What We’re Reading

• Activists gather in Chinatown to demand immediate ban on self-driving taxis in California (The San Francisco Standard, February 19, 2024)

  An activist group in California called the Network for Safety in Our Streets & for Working People is calling for Governor Newsom to ban self-driving taxis after a Waymo robotaxi was set ablaze following two recent robotaxi incidents that occurred in San Francisco: first, when a Cruise vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian, and more recently when a Waymo robotaxi struck a cyclist. The group believes that robotaxis are endangering public safety, and that they should all be removed from the streets of San Francisco. “We demand that Governor Newsom remove all Waymo self-driving taxis from the streets of San Francisco and California immediately,” said Edward Escobar, a coalition organizer, in a statement on Sunday.

  According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, self-driving vehicles have been involved in over 2,000 collisions in California alone since 2014, most of which were reported by Waymo and Cruise.  Mark Gruberg, a board member of the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, stated, “We don’t run into fire trucks. We don’t drive into wet concrete. We don’t run over people and then drag them for 20 feet…So the [California Utilities Commission] really has to get its act together.”

• Carmakers pumped the brakes on hybrid cars too soon (Vox, February 14, 2024)

  As barriers to adoption of electric vehicles continue to mount, the hybrid vehicle space, which was left for dead in the not-too-distant past, seems to be making a formidable comeback. Despite proposed rules by the EPA aimed at reducing reliance on carbon-spewing vehicles, drivers still seem to be reluctant to give up gasoline entirely due to factors such as range anxiety, reliability, and charging infrastructure. As a possible short-term compromise, hybrid cars— models that blend electric and gasoline power —are experiencing a bit of a renaissance.

  “The number of hybrid model offerings declined in 2023, but sales increased significantly across existing models,” according to the Energy Information Administration. In fact, new car purchasers are now buying around as many hybrid cars as fully electric vehicles, and demand is growing. Whether the return to hybrids will serve as a bridge to greater electrification or merely slow ultimate transition remains to be seen.

• Elon Musk claims fatal crash was not on ‘Full Self-Driving Beta’ after Tesla said logs were lost (Electrek, February 14, 2024)

  In response to an article in The Washington Post earlier this week regarding a fatal accident involving a Tesla employee in 2022, Elon Musk is claiming that the involved Tesla was not on “Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta” when the accident occurred. Although the Tesla employee was legally intoxicated at the time of the accident, subsequent investigation revealed that the Tesla may have been using FSD at the time of the accident. Investigating authorities, however, were unable to recover data from the vehicle due to fire damage, and Tesla said it could not confirm that FSD had been in use because it “did not receive data over-the-air for this incident.”

  Musk is now publicly claiming that the Tesla was not even equipped with FSD, notwithstanding reports to NHTSA that “a driver-assistance feature had been in use at least 30 seconds before impact.” It will be interesting to find out why, if true, this information did not surface until now.