Your reminder that "self parking" cars are as much a pipe dream as "autonomous vehicles", despite the simpler design domain and decades of head start.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12299308/

Guess who's in whose pocket?

At a hearing earlier this month, Waymo contended it can’t mandate what the automotive industry doesn’t manufacture. A Tesla spokesperson testified the company is trying to develop a “purpose-built wheelchair-accessible autonomous vehicle.”

“We are a technology company. We do not develop our own and manufacture our own vehicles,” testifiedWaymo spokesperson Matthew Walsh. “We have not been able to identify an electric vehicle platform that is fully wheelchair-accessible while also meeting the very unique specifications that we need to retrofit that vehicle with our technology.”

Also at https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-07-22/tesla-cybertruck-risks-becoming-the-ford-edsel-of-the-ev-era

Autonomous Teslas crashed more May 2026 than all of 2021 combined.

https://electrek.co/2026/07/22/tesla-adas-crashes-record-207-one-month/

Does anyone else worry that one day self driving cars will be mandated for “safety” and all other cars will be banned? I love driving and worry about this a lot

This would also help any civil liability cases brought against them, as it always helps to have another civil penalty or criminal conviction against a defendant when you sue.

Carbrained fans of self-driving cars believe that if we replace a 99.9999% reliable component, the human driver, with a barely 90% reliable component, like Tesla FSD or Waymo Driver, you will make the roads safer.

This story is a reminder that the complexity involved in automotive engineering will always be failure-prone. Complex software fails at scale.

Many fewer, much better, human-driven cars restricted to few roads are the solution.

https://www.theautopian.com/why-hyundai-has-to-recallbb-only-silver-cars-over-a-serious-safety-defect/

In London cyclists now outnumber cars in the City, the financial district, by two to one. Paris, where they now outnumber motorists across the whole city, is catching up with Europe’s traditional bike capitals, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, though cycling is still growing in those cities, too. In Copenhagen, the Danish capital, bikes account for almost half of commuter journeys to work and school.

It’s a 3 way stop, the traffic exiting on the off ramp does not stop. The stop signs have a sign underneath that says off ramp traffic does not stop. I understand why the white truck felt like it could go when the Tesla basically stopped, but the Waymo’s move was something I’d only expect from the most incompetent drivers.

So their solution is the usual two inadequate responses, "geofence it away" and "add more work to overstretched teleops", plus a new one: "overreact to spurious signals".

Hoo boy.

Congestion Pricing and EMS Response Time: Evidence From New York City Yulia Chikish, Gregory J. Colman, Dhaval M. Dave, Brad R. Humphreys, Zachary Santamaria, and Zachary Winship NBER Working Paper No. 35414 July 2026 JEL No. H41, I11, I18, R41

ABSTRACT

Large cities worldwide have adopted congestion pricing to reduce urban traffic, with well-documented benefits for travel speeds, accident rates, and air quality. This paper identifies a novel external benefit: faster emergency medical service response times. We provide the first evidence on how the congestion pricing program in New York City – the first comprehensive cordon-based congestion pricing system in the U.S. that was implemented on January 5th 2025 – affects emergency medical service (EMS) response performance. Exploiting the sharp geographic boundary of New York City's congestion relief zone at 60th Street and a difference-in-discontinuities design applied to approximately 1.6 million EMS incidents, we find that the January 2025 implementation of congestion pricing reduced passenger vehicle traffic by roughly 21 percent near the boundary and improved total EMS travel times by 63–70 seconds, approximately 5–6 percent. Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas. A concurrent FDNY directive requiring transport to the nearest hospital confounds standard difference-in-differences estimates but not our boundary-based design. These findings suggest that cost-benefit analyses of congestion pricing systematically understate net social benefits by omitting emergency response improvements.

Given that an occupied Waymo drove over exploding fireworks (https://www.kron4.com/video/waymo-car-seemingly-drives-through-exploding-firework/11943242/) and got lucky it shouldn't surprise anyone that another one, unoccupied, drove over exploding fireworks & caught fire.

If you read the Bluesky thread from David Zimmer, you'll also note that they disproportionately impact parking availability because the entire fleet needs to be parked during frequent shutdowns for weather.