China’s robotaxis charged ahead in 2021

Autonomous driving startups in China are in an arms race to put passengers in their machine-driven vehicles. Every few weeks, news arrives that another major player has got the greenlight to launch a new pilot program or a small-scale service. These press releases, often dotted with regulatory jargon and flowery language to aggrandize the companies’ […]

Waymo partners with Geely to make electric AVs for ride hail in the US

Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous driving technology arm, is partnering with Chinese automaker Geely to build an all-electric, self-driving ride-hailing vehicle. The companies will integrate Waymo Driver, Waymo’s AV system, into Geely’s Zeekr vehicles for use in U.S. markets “in the years to come.” While Waymo is not providing a specific time frame for either the start […]

Key executives resign after Pony.ai combines trucking and passenger car R&D units

Pony.ai, the self-driving startup that operates in both the U.S. and China, has lost at least two executives from its trucking team following the combination of the company’s passenger car and self-driving truck R&D teams. The development, initially detailed by two sources familiar with the internal restructure that happened quietly in September, was later confirmed […]

Baidu’s robotaxi service aims to be in 100 cities by 2030

Baidu keeps ramping up its autonomous driving ambitions. The Chinese tech company made its name in search engines and still relies greatly on search ads for revenues. But it’s hoping that its heavy bet on autonomous driving will pay off down the road. Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxi service, aims to be in 65 cities by […]

Cruise lays out its plan for ‘how’ it will make robotaxis a reality

The string of engineers who spoke Thursday night during a deep dive into Cruise’s autonomous vehicle technology never mentioned Tesla’s name. They didn’t have to, although the message was clear enough. GM’s self-driving subsidiary Cruise presented a technical and deployment roadmap — at a granular level — that aimed to show how it has built […]

Cruise plans to have ‘tens of thousands’ of Origin AVs on roads in coming years

Cruise expects to leap from a limited commercial robotaxi and delivery service that will start in earnest in 2022 to a business of “tens of thousands” of its purpose-built Origin AVs on the road over the next few years. The eye-popping projections will be reached, according to CEO Dan Ammann, through a combination of regulatory […]

Cruise, Waymo get OK to launch robotaxi service in San Francisco

The California Department of Motor Vehicles gave General Motors-backed Cruise and Alphabet-owned Waymo the green light to start charging for autonomous services offered to the public. On Thursday, Cruise received a “driverless deployment permit,” which means it can receive compensation for services provided without a safety operator in the front seat. Waymo’s “drivered deployment permit” […]

China Roundup: Beijing is tearing down the digital ‘walled gardens’

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. This week, China gets serious about breaking down the walled gardens that its internet giants have formed for decades. Two major funding rounds were announced, […]

Waymo launches robotaxi service in San Francisco

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle company under Alphabet, has launched a robotaxi service that will be open to certain vetted riders in San Francisco. On Tuesday, the company officially kicked off its Waymo One Trusted Tester program in the city with a fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with the company’s fifth generation of its autonomous […]

The Nuro EC-1

Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project’s Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a “little gumdrop on wheels” — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.