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.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

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 Area Current. “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 Area Current. “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.

More on Waymo: It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

The post The People Maintaining Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Being Treated Horribly, Insider Claims appeared first on Futurism.

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 reports reports 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.

More on Tesla: Teslas Are Still Driving Into Oncoming Freight Trains

The post Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway appeared first on Futurism.

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.

However, that wasn’t the case for the May 2024 superstorm, which scientists estimate cost farmers half a billion dollars in damages.

“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.

More on the solar storm: Scientists Say the Largest Solar Storm in Two Decades Is About to Blast Earth

The post Researchers Alarmed as GPS Readings Suddenly Veer Off by 33 Feet, Enough to Crash Self-Driving Cars appeared first on Futurism.

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.

More on self-driving vehicles: Former Lyft Drivers Now Doing Menial Tasks for Their Waymo Overlords

The post Uber Drivers Say Waymo Robotaxis Are Driving Down Their Pay appeared first on Futurism.