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Uber is eliminating more than 3,000 positions worldwide, about 10% of its staff, returning headcount to roughly 2021 levels near 30,000 employees. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company had grown too many management layers and small teams, slowing decisions, and the cuts will consolidate teams while freeing funds for priority areas like autonomous vehicles and delivery.
Uber is eliminating roughly 3,300 positions worldwide, around 10% of its total staff, as part of a broader restructuring effort announced by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an internal memo. The plan includes cutting management ranks by 20%, shrinking small teams, merging engineering and delivery units, and ending remote work for nearly all employees.
Tesla has started offering public rides in its steering-wheel-free Cybercab as part of its Austin robotaxi service, nearly two years after the vehicle was first unveiled. The vehicle relies on a modified version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, monitored remotely, rather than the sensor suites—like lidar—used by competitors.
Waymo has launched public robotaxi rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, expanding its US footprint to 14 cities. The company says tens of thousands of people in each city have already signed up and will be granted access gradually ahead of a wider rollout.
Waymo has opened its self-driving ride service to the public in three new cities, bringing its commercial footprint to 14 U.S. metros. The rollout, which will expand gradually, pushes Waymo's fleet of Jaguar I-Pace vehicles and its new Ojai minivan past 4,000 cars.
Waymo has started offering driverless rides to the public in San Diego, Tampa and Denver, marking its first commercial operations in Colorado, while Amazon's Zoox announced plans to begin testing its vehicles with human safety drivers in Houston and San Diego. Zoox says it will operate in 12 U.S. markets once those two cities launch, though its only paid service remains in Las Vegas.
Reggie Overton, who calls himself a Tesla ambassador with no formal ties to the company, says a 2.3-mile Robotaxi trip in Austin gave wildly inconsistent arrival estimates ranging from 16 to over an hour. After multiple calls to support failed to fix the routing issue, he and his companion exited the vehicle and hailed an Uber instead. Tesla only issued a refund after his complaint went viral online.
Zoox, the driverless-vehicle company Amazon acquired for $1.2 billion in 2020, has begun charging passengers for rides in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Its boxy, steering-wheel-free vehicles seat up to four people and are limited to roads with speed limits of 45 mph or below under NHTSA's approval, which permits up to 5,000 vehicles over two years.
Waymo announced plans to begin phased testing of its robotaxis in Munich in the coming weeks, aiming for a public launch by the end of 2027. The Google-owned company will use the testing period to map the city's streets, train safety specialists and adjust its software for local driving conditions. This marks Waymo's third international city after London and Tokyo, both still in testing phases.
Waymo disclosed it built a proprietary 5-nanometer ASIC chip that pre-processes the massive stream of sensor data—including feeds from 13 cameras—before it reaches its self-driving system's core computer. The company says the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of processing power, putting it near the performance level of Nvidia's DRIVE AGX Thor chip, and is a key part of the vehicle now rolling out to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.