What We’re Reading
The first Tesla ‘range inflation’ lawsuit has been filed (Tech Crunch, August 3, 2023)
At the end of July, Reuters released a “special report” claiming that Tesla has long engaged in efforts to suppress and avoid complaints about its vehicles’ underperforming batteries. Within a matter of days, several Tesla owners took those same claims to federal court in California, where they filed a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that Tesla’s exaggerated range estimates violated state consumer protection laws. According to the complaint, “[u]nderstanding that this would be an important feature (if not the most important feature) to many consumers, and preying on this fact, Tesla marketed its electric vehicles as having a grossly overvalued range in an effort to increase sales to consumers.”
Read the full complaint here.
How Dallas became the proving ground for autonomous trucks (Axios, August 6, 2023)
The Dallas-Fort Worth area has seen a rapid expansion of autonomous truck testing and development, given its proximity to vital freight corridors, business-friendly policies, and generally favorable weather conditions. Key players that have moved into the area include Aurora, Kodiak Robotics, and Gatik, all of which are testing their systems through a combination of real-world experience and computer simulations of extremely rare scenarios, with plans to go fully driverless within the next couple years.
Aurora, for example, announced last week that it recently simulated 32 actual fatal collisions that involved tractor-trailers traveling between Dallas and Houston to see how its technology, dubbed the “Aurora Driver,” would have performed in the same scenarios. These simulations demonstrated that all of the cases that were relevant to Aurora’s commercial operations (29) would have been avoided had Aurora Driver been engaged.
Companies like Aurora ultimately hope to deploy and scale much more efficient and safe transportation fleets through “hub-to-hub” operations—i.e., operations where automated trucks travel primarily on highways until they exit and navigate a short distance on surface streets to designated hubs where their trailers are transitioned to conventional trucks for final destination delivery, companies like Aurora hope to. The ultimate goal is to provide an alternative solution to logistics companies that are currently struggling to find long-haul drivers while simultaneously lowering costs, increasing safety and reducing fossil fuel consumption.
Robotaxis Are Coming to Los Angeles. Everywhere Could Be Next. (Slate, August 4, 2023)
After years of hype that autonomous driving technology was just “six months away” from mass availability and adoption, Cruise and Waymo, the two leading self-driving car companies, appear poised to finally turn promises into reality.
Cruise, a GM subsidiary, recently announced that it is expanding its self-driving taxi operation to Los Angeles in a year that has already seen it increase overall autonomous rides by 49 percent per month to a current tally of more than 10,000 rides per week. LA will mark the company’s expansion into its seventh major additional city this year alone with many more on the horizon. “Last year, we were operating tens of autonomous vehicles. We’re currently operating hundreds—almost 400 concurrently at peak. Next year, there’ll be thousands. And then it’ll continue at least 10 times growth every year for the foreseeable future,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt stated.
Not to be outdone, Waymo announced last week that it would begin limited operations in Austin, Texas sometime this the fall with an anticipated rollout of its ride-hailing service to the public shortly thereafter. Waymo is also dipping its toes into the next frontier of autonomous transportation with testing underway on freeways outside San Francisco. Currently, neither Waymo nor Cruise offers ride-hailing services on freeways, but this may change in the very near future.
As the article points out, there is a lot to like about the current state of autonomous ride hailing services, including convenience, affordability, comfort, and safety.