Tech
Here Come the Robotaxis: Zoox and Lyft Both Launch Driverless Ride Sharing
“How do we break down the journey into bite-sized pieces, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming or insurmountable?” says Jesse Levinson, the cofounder and CEO of Zoox. “This moment is a huge one, but the service is still unpaid and fairly limited.” Zoox launched in 2014, and though it’s been testing its technology in San Francisco, at its Foster City, California, headquarters, and in Las Vegas for years, this will be the first time it’s allowing anyone willing to download an app to ride. The company was acquired by Amazon in 2020 for a reported $1.2 billion.
Olsen, the May Mobility CEO, says he is comfortable with the company’s slower launch process after watching others rush to put self-driving cars on the road. “One of the things we’ve seen across the industry is that a vehicle might perform brilliantly some of the time, but then will do wildly inappropriate things in the edge cases,” Olsen says. He declines to say exactly when the firm would remove the safety drivers from its vehicles, or when it might expand its Lyft partnership to other areas or cities, but he says any moves the company makes will be tested and validated with real-world and simulated data. The service will scale more quickly as time goes on, he says.
Two US self-driving vehicle firms shut down this past decade after their robotaxis were involved in serious road accidents. In 2018, a testing self-driving vehicle operated by Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Uber sold off its self-driving technology to a competitor in 2020. In 2023, General Motors subsidiary Cruise struck a pedestrian in San Francisco after the person was thrown into the empty robotaxi’s path by a collision with another car; state regulators later learned that the Cruise dragged the person 20 feet while it attempted to move out of traffic, and revoked the company’s permit to operate. General Motors got out of the robotaxi business a year later, citing high development costs and a desire to focus on personal vehicles.
Keep On Robotaxiing
Still, robotaxi companies say they have plenty more public deployments on the horizon. Zoox says it will start picking up public riders in San Francisco later this year, and will then launch in Austin and Miami. May Mobility plans to deploy robotaxis in Arlington, Texas, before the end of the year, this time on the Uber platform. Waymo has announced future service in several US cities, including Miami, Washington, DC, and Dallas. Tesla is running a small, invite-only ride-hail service in the California Bay Area with drivers behind the wheel using its more limited Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech, which requires the person up front to stay alert at all times. Musk plans to move quickly: He said this spring that the company would have “millions” of vehicles operating autonomously by the second half of next year.
Developers of self-driving vehicles have argued that their tech will increase safety and ride efficiency, bringing down prices in the long term. (Of course, these companies will also no longer have to pay a cut of each ride to human drivers.) But even in Phoenix and San Francisco, where Waymo has been running public robotaxis for years, cities have yet to catch a clear glimpse of how the expensive-to-develop technology might transform residents’ lives.
“It’s not at the scale yet where it’s really dramatically changing anything,” says Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning professor who directs the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.
Robotaxi services will likely have to get much bigger, Millard-Ball says, before they can prove out their expansive visions. Waymo has released studies suggesting that its tech is safer than human drivers in many situations, but some experts still argue that it’s hard to compare robots’ performance to humans’ given the still-limited number of miles the cars have driven.
“Can this make the rideshare industry grow the pie?” asks Jeremy Bird, Lyft’s executive vice president of driver experience, who collaborated with May Mobility on the Atlanta launch. Bird says Lyft has studied data from where autonomous vehicles have already been deployed, and he thinks the answer is yes. But when robotaxis will become a moneymaking venture is still a big question mark. Clearly, though, plenty of people are still working to find out.
Tech
The Sonos Bluetooth Speaker Is $40 Off
Yesterday’s discount on the Sonos Ace over-ear headphones wasn’t the only sale you can find on new additions to your Sonos setup. You can also nab the Sonos Roam 2 for just $139 as part of the Amazon Spring Sale. This Bluetooth speaker has excellent sound despite its relatively compact size, and of course it plays nicely with your other Sonos speakers.
Unlike older Sonos products, the Roam 2 now has Bluetooth in addition to Wi-Fi. When you’re home, the speaker joins your network and acts just like any other Sonos speaker in your setup. Take it on the go, and you can easily connect your phone and keep the tunes rolling. The Sonos app isn’t always the best at finding new speakers, but in this case it fired right up and connected to the Roam 2, good news for the easily frustrated. It has a fun sound profile that’s great for picnics or backyard hangs, with solid bass and balanced mid and upper ranges. Some other Bluetooth speakers might get louder, but the Roam 2 makes up for it by joining a chorus of other speakers around your home.
While the first-generation Roam suffered from some long-term battery health issues, Sonos has assured us that the Roam 2 more than fixes the problem, and at least in the short time our reviewer Parker Hall spent with it, it wasn’t an issue anymore. The outside is also slightly prone to smudges and scuffs, something to keep in mind if you prefer your equipment looking pristine. It’s waterproof, though, and quite sturdy, so just know that any marks you see on the housing are just surface level.
I spotted the discount in both black and white, but they’re both marked as “Limited Time Deals” so you’ll want to move fast if you’re interested. For anyone wondering what else is out there, or for non-Sonos users, make sure to check out our guide to the best Bluetooth speakers, or swing by our roundup of the best deals on hand-tested and approved products in the Amazon Spring Sale to see what else sparks your fancy.
Tech
Confessions of the ICE Agent Whisperer
As immigration became one of the defining focuses of Donald Trump’s second administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken center stage. Under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and several other agencies, received more than $80 billion in additional funding, and in January the agency announced that it had hired more than 12,000 new agents.
Even as cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis have seen a surge of immigration officers descend upon them, DHS has maintained a high level of opacity around its operations. Officers carrying out raids and arrests are often masked and driving in unmarked cars. As enforcement has pulled in federal law enforcement personnel from across the government, it has become difficult to tell what agency a given officer works for, let alone who they actually are. Though DHS has been combative with the media, ICE agents themselves have been mostly quiet, even if some have mixed feelings about their work and where the agency is headed.
Karl Loftus, an independent journalist who runs the Instagram account @deadcrab_films, started a new project following the immigration surge in Minneapolis called Confessions of an ICE Agent. There, he publishes interviews with people who work in immigration enforcement across DHS. This includes agents and officers with the two main divisions of ICE—Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations—as well as CBP officers. He offers them anonymity and a place to speak their minds outside the structures of traditional media, and in return gets a glimpse of what the people inside the agency are experiencing, creating an archive of this moment in its history.
In one post, a biracial agent speaking shortly after Trump announced that he would be replacing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told Loftus he believed Noem was a “DEI” hire. In another, an HSI agent called the people leading the US government “imbeciles,” saying they were “disgusted by nearly all of them.” Another HSI agent expressed concerns about DHS colleagues violating the law, and complained of having to pause investigation into child sexual abuse cases to focus on immigration work. “If they gave child exploitation cases a fraction of the attention, funding, resources, personnel, analytical support, etc. that they’re now giving immigration enforcement, we could do so much good,” they said.
WIRED spoke to Loftus about the public response to a polarizing topic, how he vets his sources, and the pressure to pick a side. A DHS spokesperson responded to WIRED’s request for comment saying that they cannot verify anonymous interviews but that DHS and its Homeland Security Investigations unit “is not slowing down and remains committed to all aspects of its mission, leveraging a whole-of-government approach to address threats to public safety and national security.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Before this project, your account mostly focused on things like disaster recovery after Hurricane Helene and similar topics. How did you start working on ICE?
Karl Loftus: In 2018 I was a volunteer in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence. I was there during the hurricane for four days doing search and rescue. That kind of started my passion for disaster response. I had been in Jamaica for seven weeks responding to Hurricane Melissa, working with a handful of different NGOs. I worked with Global Empowerment Mission repairing roofs of hospitals and medical centers to try to get the medical infrastructure back on track. I worked with World Central Kitchen. I was there documenting. I had planned to go to Wisconsin for the holidays, which is where I’m from, to visit some family, but I ended up staying in Jamaica. In early January, I finally made it up to the Midwest to see some family, and that’s when the Renee Good shooting happened. I was like, “Man, I know shit’s about to go insane the following day, and there’s going to be protests and riots and all this stuff.” So I decided to make the trip to Minneapolis.
Tech
Humanscale’s New $15K Lounge Chair Is the Ultimate Home Office Workstation
The chair starts at $8,995, but that doesn’t include the side table or ottoman. Add those and it costs $10,995. The model pictured above uses Alpaca wool fabric and brings the cost up to $14,995. (There are more than 300 fabrics and colors to choose from, and the swiveling table comes in various woodgrains.) The Herman Miller Eames, of which the Diffrient Lounge also takes inspiration, costs roughly $8,500 today, depending on which leather you choose.
“The Eames is obviously an iconic design—it’s timeless, it’s beautiful—but it’s not something you can work comfortably in for a long time,” Silva says.
Don’t let the Lounge in the name fool you. Silva assures me that every chair the company designs is built with ergonomic comfort in mind, with the adjustable work surface and headrest allowing for different postures. While traditional lounge chairs focus on style, Silva says the Lounge prioritizes comfort. In my brief time on the chair, it indeed felt enveloping and cushy yet supportive. And the mechanical levers made it easy to shift the chair into a more active sitting position or a more relaxing posture, without disrupting the ergonomics with a laptop on the table.
Diffrient had been tinkering with the idea of a lounge chair that could double as a workstation for a long time, Silva says, and believed that technology allowed people to work in different ways.
“The chair acknowledges the fact that creativity and productivity don’t necessarily happen when you’re tied to your desk,” he says. “They happen in different postures; more relaxed or moving around the office, and this chair supports those transitions.”
King recites a famous quote from Diffrient: “The best chair is a bed.” When you sit upright, your weight compresses your spine, but when you lean back, a large portion of that weight goes into the backrest, so when you’re lying down, there’s significantly less pressure on your spine. “Reclining is really healthy,” King says. “He always thought it would be a good way to work.”
Luxe Seat
How does a chair come to cost $15,000? Silva highlights Humanscale’s long-standing approach to simplicity. After all, it’s a hallmark of the original Freedom chair. While the Diffrient Lounge may not look very complex, that’s by design, cleverly masking the engineered mechanical system with clean lines and curves. There’s even some automation in the headrest. If you’re fully reclined and the headrest is in a forward position to support your head, as you come back up, the headrest will automatically go into a neutral position.
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