Zoox 4x’s San Francisco Service Area.
Plus: All the partnerships Nvidia revealed at GTC
Welcome to the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.
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Now, Here’s What You Need To Know Today.
Top Story
Zoox is on an expansion roll.
The company is expanding its San Francisco service area to roughly four times its current size, adding the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, Pacific Heights, and the Embarcadero. It will also more than double its Las Vegas service coverage, adding the majority of major Strip hotels, the Convention Center, and beginning limited event service at Sphere and T-Mobile Arena. Zoox is also testing at Harry Reid International Airport with its retrofitted fleet, with the robotaxi itself coming to the airport in preparation for future service.
PC: Zoox
Beyond the expansion, Zoox is bringing its purpose-built robotaxi to Austin and Miami for the first time. The initial rollout will be employee and family rides only, with Zoox Explorers and public waitlist riders to follow later this year.
The company is also rolling out two new features: “Find My Zoox,” which uses lights and sounds to help riders identify their specific vehicle in busy pickup zones, and “ZooxCast,” which lets riders stream their own music via Bluetooth.
Some stats since launch: Zoox has driven nearly 2 million autonomous miles, served over 350,000 riders, retained a 4.72-star average rating, and currently has over 500,000 people on the waitlist. Surely the free pastries at Tartine juiced those waitlist numbers…
Rides will remain free for now until the company receives regulatory approval to begin charging for rides. A company spokesperson clarified that the updated service areas will be live this Spring.
Domestic News
Speaking of Zoox, if you’re curious about the company’s progress before the above expansions, I’ve just published my video review of Zoox, Tesla Robotaxi, and Waymo.
Uber has tapped Rivian to build up to 50,000 autonomous R2 SUVs for its robotaxi platform, in a deal worth up to $1.25 billion, with $300 million committed upfront. Uber keeps stacking its autonomous fleet portfolio: it now has active or announced partnerships with Waymo, Zoox, Motional, Wayve, and now Rivian, not to mention its Uber-Nuro-Lucid project and its numerous partnerships with overseas AV providers.
Nvidia announced an expanded partnership with Hyundai Motor Group and Kia to develop next-generation autonomous driving using the DRIVE Hyperion platform, covering L2+ ADAS in production vehicles and L4 robotaxi development through Motional. This is part of a broader GTC week sweep I wrote about last week. Between Hyundai/Kia, BYD, Geely, Isuzu, Nissan, Bolt, Grab, Lyft, and TIER IV, Nvidia has revealed itself to be the computing backbone of the autonomous industry.
GM has begun supervised public-road testing of its next-generation automated driving system on limited-access highways in California and Michigan, using a fleet of more than 200 development vehicles. The system will debut in the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028 with “eyes-off” capability. This means that this system will be a Level 3 system, similar to Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot. From there, GM plans to roll it out across the portfolio, from Cadillac down to mainstream Chevy models, eventually supporting driveway-to-driveway capability.
Comma.ai shipped openpilot 0.11, claims it is the first “real-world robotics agent” shipped to users that was fully trained in a learned simulation. The new WMI model was trained on 2.5 million minutes of unlabeled fleet data and meaningfully improves highway speed control and behavior around parked cars.
Waymo published a major safety impact update. There are a lot of stats, but the important ones are:
Across 170.7 million rider-only miles through December 2025, the Waymo Driver was involved in 13x fewer serious-injury or fatal crashes than human drivers in those same cities. At Waymo’s current scale, that translates to preventing a serious-injury crash every 8 days. Pedestrian, cyclist, and motorcyclist injury crashes were each down more than 80% versus the human benchmark.
Nuro revealed it has “almost 100 vehicles” in its Robotaxi Engineering Fleet, the Lucid Gravity-based units testing autonomous driving across multiple U.S. cities and states ahead of the Lucid-Nuro-Uber commercial launch later this year.
During GTC week, Wayve CEO Alex Kendall posted a daily series of hour-long zero-shot autonomous driving videos from a new country each day.
The videos are meant to demonstrate Wayve’s claim that its AI Driver generalizes to new roads without HD maps. I’ve also been seeing Wayve’s Mach-Es testing around San Francisco, though Wayve hasn’t posted a zero-shot San Francisco video… yet.
It seems Waymo’s lobbying efforts are starting to bear fruit, as Utah lawmakers approved a legal framework for driverless vehicles. The framework establishes a liability structure for accidents involving autonomous systems. Injured parties can sue for negligence with a $1 million cap on non-economic damages, and can also pursue manufacturer liability claims by proving a reasonable alternative design existed and that the vehicle caused more harm than humans would at scale. The bill now heads to the governor. The Legislature will revisit the framework in 2030.
International News
WeRide had a busy week on multiple fronts. The company entered Slovakia, its fourth European market, launching the country’s first autonomous driving program in partnership with a national initiative called ELEVATE Slovakia that brings together the government, the City of Bratislava, Slovak Post, and academic institutions. Testing begins in Bratislava this spring, with expansion to Košice and the High Tatras on the roadmap.
WeRide also showcased its Robotaxi GXR at Nvidia GTC, powered by the DRIVE Hyperion platform. WeRide’s Singapore service goes public on April 1st. And separately, WeRide integrated its robotaxi service into WeChat through an expanded Tencent Cloud partnership, letting riders in Guangzhou book and pay for rides without leaving the app.
Geely has become the first Chinese automaker to receive UN R171 certification for its driver assistance system, a certification that allows the system to be legally sold across all UN Economic Commission for Europe member states without country-by-country approval. Only BMW had received this certification before, in late 2025. The system, called G-ASD, was developed by Afari Technology, a Geely subsidiary, and will debut on Lotus vehicles in Europe in June 2026. Worth noting: the certification currently covers highway navigation assistance only, not the more advanced urban features Geely deploys in China.
Robot Oopsies
A delivery robot limps through the streets with one disabled wheel, dragging itself along with grim determination. The delivery must go on.
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!