As robotaxis from multiple companies expand on public roads, firefighters, police and paramedics face a growing patchwork of different manufacturer-specific procedures, hotlines and access methods for handling incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Tesla's two-door Cybercab, which has no steering wheel and is built for full autonomy, highlights this gap since it lacks conventional controls first responders might expect to use in emergencies.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-21
Academics led by Eindhoven University's Pavlo Bazilinskyy are hosting an industry workshop this week focused on deterring passengers from having sex in autonomous vehicles, which lack a human driver to enforce norms. The team, drawing from systems engineering, psychology and tourism studies, is using the topic to explore broader questions about behavior and design in shared robotaxi spaces.
wired.com
· 2026-09-20
As autonomous vehicles spread, the article argues they will standardize driving behavior that has long varied dramatically by region—from aggressive New York drivers to Cairo's horn-based communication system to Jakarta's informal traffic-conductor tipping rituals. These local driving cultures, shaped by decades of human adaptation to specific urban conditions, could disappear as algorithmic driving replaces human judgment.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-11
A Tesla Cybercab rider in Austin, Matthew Skrzypczak, found his in-car screen glitch into a hidden interface featuring camera feeds and a touchscreen joystick for shifting the vehicle forward and reverse. He managed to close the door and honk the horn but couldn't get the car to move using the joystick, possibly due to user error. Tesla has not explained why a passenger was able to access what appears to be a feature meant for employees or emergency responders.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-09
Rivian is rolling out Autonomy+, a semiautonomous system that lets drivers enter a destination and let the SUV navigate suburban streets, traffic lights, crosswalks and stop signs on its own across the US and Canada. The feature will debut on the upcoming R2 SUV by year's end and reach existing R1S and R1T owners via over-the-air software updates, priced at $49.99 monthly or $2,500 upfront.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-09-08
Researchers built CW-Net, an explainable version of a black-box machine learning planner (based on the DriveIRL architecture) used to evaluate self-driving vehicle trajectories. The system was trained on two large datasets of millions of driving scenarios labeled with human-understandable concepts, allowing it to justify its trajectory choices in terms people can interpret rather than as opaque scores.
nature.com
· 2026-09-02
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