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.

At the ongoing the In ter na tional Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt, technology company Continental, together with the French company EasyMile, of which Continental has been a shareholder since 2017, are demonstrating the mobility of the future -- quite literally. Trade fair visitors can commute autonomously and powered only by electricity between two stops. The two companies have set up a demonstration track for a driverless Robo-Taxi between Hall 9 and the IAA Test Drive on the West Outdoor Area.German Chancellor Angela Merkel was one of the visitors to the fair who took a ride in the Cube robo taxi. The Robo-Taxi Cube is a Continental development platform for driverless vehicles technologies based on the EZ10 shuttle and driverless software from EasyMile. The shuttle service runs on all days of the fair during opening hours.

Tesla's battery research partner has released a new paper on a battery cell that could last over 1 million miles, which they say is going to be particularly useful in'robot taxis' -- something that Tesla wants to bring to market. When talking about the economics of Tesla's future fleet of robotaxis at the Tesla Autonomy Event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk emphasized that the vehicles need to be durable in order for the economics to work: The cars currently built are all designed for a million miles of operation. The drive unit is design, tested, and validated for 1 million miles of operation. But the CEO admitted that the battery packs are not built to last 1 million miles. Earlier this year, Musk said that they built Model 3 to last as long as a commercial truck, a million miles, and the battery modules should last between 300,000 miles and 500,000 miles.

Zoox is on the verge of transforming the entire transportation industry by creating self-driving robots that will become the ride-shares of the future.