US Department of Transportation agency that sets vehicle safety standards, investigates crashes and defects, and oversees autonomous driving regulation.
Hyundai Motor America is recalling 94,622 Genesis and Genesis G80 vehicles over seat motors that can overheat and start a fire. The remedy is still being developed, so owners carry the risk until letters that Yonhap says are due Dec. 7.
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NHTSA is weighing a petition alleging about 1,000 Tesla robotaxis exceed speed limits in active school zones. Most defect petitions never become formal investigations, and the agency recorded no crashes, injuries or fatalities in this one.
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Tesla is renaming Full Self-Driving (Supervised) as Tesla Assisted Driving in Europe after Germany's transport ministry called the name "somewhat misleading". The system works the same way under the new name, and its speed allowance above posted limits is still open.
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Tesla says more than 300 Cybercabs now serve Austin, eight times the count of 30 days earlier. The post counts vehicles only, so how often those cars carry paying riders, the real test of a ride network, remains undisclosed.
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Waymo closed a $5bn loan from Pimco, Blackstone and Sixth Street, the first debt the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company has taken on. The money pays for more cars in cities it already serves and for launches abroad, and as a term loan it has to be repaid whatever the ride numbers turn out to be.
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Tesla has renamed Full Self-Driving as Tesla Assisted Driving on its European websites while it seeks approval across the EU. The bloc-wide vote has slipped to December at the earliest, Crypto Briefing reported, so the new name answers a German complaint but does not fix a date.
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Ford CEO Jim Farley says UEV cars will check their own assembly connections, after Ford set a US record of more than 150 recalls last year. The car reports straight to line workers, so the first person to hear about a bad connection now works on the line.
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Tesla is moving its Austin robotaxi cutoff from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m., with Elon Musk naming pets that are hard to see at night as the main problem to solve. Each added hour after dark now overlaps an open federal review of how well Tesla's cameras spot hazards in poor visibility.
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California's SB 1246 makes robotaxi firms send technicians to stuck cars, with fines up to $10,000 a vehicle when one blocks responders over 30 minutes. For operators, clearing a stuck car now takes paid field staff in every California city they serve.
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Tesla nearly quadrupled its authorized Cybercab fleet in Texas to 169 in a month, against Waymo's 1,154 autonomous vehicles in the state. With the shares down 18% this year, the stock depends on that pace holding for many more months.
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Five environmental groups asked a federal appeals court to review the Trump administration's cut of 2031 fuel economy targets to 34.9 mpg from a projected 50.4. Automaker and fleet plans built on the looser target now depend on a rule the petitioners want stopped.
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NHTSA projects the Trump administration's final fuel economy rule will leave the 2031 fleet average at 34.9 mpg, down from 50.4 mpg under Biden-era rules. For automakers, the harder question is how long the lower target lasts, and a Kelley Blue Book editor gives it two to three years.
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A wheel-free robotaxi carrying employees on public roads is a controlled pilot, not a product. The reported gap to the paid Austin fleet is a few days, and that interval is the thing to time.
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Regulators recalled roughly 4.3 million cars because an emergency release was coloured to disappear. Labels are the fix until 2027, when the hardware has to change.
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Tesla is running two-seaters with no steering wheel in parts of Austin and NHTSA says only that it is evaluating. Federal rules are permissive about testing and strict about sales, so the unannounced fare is the number to watch.
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The Austin launch settled where riders can find a Cybercab. Tesla's July letter, which dropped the car from its 2026 volume-production list, still settles how many of them there can be.
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Two robotaxi builders put the same question to the same regulator by different routes. What each got back now decides fleet size, staffing, and whether the car has a steering wheel at all. The door is a hardware decision.
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Raja Krishnamoorthi's letter to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pairs 43 catalogued videos of sleeping Tesla drivers with the in-car message that invites a driver the car has flagged as drowsy to switch on Full Self-Driving.
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A contractor's complaint about gas exposure grounded Zoox's Atlanta test fleet in August. The remedy on the federal record is one sensor and a battery swap, in cars where an emergency room named carbon monoxide.
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Autonomous vehicle safety cases rest on crash comparisons with human drivers, but exclusive OSHA data reported by TechCrunch carries a second injury count: the sprains and whiplash logged by the test drivers training the cars.
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Leadership · September 1, 2026 · One report1 publisher