Transpo

Despite numerous setbacks, autonomous vehicle startups are somehow still able to get rich investors to open their wallets to them. Just today, Waabi, the driverless truck startup founded by former chief scientist at Uber’s Advanced Technology Group Raquel Urtasun, announced its Series B funding round, led by Uber and Khosla Ventures, of $200 million. The money will go toward the launch of the company’s “fully driverless, generative AI-powered autonomous trucks” by 2025. Big bucks and an elusive deadline to launch the new tech? What is this, 2017?

After warning it was running out of cash, the California-based company founded by designer Henrik Fisker has filed for Chapter 11 protection:

Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently. After evaluating all options for our business, we determined that proceeding with a sale of our assets under Chapter 11 is the most viable path forward for the company.

The legislation would have given large cities the power to tax or even restrict autonomous vehicle deployment. But after lawmakers proposed stripping local control provisions, the bill’s sponsor decided to put it on ice. AV lobbyists opposed the bill, calling it a “backdoor ban.” But supporters said cities should have more say over whether to allow driverless cars on their streets.

Tesla recently filed a $1 billion lawsuit against a former supplier, Matthews International, alleging trade secret theft of its EV battery technology. Matthews has been supplying Tesla with machinery since 2019, and the company says it has been been swiping trade secrets related to dry electrode battery manufacturing. Tesla got those secrets by acquiring a company called Maxwell Technologies back in 2018.

NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.

The agency is targeting a return “no earlier than” June 22nd, and plans to hold a teleconference at 12PM ET on June 18th to talk over details of the delayed departure.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:

For the photography nerds: 1 second exposure, f 1.4, ISO 2000, 24 mm lens.

Posts on the Cybertruck Owners Forum, Reddit, and on X say that Tesla has notified them their Cybertruck deliveries are being pushed back. Some say they were told it was a wiper blade issue, while others say they weren’t given a reason.

The reports come just two months after the company recalled all Cybertrucks over stuck accelerator pedals. Tesla didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

Honda’s cute little Japan-only N-VAN is going electric and comes in versions like “FUN” for personal use and “G” which gives you a seat and a blank canvas for commercial use. It’s got 152 miles of range with support for 50kW DC fast charging, perfect for city driving. It could very well be made into a cool camper, too.

After opening its first charging hub in Atlanta, which features 400kW chargers by ChargePoint, the automaker will now install Alphitronic HYC400 models at new locations later this year. It has two plugs, supports CCS and Tesla’s NACS, and features dynamic load sharing, i.e. one car can charge at 150kW while the other at 250kW. It’s part of Mercedez-Benz’s $1 billion investment to build 400 EV charging hubs.

Stellantis has been teasing a more affordable electric Jeep, and now we know what it will be called when it arrives in 2027: Renegade. The gas-version of the subcompact SUV typically starts at $29,445, so it will take some work for Stellantis to bring that price down to $25,000 — especially given how expensive some EV batteries still are.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk got his big compensation package approved yesterday, but how many really voted in favor? Well, it seems 1.78 billion shares voted in favor of Musk’s payday, while 529 million voted against — a 72 percent margin, excluding shares held by Musk and his brother Kimbal, as The New York Times reports. Musk took a victory lap on the mic at the shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas.

The shareholder meeting ends with several people pitching Musk on their personal business ideas. He adds another note about FSD’s rate of improvement. And that’s the end.

Thanks for following along with us! We’ll have more coverage of the meeting tomorrow, so stay tuned for that.

Musk kind of sidesteps a question about whether there’s a succession plan in place in the event that he gets hit by a car — or just decides to leave. “I think Tesla has a good future without me,” he said. “I think I’m a helpful accelerant to that future.”

“People will have super helpful humanoid helper robots,” Musk says in response to a question about robot personalities. “And, yeah, you’ll be able to customize the personality, customize the voice and really kind of, the robot will kind of get to know you as well and know your preferences.”

Let’s be real: people are going to try to bang the robots. We all know it.

Musk is asked when the Cybertruck will go international. He responds saying it was designed with American specs in mind, and a new and redesigned version would be needed for the European and Chinese markets. There won’t be an international model this year, he confirms.

Trump has been a huge critic of electric vehicles on the stump. But Musk says he talks to Trump a lot and maybe its just a put-on. “I think a lot of his friends now have Teslas,” Musk says. “And they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”

He goes off on a tangent about “homicidal maniacs” after one shareholder asks him how he’s doing with everything. We have fully left the substantive portion of the meeting and are now just coasting on vibes.

This sounds like a question about financial risks of autonomy, but it could also be seen as one about human collateral. Musk leaps to his usual difference: “There’s a small chance of something bad happening. But when you look at the sort of safety per mile, it’s very clear that the safety better than human driving.”

In response to a question about bundling software, Musk says the company will continue offering free trials of Full Self-Driving to new customers as long as there are new versions of the software to release.

Musk is known for his tendency to over-hype his companies products, but this is definitely above the normal level. “I don’t want to trivialize what’s necessary to get there. I mean, it’s an immense amount of work that is required to get there, like super difficult, but we are moving very fast down that road,” he says before shifting to Q&A.

Musk says that it has several humanoid Optimus robots performing tasks at its factory in Fremont. They’re taking cells off the end of the assembly line and putting them into shipping containers. By the end of next year, Musk predicts Tesla will have a thousands robots working in its factories.

Musk quipped in response to the recent layoff of the Supercharger team, which left many charging station projects stalled. Musk says there will be more Superchargers this year than the rest of the industry combined and promises to give other manufacturers adapters to use Tesla stations (which are still in limited supply).

He first pitched this idea of Tesla’s fleet running inference compute for AI during the last earnings call. “So there’s 100 hours of 100 gigawatts of inference compute, which I think we should use. Why not?” he says.

We asked some experts. They’re skeptical.

HW4 will be “five times” more powerful than HW3. And then HW5, which will go into the company’s Optimus robots, will come out 18 months after HW4.

I’m old enough to remember when Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles had all the hardware they needed for full self-driving.

There were only two covered mystery vehicles during last year’s Master Plan Part Three event. Now we have three. One’s definitely the robotaxi. The other could be the forthcoming revamped Roadster. What about the third? The long-awaited more affordable Model 2?

We’re getting the greatest hits: Cybertruck, Model Y best-selling car globally, and Tesla Semi. Musk said last week he approved volume production plans for the Semi, which has been stuck in low-volume mode since 2022. So that’s news.

That’s Musk’s recommendation for clearing up the question of the Cybertruck’s cool factor. (I would ask my own kids, but they’re too busy blasting Skibidi Toilet non-stop.)

In light of defeated proposals to get Tesla to be more transparent about its carbon emissions, Musk puts up this slide that shows the company is producing less pollution.

Now he’s touting Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, which the company claims is already performing tasks at Tesla’s factory. “I think the ratio of robots-to-humans will probably be at least two to one,” he said, predicting there will be eventually 10-30 billion humanoid robots.

Musk recalls an anecdote about his brother giving him the wrong time to catch the school bus, to ensure he catches the bus, as a way to illustrate his trouble with deadlines. He has consistently promised self-driving cars, but has yet to deliver. But this time is different, he claims. “I deliver in the end. That’s important.”

“It will be like an Airbnb thing. You can add or subtract your car to the fleet whenever you want. So you can say, like, I’m going away for a week at just one tap on your Tesla app, your car gets added to the fleet and it just makes money for you while you’re gone.”

The company has previously teased this capability in the Tesla app.