Autonomous Cars

The autonomous car unit shares its parent company, Alphabet, with Google, which in January cut over 12,000 jobs or about six percent of its workforce. The Information reports that after a new round of layoffs affecting primarily engineers, Waymo has let go of about 8 percent of the people working there.

Amazon’s driverless subsidiary Zoox claims that it doesn’t need an exemption from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to deploy vehicles without traditional controls like steering wheels (like GM’s Cruise) because it is using “self-certification” to ensure its vehicles are safe. That sounded kind of weird, so I reached out to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to see what they say. Here’s what they told me.

The automaker’s AV division, Cruise, submitted an application to the California DMV for permission to test its steering wheel-less autonomous people mover on public streets, according to a recorded request by the Wall Street Journal. The automaker says it will only test its Origin vehicle in a confined area in San Francisco during limited hours. If approved, it would be the first no-steering-wheel-having vehicle built for human passengers allowed on public roads in the state.