What You Need to Know Today

GM is suspending funding for Cruise, citing increased competition and high costs of sustaining the investment. The automaker will instead focus its AV efforts on developing driver-assist systems for personal vehicles. GM’s retreat leaves the road wide open for Waymo and Tesla to dominate the robotaxi market. Increasingly it looks like it’s going to be a winner-takes-most outcome.

Waymo is expanding to Miami in 2025, although in typical slow-and-steady fashion, paid rides won’t start until in 2026. (In the meantime, we’re going to get some interesting data on how self-driving vehicles fare in the rain.)

Then again, maybe Waymo won’t be going slow-and-steady for much longer. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company will have robotaxis in 10 cities “robustly” in 2025. For now, Waymo is growing healthily in its current markets; ridership doubled in California in the first three months after the company launched paid rides.

Waymo also announced it is teaming up with African mobility-fintech startup Moove to handle fleet operations in both Miami and Phoenix. The move to Moove suggests Waymo isn’t monogamous with Uber and might be open to exploring better offers from other operators. (Although it should be noted that Uber led Moove’s $100M Series B round earlier this year, so the two firms are closely linked.)

Tesla confirms it is planning to use teleoperations as an extra safety measure when it launches its robotaxi service.

Chinese automaker XPeng is moving on from lidar sensors for two of its latest models in favor of pure vision cameras, similar to Tesla.

Uber has linked with WeRide to launch autonomous ride-hail in Abu Dhabi, its first international robotaxi partnership.

Vooma has raised $16.6M in seed and Series A funding, led by Craft Ventures, to develop an AI agent for the trucking industry.

And EvenFlow has raised $1.5M in seed funding to further its AI-driven capacity and revenue optimization technology for auto dealerships.

A new AAA survey finds 27% of drivers reported sending an email or text while driving in the last 30 days. Nearly half said they regularly drove more than 15 mph over the speed limit on a freeway.

Brussels’s airport is getting a self-driving shuttle pilot.

The Chinese city of Guangzhou will invest $1.4B in the low-altitude economy, encompassing a broad swath of piloted and autonomous aircraft that operate in airspace below regular commercial aviation.

Gearing up for a commercial launch in 2025, eVTOL startup Joby Aviation has launched a $300M public offering.

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