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Proponents of autonomous vehicle technology have long argued that robotaxis and other self-driving vehicles will reduce crash incidents and make roads safer. And there is some evidence of that. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a cost to those who are working (or have worked) for the companies developing that tech.
Sean O’Kane, senior reporter, special projects, dug into data submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and found that test drivers for Waymo and Zoox sustained more than two dozen injuries in 2024 and 2025 from hard braking or other sudden movements made by the autonomous vehicles. In some cases, these workers were sidelined for months after sustaining injuries like whiplash when the AVs stopped abruptly, and hard.
Check out his full story, which includes interviews with former and current workers.
There is one important item to consider. You might ask yourself, well what about the other AV developers? Surely, this isn’t a problem isolated to Waymo and Zoox? And you’re probably right. It’s likely that test drivers for other AV developers are also getting injured, but the companies they work for may be exempt from OSHA’s reporting requirements.
Got a tip for us on this story or others? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.
Deals!
I’ve been writing about Gatik, the autonomous vehicle startup known for its self-driving box trucks, since 2019 when it came out of “stealth.” At the time, I wasn’t sure if the startup would survive. The hype cycle was already chewing up and spitting out AV startups and no one seemed close to commercializing their tech.
Gatik has not only survived, but it has also crossed over from R&D lab to commercial operator, albeit at a small-scale compared with traditional human-driven delivery companies. (The company’s box trucks are driverless and deliver freight from distribution centers to retails stores like Walmart.) And now, with $200 million in fresh funding, it’s pushing to scale. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest, and Intact Private Capital.
This is Gatik’s largest funding to date. But I might argue that its multiyear commercial agreement with PepsiCo, which was signed in June and is part of $600 million in contracted revenue, is the bigger deal here.
Other deals that got my attention …
Airbound, an Indian startup building autonomous drones, raised $37 million in a Series A round led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures.
Mubadala Capital, the alternative asset management arm of Mubadala Investment Company, agreed to acquire a majority equity interest in Arrive Logistics, a truckload brokerage based in Austin.
Regent Craft, a Rhode Island electric startup developing and manufacturing electric seagliders, raised $120 million in a Series B round co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures. (The seaglider is a class of vehicle called a wing-in-ground effect vehicle, or WIG.) Regent also secured about $120 million debt capital provided by Erebor Bank, which was launched by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey. One note about Regent, a company I have followed for a while: The startup, which recently completed its 255,000-square-foot seaglider factory, is clearly pushing deeper into the defense sector, probably because there is money and partnerships to be had.
Vista Global Holding, a private aviation group based in UAE, is considering a European IPO that could raise more than a $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Notable reads and other tidbits
According to a recent YouGov survey, more Americans oppose police license plate cameras than support them. Do you? Shoot me an email and share your opinion.
Any, an electric two-wheeler startup out of Belgium, is placing a bet on cargo space.
General Motors is facing increased scrutiny from U.S. safety regulators after hundreds of incidents, more than 20 crashes or fires, and at least six injuries involving brake problems in its EVs.
Ford has hired Dave Carroll as president of the company’s energy business. Carroll, who previously worked at ENGIE North America, will succeed long-time executive Lisa Drake.
Rivian CFO Claire McDonough is resigning from her position and will leave at the end of October. Her tenure at Rivian came during a tough, and exciting (ahem IPO), period for the company. And her departure comes at another critical moment for Rivian as it takes on some of its biggest projects to date, including the robotaxi deal with Uber and scaling production and sales of its R2 SUV.
Uber is launching a new live video streaming feature that will allow parents to keep track of their children during rides.
Waymo shared 10 lessons it has learned after its vehicles had driven more than 200 million autonomous miles. The first lesson — that multimodal sensors are indispensable — received the most attention because it is in direct opposition to Tesla’s camera-only approach. But there were other lessons that got my attention, including Waymo’s promotion of vision language models (an area that is starting to get a lot of attention).
Meanwhile, Waymo is making more inroads overseas. The company announced that it plans to launch in Munich, Germany.
One more thing …
One important clarification on what I wrote about last week. You might recall that Waymo shared information about its custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip that is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core “brain” of the self-driving system. Waymo stated in its blog post:
“While these ASICs alone deliver over 1,000 TOPS of ML performance dedicated to front-end processing and ML models, we optimize across the full stack to maximize achieved performance, especially in the low-batch regimes we often operate.”
That line led me, and others, to believe that its one chip can deliver 1,000 TOPs (trillions of operations per second) of computing performance. I compared it to Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor automotive processor, noting it was about the same performance.
But alas, one eagle-eyed reader reached out with some questions, which prompted me to turn to Waymo for official answers. A Waymo spokesperson told me, “It’s for the system, not a single chip.”
That’s an important distinction.
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