On today’s pressing episode of Quick Charge, we challenge the notion that all press is good press by filling the void of information surrounding this week’s Tesla Cybercab launch with a whole lot of bad news for the Full Self Driving brand.
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Waymo’s robotaxis have collected more than 8,300 parking tickets in San Francisco since the start of 2025, running up close to $1 million in fines along the way.
The citations tracked the fleet’s rapid growth across the city. In 2024, Waymo caught just 589 tickets. It’s now averaging more than 100 a week.
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Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis.
The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.
The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.
© Alex Kent, Bloomberg
On today’s brain-addled episode of Quick Charge, President Trump says electric car drivers have a disease, Full Self Driving won’t stop earning Tesla drivers tickets, and Waymo’s CEO spends over forty minutes explaining why Tesla’s tech won’t ever beat a human driver.
Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.
He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.
A local judge has ruled that Waymo can no longer use its side-by-side charging facilities overnight in Santa Monica, California, as these may pose a “public nuisance.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bradley S. Phillips granted this week the City of Santa Monica’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the city’s ongoing public nuisance lawsuit against the autonomous vehicle giant.
City officials and neighbors assert that the constant stream of vehicles at the charging stations create light and sound pollution and cause undue traffic congestion on the streets and nearby alleys, creating a collective bother and disruption.
© Waymo
Waymo is putting Google’s Gemini AI assistant inside its robotaxis for the first time, alongside the first major redesign of its rider interface in years.
Both features are launching in the Ojai, Waymo’s purpose-built vehicle, as the company gets ready to open the car up to more public riders.
Tesla told shareholders this week that its Robotaxi service is expanding. The company’s own chart proves it isn’t.
In its Q2 2026 update, Tesla leaned on a cumulative “paid Robotaxi miles” chart climbing past 2.4 million miles as its headline proof of momentum. But break that curve into quarters and the growth flatlines: Robotaxi added roughly 900,000 paid miles in Q2 2026, the same as it did in Q1.
Tesla switched on its “Robotaxi” service in Tampa and Orlando on Monday, adding two Florida cities to a driverless network that still runs on a couple dozen cars. The company’s @robotaxi account announced it in a four-word post: “Robotaxi now in Tampa & Orlando!”
The timing isn’t subtle. Tesla reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and Robotaxi is the story Elon Musk keeps selling to investors. Two new city names the day before make for a nice slide. The fleet behind them tells a different story.
Tesla has filed four new “Robotaxi” crash reports with NHTSA, and the most revealing one involves a Tesla remote operator driving the vehicle into a tree stump in Houston.
It’s the third crash Tesla has now reported involving a human operating the car remotely caused the collision — and the first one Tesla has formally coded as remote operation in its filing.
New Jersey lawmakers are advancing a bill that would require driverless commercial vehicles to carry cameras plus two additional sensor types — a mandate Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi can’t meet.
The proposed law, S1677, would effectively lock Tesla out of the most densely populated US state unless it adds the radar and lidar hardware that Elon Musk has spent years insisting his cars don’t need.
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.
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