What’s Really Inside The Tensor Robocar?
Plus: Ride AI is tomorrow. Are you ready?
This is the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.
Tomorrow is the day. Are you ready?
Ride AI is tomorrow (April 15th!), and I genuinely cannot believe it’s here. We are completely sold out (thank you all so much for that), but if you missed out, the waitlist is still open, so get on it. See you there.
Also, we want to give a huge thank you to all our sponsors. They were absolutely instrumental to the success of this year’s event, and we really could not have done it without them.
Top Story
Last week, I sat down with Jewel Li, COO of Tensor, to chat about her career, Tensor and its historic roots as AutoX in the first self-driving hype cycle, and the design of the Tensor Robocar. The full podcast is available to listen on Spotify, but I’ve included some highlights below.
How it started. In 2017, the AutoX founding team, comprising of most of the same team as Tensor, was working out of a house in Saratoga, California, using somewhere between 7 and 17 Logitech cameras to drive a car down hilly roads. Jewel wrote some of that original code. The current Tensor Robocar has 37 cameras, 5 lidars, 11 radars, and 22 microphones.
Why sensors under the chassis? A robotaxi lives in a depot and gets checked before every shift, but a personal car can sit in your driveway for hours with anything underneath it. When the Robocar powers on, the system, not a human, has to verify what’s under the chassis before it moves. Cats (personal experience), wheel clamps, cones… The cold start problem is very real.
Why the nose is so long. The front of the car houses a large liquid tank that feeds nozzles and automotive-grade wipers on the most important sensors on the vehicle. It’s sized to sustain months of operation without needing to refilling it. Compute, on the other hand, is located between the backseat and trunk.
The grocery delivery pivot. Same roads, same AV infrastructure costs, but $2 to $3 a trip to deliver vegetables instead of $10 a trip to deliver humans. For AutoX, the unit economics were brutal, so they walked away. Every AV company that tried last-mile delivery has basically reached the same conclusion, which explains why delivery robots exist.
Was this interesting? Catch Jewel on our panel “Realizing the Robotaxi Future: Strategy and Execution”, and experience the Tensor Robocar for yourself at Ride AI.
Domestic News
Where are the potholes? Just ask Waymo. The company partnered with Waze to share pothole detection data from its autonomous fleet directly with city transportation departments through the free Waze for Cities platform. The pilot launched across five metro areas: the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, where Waymo had already identified roughly 500 potholes. Cities get a more complete picture of road conditions to complement 311 reports, and regular Waze users can see and verify the flagged locations in real time.
Volkswagen’s MOIA America is bringing autonomous ID.Buzz microbuses to Los Angeles on the Uber platform by the end of 2026. Testing is already underway in the city. The ID.Buzz is VW’s electric microbus, built for multi-passenger trips, and this marks MOIA’s formal entry into the U.S. autonomous ride-hailing market. A commercial launch still requires regulatory approval, and the company has a long road ahead on that front.
Waymo is now officially launched in Nashville, Tennessee via the Waymo app. However, its eight-car test fleet in New York City has shut down after the company’s testing permits expired in April without being renewed. A loss for safer vehicular mobility in New York.
International News
The Netherlands became the first EU country to approve Tesla’s FSD Supervised after 18 months of testing by the Dutch vehicle licensing authority (RDW). The RDW will now push for EU-wide approval through the European Commission, which would require a member state vote. If it clears that bar, the implications for Tesla’s European business are significant.
WeRide unveiled two new L4 autonomous sanitation vehicles at the 2026 China Clean Expo: the S3 Robosweeper for urban side roads and the S5 multi-functional cleaner for main roads. Alongside the launch, WeRide signed a deal with CLEAN PRO to procure at least 300 S3 units over five years, with the first 100 units scheduled within a year. WeRide’s sanitation vehicles already operate in 40+ Chinese cities and have expanded internationally to Singapore, Slovakia, and Romania.
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!