Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre autonomous vehicle proving ground in Wittmann, Arizona, for $220 million — nearly double the $125 million Apple paid for it in 2021. The facility was the centerpiece of Apple’s now-dead self-driving car program.

The deal, recorded June 5 in Maricopa County filings, adds a world-class test facility to Waymo’s infrastructure as the company races to scale its robotaxi fleet to 1 million weekly rides by the end of the year.

Tesla announced today that its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service now covers the entire Austin metro area, a significant expansion of its geofenced operating zone.

It’s a notable milestone on paper, but the actual fleet serving this massive area remains tiny — just ~20 active unsupervised vehicles, according to the latest data, a number that has actually been shrinking.

Tesla has been granted a new patent for a miniature camera cleaning system with a built-in wiper designed to keep vehicle cameras clear for autonomous driving.

The patent addresses one of the most frustrating and well-known issues with Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system — dirty cameras that constantly trigger alerts telling drivers to clean them. But Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet in Austin already has its own camera washer hardware that consumer vehicles don’t get.

Waymo is beginning to offer select riders trips in its new purpose-built Ojai robotaxi, debuting the company’s 6th-generation Driver hardware across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time.

The Ojai represents a significant step for Waymo, which has now surpassed 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities — a scale that no competitor comes close to matching.

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.