Motional, the autonomous vehicle company borne out of a joint venture between Hyundai Moor Group and Aptiv, told employees Wednesday it will cut about 5% of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.
The autonomous vehicle company last had layoffs in December 2022, when it cut about 10% of its workforce.
Motional operates an autonomous vehicle taxi service in Las Vegas (still with human safety operators behind the wheel) on Uber, Lyft and Via platforms.
A production-ready autonomous vehicle, equipped with the kind of redundancies designed for safe operations without a human driver, is a critical milestone required for commercial operations.
During CES 2024, the company announced plans to work with Kia on a next-generation vehicle that will enter commercial operations later this decade.
Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running project to build an autonomous electric car, according to Bloomberg.
The company has already started laying off some people who worked on the project, TechCrunch has learned.
Many of the nearly 2,000 employees who were still working on the project will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, Bloomberg reported.
The decision to kill the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluating their investments in electric vehicles, and amid increased scrutiny on autonomous vehicle projects.
Apple first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014.
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Of course, as he talked, I wondered if this was wishful thinking or an attempt to show the company was still part of the autonomous vehicle conversation?
Robotic Research Autonomous Industries (RRAI), an autonomous vehicle company with a history of working with the Department of Defense, changed its name to Forterra.
After a few years of funding frenzy, autonomous driving companies in China are experiencing a slowdown in investment.
Haomo.ai, an autonomous driving startup backed by Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, has raised 100 million yuan, or $14 million, from a fresh round of funding, it said today.
Four-year-old Haomo has raised over $200 million worth of equity funding, according to startup database ITJuzi, and all of that money was denominated in Chinese yuan.
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan and Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Qualcomm, are among Haomo’s past investors.
Haomo is competing with a rank of Chinese AV upstarts that raised money from Western VCs and, such as Pony.ai, WeRide, Momenta, Deeproute.
Uber, along with partners Mitsubishi Electric and autonomous robotics startup Cartken, are launching a service in Japan that will use self-driving sidewalk robots to deliver food to customers.
Uber and Cartken, a startup founded in 2019 by former Google engineers behind the short-lived Bookbot, already operate a delivery service together in Fairfax, Virginia and Miami.
Cartken’s autonomous sidewalk robot, known as Model C, will be used for the delivery service.
Cartken’s teleoperations interface will be used by Mitsubishi Electric employees who are trained in Cartken’s remote guidance system, according to an Uber spokesperson.
“We hope that this newly announced initiative will serve as a catalyst for the spread of robot delivery services in Japan,” Tanaka said.
Agriculture has a long heritage of being constantly disrupted by technology, an evolution that has continued to play out until today.
Bluewhite will also be using the funding to continue expanding in its current markets, and to break ground in new ones.
“Labor, labor, labor: it is the biggest need,” he said in an interview.
Tractors fitted with Bluewhite’s robots can still be operated by humans in situations where they might still need to be.
Bluewhite cites forecasts from researchers that project a market worth $11.5 billion for autonomous tractors by 2030.
Much progress has been made since then, and 2024 — the 20th anniversary of Ghostrider — will be another seminal year for autonomous vehicles, especially for off-road industries.
The possibilities off-roadSafety remains the paramount metric for autonomous vehicle deployment, yet there has to be industry consensus on how to adequately measure a robotic or human driver’s safety.
For commercial operations, there is another compelling reason for deploying autonomous vehicles in these conditions: increased profits.
Safety remains a concernSafety remains the paramount metric for autonomous vehicle deployment, yet there has to be industry consensus on how to adequately measure a robotic or human driver’s safety.
To increase transparency, the California DMV logs autonomous vehicle collisions.
Waymo is about to start testing its driverless passenger vehicles on the highway later this month, a critical milestone for the company that, if successful, will unlock expanded commercial operations.
Bringing its autonomous cars to the highway is just the latest in a series of big steps for Waymo, especially in the Phoenix area.
Just a few months before that, Waymo made its autonomous vehicles available in the Uber app.
The GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary recently slashed a quarter of its staff and pushed out a number of executives after a crash in October where one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian.
Last year, the company backed away from its autonomous trucking effort in order to focus more on ride-hailing.
Autonomous vehicle company May Mobility has launched its first driverless on-demand microtransit service on public roads in Sun City, Arizona in partnership with transit tech company Via.
May’s strategy of integrating its autonomous microtransit service into existing public transit, in partnership with cities, has also laid the groundwork for future, more challenging deployments.
More recently, May launched an on-demand service in Grand Rapids, Michigan in partnership with Via.
Beep operates autonomous shuttles for resident transportation in the Lake Nona community in Florida and for public transportation in Peachtree Corners, Georgia.
Riders can book the on-demand ride-hail service through May Mobility’s app, available in Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Select Waymo One riders can now get picked up or dropped off by the company’s robotaxis curbside at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
Waymo became the first autonomous vehicle operator in the U.S. to launch a paid robotaxi service to and from the airport in November 2022.
The average trip rating for its airport trips has been about 4.7 out of 5 stars, Waymo says.
Waymo’s trusted testers are riders who have been vetted by the company and have signed nondisclosure agreements.
“Last year, we partnered with Waymo to become the first airport in the world to offer travelers the ability to take an autonomous vehicle to the airport,” said Chad Makovsky, aviation director at Sky Harbor Airport, in a statement.
