What You Need to Know Today

Uber customers will soon be able to hail a self-driving cab from their smartphone, thanks to a new deal with AV firm Cruise. The partnership is expected to kick off in 2025, marking the first time Cruise’s autonomous cars will return to the roads since an accident involving a pedestrian last year.

Cruise recently cleared a major hurdle on the way to relaunching its AV service. The GM-backed company agreed to recall nearly 1,200 robotaxis over a braking malfunction, bringing a federal safety probe into three rear-end crashes from 2022 to an end.

Elon Musk shared a video of the Cortex supercomputer cluster that Tesla is building in Texas to support autonomous cars. The EV maker claims the facility will be “the world's most powerful AI-training cluster” when complete.

With schools reopening, busy San Francisco parents are turning to Waymo for help with pickup and drop-off duties. Even though it is against the company’s rules for minors to ride alone, many parents report putting their kids in the back of robotaxis anyway. Demand is so high that Waymo is said to be considering launching a “Waymo Teen” subscription, which would allow teenagers to hail a self-driving cab without a parent. Plans would reportedly range from $150 to $250 per month for 8, 12, or 16 rides, and would provide pickup and drop-off notifications for parents.

Speaking of Waymo, the Alphabet-backed firm is going to start offering 24/7 curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

BYD will use Huawei’s advanced driver-assist system for its new electric SUV brand, seeking to close the tech gap with Tesla and its Chinese rivals.

What would a second Trump term mean for autonomous trucking? Project 2025 contains a clue: the codification of AV 3.0, a policy that says regulators “will no longer assume that the driver is always a human or that a human is necessarily present onboard a commercial vehicle during its operation.”

Gatik is getting more funding to spread its autonomous box trucks into the middle-mile delivery chain. Tokyo’s Nippon Express is backing the Silicon Valley startup with a strategic investment, although the amount of funding is unknown.

Here’s another Japan-US freight technology alliance: Isuzu inked a strategic agreement with American AV startup Applied Intuition to jointly develop self-driving trucks, with the goal of putting autonomous big rigs on Japanese highways by 2027.

Chinese autonomous startup WeRide is postponing its US public offering, saying it needs more time to complete documents. Because Chinese regulators approved WeRide’s deal to take place this week, the startup may need to apply for Beijing’s blessing again if it misses the deadline.

Indian AV startup Rosh AI has raised $1M in a seed round led by Ev2 Ventures Capital.

Walmart is ending drone deliveries in Utah, Florida, and Arizona, citing high costs. Instead the retail giant will focus on Dallas—the emerging US capital for airborne delivery—where it believes it can achieve scale faster. “It costs the company about $30 to deliver a package by drone… The goal is to get that cost below $7, which is close to ground-based delivery, but much faster.”

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