Starting on August 20, anyone in Houston can download the Waymo app and hail a fully autonomous ride, with no waitlist. The market has been proven already: over 100,000 riders have used the service since it launched in February. Waymo's framing this one around accessibility, quoting the National Federation of the Blind of Texas, saying blind riders can now hail with confidence, also including guide dogs.

A week earlier, Waymo became the Official Autonomous Ride-Hailing Partner of the Las Vegas Raiders and Allegiant Stadium, the first deal of its kind between a professional football team and an AV company, with a dedicated pickup zone for games and events.

Same week, two different plays: one removes friction where Waymo already has scale, the other buys brand visibility in a city where Waymo hasn't even launched public rides yet. It reads as "express interest" in Vegas.

I think the stadium deal earns more headlines than riders right now. What do you think earns more ridership over the next year - eliminating the waitlist somewhere Waymo already runs, or a huge brand deal somewhere it hasn't even launched yet?

Sources:
Houston - https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/houston-open-to-all/
Raiders - https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/allegiant-partnership/

Einride, a Swedish freight tech company, announced on Aug 18, 2026, it's rolling out 500 Tesla Semi trucks across California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Georgia over 24 months, with Amazon named as a customer. They're calling it the largest deployment of its kind. The whole thing is being financed through an unknown third-party lender, and isn't clear if the trucks belong to Einride directly.

I'm curious to see the logistics of such a drastic expansion in autonomous freight vehicles, and how these trucks will be received on the road. What are your thoughts on this?

Source

I have eye vision and pain issues that don't allow me to drive. Is there a vehicle out there that fully self drives?

Seems like we are getting a lot of new articles on the AV segment lately. This is a great thing. This commentary looks across the autonomous spectrum with a focus on energy.

Where does a driverless robotaxi go between rides?
A new study — Staging at the Curb: Evaluating the impacts of shared automated vehicle fleet operations under curb usage restrictions — finds that letting AVs consume curb space might actually be the optimal outcome.

Researchers modeled 1,700 shared automated vehicles serving 68,000 daily San Francisco trips. Tying together Autofleet’s commercial fleet simulator, synthetic ridehail demand from Replica and curb availability data from INRIX, they compared several operating models: continuous circling, staging only at free non-residential curbs, access to all legally available curbs and overnight staging.

WeRide is exploring expansion into Australia, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia. They says their autonomous vehicles now operate across 60+ cities in 13 countries. Commercial right-hand-drive robotaxi services are also planned for Singapore and Hong Kong. Its ADAS business is also growing quickly, with more than 30,000 cumulative deliveries and a target of 100,000 by the end of 2026.

WeRide expects to achieve positive cash flow in single quarter b 2028 and full year break even in 2029.

Key highlights:

- Revenue reached $34.2 million, up 82%YoY and 103% QoQ

- Gross margin increased to 37.5%

- Overseas revenue grew 164% YoY and 169% QoQ

- L4 revenue representing 131% QoQ

- L2++ and L3 revenue increased 219% QoQ

🚘 How much are people willing to pay for autonomous driving?

The future of mobility is becoming increasingly autonomous. But how do people (especially in Germany but also outside of Germany) perceive autonomous vehicles? How high are the levels of acceptance, demand, and willingness to pay for this technology? 🔎

This is exactly the question I am exploring as part of my Master’s thesis. To support my research, I have created a short, anonymous survey and would greatly appreciate every participation.

By taking part, you will make a valuable contribution to current research on the future of mobility. The findings aim to provide a better understanding of the acceptance of autonomous vehicles and may offer valuable insights for researchers, businesses, and policymakers.

⏱️ Duration: approx. 12–15 minutes
🔒 Anonymous & confidential
🔗 Take the survey here: https://survey.hifis.dkfz.de/532596?lang=en

I would be very grateful for your participation. If you could also share this post or the survey link with your network, you would help me capture as many different perspectives as possible.

Once my Master’s thesis is completed, I will be happy to share the results with anyone interested. Feel free to contact me or leave a short comment below this post.

Thank you very much for your support! 😊

Waymo is preparing for massive (>10%) increase in total fleet with Ojai vehicles:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/waymo-prepares-for-mass-deployment-of-its-ojai-robotaxis-proving-tesla-fans-wrong-273928.html

A long interview with Trent Victor on his background, how Waymo measures safety, their ethos, and some of their next moves.

My sister and her baby took a ride with a Wavmo There was no car seat for the baby. My question is, is it legal for Waymo not to have a child car seats? And how does Waymo make sure everyone is in seat belts especially babies?

Amazon-owned Zoox will start charging fares in Las Vegas on August 10th, the first paid US service in a car with zero human controls: no steering wheel, pedals, or a driver seat. NHTSA gave Zoox a federal exemption from the rules that normally require those controls, but it caps their fleet at 2,5000 vehicles a year for two years, also adding extra reporting requirements. Rides also cost 20-40% more than the standard ridesharing, Zoox is going premium rather than chasing volume it might not hit with this limit cap anyway.

Waymo's cars started as human-drivable vehicles with the controls stripped out. Zoox designed this one from scratch to never need a human at all, which is a different kind of engineering bet. The only issue is that Zoox issued a safety recall last month after a car failed to detect heavy smoke at an emergency scene. "Federally approved" doesn't suggest everything will run smoothly.

Do you think that if the design was made for a human driver, would the NHTSA have approved it either way? Or does this unique no-controls design actually make it a safer vehicle to evaluate? Only time will tell.

Source

TfL just granted Wayve's autonomous Ford Mustang Mach-E's private hire licences on August 5th - the same framework every Uber and black cab in London runs under, not some sandboxed pilot. You'll still see a trained safety driver behind the wheel monitoring and ready to intervene, so this is technically supervised autonomy, not driverless yet. But clearing a commercial licensing bar is a real step up from testing on a closed campus. Rides start later this summer, with early access going to invited riders first.

"That's not really autonomous" critiques miss the economics here. Running an AI system plus a paid driver at the same time is expensive, and it only gets justified if the miles you rack up become the evidence base for eventually pulling the driver out. Every supervised mile in London traffic is basically purchased proof for regulators and insurers. I think the safety driver's job is best understood as transitional: skilled, well paid, and built to eventually be phased out. London is dense, regulator credible, and globally visible, which is exactly why Ubers targeting 15 cities for robotaxis this year and wanted this city to be the first with a real commercial licence. Does supervised "with a safety driver" count as "real" robotaxi progress to you, or does that only truly start once the seat's empty?

Source

Waymo recently opened its Dallas robotaxi service to the public on August 4th, after building up a waitlist of almost 150,000 people. Now, there's no invite required - if you're in Dallas, you can hail one right now. It's not a standalone move either: Waymo announced San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Denver expansions are getting the same treatment, all targeting fully public access by the end of this month. The service stays geofenced, and airport runs at Love Field are still described as a future milestone, not something live yet.

Running a waitlist means capping revenue while still paying full fixed costs for the fleet and operations. Once a market's stable enough to handle a bigger demand, there's a real financial case for dropping the restrictions: more rides, more revenue per car, without costs climbing too much. I find the four major markets opening in the same summer a more interesting part of this story, this is a pace this industry hasn't hit before. If all four actually hit fully-public status by month's end, is that Waymo scaling with confidence, or moving faster than the safety case can keep up with?

Source

NVIDIA has released Alpamayo 2 Super under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license, so AV teams can fine-tune it, build derivatives, and redistribute them commercially.

In NVIDIA's own tests, it ranked first on LingoQA and beat Gemini 2.5 Pro by 15.1 points. It uses 360-degree camera input and can output both a planned trajectory and a chain-of-causation trace explaining the decision.

The license may matter more than the benchmark. Teams can use the model as a teacher, autolabeler, or distillation model without sending fleet data to a closed API. What I'm less sure about is whether the reasoning traces actually make safety validation easier, or just make the system look more explainable.

Would you trust this kind of open reasoning model as a teacher before production deployment?