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Tech Brew

Autonomous Vehicles

Jordyn Grzelewski

techbrew.com

That’s the latest development from autonomous trucking company Aurora, which announced July 30 that it’s adding nighttime driving to its driverless route between Dallas and Houston, among other expansions of its service.

“Efficiency, uptime, and reliability are important for our customers, and Aurora is showing we can deliver,” Chris Urmson, Aurora’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Just three months after launch, we’re running driverless operations day and night and we’ve expanded our terminal network to Phoenix. Our rapid progress is beginning to unlock the full value of self-driving trucks for our customers, which has the potential to transform the trillion-dollar trucking industry.”

In a news release, the company said that adding nighttime driving “more than doubles truck utilization potential, significantly shortening delivery times on long-haul routes and creating a path to profitability for autonomous trucking.”

Aurora’s proprietary light detection and ranging tech, FirstLight Lidar, “can detect objects in the dark more than 450 meters away” and identify “pedestrians, vehicles, and debris up to 11 seconds sooner than a traditional driver,” according to the company.

, Aurora leaders hope to validate the ability of their trucks to drive in the rain. Since 

debuting commercial driverless operations

 earlier this year, Aurora says it’s logged more than 20,000 driverless miles.

In other AV expansion news, Alphabet-owned robotaxi service Waymo announced July 28 that it’s launching in Dallas next year.

The announcement included “a new strategic, multi-year partnership” between Waymo and mobility solutions provider Avis Budget Group, which will manage Waymo’s fleet in Dallas and potentially in other cities in the future, according to a blog post.

Waymo currently offers paid robotaxi rides in five cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta. It’s slated to debut its service in Miami and Washington, DC, next year.

On July 25, Lyft announced that autonomous shuttles will debut on its ride-hailing platform late next year. Lyft is partnering with mobility-as-a-service provider Benteler Mobility on the initiative, which will start in the US with the launch of Holon GmbH autonomous shuttles equipped with Mobileye’s AV tech. The deployments initially would start “in partnership with airports and cities,” with plans to expand, per a news release.

“With May Mobility bringing AVs to Atlanta this summer, plans for Mobileye to enable ‘Lyft-ready’ vehicles across our network, and now Benteler Mobility’s plans to expand our ecosystem with purpose-built shuttles and international capabilities,” Lyft said in a news release, “we’ll be creating even 

 to serve our customers and build a more connected world, with transportation for everyone.”

Uber announced on July 17 that it would add at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity EVs equipped with AV startup Nuro’s Level 4 autonomy system over six years in “dozens of markets around the world.” The first launch is slated to take place “in a major US city next year,” according to a news release.

The agreement involves Uber making “multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in both Nuro and Lucid.”

 have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with Nuro and Lucid on this new robotaxi program, purpose-built just for the Uber platform, to safely bring the magic of autonomous driving to more people across the world.”

Autonomous trucking company Aurora adds nighttime driving capability

And other AV news from July.

That’s the idea behind mixed reality testing, or MRT, a method AV trucking startup Waabi is employing as it works to launch fully driverless operations later this year.

MRT pairs AI-generated simulations with testing on a closed-course track. The strategy, according to Waabi CEO and founder Raquel Urtasun, is akin to outfitting a self-driving truck with augmented reality goggles.

“MRT is one of the coolest technologies ever, and it’s actually an extremely important technology as it relates to safety,” she told Tech Brew.

Urtasun explained that over the last century, closed-course testing has been the primary way companies test new vehicles, whether they’re human-operated or autonomous. She likened the process to doing movie stunts; it involves lots of time, resources, and coordination.

It’s also difficult to precisely repeat such physical tests, and there’s a limited diversity of scenarios you can recreate in such an environment, Urtasun wrote in a 

Although equipment like dummy props addresses some of these challenges, “they are expensive and fundamentally unrealistic,” she wrote. And some scenarios—like crashes or impaired driving—aren’t safe, ethical, or practical to test in the real world.

Urtasun cited the example of construction: Although it’s a frequent roadway scenario, it’s one that varies quite a bit. An AV company could try to account for every real-world construction possibility out there and then test its tech on a closed course.

“Suddenly you can…train the system to do things that otherwise would take you billions or trillions of miles to even see once,” Urtasun said. “How many times have you seen somebody on the highway [driving] in the opposite direction?”

Simulation has become a common tool AV companies use to test their tech. Waabi previously introduced a 

 showing that its simulator, Waabi World, is 99.7% accurate. Waabi World uses GenAI to come up with new scenarios, including some “that may have never happened in the real world,” Tech Brew previously reported.

“If we were able to bring the simulator to the physical world, then we would have the ability to really test all the safety-critical situations, be reproducible, be at scale, with no consequences,” Urtasun said. “Suddenly you open the possibilities to really test anything that you can think of.”

Enter MRT, which Waabi started using about two years ago and which has enabled it to run thousands of closed-course tests per day.

Using MRT, Urtasun said, was crucial to Waabi achieving the milestone of becoming “feature complete,” meaning its AV system is capable of going driverless.

As Waabi’s simulation system generates scenarios, Urtasun explained in her blog post, “the real physical sensor readings are modified instantaneously so the Waabi driver can react to the blend of real and virtual elements while driving in the physical world.”

“Traffic jams can materialize instantly, motorcycles can weave between lanes, crowds of pedestrians can jaywalk unpredictably, and children can dart into the street from behind parked cars,” she wrote.

 operate on public roads in Texas with human safety drivers on board, has partnerships with Uber Freight and Volvo Autonomous Solutions.

Waabi leaders view MRT as a way to build trust with customers and 

, and to improve its capital efficiency, according to Urtasun. And she noted that the tech could be applied to other forms of physical AI, like robots.

“We definitely plan to do more than just self-driving trucks in the future,” she told us. “But right now we are very, very focused on launching the product, which is end of year, and then many more things will follow.”

How Waabi is combining reality and simulations to test AVs ahead of driverless launch

Waabi started using mixed reality testing about two years ago.

Starting later this summer, some Lyft rides in Atlanta will have empty driver’s seats as the rideshare network begins rolling out autonomous vehicles.

Still, Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s EVP of driver experience, told Tech Brew that the company expects humans to occupy a critical role in the rideshare industry for many years to come, especially if hopes that AVs spur industry growth pan out. To help its drivers navigate the introduction of this technology into Lyft’s fleet, the company recently kicked off a series of forums inviting drivers to share input.

“I think the No. 1 pitfall would be to ignore it,” Bird said. “To say, ‘Oh, this is something that’s gonna happen 10 years down the road. No need to look over here.’ Meanwhile, to be signing deals with autonomous vehicle companies. I don’t think that is fair to drivers.”

Lyft plans to team up with self-driving tech companies and other partners to bring AVs into the fold amid 

The rideshare network is, for example, planning to 

 in Atlanta later this summer, using AV tech company 

“Our world-class fleet management, sophisticated marketplace engine, and large-scale demand represent the best way for AV companies, OEM manufacturers, and fleet owners to commercialize their assets,” Lyft CEO David Risher wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “We partner with those companies to bring exceptional autonomous transportation experiences to riders at scale.”

Lyft executives expect to see AVs integrated into rideshare networks in phases, starting with a slow ramp-up in which they claim driver earnings will not be significantly affected. Eventually, they envision a “hybrid” network in which robotaxis and human-driven vehicles share a larger market, and one day for drivers to perhaps even buy their own AVs and put them to work. As evidence that AVs can create incremental business, they point to markets like San Francisco and Phoenix, where the rideshare business has grown alongside robotaxi deployments.

“We want to grow,” Bird said. “The way that autonomous will help Lyft grow is by providing more options for riders at all times of the day, and being able to serve riders with more diversified supply will mean faster ETAs, will mean overall better experience for riders and will grow the number of people that don’t need to rely on other forms of transportation.”

The company hosted its first Lyft Driver Autonomous Forum in Atlanta in July and will host its next one in San Francisco in August.

“The No. 1 thing we heard from people is they want to be involved in the conversation,” Bird said. “They don’t want this to be something that they’re only reading about from headlines in the press or they’re seeing on the local news.

Company leaders also heard concerns “about what it might mean for the future of rideshare for them as a driver,” Bird said. “There’s a lot of questions.”

He acknowledged that executives don’t yet know what the long-term impact will be on drivers, but emphasized that Lyft sees humans continuing to play an important role, especially given the limitations of technology. Some riders, for example, will continue to want help with their luggage or insights from a human on the local dining scene.

The aim of the forums, according to the company, is to allow drivers the opportunity to contribute to discussions about AVs. In a blog post, Lyft said that participants “will meet regularly to discuss how AVs impact drivers, providing strategic input that will help contribute to Lyft’s policies and plans.”

Each forum will include six to 10 drivers, who will be recruited based on “qualitative data” like driver ratings and loyalty status. “Members for each meeting will be selected based on the topic at hand, representing specific regions or areas of expertise,” according to Lyft. “To ensure continuity, select drivers will participate in multiple meetings.”

Bird said he also believes it’s important to have conversations with drivers everywhere, not just in cities that have robotaxis on the road today, and for the discussion to be the same as the ones company leaders have with other stakeholders like investors. Company leaders will also continue to get driver feedback on AVs and other topics via a quarterly sentiment tracker, Bird noted.

“I think drivers are going to be essential to any rideshare network moving forward,” he said, “and to not have that conversation with them I think is pretty disingenuous.”

Lyft recently kicked off a series of driver forums focused on autonomous vehicles.

Lyft exec in charge of driver experience on why ignoring AVs would be ‘No. 1 pitfall’

 sector were on Austin in June, as Tesla 

 its long-awaited robotaxi service on a limited basis.

Meanwhile, its top competitor in the space, Alphabet-owned Waymo, announced several moves demonstrating its continued scaling of a business that now has commercial operations in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta—with Washington, DC, and Miami coming soon.

Waymo and Uber launched a robotaxi service in Atlanta on June 24. The move is part of a partnership between the ride-sharing giant and the robotaxi startup as they both aim to scale up driverless rides. Uber manages the fleet, while Waymo handles the vehicle testing and operations.

Waymo rides are available on Uber’s network across 65 square miles of the Atlanta area, from downtown to Buckhead to Capitol View, with plans to expand in the future. Users can opt into autonomous rides in the “ride preferences” section of the Uber app to increase their chances of hailing a Waymo vehicle.

Waymo also announced in June that it would be returning to New York City to conduct testing. The company said that while it’s not yet expanding into the market, “we have every intention of bringing our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the city in the future.” Waymo has applied for a permit from NYC’s Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a human safety operator behind the wheel in Manhattan. The company will start out with manual rides, pending permit approval.

Currently, New York state law doesn’t allow for autonomous driving with no human behind the wheel. Waymo is lobbying to change this.

 that the ride-hailing company is in discussions with its ousted founder, Travis Kalanick, about a potential deal to help him fund the acquisition of the US subsidiary of Chinese AV company Pony.ai, as Uber looks to become more competitive in the AV space. Pony went public in the US last year, the Times report noted, and it now has a market capitalization of $4.5 billion.

Volkswagen’s mobility company, MOIA, unveiled the autonomous ID. Buzz AD, which is 

And Amazon-owned robotaxi startup Zoox in June unveiled what it touted as “the first-ever serial production facility for purpose-built robotaxis in the US.” The plant is Zoox’s second production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. It expects the facility to eventually employ “hundreds” of people who will work alongside autonomous robots tasked with processes such as “applying adhesive for glass installation.”

Zoox plans to deploy a purpose-built robotaxi with a unique design, with no steering wheel or pedals.

The plant spans 220,000 square feet and, at full capacity, will be able to build more than 10,000 robotaxis per year, Zoox said in a blog post. The company said that the number of robotaxis it builds “will grow and scale to match the demand of our commercial service as needed.”

Zoox’s latest announcement followed the startup’s 

 that it would begin testing in a seventh city: Atlanta. Zoox also is testing its tech, with human safety operators, in Miami, Los Angeles, Austin, and Seattle. It’s preparing to launch commercial operations in Las Vegas, and, later this year, in San Francisco.

A co-branded Uber and Waymo autonomous vehicle.

Waymo and Uber debut robotaxi service in Atlanta

And more news from the autonomous vehicle sector in June.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said every year for the past decade that 

 is the year he’ll deliver on lofty promises of enabling millions of fully self-driving vehicles.

Spoiler alert: That hasn’t happened. But Tesla is now 

. The company has shared some information about what this venture entails, but there are more questions than answers.

“So far, this launch lags significantly behind the company’s promise and what competitors have already delivered,” Paul Miller, VP, principal analyst at Forrester, said in a statement.

Tesla is launching a robotaxi service with 10 to 20 Tesla Model Y SUVs (equipped with its Full Self-Driving, or FSD, software) in a geofenced area in Austin, with human safety operators in the vehicle (despite Musk previously saying this wouldn’t be the case) and a teleoperations team capable of accessing and taking control of the vehicle.

“Like all of Tesla’s competitors, these cars will only carry passengers around certain parts of the city,” Miller said. “Also, like competitors, the cars may stop operating in inclement weather. Neither of these limitations should surprise anyone.”

The service, open at first to a select group of invited users, will not initially involve Tesla’s robotaxi product, the Cybercab, which it 

 and is supposed to go into production next year. It’s unclear what version of FSD will be used.

On Tesla’s Q1 earnings call in April, Musk again claimed that the “vast majority of the Tesla fleet that we’ve made is capable of being a robotaxi,” predicting that the company will be able to quickly scale to many other cities.

But at least for now, that’s not what the service looks like. In fact, the rollout looks very similar to how 

 have deployed their robotaxis when entering new markets.

That’s the question Kathy Winter, COO of AV tech startup 

, has about Tesla’s technology. May has partnerships with Lyft and Uber to provide their vehicles with its AV tech.

“I don’t want to denigrate what they’re doing,” she added. “They do a lot to keep it right in the forefront of people’s minds. But it just takes a lot of time and validation and technology maturity to really be safe.”

(Tesla did not respond to Tech Brew’s email seeking comment.)

Many industry observers and stakeholders have 

 to autonomy, in contrast to its competitors, which use other types of perception like radar and lidar sensors.

“What Elon is trying to prove is that vision is sufficient. And if vision is sufficient, that has big cost ramifications,” Neel Mehta, a partner at VC firm G2 Venture Partners who previously worked at Amazon-owned robotaxi startup Zoox, told Tech Brew.

“You need fewer sensors. You need, potentially, a smaller compute. And therefore you can leverage the existing low-cost Tesla vehicles,” he said. “And if that works, that’s going to have a superior cost structure over Waymo. But that’s the thing that we have yet to see the data on. And we’re still in the camp that Waymo’s approach ultimately is going to lead to a safer product in the long run.”

Observers will also be closely watching to see how Tesla’s technology and unit economics stack up against Waymo’s. As of now, there’s much more data on Waymo’s track record, Mehta noted.

The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company has scaled commercial operations to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin; is testing and preparing to deploy in multiple other cities; is averaging more than 250,000 paid rides per week; and has released a safety framework and data supporting the idea that it’s safer than a human driver. In other words, it’s way ahead of the competition—but Musk contends that Tesla’s robotaxi play will outcompete Waymo on cost.

 similar data demonstrating the safety of its technology.

“It’s not that Tesla releasing the robotaxi is something that’s novel. Waymo has been doing this since 2019,” Mehta said. “What will come into focus is whether Tesla’s approach, which is the vision-only approach using their own lower-cost vehicle platform, can that ultimately work, and if it does work, does that ultimately supplant Waymo?”

The rollout comes at a crucial time for Tesla, with its stock down 15% year-to-date and investors clamoring for it to finally deliver on its autonomy promises as it faces a 

Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a June 20 research note that the robotaxi launch could mark the start of Tesla’s “$1 trillion autonomous era,” and predicted that Tesla would scale the service to “roughly 25 cities in the US over the next year.”

“There will be many setbacks,” they wrote, “but given its unmatched scale and scope globally we believe Tesla has the opportunity to own the autonomous market and down the road license its technology to other auto players both in the US and around the globe.”

An image of a Tesla, a woman wearing a headset, and an Austin city limits sign.

What we know—or want to know—about Tesla’s robotaxi service

Tesla is rolling out a robotaxi service with a small fleet of Model Ys in Austin this month.

That might seem straightforward enough, but there were multiple twists for participants in Michigan’s recent “Uncrewed Triple Challenge,” in which competitors were tasked with using driverless autonomous drones to move a package across northern Michigan at the fastest possible speed—with no human intervention, and traversing air, land, and water.

The competition, which took place May 20–22, was a partnership among the Michigan National Guard, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and the Michigan Department of Transportation. Participants came from numerous states and countries, and represented the military, government, academia, and industry.

“The goal over time is, how can we move goods more efficiently and safer, using autonomous technology?,” Charlie Tyson, technology activation director for Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, which helped organize the challenge, told Tech Brew.

Participants competed using uncrewed ground vehicles, aerial drones (UAVs), and maritime systems.

The competition’s maritime segment consisted of a zone of 5 nautical miles. Then, from a harbor in northern Michigan, participants were challenged to navigate their UAVs across 58.5 miles of a designated airspace. The land segment spanned 23.5 miles.

Tyson attended the competition in person and said he was struck by how challenging the course was—especially during a classic Michigan spring day when it was chilly and windy, which had a noticeable effect on the aerial segment.

“But they were able to do it,” he said. “It was really incredible to see.”

The winners of the sea, air, and ground segments, respectively, were Mythos AI, SiFly, and DataSpeed, and the three companies collectively won the competition as a team. SiFly’s electric drone achieved a new milestone: It more than doubled the world record for the longest continuous drone payload flight.

 as a leader in the mobility sector, including on technologies like 

“This unique challenge, the first of its kind, puts Michigan on the cutting-edge of mobility and cements our reputation as a state that knows how to bring people together to get things done,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said in a statement.

According to the state, it’s home to nearly 4,000 defense- and aerospace-related companies, along with the Unmanned Aerial Systems Consortium and seven Federal Aviation Administration test sites for uncrewed aircraft systems.

“We know that we have been leaders in automotive. We know that we have emerging industries seeking to leverage new technology. We have strong R&D and engineering talent in Michigan,” Tyson said. “And so we want to better highlight that and help advance autonomous vehicle technology that can make an impact both in the defense and commercial industries. This event…was an effort to do just that.”

Tyson pointed to other autonomous mobility initiatives happening in Michigan, including one that involved using drones to move packages off ships so they don’t have to dock to make a delivery. Other examples of putting the technology to use might be delivering medical supplies to hospitals, or moving manufacturing components from facility to facility by air.

“We see opportunities to move goods from Point A to Point B,” Tyson said, “leveraging autonomous vehicle technology.”

Image from Michigan's Uncrewed Triple Challenge

Michigan AV challenge asks competitors to move package by air, land, and water

“The goal over time is, how can we move goods more efficiently and safer using autonomous technology?” one of the competition’s organizers tells Tech Brew.

Autonomous trucking company Plus AI’s DC point person is “cautiously optimistic” that the federal government will soon establish a 

“The prior administration, my group of folks, we were working to establish a set of guardrails,” 

, former deputy administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and now the VP of public policy and regulatory affairs for Plus, said at a June 3 roundtable in Detroit.

“This is maybe the one bipartisan issue that I have found,” he added, “that the current administration is still looking at establishing a set of guardrails around the initial deployment of commercial vehicles.”

The AV sector, which has long bemoaned the patchwork of state and local laws, has been 

 about indications that the Trump administration plans to establish a regulatory framework for AVs.

In April, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a new Automated Vehicle Framework from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The first step under that framework would be to update Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which are minimum standards with which all vehicles must comply, “to blaze a path” for commercial AV deployments, per a release.

“As part of DOT’s innovation agenda, our new framework will slash red tape and move us closer to a single national standard that spurs innovation and prioritizes safety,” Duffy said in a statement.

Adams said he expects the bulk of the rulemaking for the commercial AV sector to come from his former agency, FMCSA, which regulates commercial vehicles. But, he said, the commercial AV sector is awaiting congressional action that would affirm DOT’s authority on the issue.

“Congress’s action will ensure that there’s no question as to the authority that the Department of Transportation has to put forth regulations,” he said. “It would enshrine in law that a human is not required to comply with the regulations.”

Those two processes could play out in tandem, according to Adams. Already, there’s been some action in the Senate, where Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, last month introduced a 

 called the “Autonomous Vehicle Acceleration Act of 2025,” which calls for authorizing DOT to establish standards for AVs.

Adams said he also expects to see action on the issue out of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee by year’s end.

Separately, California recently released draft regulations that would allow self-driving trucks to test and deploy on public roads in the state.

Plus develops autonomous driving software for commercial trucks. The company, which on Thursday announced plans to go public via a $1.2 billion SPAC deal, aims to launch commercial production of factory-built trucks equipped with its AV platform in 2027.

Some of the trucking-specific issues the AV industry would like to see ironed out include how driverless trucks can handle federal requirements around interacting with first responders, undergoing cargo inspections, and, in one example Adams cited, how to properly pull over to the side of the highway, since current regulations require drivers to put warning triangles outside their truck—something a driverless truck obviously can’t do.

Adams acknowledged that opposition from organized labor remains an issue. 

, for example, have pushed back hard against autonomous truck deployments in a bid to protect driver jobs. Adams contended that, given the commercial AV sector’s gradual progress, truck drivers will be needed for many years to come.

But it remains to be seen what labor’s opposition means in this political environment, he noted: “Maybe there’s been a time when organized labor and the Republican Party have been aligned—I haven’t seen it…But we do have a world where [Teamsters President] Sean O’Brien has the president on speed dial.”

Plus AI ‘cautiously optimistic’ on federal regulations for AVs

“This is maybe the one bipartisan issue” Washington can agree on these days, according to Earl Adams Jr., the head of regulatory affairs for the AV trucking company.