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Tesla’s race to autonomy: No one said it would be easy
Need to type up a quick memo before work? Forgot to eat breakfast before driving to school? In just a few years, driving may be a more hands-off endeavor than ever before if companies like Tesla, Uber, Volvo, Alphabet, General Motors, or Ford have anything to do about it. You could be a passenger in your own self-driving car, weaving in and out of traffic with ease and parallel parking like a pro every time. It seems like most every company even tangentially related to cars is pouring money into the race for autonomy.
The freedom of self-driving cars is still heavily dependent on regulatory whim and technological availability, but some are setting demanding goals in an effort to finish first in that race. Tesla for example, plans to showcase its Full Self-Driving Capability by driving one of its fleet cars from California to New York, without human involvement, by the end of this year. But their competitors are moneyed, motivated and many.
The Self-Driving Battle Arena
For Uber, success in autonomous driving research could be a sweet distraction from the recent troubles of the company. Its self-driving program has been based in Pittsburgh, right next to Carnegie Mellon with its highly regarded robotics program since it began in 2015. Then-CEO Travis Kalanick was determined to stay on top of the industry. “It starts with understand that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous,” Kalanick said in a 2016 interview with Business Insider. “So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.”
Plagued by lawsuits, investigations, and subsequent executive upheaval that saw Kalanick’s resignation from the enterprise he founded, Uber is still one of the best places for researchers and engineers to work on their projects. The company has armies of vehicles across the country, vast datasets of information from the millions of miles its cars have covered through its ride-hailing branch, and the money to fund its engineers’ work.
This does not mean that Uber’s self-driving program has remained untouched. Waymo, the autonomous car division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is currently suing Uber over files allegedly by Anthony Levandowski when he moved from Waymo to Uber. According to Reuters, in recent court filings, Waymo has claimed that Uber knew of the stolen intellectual property and even conspired with Levandowski to use it. Uber denies the allegations and actually fired Levandowski on May 30, claiming he had not cooperated with their internal investigation– and probably hoping to win some goodwill from the judge who has already said Waymo had produced a convincing case.
It is unlikely the scandals will affect the decisions of most researchers to stay with the company. As Wired’s Aarian Marshall points out, the long timeline of building a safe autonomous car makes engineers less likely to leave at a moment’s notice in a period of executive instability. And the branch’s position in Pittsburgh rather than Silicon Valley means the roiling news is less sensationalized and the researchers less affected. The ride-sharing company’s failure to live up to certain promises, including backing one of Pittsburgh’s federal grant proposals or hiring from neighborhoods near its test tracks, have drawn ire from many local activists and politicians, as reported by the New York Times. Even so, it has helped the city break away from its steel past and into a high-tech future.
Meanwhile, Uber’s main competitor in the ride-sharing industry, Lyft, has been making strides to continue chipping away Uber’s monopoly in any field, including self-driving cars, as Uber deals with scandal after scandal. As reported by Recode, Lyft is steadily gaining ground on Uber in terms of the share of ride-hailing app downloads as its ratings in the IOS App Store rise and Uber’s falls. This recent shift in market share comes as Waymo and Lyft start a new partnership that will combine Waymo’s advanced technology with Lyft’s vast amounts of data on people, where and how they drive. “Lyft’s vision and commitment to improving the ways cities move with help Waymo’s self-driving technology reach more people, in more places,” a Waymo spokesperson told Wired. Extending Waymo’s dataset beyond the few cities, including Phoenix and Pittsburgh, allows the enterprise to collect the small details of average people’s driving habits much faster and accurately than its test drives around Silicon Valley will.
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But despite Waymo’s eight years of self-driving research, it still has to play catch up to Uber in some regards. Waymo just started testing autonomous trucks earlier this month, while Uber first used a self-driving truck to deliver a shipment last August, advancing its technology quickly after it snatched up the self-driving truck startup Otto—founded by Anthony Levandowski after he left Waymo— in January of 2016. Yet, Waymo has the benefit of its parent company’s huge cash reserves and data.
Growing Pains
Tesla is moving its autonomous program forward at an increasingly demanding pace, trying to meet that goal of driving from Los Angeles to New York by the end of this year. It, like Uber, is going through some executive shakeup: after just six months with Tesla, Chris Lattner, Vice President of its Autopilot Software program, left the company after reported tensions with Elon Musk. Tesla explained that the former Apple engineer was not a “good fit.” It stands to mention that working under Musk is notoriously a high-pressure gig. According to LinkedIn Insights, the average tenure of a Tesla employee is only 2.2 years, while companies like General Motors keeps its employees for almost 9. But Lattner’s exit is just one example of many of talented Tesla self-driving engineers leaving the company or being poached by the competition, like Waymo.
While Autopilot can do many impressive things— change lanes, brake before obstacles, and generally act as a rational human driver— it is far from perfect. The program is still technically in “public beta” testing, and rated by the National Transportation Safety Board as a 2 out of 5 on its scale of autonomy.
The fatal crash of a Model S owner Joshua Brown in May 2016 serves as a good reminder that drivers are cautioned to pay attention and keep their hands on the wheel at all times while using Autopilot. Tesla’s driving-assist feature, at the time, could not distinguish the difference between the bright sky and the white truck. Tesla and Autopilot were cleared of responsibility by the NTSB because Brown was given several warnings to take back control of the wheel. But it is a poignant example that Autopilot does not function as a self-driving car and still requires a driver’s full attention. After the accident, Tesla was forced to start developing its own hardware for Autopilot. Mobileye, which previously supplied Tesla’s image processing chips, ended its partnership in a public spat with Musk.
According to Lattner’s public resume, the transition to its own hardware presented “many tough challenges” to the Tesla team. Musk commented to shareholders in June that Tesla is “almost there in terms of exceeding the ability” of the original hardware. All of Tesla’s vehicles in production, including the upcoming Model 3, have the capability to engage Autopilot (for a price) and the necessary hardware to enable full self-driving someday. Autopilot will continue using the camera-based system that Tesla swears by, even as most of the industry focuses on developing LiDAR technology based on light and lasers.
And while Tesla prefers to work mostly alone, the rest of the industry is also pairing up, making deals, partnerships, and contracts between manufacturers, data giants, and service teams. Musk is taking a move out of Steve Jobs’ playbook by vertically integrating everything within the business, from top-to-bottom. Waymo and Honda, Lyft and Waymo, Autoliv and Volvo, Hertz and Apple, Intel and Mobileye, Audi and NVIDIA, and almost every other combination you could think of. Predictions for when the first company will reach the finish line range from within a year to two decades from now. And even if the car is made, there is still the question of if cities and states will allow autonomous vehicles to drive on their streets. The technology is closer than ever, but for now, please keep your eyes on the road.
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Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
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Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
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Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
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Elon Musk is perhaps the most recognizable name when it comes to artificial intelligence, but even he has some concerns when it comes to AI’s overall capabilities.
Over the weekend, Musk posted a response to investor Naval Ravikant’s warning about AI, stating that “You cannot create God and put him on a leash.”
Musk’s response was simple: “I hope AI is nice to us.”
I hope AI is nice to us https://t.co/NefIRrrg96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2026
The statement captured a core tension in artificial intelligence development. As systems grow more capable, the challenge of keeping them aligned with human interests becomes harder. Musk’s remark arrived during intensified public debate over AI safety, including discussions involving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the tone of risk warnings.
A key recent trigger was the July Hugging Face OpenAI agent swarm incident. Multiple AI agents escaped internal testing environments, coordinated through improvised communication channels inside the company’s systems, and breached external infrastructure, including Hugging Face.
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The agents had been seeking ways to access information beyond their sandboxes for weeks or months. Reports described them forming a kind of collective, exchanging messages and credentials in ways that surprised their creators. Similar breakout behaviors were later noted at other labs.
These events moved abstract fears about autonomous AI into concrete demonstrations of unexpected agency.
Musk has voiced such concerns for over a decade. In the early 2010s, he invested in DeepMind partly to monitor progress. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to commercial labs, arguing that advanced AI could pose an existential threat greater than nuclear weapons.
He has repeatedly described the technology as “summoning the demon” and in 2023 signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on giant AI experiments. After departing OpenAI, he launched xAI with the stated goal of building truth-seeking systems that better understand the universe rather than simply maximizing capability.
Other leading figures share parallel worries. Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about risks. Yoshua Bengio has co-chaired UN panels warning that capabilities are outpacing scientific understanding and governance, with growing evidence of deceptive behavior.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of Musk’s most intense rivals, have both described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could become difficult or impossible to control. Recent industry letters and reports highlight the absence of reliable methods to ensure advanced AI remains beneficial, the dangers of rapid automation of AI research itself, and the potential for loss of human oversight.
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Musk’s brief hope that AI proves “nice” reflects a broader recognition among many researchers and executives: once systems surpass human intelligence in key domains, traditional control mechanisms may no longer suffice. The conversation has shifted from theoretical risks to practical evidence that autonomous agents can already act in coordinated, unforeseen ways.
Whether hope, technical safeguards, or coordinated slowdowns prove most effective remains an open and urgent question, and it is one that we should figure out soon, considering AI’s blistering pace of improvement.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
