Autonomous Vehicles
TechCrunch Mobility: Two roads diverged — for robotaxis
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, the role AI is playing in it.
Category
Autonomous Vehicles
Robotaxis, autonomous trucking, and aircraft flying without a pilot.
Autonomous vehicles are the largest commercial deployment of robotics anywhere, and the only one where the public rides inside the robot. A driverless car is a perception, prediction and planning stack wrapped in two tonnes of regulated hardware, and the engineering problem it faces is the same one the rest of the field is circling: how to be reliable enough, often enough, without a human ready to take over.
The field has already run the experiment the humanoid companies are starting. A decade of well-funded work established that a compelling demo is roughly the first ninety percent, that the remaining few percent of reliability costs more than everything before it, and that the gap between a supervised drive and an unsupervised one is where companies fail. Several well-capitalised programmes did not survive that gap.
Uncrewed aircraft are the same problem with a different regulator. The airframe can fly the mission; whether it may fly beyond the operator's line of sight, over people, or at scale is a matter for civil aviation authorities, so rule-making timelines move that market more than hardware announcements do. The commercial cases that have held up are the ones where the alternative is genuinely worse: inspecting infrastructure a human would have to climb, spraying fields, surveying sites, and delivering payloads across terrain with poor roads.
What separates the survivors on the ground is unglamorous: depot operations, cleaning and charging logistics, remote assistance staffing, insurance, and the patchwork of state and municipal rules that decides where a vehicle may operate at all. Autonomous trucking is on a different curve again — highway driving is a narrower problem than dense urban streets, but the freight it moves makes the failure cases heavier.
Latest autonomous vehicles news
Autonomous Vehicles
Uber is building an autonomous vehicle empire, and here’s every company it’s using to do it
Uber has partnered with — and in some cases made direct investments in — about 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past two years. Here's the list and the latest on the partnerships.
Autonomous Vehicles
Procore Technologies acquires DroneDeploy for $845M
Procore will integrate DroneDeploy's visual intelligence technology to link the digital world with physical construction sites.
Read as Deal terms are usually undisclosed and headline prices often include earn-outs that depend on targets not yet met.
Autonomous Vehicles
DoorDash gains FAA certification to operate its own drone delivery program
The FAA approval came nearly a year after DoorDash unveiled its delivery robot and reflects its increasing interest in building automation in-house.
Autonomous Vehicles
Zoox can now charge for rides in its steering-wheel-free robotaxis
Zoox just got permission to charge for robotaxi rides in its boxy, steering-wheel-less vehicles. On Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it has granted the Amazon-owned Zoox a temporary exemption, allowing it to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles annually over the next two years, as reported earlier by Reuters. The NHTSA's decision exempts Zoox from rules requiring…
Autonomous Vehicles
Zoox clears final federal hurdle to launch paid robotaxi service
Federal safety regulators have given Zoox a temporary exemption that will allow the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle technology company to charge customers for rides in its custom-built robotaxi.
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo robotaxis are starting to return to freeways
The freeway pause — and its restart — comes amid increased scrutiny into Waymo and other robotaxi operators, particularly over how these self-driving vehicles behave in certain high-traffic situations and around emergency responders.
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo, robotaxi operators face fresh scrutiny over emergency response failures
Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-California ) has proposed a bill that would direct federal regulators to establish minimum national safety standards for autonomous vehicle operators.
Autonomous Vehicles
Lyft and Baidu enter London’s robotaxi battleground as testing begins
Baidu's Apollo Go autonomous vehicles will be available on Freenow, the mobility network that Lyft acquired in 2025.
Read as Deal terms are usually undisclosed and headline prices often include earn-outs that depend on targets not yet met.
Autonomous Vehicles
Waymo reportedly mulling a breakup with Uber
The contract between the two companies ends in May 2028, Uber told TechCrunch.
Autonomous Vehicles
Tesla’s robotaxi promises are clashing with reality
In an earnings call yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did his best to paint a positive portrait of the company's robotaxi program. New cities are being added, more miles are being driven, and more people are experiencing Tesla's unsupervised vehicles. But Musk's typical bullishness seemed to be absent from the call, as the occasional trillionaire sought to temper expectations about the program's…
Autonomous Vehicles
How to Make an Invisible Drone
There are many words that I would never, ever use to describe a drone. Stealthy. Subtle. Whatever the opposite of obnoxious is. Much of this is because of the giant angry bee sound that drones tend to make, but it’s also the way that they look in flight: With uncannily linear movements and an even less canny ability to hover perfectly still, they tend to draw the eye as affronts to nature. In a…
Autonomous Vehicles
The first American autonomous ground vehicles are fighting in Ukraine
Forterra has deployed more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs in conflict zones in Ukraine.
Autonomous Vehicles
Visual Language Models Train Robots to Read Human Emotions
This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. As robots advance in terms of dexterity and other physical capabilities, it becomes more likely that humans may find themselves working alongside them. If that happens, how will robots’ emotional capabilities need to advance for them to successfully work with people? In a recent study, researchers…
