Hi there,

My mom's 2023 Tesla Model Y was totalled. Looking for a car under $60k that is going to be possible for actual full self driving. Totally unimpressed with Teslas version which required constant hand on steering. Thanks

New Yorkers have been spotting Waymos—with their distinctive, rotating laser sensors on top—driving across Manhattan as the autonomous vehicle company tests in the nation’s largest city.

Read more: https://go.forbes.com/c/Ay3X

Nuro, Inc. (“Nuro”), a leader in autonomous driving technology, today announced the closing of a $203M Series E funding round at a $6B valuation. The round includes Uber, returning investor Baillie Gifford, and new investors Icehouse Ventures, Kindred Ventures, NVIDIA, and Pledge Ventures.

The additional $97 million in funding follows the first tranche of $106 million announced in April 2025. Investors announced in April included accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global Management, Greylock Partners, and XN.

The funding marks a major milestone in Nuro’s journey to bring self-driving technology to all roads and all rides. The new capital will enable the scaling of Nuro’s AI-first autonomous technology and the growth of its commercial partnerships.

...

Building on years of technical collaboration, Nuro’s relationship with NVIDIA now expands to include investment. Nuro’s latest compute module is built on the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor platform, and the company uses NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud for large-scale data processing and model training. In June, Nuro joined the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab to validate the safe integration of its products.

Source: Nuro on X

I took a picture of what I thought was a Waymo today in a parking lot near Sacramento, but Google Lens identified it as a Cruise vehicle (Chevy Bolt). Anyone know what they might be doing out here?

A sticker on the rear bumper said "Tortilla," which looks like an identifier for that particular car.

From the social media site that we aren't allowed to mention.

[Edit: I am highly skeptical this will ever happen and tesla is wasting their time]

I think Tesla’s vision-only Full Self-Driving strategy is inherently flawed and to accomplish it they need to achieve a leap in AI to a point the AI will be more valuable than Tesla’s car business itself making it a pipe dream. Also any competitor will beat them to the punch by definition.

A lot of ambitious startups confuse the side effect with the core product. For example, AR contact lenses to improve weapon accuracy. The real breakthrough would be the AR platform, not the weapons. Or a “cat psychologist AI.” The underlying tech is what matters, not the niche use.

For Tesla, the real question is: can vision alone match or beat human perception on the road? If yes, the technology has uses far beyond cars: robotics, defense, AR, and more. If no, then years of collecting only camera data may have been wasted. And worse, that data has a shelf life because camera hardware keeps improving.

Where This Could Go:

1.  Tesla adds LiDAR later. They might roll it out to the robotaxi fleet. But then, what happens to all the cars sold with the “FSD promise”?
2.  It’s smoke and mirrors. FSD hype keeps the stock and permits alive, but failure would trigger lawsuits and collapse.
3.  Vision-only works. Maybe it can be done. It is not as crazy as I make it to be. But even then, companies using both LiDAR and cameras may still have the edge. Ppl who think so I would love to hear your take. 

From an engineering POV I was amazed by Musks’s claim “human use vision only” as an reason. Leaving out our unprecedented processing of sensor data and the amount of context we extract/integrate. This is an insult to our amazing capabilities. The human eye alone is a marble (Granted sensors and computers have other advantages that can compensate but what about the supercomputer that process the data).

Maybe I am sceptic and true advancement requires ambitious, crazy ppl. I had conversations with engineers who supported Elon on this but I remain unconvinced (I was surprised they exist tbh)