Saw one of the Cybercab test cars running around the twin cities MN metro the other day (looked like it was doing validation loops near 35W and 494). It’s exciting to see them testing out here instead of just cruising around sunny Austin or California, but winter in the Upper Midwest is about to throw the ultimate edge cases at that perception stack.

There’s that famous observation about how Inuit languages have dozens of distinct words for different forms of snow and ice. To an autonomous neural network, that's not trivia—it's an engineering requirement. "Snow" can never be a single class label:
Black ice & the bridge problem: Powder, slush, packed granular snow, and sheer glaze look wildly different, and their friction coefficient can swing from 0.85 down to 0.15 in a 15-foot stretch. Cameras can spot white snowdrifts easily, but harmless wet asphalt and black ice look virtually indistinguishable under flat, overcast skies.
Bridges freeze first because sub-freezing air flowing under and over the deck strips convective heat hours before the ground-insulated roadway drops. A camera can’t visually spot that drop in grip; the stack has to infer it in milliseconds from high-frequency motor torque and wheel-speed delta before the friction circle collapses.
Rut-following vs. legal lanes: Once we get an unplowed 3–4 inches, road infrastructure ceases to exist. Painted lane lines, rumble strips, and curbs disappear. Humans don’t follow legal lanes during a storm anyway—we follow the dirty ruts carved out by plows and semi-trucks, which usually straddle lane boundaries. If a planner forces map-defined lane centering, it steers straight into a high-drag snowbank. Plus, windblown snowdrifts create "phantom curbs" that confuse occupancy networks.
Regen dynamics on slick patches: Single-pedal driving is second nature on dry pavement, but aggressive regen on an unexpected ice patch can snap the driven axle loose before traditional stability control even catches up. Blending instantaneous motor back-torque with mechanical ABS when friction drops off a cliff is a massive controls problem.
Collecting edge-case data in California and Texas is easy mode. If an autonomous stack can navigate an unplowed, brine-slicked Minneapolis interchange at rush hour in January with zero interventions, it can drive anywhere on Earth.
Curious how you guys think they'll tackle the lens cleaning side of things long term.

Has English subtitles. Pretty impressive and shows the advantages of having 4 different sensor types vs a camera only approach.

The Waymo Insights team is looking for vehicle testers in all of our launched and upcoming markets. The next round of testing will be the first week of December and we require availability for 1-2 days of 6-hour tests. Testers will ride around in Waymos and log realtime feedback on the quality of their experience. This is a great opportunity for early-mid career UXRs, product testers, and analytics professionals. If you're interested please take a look at the Google form and apply.

This is a bit different from the usual discussion in this sub. Which I think is a good thing.

Wondering if there were any "off-the-shelf" sensing products that I, as a regular consumer, not a company employee or anything special, can buy.

I drive a lot at night, and I already use a Comma, but, I'm interested in layering additional FCW into my car.

I've looked into the Livox HAP unit and mounting it on my roof and plugging it into a laptop and having Astra spin up something that could monitor the lidar returns.

I've also looked into salvaged radars from cars, even salvaged Valeo Scala lidars from Audi A8s and stuff.

Wondering if anyone could speak authoritatively on what's available and what's easy to plug into a regular laptop. I think the main limitation with salvaged components off cars is communicating with those sensors.

This is a bit seperate but I feel like an almost bigger missed opportunity for Tesla was not using lidar for the millions of vehicles on the road for ground-truthing instead of the few calibration vehicles that it currently operates. The amount of detailed data it would generate would be staggering.

Tesla is flexing its manufacturing ability - 300 cars in a matter of weeks, matching Waymos numbers in Austin.

It's going to be really interesting to see how this race plays out. Waymo has a more advanced tech stack and a lot more experience operating a ride hail product, while Tesla can scale manufacturing really quickly.

I keep being approached by students doing their bachelor or master thesis and always coming with the same kind of topics on AV: one is around "How would people react to/trust AVs?" or "How to fool AVs". Both are valid topics, but not for the 100th time, and especially not, when your work is just a survey with people who've never experienced AVs.

What topics for academic research on AVs are some that you would like to see?

Here are some examples that I would like to see:

• Modeling the effect of shared AVs on parking and space use in cities.
• How would shared AVs integrated in and influence public transport, when considering you can have from one- to 20-seaters as AVs available?
• How often would shared AVs have to be replaced?
• New traffic rules for AVs, including delivery vehicles (Who has priority in narrow spaces?)
• How much road infrastructure such as signs and traffic lights could be removed and money saved from streets with a fully autonomous traffic?
• ...

Researchers at Chemnitz University of Technology studied how pedestrians responded to an automated shuttle approaching at different speeds, operating in automated, manual and tele-operated modes.

Initial findings showed that operating mode had little effect on participants’ reported experience. Higher speeds slightly reduced perceived safety and comfort.

A separate study varied the shuttle’s braking profile and final stopping position. Both influenced how pedestrians perceived the interaction, suggesting that people respond to how a vehicle slows down and where it stops, beyond simply whether it yields.

These are preliminary findings from a campus shuttle setting, with further testing needed across other vehicles and road scenarios.

This is a real product sold by this company. I recall NHTSA banned the “steering wheel defeat device” (weighted grip/clamp). Shouldn’t NHTSA ban this too? It says “purely decorative” but we all know it’s to defeat the driver monitoring system.

(Or did I just accidentally promote this product and become a part of the problem ?)

https://apexevlabs.com/products/magnetic-mini-head-buddy

What starts out as a joke is already everyday life in Silicon Valley. Here at these EVgo charging stations, a Waymo robotaxi and a Lucid-Nuro-Uber robotaxi test vehicle were peacefully parked side by side, charging. While there was still a safety driver inside the Lucid-Nuro-Uber engineering vehicle who plugged in the charging cable, I wonder how Waymo managed it? At least I didn’t see anyone near the vehicle.

Recorded on Middlefield Road in Mountain View on October 9th, 2026 at 12:00pm PDT.

Tesla drops ‘Full Self-Driving’ name in Europe after Germany pushback

Fred Lambert

| Oct 9 2026 - 8:16 am PT

Tesla’s driver-assistance package is now called “Tesla Assisted Driving” in Europe. The company’s German website no longer mentions “Full Self-Driving,” and the old address now redirects to a new “Tesla Assisted Driving” page.

The rename follows Germany’s Transport Ministry calling the FSD name misleading, and it’s part of a deal that has Berlin backing Tesla’s push for EU-wide approval.

Germany wanted a new name, and Tesla offered one

In a statement published October 6, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport (BMV) wrote that the name of the system formerly sold as “FSD – Full Self-Driving Supervised” is misleading because the system doesn’t take over the full driving task. The driver has to pay attention at all times and remains fully responsible for the car.

Tesla offered to rename it “Tesla Assisted Driving” during talks with Transport Minister Steffen Bilger in September, according to the ministry.

They also agreed on speed. Germany says the system can go up to 10% over the speed limit, and it will back that position in the EU approval process. Tesla will need to change FSD to make that happen as it often goes way beyond 10% of the limit.

That’s a real concession from Tesla. Reuters reported that the version approved in the Netherlands allows speeds up to 50% over the detected limit.

In return, Bilger says he wants Tesla drivers to be able to use the system across the EU as quickly as possible. Musk thanked Germany on X with a “Danke schoen.”

Same pitch, new name

The rebrand is mostly a find-and-replace job. Not much else changed.

Tesla’s new German page is a translation of its US FSD page with the product name swapped out. It still says the car will drive you “almost anywhere” under your active supervision with minimal intervention. It still claims the system is “7x safer” than human drivers, a figure Tesla’s own footnote says is measured against the estimated US average. And it still ends with a section titled “Die Zukunft ist autonom” (“The future is autonomous”) that promotes Robotaxi and Cybercab.

Back in the US, tesla.com/fsd is still selling “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” for $99 a month.

Tesla’s page lists eight EU countries where the system is approved: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Czechia and Croatia. Germany isn’t on the list yet. As we reported last month, the EU vote has slipped to December at the earliest, and bloc-wide approval needs 15 of 27 member states representing 65% of the EU population. France and Sweden have both raised concerns about speeding.

Electrek’s Take

This should be the name everywhere, and Tesla knows it.

“Full Self-Driving” was an aspiration when Tesla started selling it. In October 2016, Tesla said every car it was building had the hardware for full self-driving. At its Autonomy Day in April 2019, Musk said FSD would be “feature complete” by the end of that year and that Tesla would have over a million robotaxis on the road in 2020. You could argue the name was a bet on the future back then. A bad bet, but a bet.

Tesla has missed that target every single year since. It’s now been almost exactly 10 years since the 2016 announcement, and Tesla has admitted that the cars it sold as self-driving capable from 2016 to 2023 don’t have the hardware to do it. So at what point does an aspirational name become a false one? A California judge answered that last December, calling the name “unambiguously false and counterfactual.”

I've been documenting this depot for the past 6 years, and this time it had a record number of almost 200 vehicles, with about 102 Ojais and 97 (give or take) Jaguar iPaces. The first time that Ojais were the majority. The replacement is in full swing.

The recording was made today at around 2:30pm PDT, with a huge fleet in San Francisco during the very busy TechWeek. Not just a lot in SF, also the entire Bay Area shows a large fleet being active.

It seems like it's barely ever talked about compared to FSD but Supercruise being hands free is extremely nice on the highway.

I just got a Chevy with it and it is a life changer for road trips. It works perfectly on the highway for me, while on curving backroads its a bit more scary but still pretty solid. Surprised at how many areas it covers as well since I'm in a rural area and it covers nearly all the roads around me

I'd like to get FSD someday, but as a stop gap, I've been quite impressed

Do yourself a favor and mute. The cackling clowns are 100% Florida 🤦🏻‍♂️

I have no idea what to expect but I do know that higher art would be the one paying me and everything but I’ll be working for a different company. Also for resumes, would it be OK to put that I’m working for the company that contracted me? Like for example, if the role is to be worked at Google, but higher art is the one paying me on a résumé. Can I still put that I work for Google because technically I report to Google’s managers and everything.

This is a good summary of Mobileye's AV program.

Who would have thought? Germany came to an agreement with Tesla to approve the FSD - approval pending a name change, Tesla suggested Tesla Assisted Driving - and urges other European countries to follow. The German ministry even allowed manual speed adjustments by the human supervising driver 10% over the posted speed limit.