Tesla’s flashy unveiling of its Cybercab robotaxi in 2024 left some glaring questions unanswered.
The sleek, gold-colored coupé impressed with a futuristic design, but baffled onlookers with its cramped two-seat interior, lack of a charging port, and a dubious, far-too-good-to-be-true $30,000 price tag.
Just under two years later, the first Cybercabs are starting to hit the streets in Austin, Texas — and Tesla is just itching to sell you one. Last week, the EV maker started handing out a “Robotaxi interest form,” as Electrek reported at the time, in an apparent effort attract would-be entrepreneurs willing to buy an entire fleet of the unusual vehicles.
Put simply, the idea is to share revenue from ride income with Tesla while the vehicles operate on the carmaker’s network, using its self-driving tech.
It’s part of a much broader plan. For many years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised that its Full Self-Driving-enabled vehicles, including the Cybercab, could effectively turn into an appreciating money-printing machine, allowing owners to sit on their couch and magically watch the money roll in.
As early as 2018, Musk promised investors that he saw the “future as kind of a shared electric autonomy, so that you’d be able to do ride-hailing or share the car any way,” likening it to “some combination of like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb.”
But there are plenty of reasons businesspeople should hesitate before takeing Tesla up on the offer of operating a Robotaxi fleet, as Electrek‘s Fred Lambert argued in a compelling essay this week.
Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.
There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.
Then there’s the questionable value proposition. Tesla controls the entire network, the self-driving software, and prices. It even “sets the split,” as Lambert argues. Instead, fleet owners are stuck eating the “capital cost and the depreciation, while Tesla keeps the software margin and its cut of every fare.”
In other words, “you don’t own a business in that arrangement. You own the downside.”
It’s a dubious business opportunity closely reminiscent of Tesla’s infamous FSD advanced driver assistance software. Owners once shelled out a massive $15,000 — before it became exclusively a $99 a month subscription — to access a feature that’s still a complete disaster, leading to fatal collisions and terrifying close calls even after many years of development.
Not only are they spending the equivalent of a small car on faulty software, they’re willing to shoulder the risk as well. Tesla has a long track record of trying to wriggle out of lawsuits arising from these accidents, arguing it was the driver’s fault for engaging the software and not paying attention.
Much like its regular lineup of FSD-enabled vehicles, Tesla’s Cybercab relies entirely on a camera-based autonomous driving system, an approach that experts say is fundamentally flawed.
Nonetheless, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, local investors in Austin are chomping at the opportunity to run their own Cybercab fleet.
Meanwhile, regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are watching closely. The agency opened a probe into the Tesla, questioning that its new Cybercab “meets all applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.”
One of the selling points of Tesla’s much-hyped Cybercab — its purpose-built robotaxi — is that it doesn’t need manual controls. That’s why it doesn’t even come with a steering wheel or pedals.
But an early passenger who got to ride one of the self-driving cars after they launched in Austin last week discovered that they secretly have manual controls hidden in a touchscreen — the most practical way to control a car, as everyone knows — after its software glitched out and accidentally revealed them.
The passenger, Matthew Skrzypczak, wrote on X over the weekend that when he got in his Cybercab to take it for a spin, the display, instead of showing an interface to let him start his ride, showed a “virtual joystick for manual driving.”
“I have a feeling I wasn’t supposed to see this,” he wrote.
In a video he uploaded, the display shows a splitscreen view of various camera angles and an area that lets you control several of the car’s functions. Crucially, there’s also a touchscreen joystick for shifting the car into gear, which says “forward” at the top and “reverse” at the bottom.
Skrzypczak was able to close the door and honk the horn successfully, but when he tries to move the car it doesn’t budge — which is probably for the best, since there were pedestrians nearby — though this may be because he was simply using the joystick wrong.
This feature is almost certainly intended for Tesla employees, and it’s unclear why a passenger like Skrzypczak, and at least one other who noted the issue, was able to access it. To be clear, manual controls are obviously necessary in case an employee or emergency workers needs to move the vehicle when it’s malfunctioning. But putting it behind a slippery touchscreen is also far less practical than an old-fashioned steering wheel and pedal, which is all being done so CEO Elon Musk can have bragging rights.
The workaround hasn’t proved amusing to regulators. Shortly after Tesla launched Cybercab rides in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit into how Tesla self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional manual controls.
The Amazon-owned driverless car company is a distant second to Waymo. Its pitch to riders? Wine pop-ups, festival sponsorships and a car built to be filmed.
An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.
It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.
The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.
The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.
Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.
The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”
Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.
With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.
As work conditions go, the transition from licensed taxi cabs to the rideshare model represented a significant step backwards for drivers in the US. Stable wage jobs became “side gigs,” while human managers were replaced by labyrinthine algorithms. And forget fleet maintenance — under the new model, disenfranchised drivers were now responsible for their own vehicle’s upkeep, and all the financial burdens that come with it.
Yet with robotaxis from brands like Waymo and Tesla spreading through US cities like wildfire, even the Uber-fied gig economy is starting to become untenable for workers. Rising in its place is the “robotaxi handling” industry, bring with it contract jobs that are somehow even more grueling than the rideshare gigs they’re replacing.
A startling interview with an anonymous Waymo contractor by Bay Area Current details precisely how degrading these jobs can be. The worker, identified only as a “Robotaxi Handler,” outlines a poorly organized jobsite where incognito enforcers routinely snitch on undertrained contractors on behalf of management. Oh, and there’s poop to clean — lots of poop.
Starting off, the handler clarifies that although their work is for Waymo vehicles, they actually report to a third-party company called Transdev US, which handles the messy logistics behind the autonomous cabs. (Neither company commented on Bay Area Current‘s interview.)
Per the worker, Transdev’s hiring process amounts to a kind of Soylent Green approach to human resources, in which dozens of contractors are rounded up sight unseen, onboarded en masse, and then culled from the herd when they inevitably fall behind.
“There’s no interview process,” the worker explained. “They weed people out over time based on whether or not you can keep up with that process and adapt really quickly.”
After that rapid-fire orientation, workers can be assigned to various Waymo facilities all over their home city, with job duties rotating on a daily basis.
“Who gets placed in those specific jobs gets decided by managers the day of,” the robotaxi handler told Bay AreaCurrent. “So your job changes every day depending on how much experience you have, how long you’ve been there, and how friendly you are with the managers.”
Sometimes those roles involve troubleshooting — updating software, cleaning sensors, and uploading Waymo data to company servers. It also includes unsticking Waymos when they clog up traffic, which is becoming a frequent occurrence in San Francisco. That can put workers in a precarious situation in which they have to choose whether to follow company orders not to interfere with a piece of tech still in its infancy.
“The policy for Transdev and Waymo is actually to let [the car] sit there and figure it out, because if we disengage it whenever there’s an issue, then the cars don’t have a chance to figure out the issue itself,” the worker explained. “But when it gets really bad, then we have to — what are you going to do? There’s 50 cars all stuck and people off the street yelling at us and threatening us.”
Other times, handlers can be assigned to cleaning tasks. This becomes especially unpleasant near the end of the week, when weekend revelers leave all kinds of nasty surprises for handlers to mop up.
“Typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back,” the handler told Bay AreaCurrent. “Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop. Way more than you think.”
“One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up,” the worker continued. “I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.”
This worker’s arduous experience wrangling Waymos in San Francisco may just a taste of things to come as robotaxis hit the streets across the US.
A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.
The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.
Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.
The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.
Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.
What happened is unclear. Tesla’s self-driving software has a well-known “phantom braking” problem that causes the cars to brake unexpectedly, but this is typically to slow the vehicle down, not stop it completely. Going from highway speeds to a grinding halt would be an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, example. It’s also possible that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or experienced some kind of medical episode that rendered them unable to respond.
The upshot is that we’re more or less being kept in the dark. These details, and whether the car was running the now-obsolete Autopilot or its more advanced successor FSD is impossible to know, because Tesla censored that section of the crash report. It has long redacted crucial information in these reportsreports under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” a practice that is legal but rarely used to the extent that Tesla does. It has gotten in trouble with regulators for how it reports crashes, though. Last year, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for repeatedly failing to report crashes in time.
In November of last year, scientists warned of a “severe” solar storm, the strongest in over two decades, colliding with the Earth.
Solar storms are the result of a surge in solar activity, with the Sun unleashing a barrage of charged particles that can trigger spectacular auroras — and wreak havoc with communications satellites and radio signals — when they reach the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Beyond being ferocious enough to delay the launch of a Mars-bound NASA spacecraft, the storm wreaked absolute havoc with GPS systems back on the ground for hours at a time. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists found that global navigation satellite systems experienced “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet during the superstorm, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” across the continental United States.
That’s enough risk to warrant a careful study on these types of events can impact human activity on Earth.
“The results underscore the importance of accurate understanding of various space weather phenomena to enhance our predictive capabilities through coordinated observations and physics‐based modeling and ultimately reducing disruptions to RF applications during space weather events,” the paper reads.
The researchers analyzed observations from several scientific instruments spread out across the US to watch the chaos unfold last November. The Aurora Oval, a ring-shaped area of pronounced activity around the Earth’s geomagnetic north pole where auroras conventionally occur, was pushed south toward the equator. This triggered a “horizontally extended band of intense density gradients” in the upper atmosphere, causing fluctuations in how long signals take to travel through it.
The result: “significant positioning errors at mid-latitudes,” the researchers noted.
The researchers also found that as the auroras became brighter, the observed irregularities became more intense, deteriorating GPS accuracy accordingly.
Fortunately, while farming equipment like GPS-equipped tractors would’ve likely been affected, the November storm occurred long after the farming season concluded.
“Had the November superstorm occurred during the farming season in the American sector, it could have caused significant economic losses for the American farming industry, in addition to affecting the autonomous transportation industry,” the paper reads.
On September 3, 1967, at 4:50 a.m., a lone Swedish taxi driver stopped his car on the street in the light of early dawn. He carefully checked around him on both sides of the road, then pulled over from the left-hand side of the road onto the opposite lane on the right-hand side. He then stopped again. After 10 minutes, he continued driving on the right, along with every other driver in Sweden who had made this switch at the same time. This was Högertrafikomläggningen, also known as “Dagen H,” the largest traffic logistics event that Sweden—and perhaps the world—had ever seen.
Dagen H provides insight into some of the difficulties that people and systems have with changing their behavior, alongside highlighting the danger of having left-hand- or right-hand-drive vehicles misaligned on the road. With its memorabilia campaigns and smooth execution, Dagen H has since provided an example for other countries to follow, some of which still sorely need to make a change.
Rösta nej: Swedish voters said “no” to driving right
The origins of left-hand or right-hand traffic are “clouded in antiquity,” writes David Baldwin, a U.S. traffic safety expert, but are most likely related to horse-drawn carts. In Sweden’s case, the first ordinance on left-hand traffic originated in 1734. That was later affirmed in 1916.
But this left-hand driving practice meant Sweden was out of step with all surrounding nations, where people drove on the right. This meant that most Swedes drove left-hand-drive vehicles (mostly imported from surrounding countries, or manufactured with export in mind), which resulted in a high level of head-on collisions and fatalities. Essentially, Sweden’s left-hand drive vehicles were “wrong-hand drive.”
The left-hand driving rule was hotly debated for several decades, followed by a 1955 referendum with dismal results. The Swedish National Maritime, Transport and Military Museums writes that “a violent scaremongering erupted about the enormous waste of money the changeover would entail and, above all, the terrible bloodbath that would occur on the roads.” Ultimately, the referendum concluded with 83 percent voting against the switch.
Generally, people don’t like making major changes to their habits, or feeling like their behavior is incorrect. “[People] are invested in maintaining the status quo,” said Dr. Christina (Missy) Rudin-Brown, a transportation safety and behavioral adaptation expert at Human Factors North. “Because if you switch everything, it means everything you’ve been doing your whole life has been wrong and unsafe.”
Despite the significant resistance, the Swedish parliament decided on May 10, 1963, that right-hand traffic would go ahead.
The major pop hit: “Keep to the right, Svensson”
Several years of widespread advertising then took place, including memorabilia with a leaning blue letter “H” on a yellow background (for “Höger,” meaning “right”). People could purchase cups, soda bottles, socks, underwear, and bags, and each household received a 32-page pamphlet, produced in nine different languages. For children, cartoons helped them learn to look left, using characters such as Donald Duck and Dennis the Menace.
One popular song about the traffic switch called “Håll dej till höger, Svensson” (“Keep to the right, Svensson”) reached number five on the Swedish hit music charts, and stayed in the top 10 for three weeks. Despite the widespread attention and understanding, many residents were nervous. The Victoria Advocate reported that many Swedes said they’d prefer to “stay off the streets for a few days.”
In 1967, Sweden came out with the bop to remind drivers to stay on the right side of the road. Video: Håll dig till höger Svensson – Swedish propaganda song, All things Swedish
One of the issues was that this change affected everyone. “It’s not just the drivers,” said Dr. Rudin-Brown. “You have all the pedestrians, who might be very alert and conscious of the change for a few days, but that tends to wear off over time. All it takes is one instance of forgetting that you have to look left first.”
The big switch takes place
The Saturday before the switch, traffic was banned, and workers hurried around switching signs. By evening, it was so quiet that it felt like there was “a touch of the eerie.” A few hours later, early on Sunday morning, the Swedish population (including its nearly 2 million drivers) was waiting with bated breath. Every driver knew they were required to stop at 4:50 a.m., switch sides of the road, and pause for 10 minutes, before continuing to drive at a lowered speed.
Thousands of Swedes came out on that Sunday to test out the new rules, with numerous resulting traffic jams. Crowds began gathering at around 4 a.m., with fireworks, impromptu choirs, clapping, and “what appeared to be every taxi driver in the city” ready to go. One man, so eager to be a part of it all, turned up in his pajamas.
For most people, making such changes is very hard because of behaviors that have become partly automatic. Difficulties arise particularly when our cognitive resources are under pressure.
On September 3, 1967, at 4:50 a.m., Kungsgatan( King’s Street) in Stockholm, Sweden, suddenly switched from driving on the left to the right. Image: Public Domain / Jan Collsiˆˆ
However, in the case of Dagen H, every driver was potentially expecting every other driver to do something incorrect. “If you did turn the wrong way down the road,” said Dr. Rudin-Brown, “at least you’d be facing drivers who might expect that to happen rather than people just continuing [on] into a collision.”
Despite some level of chaos, the number of accidents was far below that of a typical day. One hundred and fifty-seven accidents were reported nationwide, only a small number of which were serious.
However, one visiting traffic expert warned of celebrating too soon: “We have only seen the bride and groom brought to the altar. The citizens of Sweden have now embarked on their honeymoon. It is too early to judge the results.”
In the first few weeks after Dagen H, traffic accidents maintained their low levels, some of which was attributed to lower speed limits and other rules established alongside the switch.
Throughout 1967, the year of the switch, 1,077 traffic deaths were recorded, compared to 1,313 in 1965. The mood in Sweden had also changed: Instead of the initial 83 percent against the move in the 1955 referendum, 57 percent of Swedes after Dagen H perceived it favorably.
The complex safety results of Dagen H
In the following years, overall traffic deaths crept back up. However, when compared to deaths per 100,000 cars, the fatalities continued reducing. This meant that even while the number of cars on the roads was increasing, driving had become safer.
Dr. Felix Rösel, professor of economics at Technische Universität Braunschweig, studied the Dagen H switch to examine the causal effect of wrong-hand-drive vehicles on road safety. He was able to determine that “more than 4,000 lives between 1953 and 1966” could have been saved if Dagen H had happened earlier. Rösel’s results highlighted just how dangerous a wrong-hand-drive misalignment is. “I came up with this one-third markup in risk,” said Dr. Rösel. “I think that’s quite substantial. It’s not a trivial thing.”
In addition, it was not only the most serious types of accidents that could have been prevented earlier. Rather, the effect was also shown with minor accidents, such as hitting another parked car.
“We see very similar effects on the number of fatalities and the number of injuries [from the study],” said Dr. Rösel. “It seems you have a problem per se, that you have this bad vision that is not aligned with the road.”
This diagram shows the field of view under different vehicle configurations. Image: Courtesy of Felix Rösel
Dr. Rösel also found that the reduction in accidents was likely due to the switch, rather than because of reduced speeds or other safety measures put in place after the event. But if safety improvements came from Dagen H, why did accidents not reduce more significantly? This is partially due to behavioral adaptation.
“People usually use [a safety improvement] in some way to adapt and improve their experience,” said Dr. Rudin-Brown. “They feel like the road is safer, they feel like they’re better able to drive faster and assume more risk.” This means that even with the safety benefits of Dagen H and greater visibility, drivers eventually reverted to driving less carefully.
A huge undertaking with global relevance
Other countries have followed the example of Sweden and made similar changes, most notably Samoa in 2009. In Samoa, the country switched from right- to left-side driving to bring it into step with surrounding countries. Samoa also faced widespread protests (including from a group called “People Against Switching Sides”), and broadcast a song about the switch.
A number of other countries around the world still deal with wrong-side-drive alignment, particularly Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Russia, all of which experienced widespread protests when changes were suggested.
“These fundamental institutions of driving on the left or right, it’s almost in the genes: the British on the left and the continent on the right,” said Rösel. “This really takes a long time [to change]. Even in Sweden, it was not a switch from one day to another. It took decades.”
In the case of Dagen H, the switch was considered a success. For Swedes at the time, only “a few minor skirmishes between right-hand partisans—now estimated at 43 percent of the population—and adherents of the old way were reported in towns across the country,” wrote the Daytona Beach Morning Journal. “But even the reluctant majority appeared to be swept up in the festive mood of the day.”
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta are fed up with Waymo robotaxis.
The Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union is claiming that drivers have reported lower pay, longer waits between rides, and fewer fares since Waymo began offering its service in the city last June, Axios reports.
As such, the union is calling on city and state leaders to curb Waymo’s expansion — and to consider some measures to easen its disruptive effects on their livelihoods.
Liza Ramsey of the ARDU proposed a particularly bold measure to Atlanta City Council members on Wednesday. Rideshare drivers, Ramsey claimed, wanted to create a robotaxi impact fee of between $0.50 to $1.00 that would be added to each ride.
The money from this would go into a “driver transition fund” to help drivers find a new calling with job training and other assistive programs.
“If corporations profit from replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute to helping those workers transition to the next opportunity,” Ramsey said, per Axios.
The union also wants to ban robotaxis from picking up people from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Airports, historically, have always been a reliable place to pick up passengers.
Ramsey said that the union hasn’t collected any hard data proving the decline in income, but cited widespread complaints from drivers who share screenshots of their earnings in a group chat.
Since launching in June 2025, Waymo’s Atlanta service has logged more than 5.4 million miles of fully autonomous rides. (It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, with residents complaining about the vehicles’ strange habit of congregating in suburban neighborhoods and repeatedly plunging into flooded stretches of road.) It also hasn’t had an antagonistic relationship with Uber: to help it get a foothold in the area, Waymo partnered with the rideshare app, allowing passengers to hail a robotaxi directly through its app as they would a human driver.
It’s not the only city where Uber and Lyft drivers are disgruntled about automation. In January, rideshare drivers protested against Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, demanding tighter regulation of the industry. Similar protests have taken place in New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
ARDU is also not the only union going on the offensive against autonomous vehicles. Earlier this month, the California branch of the Teamsters union sued state lawmakers for pushing out new regulations friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry, which they allege didn’t consider the devastating impact of self-driving trucks on their jobs.
The panel debates whether giving Claude controlled access to 1Password credentials is a practical automation feature or an unnecessary security risk, weighing trust, passkeys, vault isolation, and AI limitations. The conversation then shifts to the humor of waterproof phone holders and shower tech before wrapping with a discussion of how autonomous vehicles could reshape liability, […]
Cameras in airline seatback screens and increasingly sophisticated driver-monitoring systems spark a debate over safety, privacy, data access, and surveillance. The MacVoices Live! panel examines EU vehicle requirements, Tesla interior cameras, dash cams, accident evidence, connected devices, and whether consumers receive enough disclosure and control over technologies designed to watch them. Panel members include: Chuck […]
At this point, it’s a pretty well known fact that electric vehicles — and, at least in the popular imagination, Teslas especially — have a nagging habit of erupting into flames.
One Tesla owner in Maine evidently has that concern hovering in the back of their mind every time they leave the driveway.
While driving around the town of Tremont in a sleek red Model S, an unnamed driver hit an object on the road which punctured the vehicle’s lithium-ion battery, local station WABI5 reported. As most EV drivers are hopefully aware, any kind of damage to a car’s battery can easily spark a fire fueled by thermal runaway, resulting in a uniquely dangerous inferno that can be difficult to put out.
Luckily, this driver kept their head, driving straight to the Tremont fire station where the high-voltage battery immediately burst into flames, Bangor Daily News reported.
With help from the nearby Southwest Harbor Fire Department, the crew of the Tremont Volunteer Fire Department sprang into action, shutting down the road and dousing the Tesla using an arsenal of firehoses.
Based on photos of the incident, it seems the Tesla was totaled, but the driver is said to be doing alright.
The Tremont fire comes just days after an exploding Tesla in Seattle sent two firefighters to the hospital. That particular EV was parked inside an attached garage at the time, resulting in a two-alarm housefire that displaced an unfortunate family.
All told, if you drive an EV, it’s probably smart to have the address of the nearest fire department drilled into your head — especially if it’s a Tesla.
With gas prices high, people in developing countries are lining up to buy battery-powered bikes. We took a spin around Lahore, Pakistan, on a small-but-mighty one.
A research team in Japan has won a US$1 million Milestone 2 award in the XPRIZE Healthspan competition for developing engineered “super exosomes,” microscopic biological delivery vehicles designed to target aging and damaged cells. Led by Professor Keisuke Goda of Tohoku University’s SiRIUS Institute of Medical Research and Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Department of Chemistry, the team was selected from more than 600 competitors worldwide.
XPRIZE Healthspan is a seven-year international competition focused on extending the period of life people spend in good health. Participating teams are challenged to develop treatments capable of restoring muscle, cognitive, and immune function in adults between 50 and 90 years old. The competition sets a minimum target of reversing at least 10 years of biological decline, while the most ambitious goal is a 20-year improvement within one year or less of treatment. Goda’s team is now moving forward after receiving recognition for results obtained in aged animal studies.
At the center of the research are exosomes, naturally occurring nanoparticles released by cells. These membrane-bound vesicles normally transport proteins, lipids, messenger RNA, and other molecular signals between cells, functioning as part of the body’s communication network. Because exosomes can carry biological cargo and interact with specific tissues, scientists have been investigating them as potential alternatives to synthetic drug-delivery systems. However, naturally produced exosomes often lack sufficient targeting precision, limiting their ability to reach the cells most relevant to a disease or aging process.
The Tohoku-led group attempted to solve that problem by chemically modifying the surface of exosomes with lanthanide ions. Lanthanides are a family of metallic elements with distinctive electronic and chemical properties. According to the researchers, attaching these ions changes the surface behavior of the exosomes and substantially improves their ability to recognize and bind to senescent cells. The resulting particles have been named “super exosomes,” a term that reflects their enhanced targeting and delivery capabilities rather than a new biological category.
Cellular senescence is one of the major biological processes associated with aging. Senescent cells have generally stopped dividing because of accumulated damage or stress, but they do not necessarily disappear. Instead, some remain metabolically active and release inflammatory molecules, growth regulators, and other signals that can disrupt nearby tissues. This collection of secreted factors, often called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, can contribute to chronic inflammation, impaired tissue repair, and the deterioration of organs. Precisely influencing these cells has therefore become a major objective in longevity research.
The proposed super-exosome platform is designed to deliver regenerative molecular cargo directly to aging tissues after attaching to senescent cells. Potential cargoes include growth factors, messenger RNA, and other genetic materials capable of altering cellular behavior. Rather than distributing such molecules broadly throughout the body, a targeted exosome could concentrate them near damaged or dysfunctional tissue. In theory, this approach could promote repair while reducing unwanted effects in healthy cells, although the degree of targeting and the durability of the response will need to be confirmed in human studies.
In preclinical experiments involving several groups of aged mice, the researchers reported statistically significant improvements in frailty, physical performance, and multiple functional measures associated with aging. They also described the treatment’s safety profile as excellent in the studies conducted so far. The team says the overall benefit corresponds to more than 15 additional healthy human years when estimated using cross-species lifespan scaling. Such calculations can help compare biological effects between species, but they are not evidence that a mouse treatment will extend human life by a specific number of years. Human biology, dosing, immune responses, and long-term risks could differ substantially.
The award will support the next stage of development: clinical studies planned in collaboration with Tohoku University Hospital and the Tohoku University Healthspan Research Center. These studies will need to establish how the particles behave in humans, how efficiently they reach senescent cells, what cargoes are most effective, and whether the treatment produces measurable improvements in strength, cognition, immunity, or other healthspan indicators. Researchers will also have to monitor possible immune reactions, unintended effects on healthy tissues, changes in tumor risk, and the persistence of engineered exosomes in the body. These questions are essential before claims of age reversal can move beyond the laboratory.
The platform could eventually be investigated for conditions involving muscle decline, cognitive impairment, immune dysfunction, hair loss, skin aging, and reproductive health. The team plans to commercialize the technology through NanoTitan, with the aim of developing scalable manufacturing and international distribution for exosome-based therapeutics produced in Japan. “Advancing to the XPRIZE Healthspan finals is an important milestone, but our ultimate goal is to translate this technology into therapies that allow people to lead healthy, independent, and active lives longer,” Goda said. The research now enters its most demanding phase: determining whether an impressive result in aged mice can become a safe, reproducible, and clinically meaningful treatment for people.
Subject of Research: Engineered “super exosomes” designed to target senescent cells and deliver regenerative molecular cargo for healthy aging.
Article Title: Japanese Research Team Wins US$1 Million XPRIZE Award for “Super Exosome” Aging Technology
Web References: https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/673c8fb3-268a-4a90-93b4-a0d531624a52/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public
With gas prices high, people in developing countries are racing to buy battery-powered bikes. The Iran war has made Trump “salesman of the year,” one executive in Pakistan said.
With gas prices high, people in developing countries are lining up to buy battery-powered bikes. The Iran war has made Trump “salesman of the year,” one executive in Pakistan said.
As Waymo deploys more driverless cars to 15 U.S. cities and counting, its vehicles keep encountering new and unexpected situations that they have no script to handle.
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.
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