Waymo is bringing its robotaxis to Canada, and Toronto is first. Its cars will start driving the city’s streets in the coming days, and the company wants its first public riders on board in 2028.
That makes Toronto Waymo’s fourth announced market outside the US, after London, Tokyo, and Singapore. But there’s a catch: Ontario doesn’t have rules for a commercial driverless service yet.
more…A new defect petition accuses Tesla’s Robotaxis of speeding through active school zones, and NHTSA has opened a file to decide whether to investigate. The agency puts the affected fleet at about 1,000 vehicles, Model Y and Cybercab.
It’s the third federal action aimed at Tesla’s driverless fleet in about five weeks, after an audit query and a Special Order over how the Cybercab was certified.
more…Tesla’s driver-assistance package is now called “Tesla Assisted Driving” in Europe. The company’s German website no longer mentions “Full Self-Driving,” and the old address now redirects to a new “Tesla Assisted Driving” page.
The rename follows Germany’s Transport Ministry calling the FSD name misleading, and it’s part of a deal that has Berlin backing Tesla’s push for EU-wide approval.
more…Tesla spent months pushing the Dutch vehicle regulator RDW to scale back its review of “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” including disputing a €365,000 bill, according to emails obtained by Reuters. RDW later approved the system and is now asking the EU to do the same.
That Dutch approval is the foundation of Tesla’s entire FSD push in Europe. Eight EU countries now allow the system, and a bloc-wide vote could come as early as December.
more…Rivian’s first R2s with LiDAR and its in-house RAP1 autonomy computer will go to employees before the end of 2026. Paying customers will have to wait until 2027. It could be interpreted as a delay compared to previous communications.
The automaker laid out the timeline at an investor conference in New York this week, along with updates on point-to-point driving, its Uber robotaxi deal, and what LiDAR now costs it: “a few hundred dollars.”
more…Mercedes-Benz has signed a definitive production agreement with British self-driving startup Wayve to build its “AI Driver” into future Mercedes vehicles, with integration starting within the next two years.
It’s the first time Wayve’s end-to-end driving AI is going into a production car in the premium segment, and it deepens a relationship that already includes Mercedes investing in Wayve’s $1.5 billion Series D round earlier this year.
more…XPeng is trying to turn its self-driving and smart-cockpit systems into a licensing business, courting automakers, suppliers, and software firms well beyond its existing Volkswagen deal, according to a Reuters report.
It’s the exact playbook Tesla has been pitching for years with “Full Self-Driving.” The difference is that XPeng is finding interest.
more…A Tesla Cybercab rider found something in the robotaxi: a manual driving mode. When he got in, the touchscreen was showing a virtual joystick to drive the car by hand.
Tesla built the Cybercab with no steering wheel and no pedals. But it apparently still has a way to drive it manually, and you do it by dragging a finger across a screen.
more…Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.
He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.
Waymo is putting Google’s Gemini AI assistant inside its robotaxis for the first time, alongside the first major redesign of its rider interface in years.
Both features are launching in the Ojai, Waymo’s purpose-built vehicle, as the company gets ready to open the car up to more public riders.
A former Tesla manager who ran the company’s “Full Self-Driving” test fleet in Houston says the operation was so understaffed that its cars became “rolling hazards on public streets,” according to a lawsuit.
The manager, Javier Medrano, filed the wrongful-termination complaint in Houston federal court, and its contents were reported this week. He oversaw the fleet before Tesla launched its driverless “Robotaxi” in the city.
Tesla told shareholders this week that its Robotaxi service is expanding. The company’s own chart proves it isn’t.
In its Q2 2026 update, Tesla leaned on a cumulative “paid Robotaxi miles” chart climbing past 2.4 million miles as its headline proof of momentum. But break that curve into quarters and the growth flatlines: Robotaxi added roughly 900,000 paid miles in Q2 2026, the same as it did in Q1.
NHTSA is now demanding a Tesla internal document titled “Radar Saves Us” as part of its investigation into “Full Self-Driving” crashes in low-visibility conditions.
The request is buried in a new 24-part information demand sent to Tesla on July 2, and it points the probe straight at the decision that started all of this: Tesla removing radar from its cars.
Tesla switched on its “Robotaxi” service in Tampa and Orlando on Monday, adding two Florida cities to a driverless network that still runs on a couple dozen cars. The company’s @robotaxi account announced it in a four-word post: “Robotaxi now in Tampa & Orlando!”
The timing isn’t subtle. Tesla reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and Robotaxi is the story Elon Musk keeps selling to investors. Two new city names the day before make for a nice slide. The fleet behind them tells a different story.
I got a speeding ticket this weekend while using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving. The car was driving itself in Standard mode on FSD when it took me up to 78 km/h in a 50 km/h zone.
A police officer coming the other way clocked me on radar and pulled me over on the spot. I’d turned FSD on less than two minutes earlier.
Tesla is building a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a company policy advisor told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday.
But Tesla gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the “active product” is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.
Waymo has activated fully driverless operations in Las Vegas, its riders will now see vehicles with no human at the wheel, and the Alphabet unit says Denver, San Diego, and Tampa are next in line.
The move adds four new markets to Waymo’s driverless footprint and pushes the company deeper into its target of 1 million paid rides per week by the end of 2026.
Elon Musk says Tesla’s Full Self-Driving will soon remember your parking preferences and let you talk to it through Grok, like giving directions to an Uber driver.
The features sound useful, and they reflect how genuinely impressive FSD has become — but they also underscore that it remains a supervised driver-assist system, not the unsupervised self-driving Tesla has sold to owners for years.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says the money automakers charge for self-driving software won’t last, comparing autonomy to airbags: a paid option today, baked into the price of every car tomorrow.
The comments, made in a new interview with WIRED, amount to a quiet warning shot at Tesla, which just moved its “Full Self-Driving” package to a subscription-only model at $99 per month.
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