DoorDash Is Going Airborn
Plus, doctors vs. lawyers, discussing torque latency with EVP of Physical AI @ Arm, and how entering Western markets might expose China's AVs.
This is the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.
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Podcast Push
I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Drew Henry, EVP of Arm’s new Physical AI business unit, about where autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots actually overlap, and why system-level design and safety standards matter for both. The conversation turned out to be quite a long and interesting one, so put it on while you’re cooking or gardening and let me know what you think.
Top Story
DoorDash has earned FAA Part 135 air carrier certification and launched DoorDash Air, its in-house drone delivery program built inside DoorDash Labs. You might remember DoorDash Labs being the same team behind googly-eyed ground delivery robot Dot. The certification makes DoorDash the eighth drone operator in the country to clear the FAA’s five-stage evaluation of aircraft airworthiness, maintenance programs, and safety procedures.
While the aircraft is interesting, DoorDash says the harder problem is the ground infrastructure. To address complications with pickup and delivery, DoorDash integrated real-time inventory reconciliation and universal handoff systems for drive-throughs, rooftops, and merchant back doors, all built to plug into its existing Autonomous Delivery Platform. That platform already decides in real time whether a Dasher, Dot, a drone, or a delivery partner handles a given order, and DoorDash’s SmartScale tool for merchants feeds into the same strategy by keeping order weight and accuracy consistent across every mode.
But why drones? DoorDash says more than 20% of its orders now travel three to five miles, but those orders take nearly 25% longer to fulfill since finding a Dasher for a mid-range trip takes longer. Drones cut that wait down to under 25 minutes on average for deliveries under five miles, and some pilot markets saw order volume grow by roughly 30% for nine weeks after launch. Routing those mid-range orders to drones also frees up Dashers to focus on the shorter, denser trips they already prefer.
DoorDash hasn’t named a launch region or timeline yet. The company says it’ll share more on the aircraft, ground infrastructure, and operations at its Dash Forward press event in San Francisco later this year. Stanley Tang, DoorDash’s co-founder, also published a companion piece going deeper on the engineering approach and DoorDash Labs’ philosophy behind the program, which I think is worth a read.
Domestic News
Almost 400 clinicians, including a former US Surgeon General, have signed an open letter to Congress and NHTSA arguing that autonomous vehicle safety data has crossed a threshold doctors can’t responsibly ignore. The letter, published by neurosurgeon Jonathan Slotkin and Eric Topol on Doximity’s Op-Med and signed by founding signatories including former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, cites a 2025 peer-reviewed study of 56.7 million driverless miles that found an 85% reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes compared with human drivers on the same streets, and Waymo’s own safety data, covering more than 170 million miles, showing a 92% reduction in serious-injury-or-worse crashes and a 96% drop in intersection crashes.
The letter calls on Congress and NHTSA to require standardized crash reporting across all AV operators, since Waymo is currently the only company publishing data detailed enough for clinicians to evaluate, and it singles out New York, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Minnesota for blocking or slow-walking AV deployment despite the safety data. It also calls for real workforce transition planning for the millions of Americans who drive for a living, writing that “displacement that is foreseeable and unaddressed is its own kind of preventable harm.”
The letter is still collecting signatures before it’s formally delivered to the White House and NHTSA, and I can’t help but mention how completely opposite what personal injury lawyers are doing this is.
Zoox has received the first-ever commercial exemption for a purpose-built autonomous robotaxi from NHTSA, clearing it to start charging fares. The Part 555 exemption builds on the demonstration exemption Zoox became the first AV company to receive back in August 2025, the pathway NHTSA opened for vehicles built without a steering wheel, pedals, or other traditional manual controls. Zoox has carried more than half a million riders for free in Las Vegas and through its Explorers Program in San Francisco, with another half million on the waitlist.
Under the exemption, Zoox can deploy up to 2,500 vehicles a year over the next two years, and it’s exempted from eight federal vehicle safety standards written for human drivers, including rules requiring a steering wheel, pedals, and windshield defrosting. Fares start in Las Vegas next month, with Miami and Austin up next.
Waymo has started resuming freeway driving in Phoenix, more than two months after pulling its robotaxis off highways over how they handled construction zones. Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Miami are set to follow in the coming days. Waymo says it shipped software updates for better scene recognition and routing around construction zones after voluntarily recalling nearly 4,000 robotaxis in June, its sixth recall, following at least 13 instances of vehicles driving into closed highway construction sections. No injuries or collisions were reported. While Waymo says freeway routing is still coming soon everywhere outside Phoenix, but my Trusted Tester account already has freeway routing in San Francisco.
Waymo has also brought Google’s Gemini into the cabin of its new Ojai vehicles, allowing riders to use it for cabin controls, trip information, and general questions. Gemini in Waymo runs independently from the Waymo Driver, with the only influence it has over the vehicle being pulling the car over on request. The Ojai is also getting a redesigned tri-screen interface that adjusts what each rider sees based on which seats are occupied, plus a Calm Mode that dims the screens for a quieter ride.
Charger Logistics has signed on to run Aurora’s second-generation driverless trucks between Dallas and Laredo, the same Sun Belt corridor Value Truck signed onto last week. Charger is an asset-based freight and logistics carrier operating across the US and Mexico, and it plans to use the Aurora Driver to add capacity and improve utilization on one of its busiest lanes, moving temperature-controlled, pharmaceutical, and other time-sensitive freight. Aurora says it’s just the first of many routes the two companies plan to bring online together.
No Home Field Advantage
We’ve got a flurry of Chinese companies launching in Europe this week, all trying to scale like crazy outside of China. I’ve been watching these launches closely, because while it’s easy to cover up mistakes and manage bad press in China when the government has a vested interest in making domestic advanced technology look good, foreign governments do not.
For context, Momenta, Baidu, and WeRide are launching in three different European markets this week. Momenta has been cleared for nationwide Level 4 robotaxi testing across Germany, targeting Munich as its first robotaxi city with partner Uber. Baidu’s Apollo Go has started road testing in London with Freenow, putting it in a three-way race there with Waymo and Uber’s Wayve. WeRide has entered Denmark through a partnership with GreenMobility, becoming the first Chinese robotaxi company to reach the Nordics and its third new European market in about two months.
Meanwhile, the western AV companies these three are about to compete against are having a rough stretch of their own PR-wise.
Waymo is still dealing with fallout from a robotaxi striking a 9-year-old near a Santa Monica elementary school in January, an incident that triggered NHTSA and NTSB investigations and led California’s Teamsters to call for the company’s operating license to be suspended. That’s on top of six separate robotaxi recalls to date, the freeway-construction pause I mentioned above, and a pattern of vehicles blocking or driving into active emergency scenes that got Waymo, Zoox, and every other AV operator a formal NHTSA ultimatum in July. Zoox recalled its entire 105-vehicle fleet in July after one of its robotaxis drove into an active fire scene in Las Vegas, so blinded by smoke that firefighters had to cone off the area themselves. Avride, an Uber-backed robotaxi startup, is under a separate NHTSA investigation into 16 crashes in four months, after regulators reviewed footage and found a pattern of vehicles changing lanes into the path of other cars and failing to slow for traffic ahead, behavior the agency said could reflect “excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability.” Tesla has spent the summer unredacting details on 17 robotaxi crashes in Austin, including two where a remote teleoperator was behind the wheel.
My point in mentioning all of this is that none of this happens quietly in the West. Every recall triggers a press release, every crash report becomes public record NHTSA has to publish, and a child getting clipped near a school leads to bill proposals in Congress within weeks. Compare that to how China handled Baidu’s own Apollo Go outage in Wuhan back in April. License issuance was frozen for months without warning, an industry safety review happened almost completely without press coverage, and while I consider myself fairly tied in to news out of China, permits started flowing again in July with barely a mention in Chinese-language coverage (I did mention it here though). Not to mention how news of the pedestrians gravely injured by an Apollo Go RT6 (operated by Hello) just seemed to fizzle out with no official follow-up.
Momenta, Baidu, and WeRide are about to learn what it’s like to operate without that kind of insulation. I doubt Munich, London, or the Danish regulators GreenMobility answers to will look away the way Beijing did. The time will soon come when domestically developed Chinese ADS becomes more visible, and we should all be paying close attention to if it lives up to its claims.
International News
China is banning the blue ADAS indicator lights that have become a signature design element on cars like the Li Auto L9, after regulators moved to strictly enforce the GB4785 national lighting standard, which only allows white, red, yellow, and amber exterior lights. The trend started with the L9’s five blue indicators in 2022 and spread to Aito, Xpeng, Nio, and BYD. Starting next month, any new passenger car filing with a blue light will be blocked from getting a product announcement, though it’s still unclear how automakers will handle blue lights on cars already on the road. Some expect over-the-air updates to change the light color or disable the feature entirely. I’m somewhat confused by this move, as I’m of the opinion that the blue ADAS indicators are actually a good thing to have and should be folded into GB4785 as a recognized standard.
Tesla says its FSD Supervised driver-assistance system has been in over 5.2 times fewer collisions than manual driving across 65 million kilometers in five EU countries over the last four months. The self-reported figures, covering the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, and Belgium, also claim steep drops in automatic emergency braking events, harsh acceleration, harsh braking, and hard swerves compared to manual driving. Worth remembering: FSD Supervised is a driver-assistance feature that requires an attentive driver behind the wheel, not autonomous driving, and Tesla hasn’t published the underlying data for independent review.
Getting Over It
A security robot patrolling a Kaiser Permanente lot met its match in a speed bump this week. Roameo, built by RAD, leases for $9,000 a month. Looks to me like they should up the torque on that bot…
Alright, that’s it from me… until next week. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with your friend, colleague, or boss. Thank you for reading; Sophia out!
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Geez, I'll need a week to digest all these stories!
Am accepting your invitation for us to share our thoughts on your sit-down with Arm’s Drew Henry:
- Sounded like you and Mr. Henry had as much fun talking for an hour as I did listening for an hour.
- Very interesting to hear about the engineering challenges related to moving a robotic finger and interpreting force-detection feedback to successfully hold a paper cup of coffee or playing cards at a poker game.
- Enjoyed the questions around how the signals from (all those) various sensors on given platforms are managed by the processor, are the processors to be centrally-located or distributed, and at what point do the quantity of sensors and signal traffic begin to slow the processor decisions and affect overall drivability / operation.
- Appreciated the many mentions of integrating safety into the products when performance and results seem to always be first in the end-user’s spotlight.
- The concept of trust. I wonder to what degree timelines will either clash or mesh as autonomous-related technology matures: the timeline for the public to accept and gain a comfort level in an autonomous anything, and the timelines for business- and financial-based milestones related to rolling out the next product.
Will corporations have enough patience to wait for public acceptance before introducing the next ‘thing’? Up to now, cell phone generations / iterations have been eagerly and continuously accepted by the masses, but the masses believe (mistakenly believe, but that’s a different conversation) that they have control over what they hold in their hands.
The number of miles logged, rides hailed, construction zones encroached, blinking school bus lights passed, and 4am honking Waymos notwithstanding, what’s your opinion of the public’s acceptance and comfort level with robotaxies and AVs in general so far?
- Mr. Henry’s observation about how the lack of a system-level design philosophy kills projects. That’s huge because missing that or even taking too little time to get that part of the project right leads, I believe, to a clash in the timelines idea I mentioned above.
- Addressing the constraints around having sufficient battery capacity to sufficiently power the processor(s) for desired durations.
Thanks so much for the later paragraphs about China having No Home Field Advantage when they unveil AVs in Europe. I appreciate the content and raised awareness there.
Finally, the short clip about 'the little security robot that could' gave me a good laugh!