All posts tagged: selfdriving

Police can’t find shoplifter who fled in self-driving Waymo

Police can’t find shoplifter who fled in self-driving Waymo

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. It may not have been the most thrilling getaway job, but San Francisco law enforcement said it’s one of the first crimes of its kind. It also remains unsolved after nearly six months. According to officials speaking with the San Francisco Chronicle, police are still investigating a case in which an unidentified man stole an arm-full of activewear from a local yoga studio, then fled the scene inside a self-driving Waymo taxi. “I would think it would be easier to solve in a Waymo,” Sgt. Tim Faye told the newspaper on June 4. Anticipating an open-and-shut investigation is understandable, but the situation is actually more complicated than it seems. While police couldn’t comment on an active case, it’s almost certain the robber used …

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) …

Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ fraud lawsuit gets first hearing in China — 10 owners seek 3K

Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ fraud lawsuit gets first hearing in China — 10 owners seek $583K

Published by skeptic

A Beijing court held its first hearing in a consumer fraud lawsuit against Tesla over its “Full Self-Driving” software, with 10 owners seeking more than 3.95 million yuan ($583,000) in damages. The case, which we first covered when it was filed last September, has grown from 7 to 10 plaintiffs and marks China’s first collective legal challenge targeting Tesla’s FSD promises. What the owners claim According to a report from The Beijing News, the plaintiffs each paid 56,000 yuan (~$7,800) for Tesla’s FSD package between 2019 and 2021. They allege that Tesla sales staff and CEO Elon Musk assured them “full self-driving” capability was imminent and that the price would increase — motivating them to buy. The reality turned out differently. When Tesla began rolling out its driving assistance software in China last this year, it only supported vehicles equipped with HW4.0 hardware. Owners with older HW3.0 vehicles, which includes all cars produced between 2019 and 2023, were excluded. Advertisement – scroll for more content The plaintiffs argue Tesla’s FSD system has not received regulatory …

Tesla’s own AI trainers don’t trust ‘Full Self-Driving’ or its safety stats, Reuters finds

Tesla’s own AI trainers don’t trust ‘Full Self-Driving’ or its safety stats, Reuters finds

Published by skeptic

A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them. The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program. Tesla’s safety stats inflated by a factor of 3 We’ve been calling out Tesla’s misleading FSD safety claims for a while now, and the Reuters investigation confirms the core problem with hard data. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other executives have repeatedly claimed that “Full Self-Driving” is up to 10 times safer than human drivers. Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja first made this claim last July, and Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm repeated it at a November shareholder meeting. Musk himself displayed a chart at that meeting claiming “85% less crashes.” Advertisement – scroll for …

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 now forces drivers to give feedback when intervening on ‘Full Self-Driving’

Tesla now forces drivers to give feedback when intervening on ‘Full Self-Driving’

Published by skeptic

Screenshot Tesla has quietly made it mandatory for drivers to provide feedback every time they intervene on “Full Self-Driving.” The prompt, which used to disappear on its own after a few seconds, now stays on screen indefinitely until the driver selects a reason or sends a voice note. The change arrived with FSD v14.3.2 as part of software update 2026.2.9.9, which rolled out in late April. Tesla didn’t announce the new behavior — the company retroactively updated the release notes to mention it. What changed Previously, when a driver took over from FSD, a feedback prompt would pop up on the touchscreen asking why they intervened. You click on the voice button on the steering and automatically send Tesla a message about what happened. If you ignored it, it would go away after a few seconds. It was a great way for Tesla to get feedback on FSD. That’s no longer the case. Advertisement – scroll for more content With the latest update, the prompt sticks around until you either tap one of the on-screen …

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 …

China Presses Pause on Self-Driving Taxis Nationwide After Issue Where They Blocked Streets. America Could Learn a Lot From That

China Presses Pause on Self-Driving Taxis Nationwide After Issue Where They Blocked Streets. America Could Learn a Lot From That

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Earlier this year, dozens of autonomous vehicles from the Chinese company Baidu suddenly stopped in their tracks in Wuhan, China, triggering major chaos and sparking alarm among lawmakers in Beijing. Not much later, the country’s government decided to stop issuing new licenses for new autonomous vehicles altogether, as Bloomberg reported last week, once again highlighting persistent pain points in the rollout of the tech — not to mention how far Beijing is willing to go to intervene when things go south. As Fortune points out, a strikingly similar situation is playing out in the United States — yet federal regulations are nowhere in sight. Robotaxis from both Waymo and Tesla are still relying on human operators, stealing luggage, or colliding with objects and animals in the streets. Federal regulators are even investigating a Waymo vehicle crashing into a child outside of an elementary school. A massive power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo’s fleet to clog up the …

1966 Ford Mustang converted into a Tesla with working ‘Full Self-Driving’

1966 Ford Mustang converted into a Tesla with working ‘Full Self-Driving’

Published by skeptic

A Tesla auto parts shop owner in Sacramento spent about $40,000 and two years converting a 1966 Ford Mustang into a fully functional Tesla — complete with the Model 3’s dual-motor drivetrain, 15-inch touchscreen, and working “Full Self-Driving” (Supervised). It’s likely the first non-Tesla vehicle to run FSD, and it achieves 258 Wh/mi — roughly matching the efficiency of an actual Model 3. From Facebook Marketplace find to Tesla-powered classic Yaro Shcherbanyuk, the owner of Calimotive Auto Recycling in Rancho Cordova, California, found the 1966 Mustang on Facebook Marketplace in the summer of 2022. Calimotive specializes in Tesla and Rivian parts, so Shcherbanyuk had access to the components — and the knowledge — needed for an ambitious build. He worked on the project for roughly two years alongside his father Viktor and brother Daniel. The family initially considered fitting the Mustang with a Model S drivetrain, but once the car was stripped down, Shcherbanyuk realized the Model 3 battery was nearly a perfect fit. Advertisement – scroll for more content The team grafted three sections …

Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

Published by skeptic

Uber has a long-term ambition that goes well beyond shuttling passengers: the company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers’ cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and potentially other companies training AI models on physical-world scenarios. Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs. “That is the direction we want to go eventually,” Naga said of equipping human drivers’ vehicles. “But first we need to get the understanding of the sensor kits and how they all work. There are some regulations — we have to make sure every state has [clarity on] what sensors mean, and what sharing it means.” For now, AV Labs relies on a small, dedicated fleet of sensor-equipped cars that Uber operates itself, separate from its driver network. But the ambition is clearly much larger. Uber has millions of …