Two firefighters were rushed to the hospital on Wednesday, after a Tesla parked in a family garage exploded.
According to local station KING5, the incident happened in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, after a massive fire spread from a family’s garage to the rest of their home.
The Tesla explosion set off what ultimately became a two-alarm fire, requiring emergency crews to battle back flames for hours. Thankfully, the two injured firefighters were discharged with non-life threatening injuries, and nobody else was hurt, though the single-family home was pretty much totaled.
The ultimate cause of the fire is still under investigation — whether the Tesla combusted on its own, setting off the blaze, or was the result of a fire which started elsewhere isn’t known.
Still, it’s fair to assume the explosion contributed to the severity of the fire, the latest example of an all-too-common situation plaguing Teslas and other electric vehicles.
Thanks to their massive lithium batteries, Teslas have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames, often after being involved incollisions, but occasionally entirelyon theirown.
Regardless of what sparks the flames, battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out, requiring specialized hazmat units and thousands of gallons of water to end the battery’s combustion.
Self-driving trucks could be hauling cargo across highways in the near future. But not without the Teamsters having a say in the matter first.
As Politico reports, the California branch of the nation’s largest union is suing state lawmakers, accusing them of rushing out new regulations that’re friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry without considering their impact on workers’ jobs.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, takes aim at several state agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles, and governor Gavin Newsom’s administration. The union contends that the new regulations are an “existential threat” to hundreds of thousands of union jobs, and is demanding that the DMV should be blocked from enforcing the new rules.
“The DMV irresponsibly, carelessly, and unlawfully kept the public in the dark about the true economic and human costs of the amended Autonomous Vehicle regulations,” Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney representing the Teamsters, said in a statement, per Politico.
“The only way to protect the public’s right to properly scrutinize regulations that will transform transportation in California is for the Court to order the DMV to immediately rescind the illegally enacted regulations,” Gutman added.
At the crux of the suit, the Teamsters say that the DMV didn’t conduct a mandatory economic study to gauge the effects of the new regulations. Instead, the lawmakers expediently used a process meant to fast-track minor updates that have minimal economic impact, they allege.
The DMV, puzzlingly, calculated that no jobs would be eliminated by self-driving trucks. Fat chance, according to the Teamsters: by its own count, over 200,000 semi-truck drivers could be put out of work.
The Teamsters also raised the danger posed by allowing computer systems to control a vehicle weighing tens of thousands of pounds, compared to the smaller threat posed by a robotaxi. A Tesla Semi — a vehicle that’s envisioned as having autonomous driving capabilities — was involved in a grisly crash that killed two people, though it doesn’t appear that self-driving features were being tested at the time of the accident.
For certain BMW owners, enormous car payments aren’t the only rude reminder that they don’t actually own their ride yet: now, irritating in-vehicle commercials will send them the same message.
Starting last week, the German automaker started blasting a promotion for the new Spider-Man movie into its customers’ cars without warning — because nothing says riding in luxury like a full-vehicle pop-up ad. BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a “special surprise.”
According to The Autopian‘s coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad’s done playing — a cheap looking animation that doesn’t come close to warranting all this hubbub — it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code.
While it does give you the option to play or skip the “festive animation,” it’s still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It’s also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads when they’re trying to hit the road.
Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.
“BMW should stop with this sh*t,” one user fumed.
“F*ck everything about this,” another said.
According to a BMW press release, this latest ad campaign has been available in more than 70 markets since July 27 and is scheduled to keep playing through August 10.
If any automaker would have the temerity to pull a shameless stunt like this, it’d be BMW, which has a history of monetizing the digital and hardware features in its cars with video game-style microtransactions. It previously demanded customers pay a monthly subscription fee to unlock their heated seats that were already installed in their vehicles, and an additional fee for heated steering wheels.
It also tried paywalling the widely popular Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone integration features — something no other automaker charges for — but backed off after massive backlash.
It’s not the only carmaker that’s gotten into hot water for repurposing infotainment screens into ad real estate. Last year, Jeep drivers were livid after the company’s vehicles started showing giant pop-up ads that badgered them into buying an extended warranty.
In a federal lawsuit reported by The Independent, Javier Medrano accused Tesla of turning its autonomous test fleet in Houston into 24/7 “rolling hazards” by “aggressively” scaling up operations.
The size of the fleet more than doubled to a size that Medrano claims was impossible to oversee on his own,. Despite consistently pleading higher-ups for more help, he alleges his warnings were ignored, and he was later fired.
“It almost feels like these big corporations can get away with anything, and people just kind of put their heads down and say, ‘Well, this is how it is,'” Medrano told The Independent. “And it breeds an environment where people don’t say, ‘This is not okay.'”
Medrano took over as the sole operational manager of Houston’s FSD test fleet eight months after joining the company in 2023. When he joined, the size of its fleet and human operators was just 15. But months later, Tesla increased it to 38 vehicle operators. These employees kept the cars running for 24 hours a day across three shifts, and Medrano, as remote fleet manager, oversaw them all.
This “dangerous 38:1 operator-to-manager ratio,” the suit argues, violated Tesla’s own “mandated 15:1 safety baseline.”
These operators, by the way, were part of Tesla’s controversial “Rodeo Team,” whose existence was first made public in reporting from Business Insider in 2024. The moniker is fitting: these drivers purposely got their autonomous cars into dangerous situations and only intervened at the last possible moment, providing Tesla valuable training data.
The lawsuit claims that in other cities with Rodeo Teams, Tesla had more than one safety lead. Having to oversee this sprawling fleet self-driving daredevils was wearing Medrano down to a nub. In one email to his boss, he confessed he was “trying not to lose my absolute mind, from not sleeping or eating correctly and doing everything I need to do to actually meet the expectations,” per the Independent. A month later, he begged for another safety lead and asked for a week off.
“This is officially my S.O.S signal,” he wrote.
Inevitably, all this foreshadowing came to a head. Just days after sending that message, one of the FSD vehicles was involved in a collision with another car. The test driver, following protocol, called Medrano after the accident, at the late hour of 2:05 AM.
But Medrano was so exhausted that he answered the phone call while “physically asleep,” according to the complaint, causing him to give erroneous advice to the operator. Following his orders, she remained at the scene of the accident, where she was allegedly approached by an impaired stranger.
Medrano told HR the next day he had “no recollection” of the phone call, per The Independent. He then echoed his complaints of “severe understaffing” he’d made to his boss.
The response he apparently got was baffling and callous. An HR rep allegedly told Medrano to set his phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode if he didn’t want to be bothered during active testing shifts. And the Autopilot director said he should’ve “delegated” better.
But, he told The Indepedent, “I didn’t have anybody to delegate to.”
“I was really trying to let them know how serious this was,” Medrano added. “But there was no sense of urgency.”
“It’s baffling to me how this went on so long,” he continued. “In other cities, they had multiple leads per shift. I was the only one who didn’t have that luxury… Our job is to make sure these cars are safe on the road.”
Três brechas na configuração de proxy do WebKit, que também afetam a Retransmissão Privada (Private Relay) do iCloud+, foram descobertas, permitindo que o endereço IP de usuários da Apple seja exposto a terceiros. O comportamento afeta todos os navegadores para iOS que dependem de conexões proxy para ocultar o IP do iPhone.
A falha foi localizada pelos desenvolvedores Talal Haj Bakry e Tommy Mysk, fundadores do navegador com foco em privacidade Psylo. Eles explicaram como a exposição da informação do usuário ocorre em uma postagem no blog oficial de Mysk:
Navegadores baseados em WebKit no iOS e no macOS podem ser configurados para encaminhar todo o tráfego web por servidores proxy. […] Em teoria, toda conexão de rede iniciada por uma página deveria passar pelo proxy configurado, de modo que os sites enxergassem apenas o endereço IP do proxy. No entanto, descobrimos que três recursos do WebKit ignoram essa configuração e enviam tráfego diretamente do dispositivo.
As três ferramentas mencionadas ao longo do boletim incluem a pré-busca (prefetching) de DNS, que resolve o endereço pelo caminho normal de DNS do dispositivo em vez de pelo proxy, expondo os servidores DNS reais do usuário; o Related Origin Requests (ROR) do WebAuthn, que faz com que o serviço de credenciais do sistema busque, diretamente do dispositivo, um arquivo de validação hospedado no domínio de origem, expondo o endereço real do usuário; e o WebTransport, que ignora o proxy ao estabelecer uma conexão HTTP/3 direta.
No caso do Safari, o recurso Retransmissão Privada do iCloud+ também é afetado pela falha; embora projetado para ter dois servidores intermediários para o tráfego e as consultas de DNS, os recursos listados ocorrem fora desse mecanismo de proteção, expondo o usuário de qualquer maneira.
Isso afeta também navegadores que utilizam a API 1Application programming interface, ou interface de programação de aplicações. de proxy para privacidade, como o Onion, que foi alertado sobre o problema junto do Tor Project. O relatório pontua, no entanto, que a única exceção quanto à exposição desses dados com algum desses recursos é o nível de segurança “Silver” do Onion Browser, que desativa o WebTransport por meio do Modo de Isolamento (Lockdown Mode).
As conexões por VPN 2Virtual private network, ou rede privada virtual. não são afetadas pela falha de segurança, visto que o tráfego do dispositivo passa pelo túnel do provedor da rede privada virtual.
O relatório conclui informando que o problema foi resolvido na versão mais recente do Psylo, que desabilitou por ora o funcionamento do WebTransport e do WebAuthn, além de bloquear a dica de pré-busca de DNS.
Tesla’s latest earnings report was very bad news for the company. In the second quarter, it made $1.1 billion in net profit, less than the $1.2 billion it reported a year earlier. Vehicle sales were up, but profits remain about a quarter billion short of expectations, and the automaker’s cash flow is negative for the first time in over two years.
But the real blow has been the slow rollout of its Robotaxi service. Elon Musk has staked his automaker’s future on fully autonomous vehicles, promising investors it would help push Tesla’s valuation to an eyebrow-raising $30 trillion — approximately the gross domestic product of the United States, for perspective.
And importantly, he promised to get this done quickly. Before launching Tesla’s first Robotaxi service in Austin last summer, Musk estimated that over 1,000 of the self-driving cabs would be roaming the streets “within a few months.”
Now, a year later, Tesla doesn’t even have a hundred Robotaxis in operation. And its efforts seem to actually be regressing. According to a new chart the company released Wednesday, the Robotaxi network racked up fewer miles from paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first.
The chart, which may be the most dismal single aspect of the entire earnings cycle, misleadingly displays this data as cumulative miles to make it appear like the Robotaxi service is steadily growing.
But TechCrunch broke it down, finding that in the first quarter, Tesla’s driverless cabs carrying paying passengers drove around 1.1 million miles, but fell to just 700,000 miles in the second — cratering by over a third.
The misleading chart isn’t the only way Tesla has tried to dress up its stalling efforts. A day before releasing the earnings report, it announced that it was expanding to two more cities in Florida, Tampa and Orlando — without sharing the size of those fleets, Electrek noted.
It should tell you something that Tesla has gone to great lengths to keep the size of its operation under wraps. In June, Bloomberg reported that its fleet size across all cities was just 59 robotaxis. Only third of those are fully unsupervised; the other vehicles have a human safety monitor sitting in the front seats.
It’s also tried to play up its seemingly spotless safety record. Before the report, the official Tesla account on X bragged that there were “0 notable incidents across over 380,000 miles traveled by Robotaxi.”
But Tesla doesn’t define what a “notable incident” is. Its vehicles have regularly been caught driving erratically and at times dangerously. Only a day after launching in Tampa, one of its Robotaxis was spotted blundering the wrong way down a one way street in the city.
Musk has frequently emphasized that he’s “paranoid about safety” to explain why progress has moved slowly, while at the same time promising to scale things up rapidly. In January he projected that the Robotaxis would cover half the US population by the end of the year.
But investors are running out of patience. Tesla shares plunged by 15 percent on Thursday after the earnings were released, in part due to frustration over the Robotaxis’ laggard progress, and another three percent on Friday.
“More is needed to show that Tesla’s capabilities are inflecting” on robotaxis, Barclays analysts said in a note per Reuters, noting that Tesla didn’t provide new expansion targets and “hasn’t met previously laid out targets.”
For all of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose claims that the pickup would be an “apocalypse-proof” tank capable of winning its driver style points wherever they go, it’s instead earned a reputation for being incredibly unreliable and just about the opposite of “easy on the eyes” — probably because you can imagine the numerous sharp edges that define its low-poly design poking you in them as soon as you see it.
Most unforgivable in the capitalist society Musk champions, it hasn’t sold well. He once estimated that Tesla would sell up to 500,000 Cybertrucks annually, but it hasn’t even come close to that number in the nearly three years since it first started shipping, and at this point it probably won’t in its entire lifetime.
So, yes. It’s a flop. But could it also be the greatest flop in American automotive history?
A new piece from Bloomberg makes the case, comparing the Tesla vehicle to the misfortunes of Ford’s Edsel, which was first introduced in 1957 and discontinued just two years later. After spending years building up hype for the car, Ford predicted selling 200,000 units in its first year, but ended up selling less than a third of that.
That’s comparable to expectations versus reality of the Cybertruck. In fact, the Cybertruck is actually doing worse in key ways. Tesla’s annual sales target was 250,000 units, but it didn’t even crack 40,000 sales in its first year. And like the Edsel, it’s sold less with each successive year, with barely 7,100 registered in the US in 2026 so far, according to S&P Global Mobility data — despite Musk juicing those figures by selling Cybertrucks to his own companies.
And like the Cybertruck, the Edsel’s unusual design was also widely mocked. The most notorious feature was its vertical grille, which many jokesters compared to a toilet seat. A review in Time magazine sealed its fate by observing that it looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.”
“For most people it was just downright ugly,” Don Sherman, a journalist and auto historian, told Bloomberg.
The exterior wasn’t the only weird — and doomed — thing about the Edsel. In it, Ford debuted a new “Teletouch” push-button shift placed in the center of the steering wheel — yep, right where most cars have a horn button. It confused drivers and frequently malfunctioned.
(And spiritually, it’s hard to ignore, the Teletouch evokes Tesla’s insistence on hiding features that traditionally have physical buttons in a central touch screen.)
The Edsel is generally cited as the American automotive industry’s biggest disaster. But the projected annual sales target compared to actual sales is actually worse for the Cybertruck. It may be time to put a new car on this ignominious throne.
But will Tesla discontinue the Cybertruck the same way Ford dropped the Edsel? Maybe not. The Cybertruck is a point of pride for Musk and has become synonymous with his vision. Garrett Nelson, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, thinks it’s more likely the truck will “fade away.”
“It’s possible that they try to do some sort of redesign, or come up with a different variant to try to boost sales,” Nelson told Bloomberg, “but we think that would really be a futile effort.”
Shares of Elon Musk’s embattled carmaker Tesla slid over 13 percent Thursday morning after posting dismal second quarter results the night before.
The stock is hovering at around $324 at the time of writing, down over 15 percent over the last five days and about 28 percent year to date.
The company missed Wall Street expectations, despite its core automotive segment generating just over $20 billion in revenue, up 23 percent from a year ago. However, the company’s gross profits dropped as operating expenses climbed far quicker than revenue, in large part thanks to AI-related capital expenses and other research and development — an intimately familiar refrain for the tech world in 2026.
In other words, investors are growing increasingly wary of Musk’s reinvention of his car business. The almost-trillionaire is trying to shift the company’s focus from selling cars to robotaxis, a humanoid robot called Optimus, and AI — a series of major undertakings that’re clearly weighing it down financially after multiple quarters of major losses.
Worse yet, Tesla’s woes are clearly having knock-on effects on his rocket company as well. SpaceX’s stock has had a bruising month since hitting an all-time high after going public in mid-June. An aborted Starship test launch and Musk’s dubious plan for orbital data centers have investors betting against the company in incredible numbers.
During Wednesday’s earnings call, the company claimed that production of its Optimus humanoid robot remains on track, but didn’t elaborate beyond promising that production is starting “soon.”
“This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla, because everything on the robot is new,” Musk said.
Tesla’s robotaxi service is also being rolled out to six major metropolitan areas across the country, but continues to lag far behind its key competitor, Alphabet’s Waymo.
Despite slightly more optimistic vehicle sales numbers, the company continues to burn through billions of dollars to keep all of those new plates spinning.
The elephant in the room during this week’s call was the long-rumored possibility of Musk merging Tesla and SpaceX — a doubling down on his portfolio that could set up some of the most unbelievable financial drama in economic history.
The mercurial entrepreneur didn’t rule out the possibility, saying that “we can’t talk about combining companies on an earnings call.”
“It’s got to be done with the appropriate process,” he added.
Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, issued a recall after one of its self-driving cars blundered into a cloud of heavy smoke near a fire scene that emergency workers were responding to, and became confused.
The recall, in the form of a software update, will affect its entire fleet of 105 autonomous robotaxis.
The patch “enhances the existing capability of detecting active [emergency] scenes by adding the ability to detect and respond to heavy smoke in certain situations,” Zoox told TechCrunch in a statement.
While you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking this was related to the wildfire smoke covering much of the eastern US right now, the recall highlights how self-driving cars still struggle to respond to unpredictable conditions.
In a report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Zoox said that during the June 20 incident, one of its robotaxis “encountered heavy smoke that obscured an active emergency fire scene that was not cordoned off with cones.”
Though it should have avoided the smoke cloud, the vehicle, which wasn’t carrying any passengers, “braked hard while attempting to steer away before coming to a stop,” the company added. Eventually, a teleoperator intervened and helped reverse the robotaxi away from the scene, allowing first responders to place traffic cones to block off two of the three lanes. CNBC reported that the incident occurred in Las Vegas, where Zoox is currently offering free rides.
It’s not the first time robotaxi companies have landed in hot water for impeding emergency responders.
These mounting incidents led NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison to send a strongly-worded letter to robotaxi companies, calling their cars’ interference with emergency responders “unacceptable.”
“Let me be clear: the inability to detect and appropriately respond to such situations represents a functional insufficiency,” he wrote. “Emergency scenes are not rare or extreme ‘edge cases.'”
“To state it bluntly: an AV that cannot safely interact with first responders is a danger to the general public,” he added.
Robotaxis are multiplying across the US, and as they do, a not-so-flattering pattern is riding shotgun. Not only do robotaxi companies themselves put a significant strain on public resources, they’re training the public to act just as entitled as they are.
As a recent article by Bloomberg points out, riders hopping into driverless cabs from Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox are treating driverless trips as a license to unwind.
With no human behind the wheel, riders feel like they have no social contract to follow. As a result, they’re turning robotaxis into trash cans, leaving behind spilled drinks, food scraps, and in some cases, bodily fluids like vomit for the next unlucky sap.
Granted, it’s probably easier said than done to clean a mess from a robocab once it’s been made: as one unfortunate Waymo rider discovered in May, the vehicles will sometimes speed off within seconds of dropping you off, even if you have bags in the trunk.
Others are using their robotaxi rides as roving sleep pods. It’s tough to say how common this particular behavior is, but Bloomberg notes that first responders in Austin, Texas got so many calls about dozing riders during Waymo’s first nine months in the city that they had to invent a new category just for “sleepers.”
Elsewhere, people are treating their self-driving cars more like party buses. In April, a Tesla driver was arrested after police found him passed out behind the self-driving wheel, having polished off a buffet of wine coolers and pizza before dozing off.
Sure, none of this will really affect you unless robotaxis are part of your daily commute. But as discussion around the robotaxi’s broader impact on society grows more urgent, it’s worth noting that hailing one seems to put you in a league with some of the worst riders currently in the game.
Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m
The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.
Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.
EV owners were sent hefty PCNs but say some signs in private car parks fail to warn of fees to park and recharge car
Does refuelling your car class as parking? The answer appears to be yes if it’s an electric vehicle. Guardian Money has been contacted by several readers who were fined after charging their cars away from home.
The motorists report being caught out by signs that fail to make clear that charging points are subject to parking tariffs or to store opening times. Also, they have found some chargers being advertised as available for use when it would be a breach of the car park’s terms and conditions to use them.
Paper Transport (PTI) announced today that it is evaluating the Tesla Semi Long Range in dedicated operations in the Chicago market, becoming the latest fleet to put Tesla’s electric Class 8 truck to work in daily freight.
The Wisconsin-based carrier, which has logged more than 87 million miles on compressed and renewable natural gas, is adding battery-electric to a sustainability push it has been running for over 15 years.
A passenger on Ryanair — because of course — had his insistence on keeping his seat belt fastened abruptly validated when the window next to him suddenly “detached” and sucked the bulk of his body out of the plane.
Witnesses told Agence France-Presse that the man, a tourist from Serbia en route from Thessaloniki in Greece to Memmingen in Germany, had to be pulled in by the other passengers. Yes, several of them.
“Most of us had fallen asleep, we had closed our eyes. There was a noise, like a tyre bursting,” one of them told Radio Thessaloniki, per AFP. “We immediately realized there had been a decompression. There were screams… for a moment I thought someone had accidentally opened the emergency door.”
“The masks dropped and there was a strong smell,” she added. “The head and shoulders of one passenger were outside the window. Fortunately, he hadn’t taken off his seat belt.”
Per AFP, Greek media reported that the window was broken by a piece of debris that came off one of the plane’s engines, causing the cabin to decompress.
Ryanair in a statement described the incident anticlimactically. The plane “returned to Thessaloniki shortly after take-off when a passenger window detached during the flight. The aircraft landed normally and the passengers returned to the terminal.” An apology would’ve been nice, maybe.
Nearly getting airplane-keelhauled by the wind gods could take quite the toll physically and mentally. The man was hospitalized with friction burns, but thankfully authorities said he was in good condition otherwise.
You may remember a similar incident occurred over two years ago, when the door panel on an Alaska Airlines flight suddenly blew out midair, causing a massive scandal for the plane’s manufacturer Boeing. That plane was a Boeing 737 MAX 9; the Ryanair one was a 737 NG.
For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sworn up and down that the use of radar and lidar sensors for autonomous driving is a waste of time.
His counterargument has been that cameras and powerful AI-powered hardware are all you need for safe self-driving, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
That decision is now risking a major roadblocks for the company in New Jersey. As The Verge reports, a bill that’s coming up for a vote this year would require fully autonomous vehicles to use both cameras and at least two other sensing technologies — in most cases, lidar and radar.
If the bill were enacted, it would effectively banning Tesla’s fully autonomous fleet of Robotaxis. Other states could soon follow — including New York, which is pondering a similar bill — in a domino effect that could completely derail the automaker’s current trajectory.
“This is not anti-Tesla,” bill sponsor and senator Andrew Zwicker (D-NJ) told The Verge. “I’m pro-New Jersey safety.”
Zwicker argued that there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that a single sensor, plus software “can handle situations that humans can.”
“Can we get there? Maybe,” he told the publication. “But we’re not there yet.”
Relying entirely on cameras that can be blinded by the Sun, fog, or heavy rain is part of Musk’s major bet on AI. He has argued that adding extra sensors may end up being less safe thanks to what he called “sensor contention” in a tweet last year.
“We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety,” he wrote. “Cameras [for the win].”
However, Musk is largely alone in that belief. Competitors, most notably Waymo, have made major headway by relying on both cameras and other sensor tech, such as lidar and radar, which perform far better in inclement weather and the dark.
“To run 24/7 across the majority of public roads in New Jersey today, it needs lidar,” Carnegie Mellon professor and autonomous vehicle expert Philip Koopman told The Verge. “It’s pretty clear that today camera-only technology is not up to the challenge.”
Tesla’s current fleet of 42 fully autonomous Robotaxis on public Texas roads is still dwarfed by Waymo’s, which has 577 authorized robotaxis in the state, in addition to several thousand more spread across ten US metropolitan areas.
The company’s slow rollout has been mired by setbacks, which Musk has rationalized is the result of Tesla being “paranoid about safety.” The EV maker has gone to great lengths to censor the circumstances surrounding the Robotaxi crashes it has reported to regulators so far.
Unsurprisingly, Tesla is already lobbying to fight the New Jersey bill. Zwicker told The Verge that company representatives are discussing the subject with lawmakers.
It’s a precarious situation, especially considering the complete lack of comprehensive federal laws providing oversight over the rollout of autonomous vehicles. Each state has been left to fend for itself, a legal patchwork that’s allowing Tesla to push forward despite safety concerns.
In a groundbreaking decade-long study analyzing São Paulo’s urban landscape, researchers have revealed how the expansion of bike lanes and public parks profoundly influences physical activity and public health. Between 2014 and 2024, the city’s bike lane network surged from 242 to 743 kilometers, complemented by the addition of 15 municipal parks. This urban transformation was linked to increased transport-related cycling, emphasizing the critical role of accessible infrastructure within a 500-meter radius of residents’ homes.
The study’s multidisciplinary approach combined longitudinal surveys of 1,500 residents with geospatial datasets from the Geosampa platform, enabling precise correlation between environmental changes and behavior. Findings indicate that proximity to bike lanes significantly counteracts declining bicycle use trends, suggesting these facilities serve as protective factors promoting sustained physical activity. Such activity reduction directly translates to lower risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and improved mental health outcomes like reduced anxiety and depression.
Importantly, the research underscores active transportation infrastructure not only as a logistical planning tool but as a vital public health strategy. By reducing reliance on automobiles, these interventions diminish air pollution and traffic-related accidents, thereby contributing to climate change mitigation efforts. However, the study highlights uneven developments: wealthier neighborhoods received disproportionate infrastructure investments, calling for policy shifts to equip underserved zones with similar amenities.
Beyond infrastructural improvements, the researchers emphasize that sociocultural elements and affordability constraints also limit cycling uptake. Despite increased bike lanes, economic barriers such as the high cost of bicycles and gender disparities in cycling participation suggest that integrated approaches—encompassing recreational street design, bike-sharing expansions, and commuter support facilities—are necessary for meaningful behavioral shifts.
An illustrative testimony comes from a local photographer who transitioned from motorbike to bicycle commuting due to new bike bridges providing direct, safer routes. While embracing cycling’s growth, he voices concerns about road space allocation favoring cars and the emerging challenges of cyclists’ vulnerability amid the rise of faster electric bikes. Additionally, issues of public safety and bike theft remain barriers to broader adoption.
Overall, the findings reveal that São Paulo’s urban planning efforts over the past decade represent a promising model of how thoughtfully designed public open spaces can foster healthier, more sustainable cities. Still, ensuring equitable access and addressing multifaceted cultural and socioeconomic factors remain essential for realizing the full potential of active transport systems.
Subject of Research: Public open spaces and transport-related cycling in urban environments Article Title: A decade-long study on public open spaces and transport-related cycling in the largest Brazilian city News Publication Date: 13-Apr-2026 Web References: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2026.102323 Image Credits: Phelipe Janning/Agência FAPESP
Keywords
Urban planning, Transportation, Public health, Cycling, Active transportation, São Paulo, Infrastructure, Mental health
I would like to know why we build solar farms over green space, when we could just put them over massive car parks as a popular current internet meme suggests. Chris, Middlesbrough
Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published next Sunday.
The US energy landscape is changing quickly. Demand for artificial intelligence is driving up power demand while electric vehicle (EV) adoption slows down and enters a more complex phase. Together, these trends are reshaping how utilities, policymakers, financiers and automakers respond to emerging challenges in the energy sector.
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