Latest news with #robocar
Forbes
3 days ago
- Automotive
- Forbes
Robocar Startup 'Tensor' Unveils Luxury Self-Drive Car For 2026
Tensor is a Silicon Valley based startup that plans to be the first company to sell a true robocar (Link goes live at 10am PDT) with 'eyes off' self-driving ability and a steering wheel that folds away and is replaced by a screen. While most entrants have worked to first make a robotaxi to provide ride service, Tensor aims to start with a high-end electric vehicle consumers can buy, and either drive themselves, or allow it to do the driving. Able to operate without the cloud, they promise luxury, an agentic experience that does your bidding, and unlike so many vendors, a promise of privacy from being tracked. The vehicle is large and the design is sleek, though adorned with the largest number of sensors I've yet seen. This includes 37 cameras, 5 custom-designed lidars, 11 custom radars, and an array of microphones, ultrasonics, collision sensors, water detectors, data radios and more. Most of the sensors have built in cleaning methods and left with clear sightlines for good visibility. The vehicle was designed from the ground up to be a personal robocar, but will be made by Vietnamese automaker Vinfast. Tensor is a rebranding of the U.S. portion of AutoX, a Chinese/American robotaxi project which launched self-driving service in the suburbs of Shenzhen several years ago with a large fleet, showing off video of over 1,000 robotaxis, but has generated minimal news for 2 years. Tensor says it is an 'evolution' of AutoX aimed at personal cars. AutoX was one of the earliest companies to deploy vehicles with no safety driver in China, but had faced controversy over allegations of operation without active safety intervention controls in the USA. Tensor's design focus has been to spare few expenses to get out there first and do what was necessary to maximize safety--which is needed to be early. Tensor/AutoX began in 2016, and has had California test permits (including for unmanned operation ) since 2000. Their latest software approach is machine learning centric but not end-to-end, rather relying on a collected series of ML-based tools and their own transformer based 'Tensor Foundation Model.' Taxi vs. Personal Car They currently decline to comment on pricing, which is frustrating for a luxury product, but it will be more than existing luxury EVs like the Lucid Air, which do not self-drive. They have also decided to focus on sales to consumers rather than taxi service. Most self-driving teams doing cars, including AutoX, have started with ride-hail. There are a number of strong reasons for that. A taxi need only drive one city to be a workable business, and it comes home every night, remaining under the close watch and control of its maker. A consumer car must provide strong value in most major cities, or the market is too small. With no depot to visit the car or its owner must handle everything. Tensor will not be able to drive every street upon release, but plans to handle a worthwhile subset, such as highways and arterials in non-snowy places. Owners can drive the car conventionally on roads it doesn't self-drive on. Tesla also has ambitions to sell a personal self-driving car, but they recently decided to try a taxi first, in a limited area. Tesla's offerings can't self-drive at present, and instead operate in driver assist mode with a supervising human. For the last 8 years, Tesla has predicted their car will self-drive unsupervised within a short time, and this prediction was made again next week, but skepticism is high after the many failed predictions. Many other companies have showed concept personally owned self-driving cars, including features like fold-away steering wheels and reversible seats, but nothing has been announced for production. Tensor hopes to be the first, claiming they will ship in the 2nd half of 2026. Privacy An interesting, and sadly unusual feature of the Tensor is an effort to protect driver privacy. All other robocar designs are constantly in touch with the cloud, relaying all the car's activities to it. The cars have interior cameras which can feed video back to HQ (though Waymo and others say this is only turned on in unusual situations.) The Tensor also talks to the cloud for the usual reasons of updating maps and software and fetching traffic and weather, and it has the ablity for remote operations assistance that all robocars have, but the owner can turn that off, and give the car any 'assist' from the controls. In self-drive mode, the yoke wheel folds into the dashboard, and the center screen slides over to cover it; the pedals retract into the footwell. The interior of the vehicle is spacious and uncluttered. Tensor says in this mode, even though the vehicle can self-drive, the owner's data stays with the car and is not uploaded. This is a refreshing take. It would be nice to see more attention to privacy not just from consumer cars but from robotaxis. Today's transportation world is mostly private and anonymous. Even taxis used to be summoned with a street hail and paid with cash. That world is vanishing, replaced by a world where all your travels are recorded. Of course, robotaxis need a way to know if a passenger soils or damages the car and to get payment if that happens (or simply tell you if you left your Stradavarius behind) but there are ways to still do that with intermediate escrow that protect privacy and erase information when it's no longer needed. Interesting Hardware The vehicle is entirely drive-by-wire, with multiple redundant systems, including 3 braking systems, to allow this to meet automotive safety standards. Most cars have some physical link as a backup, but when self-driving that doesn't help. Some of the cameras are 17 megapixel, higher resolution than is typical. Radars have 1.1 degree imaging resolution which is fairly good. The car has cameras under the vehicle, which would presumably detect anything or anybody underneath the vehicle, a failure which sunk Cruise. Water sensors will detect if the car drives in water that's too deep, something we've seen a few other robocars fail on. Tensor's LIDAR claims very dense resolution, though I did not get a chance to personally examine its results. It includes a spinning 360 degree 1500nm unit on top, and a variety of smaller short range units on the sides for full visibility. Also present on the front bumpers are small screens at the corners which are used to show pedestrians that the vehicle sees them, and any intentions the vehicle has (like doors about to open.) While a robocars absolutely must see every pedestrian around it in every dirction at all times--or its badly broken--many people don't know that and so are comforted with a reminder. Software The Tensor's hardware suite is impressive but expensive. Tensor says it improves safety and this will help them come to market first. No matter how good the hardware is, however, the software is the key. I rode in the vehicle in a parking lot, but this showed only simple operations and doesn't allow judgment of the quality of the self-driving stack. Tensor built their own, on top of tools and hardware from their partner down the street, Nvidia. But most cars have this. We'll need to see millions of miles of test data to judge if the self-driving system is safe enough to bet your life on. Tensor didn't say, but presumably the code is not based on the AutoX stack, as new regulations starting in 2027 forbid Chinese software in self-driving systems.
WIRED
01-08-2025
- Automotive
- WIRED
Uber's Drive to Become the Kleenex of Robotaxis
It doesn't matter who makes the tech—when you call a robocar, Uber's mission now is to make sure you use its app. Photograph:At a 2015 event, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pondered aloud the future of his ride-hail company in a world of self-driving cars. There were still a ways off, he acknowledged—five or 10 or 15 years. But to him, Uber's role was clear. "Are we going to be part of the future?" he said. "Or are we going to resist the future, like that taxi industry before us? For us, we're a tech company, so we've said, let's be part of that.' Kalanick isn't at the head of Uber anymore, but the specter of disruption remains. Ten years later, self-driving vehicle companies that mostly didn't exist in 2015 are readying robotaxis for passenger rides. Moreover, nearly every player in the currently hot robot car space has something in common: They've signed a deal with Uber. Yes, really. Take a look: It's the classic 'throwing spaghetti on the self-driving cars to see what sticks' strategy. Uber's interest in self-driving makes a ton of sense. The business estimates it spends $2 per mile to have a pesky human behind the wheel, and Dara Khosrowshahi, Kalanick's replacement, said in a recent interview that Uber pays drivers a global average of 80 percent of riders' fares. (Many drivers believe Uber takes much more.) How much more money could Uber made if robots did the driving? 'We think it's an enormous, enormous long-term opportunity,' Khosrowshahi said. This year alone, Uber has announced tie-ups with China's Baidu, and Momenta; Volkswagen; the Michigan-based developer May Mobility; and this month, the Bay Area self-driving vehicle company Nuro and Arizona EV manufacturer Lucid, who together say they'll launch 20,000 robotaxis over the next six years, starting in a US city next year. As the world, and the taxi business, hints at big changes on the roads, Uber seems poised to maintain its status as the Kleenex of ride-hail, a name brand synonymous with an entire category. It's inconsequential who builds the tech—when you call a robocar, Uber wants you to use its app. 'To them, it doesn't really matter who ultimately succeeds,' says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving-vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm. 'If you've got a car that works and can drive safely, you're welcome to come onto Uber and provide rides.' Still, it's too early to say whether the Kleenex gambit will work. Plenty has changed since 2015. Kalanick is no longer at Uber, deposed by a hostile board in 2017. The company marked a grim milestone in 2018 when one of its own testing self-driving vehicles struck and killed a woman. The incident, for which federal investigators later found the ride-hail giant partially responsible, led to a suspension and then reorganization of Uber's self-driving development effort. In 2020, Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle unit to a competitor. In some ways, though, this asset-light existence—where Uber serves as the middleman for drivers and riders, without owning its own (robo)car—seems to have worked for the company. Under the guidance of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company finally recorded its first profit last year. One potential issue for Uber is that its particular role in the autonomous vehicle industry won't be super useful for a while. Uber is powerful because it's already on the phones of some 160 million active monthly users all over the world. The company is good at matching people driving cars with those millions of people who want rides. But there likely won't be millions of robotaxis for a while. Waymo, the US leader in robotaxis, has about 1,500 vehicles operating in five cities. Baidu says its next city, Dubai, will have 100 robotaxis by the end of this year. 'This is a marketplace that for quite some time will be supply constrained, not demand constrained,' says Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School who has written about Uber. Self-driving car developers want access to Uber's network—but because there simply aren't that many self-driving cars, the company is less useful in the near-term. This leads to another potential issue: Uber may have less power to get a big chunk of each fare in the robotaxi world. The company has spent billions figuring just how much they need to pay individual drivers to take on fares. Robotaxi tech developers who have spent their own billions building self-diving software will likely look to take a bigger portion of each fare. After all, companies including Tesla and Waymo run their own ride-hail apps. Do they really need Uber? 'I guarantee they'll drive a harder bargain,' says Sherman. (A spokesperson for Uber didn't provide financial details of its existing partnerships.) Chinese Uber competitor Didi—which acquired Uber's China business in 2016—seems to be following the old Uber self-driving playbook. It has its own autonomous vehicle technology subsidiary, which is building autonomous vehicle software. It said last year that it would work with EV firm GAC Aion to mass produce robotaxis starting this year. It may be that Uber hasn't totally closed the door on owning some of its own robotaxi tech. Earlier this summer, the New York Times reported that Kalanick was back, and in talks to acquire the US arm of the Chinese AV company a financial assist from Uber. A spokesperson for declined to comment on the report. Uber told the Times that it plans to work with many AV players globally. The Kleenex strategy, in other words. One company is conspicuously missing from the tall stack of Uber's autonomy partnership press releases, of course. In a February interview, Uber CEO Khosrowshahi seemed to indicate that's not for lack of trying. Tesla appears to want to own its whole self-driving car operation: the technology, the cars, the maintenance, and the app that powers it—but Uber could still be a great robotaxi partner, Khosrowshahi said. 'Ultimately, we're hoping that my charm and the economic argument gets Tesla to work with us as well,' he said.
Forbes
15-07-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Autonomy, Territory, Generality - The Ingredients Of A Real Robotaxi
A Waymo in San Francisco, where they fit the parameters of a real service. There are now several companies actively playing in, or claiming to play in, the robocar/robotaxi space. As a result, people want to compare them, and judge how far along they are towards a real robotaxi. My past efforts have included a list of milestones for a project and the robotaxi timeline. As such, it's worth discussing what the necessary requirements are to make a robotaxi or Big One: Safe Autonomy By far the biggest milestone is safe operation without full time human supervision on uncontrolled public roads. This is such a big one that one must effectively divide the teams which can do this from the teams which have yet to do it in a significant way. They are not even in the same race. When a team does this, for real and not just as a limited demo, it shows that they have internally had a meeting where they decided they were good enough to do this without significant risk. No project is perfect, but teams are trying every day to judge the quality of their driving and make sure that risk is low. If they're wrong, and they have a serious incident, it could easily mean the end of their entire project, and the squandering of what is often billions in investment. This step is so big because it means the company did a lot of work to make their safety case. They had to make it to the lawyers and the board. In some places they have to make it to the government. And they have to get the public to trust it too. Safe means 'bet your life' safety, and many have said the vehicle be safer, even much safer than a human driver. That means being able to do 100,000 drives in a row without significant crash. The step can seem small because every team still has human supervision until they are 99% of the way to making that case. Then one day they pass 100%, and the decision comes. But it turns out you can also be out there with human supervision when you are only 1% of the way there, even 0.1% which would be 100 flawless drives in a row. The public can't tell if you are 1% or 99%, unless you are more transparent with internal data than any company has been. Even so, we try to figure out where they are, but from the outside, this is why the step is so large. Before a team does this, we have to treat them as possibly 1% of the way there unless they can show otherwise. Safety drivers (supervisors in the car who can intervene) work. They can keep a car safe even if it would crash every 10 miles on its own. There are different amounts of human supervision. The most common is a human employee in the vehicle, normally behind the wheel. A few teams have put them elsewhere, either because they don't have a wheel, or for appearances. Turns out that as long as they can hit an emergency stop, and especially if they can grab a wheel, it still works – as it has for literally billions of teen drivers (including myself and probably you) supervised by a driving instructor in the passenger seat who has only an extra brake. The Tesla pilot in Austin is called a robotaxi, and it's a pilot one. But because it has an ... More employee in the vehicle (called a safety driver or safety monitor) it's not over the big hump yet. There's been talk of remote supervision. Because remote data links can sometimes fail, there's not good data on the safety record of this approach, though some companies have working remote driving. If it's full time, it still doesn't count as crossing that big line. Intermittent remote supervision and remote assistance continue forever, and do not disqualify a team from crossing the line. Viable Territory The system has to run on public streets. Lots of autonomous vehicles have been deployed on private property or other controlled areas. That's useful but it's much more limited. And it has to serve enough destinations that it would be a viable business, which means it has to be in an urban area with lots of demand for rides. Clearly some areas like Manhattan and London (the world's top taxi markets) are both more difficult, and more lucrative, but we'll judge you on how lucrative. Waymo's early deployment in Chandler, AZ doesn't score nearly so well as downtown San Francisco. It also matters when you can drive. If you can only drive at night, like Cruise's first deployment, that clearly cuts the viability. If you have to shut down in bad weather, you're not a service people can depend on, and that's a strike, though situations will vary. Related to where you drive is where you can do 'PuDo' – Pick-up and Drop-off. Some early projects have made people walk fairly far to get to such spots. The most extreme form of this is the 'limited stop shuttle' which is more like a bus, with stops far apart, and possibly only a fixed route. That's something, but it's not a real robotaxi. As such, many companies have had limited territory that would not be that viable, so in that case what matters is if we see a clear path to expansion to something viable. You need to be open to the public. A waitlist can be OK if you don't have capacity yet, but you can't limit ridership to people you have picked, or require them to sign NDAs or other agreements. People beholden to the company won't be as clear and direct when they see warts. Indeed, because China has different cultural rules about online criticism, we sometimes have concern if we see all the warts on those services as we would in the USA or Europe. It's not nothing to take employees or selected people for rides, but it's also possible to paper over warts if that's all you do. Viable territory for a robocar (private consumer car with self-driving) can be quite different. It's not viable to make a private car that only drives in one city or a few cities, you just would not sell enough. A taxi service that only drives one (larger) city can be a viable business. On the other hand, a private robocar that does most of the freeways and arterial roads in a country is a worthwhile product. It may not be able to drive to pick poeple up, but it can make commutes and any long terms much more pleasant. Also handy would be an ability to drive slow, short trips to recharge an electric car. Generality A fixed route service is useful, but much less so than a taxi which can go pretty much 'anywhere to anywhere' in its service area. This is much harder because you must make your safety case on all reasonable streets. Riders won't tolerate going far out of their way because of a limited street network. While removing the supervision and being able to bet your life is pretty much a yes/no thing, there are degrees of territory size and viability, and of generality. When looking at the progress of a project, sometimes you can see the path to a more complete offering clearly, sometimes it's hard (even for those inside) to judge how long it will take. While having a fixed-route service isn't nearly as hard as doing a general anywhere-to-anywhere one, one can see the path of expansion, and look how much work it is to expand the routes and stops. Waymo and Cruise and a few other companies all started staying out of downtowns, but moved there in time. Waymo (and everybody else except the trucking players) are still keeping off the freeways due to the high speed. It's not directly needed to have a real robotaxi service, but if you want to scale and convince the world you've arrived, you need to do a lot of stuff locally in terms of infrastructure and local logistics. The article below helps explore the many things you need to do. As noted in the Robotaxi Milestones, because companies often don't disclose all their safety data, the only clues the public gets as to progress come from what their actions say about what they have calculated internally. That's why we now use the 'Yoda Test' – there is no 'try,' only 'do.' Being able to do all the things above is where everybody needs to get, and from there they need to scale it up to more service area, more conditions, more vehicles and more.
