After months of testing, the Silicon Valley-based driverless car company began offering Waymo One -- its 24/7 robotaxi service -- to the public Wednesday. Those interested can get an activation code that will allow them to ride free for one week at an in-person pop-up event or by signing up online. In November, Waymo One will move on to Century City, then West Hollywood, Mid-City, Koreatown and downtown L.A. Autonomous vehicle enthusiasts, many of whom received emails about the event ahead of time, lined up at the Waymo stand in Santa Monica on Wednesday morning before it opened at 8 a.m., said Waymo product marketing manager Julianne McGoldrick. What happens when autonomous vehicles invade the traffic capital of the country? They collected their "ticket to ride" with an activation code and snagged T-shirts and tote bags.

Self-driving cars are hitting city streets like never before. In August the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) granted two companies, Cruise and Waymo, permits to run fleets of driverless robo taxis 24/7 in San Francisco and to charge passengers fares for those rides. This was just the latest in a series of green lights that have allowed progressively more leeway for autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the city in recent years. Almost immediately, widely publicized accounts emerged of Cruise vehicles behaving erratically. One blocked the road outside a large music festival, another got stuck in wet concrete and another even collided with a fire truck.

Driverless cars may be worse at detecting children and people with darker skin, tests on artificial intelligence systems suggest. The researchers who carried out the work say that tighter government regulation is needed and that car-makers must be transparent about the development and testing of these vehicles. Jie Zhang at King's College London and her colleagues assessed eight AI-based pedestrian detectors used in driverless car research.

Get ready, San Francisco: The state government on Thursday approved a major expansion of driverless robotaxi service throughout the city. And get ready, Los Angeles: The industry is planning to push for driverless rides here as soon as it gets permits to do so. The state's green light, on a 3-1 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission, signals a historic turning point for the robotaxi business as it evolves from fascinating experiment to commercial reality. It also marks the beginning of a grand experiment in public safety as thousands of multi-ton vehicles operated via artificial intelligence attempt to safely negotiate the hills and narrow streets of San Francisco. It highlights California's messy multiagency regulation of new automobile technology: Two agencies are in charge of the robotaxi business, the CPUC and the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

As a child-size mannequin stands in a traffic lane on a rural two-lane road, a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode barrels toward it. And the car drives on, as if nothing happened. It's the latest salvo from activist organization the Dawn Project, which publishes videos aimed at showing how badly Tesla's automated driving technology can behave. Dan O'Dowd, the wealthy, tech-savvy activist who founded and self-funds the Dawn Project, said he wants to ensure that "the safety-critical systems that everyone's life depends on are fail-safe and can't be hacked." While O'Dowd's stated goal is brand-agnostic, his main target since launching the Dawn Project in 2021 has been Tesla and its controversial Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems.

The California department of motor vehicles has approved Mercedes-Benz's automated driving system on designated highways under certain conditions without the active control of a driver. California is one of Tesla's largest markets, accounting for 16% of the carmaker's global deliveries last year, according to Reuters calculations. But the German carmaker beat Tesla to become the first carmaker to receive authorization to sell or lease cars with an automated driving system to the public in California. The approval was granted to Level 3 Mercedes-Benz "Drive Pilot" system that allows a driver to legally take their eyes off the wheel but must be available to resume control in need. The "Drive Pilot" system can only operate on highways during daylight at speeds not exceeding 40mph, the DMV said.

This article was co-published with Understanding AI, a newsletter that explores how A.I. works and how it's changing our world. In 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay that became a kind of manifesto for Silicon Valley during the 2010s. "Software is eating the world," Andreessen declared. Computers and the internet had already revolutionized a bunch of information-oriented businesses: books, movies, music, photography, telecommunications, and so forth. Software also played a major supporting role in more tangible industries. New cars had dozens of computer chips in them, for example, and the oil and gas industry made heavy use of software to discover new drilling sites. But Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, argued that the software revolution was only getting started.

Ford wants to build cars that repossess themselves, although the technology can't be used on current models like the Ford Puma Ford has been granted a patent for a system that allows a car to repossess itself if the owner fails to keep up with payments. Ford envisions the car driving itself back to the showroom – or to a scrapyard if the value is low. But a security expert warns that the proposed system could instead be used to steal cars remotely. The patent, which was filed in 2021 but granted only this week, describes how the system would kick in if the car owner failed to respond to messages informing them they were falling behind with payments. At that point, a series of measures would be used to make the car first unpleasant to drive, and then impossible.

When it comes to the evolution of mobile robots, it may be a long time before legged robots can safely interact in the real world, according to a new study. Led by a team of researchers at The Ohio State University, the study published recently in the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2022 describes a framework for testing and characterizing the safety of legged robots, machines that, unlike their wheeled counterparts, rely on mechanical limbs for movement. The study found that many current legged robotic models don't always act predictably in response to real-life situations, meaning it's hard to predict whether they'll fail – or succeed – at any given task that requires movement. "Our work reveals that these robotic systems are complex and, more importantly, anti-intuitive," said Bowen Weng, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. "It means you can't rely on the robot's ability to know how to react in certain situations, so the completeness of the testing becomes even more important."

Officials in San Francisco have asked for a halt to the expansion of driverless car tests across the city after a series of incidents that have hampered the work of emergency services. San Francisco's position at the heart of Silicon Valley and its wealth of technology talent has made it a hotbed for the driverless car industry. Both Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, and Cruise, owned by General Motors, operate experimental robotic taxi services in the city. But they haven't been without problems. New Scientist has previously reported how autonomous vehicles (AV) from Cruise, for example, have randomly stopped and blocked traffic and had a run-in with police.