to float around on social media. The company has “policies in place” to help it identify violations of its terms of service, Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli wrote in a statement to WIRED. “We are continuing to refine our system and processes for accuracy over time.” Violating its terms of service can lead to temporary or permanent suspension of an account, Waymo says. The company uses cameras inside its cars to check that riders aren’t violating its rules. Its privacy policy notes that the company records video inside the …

Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

Published by skeptic

Emergency first responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting. Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles’ performance is getting worse. “We are actually seeing something interesting: backsliding of some things that had improved upon,” Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, told officials with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees self-driving vehicle safety in the US. “They are committing more traffic violations.” “We’ve seen some behavior we haven’t seen in a few years. … Waymo is frequently now blocking our fire stations from access,” added Chief Patrick Rabbitt, the …

Breakthrough AI system helps self-driving cars remember the road

Breakthrough AI system helps self-driving cars remember the road

Published by Jenni Sidey

A self-driving car moves through traffic one moment at a time. A bus blocks part of the road. Rain throws reflections across the pavement. A merging vehicle appears from the side. In scenes like these, the hardest part is often not seeing what is there, but deciding what to do next. That is the problem a research team behind a system called KEPT set out to tackle. Their idea is simple in principle: instead of asking an AI driving model to react to each new scene in isolation, give it a way to recall similar situations from the past and use those memories to guide its next move. “Short-horizon trajectory prediction is where many autonomous driving systems still struggle, especially in complex, busy scenes,” said first author Yujin Wang from the School of Automotive Studies at Tongji University. “Our idea was to let a vision-language model not only look at the current frames, but also recall how similar scenes have unfolded before, and then plan a safe, feasible motion based on that prior experience.” The …