News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Uber puts $10bn behind 120,000 robotaxis it will not build - and buys its way into the companies that do
Alongside its second-quarter results in the first week of August 2026, Uber said it would commit more than 10 billion dollars to putting 120,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform. The money splits roughly two ways: about 7.5 billion dollars to buy fleets, released against deployment milestones rather than up front, and about 2.5 billion dollars in equity stakes in the companies that make the cars and the driving software - Lucid, Rivian, Nuro and Wayve among them. The service target is at least 15 cities by the end of 2026 and 28 cities by 2028. What is notable is the shape of the bet rather than its size. Uber has spent years insisting it does not need to build a self-driving car, having sold its own programme in 2020, and this announcement doubles down on that: more than thirty partnerships, no in-house vehicle, and capital used to secure supply rather than technology. The company is buying the two things a robotaxi operator cannot generate on its own - hardware it does not manufacture and priority access to it - while keeping the part it already owns, which is the demand. The underlying quarter was strong enough to pay for it: 208 million monthly active platform consumers, up 16 percent, trips up 18 percent, gross bookings up 22 percent to 58.02 billion dollars and revenue up 11 percent to 14.19 billion. The market response was cooler - the stock has fallen through 2026 - which reads less as doubt about the results than about how much of the value in a driverless network eventually accrues to the app rather than to whoever owns the cars. The number to keep in view is the one Uber gave earlier this month: robotaxis are live in seven cities and still account for well under half a percent of its trips. Going from that to 120,000 vehicles is not an incremental step, and the commitment is deliberately staged so the money follows the deployments rather than leading them.
Tesla says 380,000 unsupervised robotaxi miles and zero notable incidents — but still will not say how many cars
On its Q2 2026 earnings call on 5 August 2026, Tesla gave the most specific account so far of its driverless ride-hailing service. AI chief Ashok Elluswamy said the company had driven "more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised robotaxi now across six cities" and had "zero notable incidents". Elon Musk said miles driven are growing more than 10% a week. The six unsupervised cities sit in two states: Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas, with Miami, Orlando and Tampa added in July 2026. Tesla counts a seventh U.S. market. Two things the call did not settle. First, the fleet size: CFO Vaibhav Taneja declined to give a vehicle count, arguing that robotaxis drive almost continuously, so miles rather than units are the meaningful measure. That is defensible, but it also means the mileage figure cannot be checked against how many cars are actually deployed — and the safety claim is Tesla's own, with no independent audit behind it. Second, what the seventh market is. Tesla's Bay Area operation runs under a California charter-party carrier permit — a limousine licence — with a human driver in the seat. The California Public Utilities Commission has stated the company is not operating an autonomous vehicle service there, and Tesla holds no CPUC driverless deployment permit. A Nevada application for Clark County covering up to 5,000 vehicles was filed on 5 June 2026 and remains pending. On hardware, Musk confirmed Cybercab — the two-seat car with no steering wheel or pedals — has started production at Gigafactory Texas, where Tesla lists annual capacity above 125,000 units. Production cars began engineering test drives on public roads during the quarter and employees started taking Cybercab rides on the factory campus in July. The paying service, however, still runs on Model Y. Software is FSD v14, with v15 in development; Elluswamy said the same v15 models that power Model Y will also run on Cybercab. Cars use Tesla's AI4 computer, with AI5 expected in volume production around the middle of 2027.
Tesla Robotaxi →