Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Self-driving cars seem to be just more cars, and people who dislike cars don't love that. But the electric robotaxi offers much more potential

Tesla has expanded their service area for rides with nobody in the vehicle. This implies they are closer to ready, but other clues suggest otherwise

Baidu Apollo Robotaxis froze in the middle of lanes, stranding passengers and causing crashes. What didn't Baidu learn from Waymo and what might we suspect about the cause?

Verne was to ship a Croatian built 2 seater custom robotaxi with Mobileye Drive. Instead they have a Chinese robotaxi from Pony.AI and Arcfox, managed by Uber.

Most EVs in the 2030s will be able to drive themselves a short distance to an automated charging station. That rewrites what EV charging infrastructure to build

A fancy seat has room for 2. United could let you pair it with a coach seat you barely use and make an attractive offering for couples

Waymo is forced to pick up far away from the gate, especially when the AirTrain station in your terminal is closed. I describe the issues of an SFO Waymo ride for now

People love and hate Daylight Savings Time. Or more to the point, they hate the transition to and from it, particularly the spring one where you get 1 hour less sleep. It's even been tracked that traffic accidents go up after this shift.

I examine if Waymo is becoming less transparent and why, and how transparent they should be. Plus several key new details on the blackout, school buses and schoolchild.

I don't watch sports live, I watch on a delay. This saves a lot of time immediately by skipping commercials (if I haven't paid to remove them, as I did in the Olympics) but also things like time-outs, long no-action intervals (whistles, pitching changes, etc.) But I also skip far more. The best Winter Olympics sport is curling, for many reasons, but you can watch it in far less time if you are so inclined, without missing the key events. For example, you can usually skip the first few ends, and also the first stones of most ends.

Waymo reveals it has only one remote assist operator per 40 vehicles. I examine the security issues around having remote ops staff, particularly overseas.

Kevin Kelly is easily on the list of the world's best and most experienced futurists, and a friend. He's started a new podcast series to explore the most optimistic forecasts for the future, and he asked me to join him for one of his very first episodes.

Usually I like to temper my optimism, and talk both about the utopia and what can go wrong, but it's fun to just look at some of the great things in what I call the robocar vision that got me interested in it and how it can change the world.

You want to test a robocar in a simulation of everything you can think of. Now Waymo has built an AI tool with Google Gemini to make that easier to do

CES has become the smart car show. I summarize what was interesting from several companies.

Tesla has pushed a bold and risky strategy to do it with less hardware. Has this been an effort to force the team to make the harder path work?

Empty robotaxis and long drives without interventions make some imagine Tesla FSD is ready to deploy. The math may say the reverse.

Charging at hotels is the best way to charge on road trips. Sadly, hotels are now billing a lot more to do it.

A review, with video, of the new Zoox robotaxi operating in Las Vegas. The ride is good but has some flaws. Can Zoox's risky strategy win the game against Waymo, Tesla?

I don't think Waymo failed to plan for a power outage. I suspect a combination of human craziness and some Waymo mistakes made it happen

Waymo says they failed because they ran out of humans to help cars out of a jam. Why didn't simulation tell them in advance how many humans they would need?