The autonomous vehicle industry is hitting the gas pedal hard this week. Waymo started testing in Philadelphia while Uber and Avride launched robotaxi service in Dallas, but federal regulators are asking tough questions about safety incidents including illegal school bus passes and a tragic cat fatality that's sparking new controversy.
Waymo just shifted into high gear with its autonomous vehicle expansion, but the accelerating rollout is hitting some serious speed bumps. The Alphabet subsidiary started testing its self-driving cars in Philadelphia this week, marking another major East Coast push for the robotaxi leader. The company's also collecting manual driving data in Baltimore, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh - a clear signal that more cities are coming online soon.
Meanwhile, Uber and Russian startup Avride launched their own robotaxi service in Dallas, though these rides still include human safety operators behind the wheel. It's the latest sign that the autonomous vehicle industry is racing to establish footholds in major metropolitan areas before competitors can lock up territory.
But this breakneck expansion is drawing scrutiny from federal safety regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just demanded more information from Waymo about its self-driving system after the Austin School District reported that robotaxis illegally passed school buses 19 times this year. The agency already had an open investigation into Waymo's performance around school buses, and these new incidents aren't helping the company's case.
The pressure intensified this week when The New York Times tracked down surveillance footage of the October 27 incident where a Waymo robotaxi killed KitKat, a beloved bodega cat in San Francisco. The video shows a woman crouching beside the vehicle trying to lure the cat to safety before the Waymo suddenly drove away, running over KitKat. The footage adds a disturbing visual element to what was already a public relations nightmare for the company.
These incidents highlight the complex challenges autonomous vehicle companies face as they scale from controlled testing environments to real-world city streets filled with unpredictable scenarios. School buses with flashing stop signs and small animals darting into traffic represent exactly the kind of edge cases that human drivers handle instinctively but that AI systems struggle to navigate safely.
The regulatory environment is also shifting. California's Department of Motor Vehicles released revised rules allowing companies to test and eventually deploy self-driving trucks on public highways statewide. It's a significant development for companies like , which has been promising autonomous trucking capabilities, and , which supplies the AI chips powering many self-driving systems.
