Tesla is building a purpose-built, wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle, a company policy advisor told lawmakers in Washington, DC, on Monday.
But Tesla gave no timeline, no vehicle, and no details, and it’s not clear the “active product” is anything more than the Robovan it unveiled nearly two years ago.
Waymo has activated fully driverless operations in Las Vegas, its riders will now see vehicles with no human at the wheel, and the Alphabet unit says Denver, San Diego, and Tampa are next in line.
The move adds four new markets to Waymo’s driverless footprint and pushes the company deeper into its target of 1 million paid rides per week by the end of 2026.
Elon Musk says Tesla’s Full Self-Driving will soon remember your parking preferences and let you talk to it through Grok, like giving directions to an Uber driver.
The features sound useful, and they reflect how genuinely impressive FSD has become — but they also underscore that it remains a supervised driver-assist system, not the unsupervised self-driving Tesla has sold to owners for years.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says the money automakers charge for self-driving software won’t last, comparing autonomy to airbags: a paid option today, baked into the price of every car tomorrow.
The comments, made in a new interview with WIRED, amount to a quiet warning shot at Tesla, which just moved its “Full Self-Driving” package to a subscription-only model at $99 per month.
Tesla didn’t report a single at-fault “Robotaxi” crash in the latest NHTSA autonomous-vehicle data — its only fresh incident was a Model Y getting rear-ended while stopped, clearly the other driver’s fault.
That sounds like good news for Tesla’s safety record. But live fleet data points to the real reason the crashes have dried up: Tesla’s robotaxis are barely running, and the active fleet is shrinking a year into the program.
Baidu’s Apollo Go has received a Level 4 autonomous driving permit in Switzerland for AmiGo, a robotaxi service it is running with Swiss Post’s PostBus, putting the Chinese tech giant ahead of Waymo and Tesla in deploying driverless vehicles into European public transport.
The Federal Roads Office (FEDRO) special permit covers an 80 km² service area across three eastern cantons, and Baidu says the project is on track to become the largest planned automated public transport operation of its kind in Europe.
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.
Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving told Electrek that the company is spending roughly 300 million RMB (~$41 million) per month on AI training alone and believes it has already reached parity with Tesla’s FSD v13 — with v14 within reach before the end of summer.
I sat down with Dr. Xianming Liu, head of Xpeng’s General Intelligence Center, the day after he delivered a keynote at CVPR 2026 in Denver — sharing the stage with Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy and leaders from Nvidia and Waymo at one of the world’s top computer vision conferences.
BYD says it will assume full financial liability for at-fault accidents that happen while its “God’s Eye” urban driving system is active in China — with no cap on the payout.
It’s a commitment Tesla has never made for “Full Self-Driving,” and it flips the industry’s standard liability model on its head.
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