Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

More data for better comparisons are good. Now everybody has to do it, and regulators and the public have to learn to look at only the data, and not individual incidents

Several companies have tried to declare they met a major milestone by having "nobody behind the wheel" and moving supervision to the passenger seat. It's a bad idea

13 years ago, at the Wired 2013 event in London, I was asked when robotaxis would arrive there and as a joke, gave an answer of June 22, 2026 that turned out to be impossibly spot on.

Figuring out the depth of water should be easy for a car with 3D sensors. So why is Waymo having so much trouble tracking flooding?

A Waymo left a rider at the airport without his bags. Another had a flat tire on the way to the airport. Incidents like this teach hard lessons about customer service.

Flying cars, self-driving vans and full traffic metering probably can't be fully ready in 2028, but some modern technology can help to reduce the traffic nightmare.

Here's the video I made in 2024 on watching a total solar eclipse, the most spectacular natural phenomenon you can see on the Earth. Below, I have some updates for what's different about the 2026 eclipse on Aug 12 in Spain and Iceland.

It's counter-intuitive, but smaller, van-sized vehicles can make more energy-efficient transit than buses and trains, because better service means less empty seats, thanks to self-driving

FSD and Robotaxi will be a lot slower to roll out than promised earlier. A few details were given on upgrading older HW3 cars to use FSD, once it works.

Why is Pony.AI starting operations in Croatia?

Read more at Forbes.com in China: Pony.AI Wants Toe In European Water

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.