Everyone needs to get around. How we do it will change more over the next decade than it has in the last century. Legacy automakers, like Ford and GM, are scrambling to become technology-savvy companies, and the tech industry is trying to cash in on the change. New players, like Rivian and Tesla, are disrupting the industry and sometimes stumbling. We look at how self-driving hardware and software make the automobile better or, in some cases, deeply flawed. We cut through the hype and empty promises to tell you what’s really happening and what we think is coming. Verge Transportation cares about all moving machines and the place they have in the future.
Despite Elon Musk’s public statements that Tesla was close to getting “regulatory permission” to launch a robotaxi service in the Bay Area, the company has yet to apply for any of the required permits, Reuters reports. It also logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California roads. Seems like a strange position for a company staking its future on robots and self-driving cars.
The ridehail company is working with Irish drone company Manna to launch a commercial drone delivery service on the Emerald Island. This is Uber’s first drone delivery deployment in Europe, although the two companies say they plan on bringing their service to more cities in the future. Uber also oversees drone delivery in Dallas, Texas, with Flytrex, while Manna used to deliver Samsung electronics via drone in its home market.
The robotaxi company has yet to obtain permits for driverless commercial operations in either city, but it typically deploys manually driven vehicles to gather mapping data while its applications move through the bureaucracy in the background. The news comes after Waymo announced the commencement of driverless operations in four new cities in Texas and Florida earlier this week, bringing its total robotaxi markets in the US to 10.
[Waymo]
Joby Aviation, the company that acquired Uber’s own air taxi business in 2020, says it will launch its first commercial service in Dubai later this year. To build anticipation, Uber is adding Joby’s air taxis to its app so customers can get a sense of what it will be like when the service eventually launches.
A year ago James Bruton demonstrated a custom self-balancing bike that rolled around on a pair of big red inflatable balls. For 2026 he’s both simplified the bike by reducing it to just a single ball, while also further complicating the build by creating his own custom omni-wheels for more precision and control.
The robotaxi company said today that it will start accepting its first public riders in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. First up will be customers from those four cities who have downloaded the Waymo app; other customers will be added on a rolling basis, the company said. That brings Waymo’s total number of markets to 10, which is double from where it was a couple of months ago.
On Monday afternoon, Uber announced it’s buying the parking spot reservation app for an undisclosed amount, saying it plans to add parking benefits to Uber One and build in-app reservation into its main app, bringing car owners into Uber’s ecosystem.
The two also note the potential for fleet services (like parking robotaxis?), and vehicle charging.
The Italian automaker cancelled the Lanzador, which was supposed to be its first crack at a pure battery-electric supercar, to focus instead on plug-in hybrids. Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winklemann told the Sunday Times that the “acceptance curve” for EVs among the company’s target demographic was “close to zero”. Yipes!
[The Sunday Times]
The parent company of Jeep and Dodge just took a $26.5 billion hit on its EV investment. But its problems run much deeper than that.
The EV company says the staff cuts are intended to “improve operational effectiveness and optimize our resources,” TechCrunch reports. An internal memo added that the company is still focused on “further expansion into the robotaxi market,” following the launch of a robotaxi collaboration with Nuro and Uber last year.
The EV tech startup rocked the auto industry with its CES announcement of a production-ready solid-state battery. Since then, there’s been a lot of skepticism and some out-right denials that the battery is even real. Now, Donut Labs is pushing back with a cleverly titled new video series, “I Donut Believe,” and independent test results that verify its claims. The first report is expected to drop next week.
A federal jury in Florida last year found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot driver assist software, and ordered the company to pay the families $243 million. Tesla appealed the ruling, but now a judge has dismissed that effort. In her ruling, US District Court Judge Beth Bloom stated that Tesla’s arguments “were already considered and rejected” and that the evidence at trial “more than supports the jury verdict and does not find it committed any error.”
That’s the message from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Thursday as the agency released a 311-page redacted report (pdf) on what went wrong during the Boeing Starliner’s first crewed flight test in 2024.
NASA and Boeing announced that “Investigators identified an interplay of combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns that created risk conditions inconsistent with NASA’s human spaceflight safety standard.”
An update to the Rivian mobile app released today introduces a companion app for the Apple Watch. From your wrist you can lock and unlock doors, vent windows, activate the alarm, adjust the cabin temperature using the Apple Watch’s crown dial, and monitor your vehicle’s battery status from your watch face.
Starting on May 3rd, 2026, five Formula 1 races, including the Miami, Monaco, British, Italian, and United States Grands Prix, will be shown in “select IMAX locations” across the country. The showings will take place in at least 50 IMAX theaters as a result of a new partnership with Apple.
The SUV pioneer owned by Volkswagen won’t start production on its first EVs, the Terra truck and the Traveler SUV, until 2028, not 2027 as originally planned, German publication Der Spiegel reports (as noted by The Drive). Given the dour mood around EVs these days, a one-year production delay isn’t the worse news.
Look, if you’re going to build a product that sits below a car’s backup camera and squirts it clean every now and then, there’s really only one name you can give it, and it isn’t Lens Lizard.
oak:
disappointed that they decided against calling it the backup-bidet
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We can’t really tell from the photo whether it has a steering wheel, which was probably a deliberate choice. Elon Musk has said that the fully driverless vehicle will go into volume production in April.
That works out to one crash for every 57,000 miles, according to Electrek, which has been tracking robotaxi crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Tesla also updated a July 2025 crash to include information about someone being hospitalized — but since Tesla heavily redacts its crash reports, we have no more information about who was injured. The lack of transparency from Tesla also means we have no information about the cause or circumstances around any of those 14 crashes.
The automaker’s EV skunkworks team is using ‘bounties’ to guide engineering decisions that track gains in battery range and reductions in cost.
Turns out, if you leave a Waymo door open, someone gets paid to close it, opening up some novel opportunities for improving the economy.
tsmuse:
So you’re saying we can create jobs if we call a bunch of waymos, open their doors, and then walk away?
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The system works to save fuel by cutting off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop at a red light, for example. Automakers were incentivized at add the feature by off-cycle credits from the federal government. But now those credits are gone, and the auto industry is likely to start phasing the feature out. Lee Zeldin claims it will save “$1.3 trillion,” but good luck spending it while the world burns.
Since Waymo doesn’t have a vehicle with automatic doors, it has to pay on gig workers for help. (The Washington Post covered this phenomenon recently.) Just another example of the invisible human labor that’s required to keep these autonomous systems afloat.
Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told Bloomberg the robotaxi company was on track to reach the 1 million weekly rides milestone by the end of 2026. The company is currently provides about 400,000 rides per week across six US cities. Waymo just announced that its sixth-generation vehicle is going to start accepting passengers in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
