“National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator Jonathan Morrison issued a directive Wednesday to autonomous vehicle (AV) developers, stating that it is unacceptable for their vehicles to interfere with first responders or law enforcement.”
What’s going on with electric RVs?
”Thor’s first electric vehicle is going to rental fleets rather than dealerships, and Winnebago’s eRV2 has been in field testing since 2023 without reaching consumers. That gap has drawn a wave of startups, and Evotrex is racing to fill it first.”
Evotrex will offer its first hybrid RV travel trailers in 2027.
Numbers. Self driving trucks in Texas.
Aurora has 91 autonomous driving trucks on Texas roads. “ Big rig competitors Kodiak AI and Waabi have 33 and 13 self-driving trucks, respectively. Gatik AI, a startup that focuses on self-driving mid-sized trucks, has 64 vehicles in its fleet.”
Texas’ automated vehicle tracker tool
Texas law requires companies testing or deploying AVs to disclose how many vehicles are in their fleets and safety information. Waymo has the most AVs on Texas roads at 577. Avride has 317, and Nuro has 47. Tesla has 42, a number that will make Douglas Adams readers giggle.
Freeways, Construction, & robotaxi oops
Remember how we talked about robotaxis starting to drive on freeways? Like human drivers, robotaxis also have reactions to construction.
“Waymo halted robotaxi operations on freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami as it works to improve performance in construction zones.” Tech Crunch Mobility
Robotaxis drive into floods
“Waymo paused operations in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and San Antoniobecause its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads — and specifically knowing when not to enter them. “
Data sharing: potholes, guardrail damage, graffiti
Last month we talked about “Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data with local governments. “ Fleet management company Samsara proposes using AI to rank the pothole’s problems. Samsara has been collecting visual road data for a decade on a fleet larger than Waymo and Waze.
Samsara is contracting with cities to share its data on how potholes change over time, and also include data on other city concerns like graffiti, broken guardrails, & low-hanging power lines.
TechCrunch | Potholes cost cities millions: This company is using AI and trucks to fix them
Transportation planning: wildlife crossings
Arizona includes wildlife crossings in its transportation planning. Over the past 25 years, the state has seen a 90% reduction in wildlife – vehicle accidents. This impacts rural counties the most which account for 30% of wildlife traffic accidents.
Pew Charitable Trusts | Arizona Builds on Leadership With Wildlife Crossings
Texas’ driverless large truck routes
This week Aurora Innovation announced a deal to start hauling loads in driverless trucks for distribution giant McLane. The starting route will be Dallas to Houston and the trucks will have no human driver, but will have a human observer.
Lidar or cameras for driverless vehicles?
Ouster, a LiDAR company, has added cameras to its LIDAR sensors. Ouster says that the new sensors are a decade in the making and the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”
Why does this matter? Changing policy landscapes, the high rate of scaling with robotaxis, and that robotics companies, industrial and humanoid, are “hoovering up investment dollars.”
Tech Crunch | Ouster’s new color lidar is coming to replace cameras