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
Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray Is the Easiest Part of My Nightly Routine
I’ve always approached taking melatonin supplements with skepticism. They seem to help every once in a while, but your brain is already making melatonin. Beyond that, I am not a fan of the sickly-sweet tablets, gummies, and other forms of melatonin I’ve come across. No one wants a bad taste in their mouth when they’re supposed to be drifting off to sleep.
This is where Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray comes in. Fellow WIRED reviewer Molly Higgins first gave it a go, and reported back favorably. This spray comes in two flavors, lavender and mint, and is sweetened with stevia. While I wouldn’t consider it a gourmet taste, I appreciate that it leans more into herbal components known for sleep and relaxation.
Keep in mind that melatonin is meant to be a sleep aid, not a cure-all. That being said, one serving of this spray has 3 milligrams of melatonin, which takes about six pumps to dispense. While 3 milligrams may not seem like a lot to really kickstart your circadian rhythm, it’s actually the ideal dosage to get your brain’s wind-down process kicked off. Some people can do more (but don’t go over 10 milligrams!), some less, but based on what experts have relayed to me, this is the preferable amount.
A couple of reminders for any supplement: consult your doctor if and when you want to incorporate anything, melatonin included, into your nighttime regimen. Your healthcare provider can help confirm that you’re not on any medications where adding a sleep aid or supplement wouldn’t feel as effective. Onnit’s Instant Melatonin Spray is International Genetically Modified Organism Evaluation and Notification certified (IGEN) to verify that it uses truly non-GMO ingredients.
Apart from that, there may be some trial and error on the ideal amount for you, and how much time it takes to kick in. Some may feel the melatonin sooner than others. For my colleague Molly, it took about an hour. Melatonin can’t do all the heavy lifting, so make sure you’re ready to go to bed when you take it, and that your sleep space is set up for sleep success, down to your mattress, sheets, and pillows.
Tech
I Tested Bosch’s New Vacuum Against Shark and Dyson. It Didn’t Beat Them
There’s a lever on the back for this compression mechanism that you manually press down and a separate button to open the dustbin at the bottom. You can use the compression lever when it’s both closed and open. It did help compress the hair and dust while I was vacuuming, helping me see if I had really filled the bin, though at a certain point it doesn’t compress much more. It was helpful to push debris out if needed too, versus the times I’ve had to stick my hand in both the Dyson and Shark to get the stuck hair and dust out. Dyson has this same feature on the Piston Animal V16, which is due out this year, so I’ll be curious to see which mechanism is better engineered.
Bendable Winner: Shark
Photograph: Nena Farrell
If you’re looking for a vacuum that can bend to reach under furniture, I prefer the Shark to the Bosch. Both have a similar mechanism and feel, but the Bosch tended to push debris around when I was using it with an active bend, while the Shark managed to vacuum up debris I couldn’t get with the Bosch without lifting it and placing it on top of that particular debris (in this case, rogue cat kibble).
Accessory Winner: Dyson
Dyson pulls ahead because the Dyson Gen5 Detect comes with three attachments and two heads. You’ll get a Motorbar head, a Fluffy Optic head, a hair tool, a combination tool, and a dusting and crevice tool that’s actually built into the stick tube. I love that it’s built into the vacuum so that it’s one less separate attachment to carry around, and it makes me more likely to use it.
But Bosch does well in this area, too. You’ll get an upholstery nozzle, a furniture brush, and a crevice nozzle. It’s one more attachment than you’ll get with Shark, and Bosch also includes a wall mount that you can wire the charging cord into for storage and charging, and you can mount two attachments on it. But I will say, I like that Shark includes a simple tote bag to store the attachments in. The rest of my attachments are in plastic bags for each vacuum, and keeping track of attachments is the most annoying part of a cordless vacuum.
Build Winner: Tie
Photograph: Nena Farrell
All three of these vacuums have a good build quality, but each one feels like it focuses on something different. Bosch feels the lightest of the three and stands up the easiest on its own, but all three do need something to lean against to stay upright. The Dyson is the worst at this; it also needs a ledge or table wedged under the canister, or it’ll roll forward and tip over. The Bosch has a sleek black look and a colorful LED screen that will show you a picture of carpet or hardwood depending on what mode it’s vacuuming in. The vacuum head itself feels like the lightest plastic of the bunch, though.
Tech
Right-Wing Gun Enthusiasts and Extremists Are Working Overtime to Justify Alex Pretti’s Killing
Brandon Herrera, a prominent gun influencer with over 4 million followers on YouTube, said in a video posted this week that while it was unfortunate that Pretti died, ultimately the fault was his own.
“Pretti didn’t deserve to die, but it also wasn’t just a baseless execution,” Herrera said, adding without evidence that Pretti’s purpose was to disrupt ICE operations. “If you’re interfering with arrests and things like that, that’s a crime. If you get in the fucking officer’s way, that will probably be escalated to physical force, whether it’s arresting you or just getting you the fuck out of the way, which then can lead to a tussle, which, if you’re armed, can lead to a fatal shooting.” He described the situation as “lawful but awful.”
Herrera was joined in the video by former police officer and fellow gun influencer Cody Garrett, known online as Donut Operator.
Both men took the opportunity to deride immigrants, with Herrera saying “every news outlet is going to jump onto this because it’s current thing and they’re going to ignore the 12 drunk drivers who killed you know, American citizens yesterday that were all illegals or H-1Bs or whatever.”
Herrera also referenced his “friend” Kyle Rittenhouse, who has become central to much of the debate about the shooting.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, traveled from his home in Illinois to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, brandishing an AR-15-style rifle, claiming he was there to protect local businesses. He killed two people and shot another in the arm that night.
Critics of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis quickly highlighted what they saw as the hypocrisy of the right’s defense of Rittenhouse and attacks on Pretti.
“Kyle Rittenhouse was a conservative hero for walking into a protest actually brandishing a weapon, but this guy who had a legal permit to carry and already had had his gun removed is to some people an instigator, when he was actually going to help a woman,” Jessica Tarlov, a Democratic strategist, said on Fox News this week.
Rittenhouse also waded into the debate, writing on X: “The correct way to approach law enforcement when armed,” above a picture of himself with his hands up in front of police after he killed two people. He added in another post that “ICE messed up.”
The claim that Pretti was to blame was repeated in private Facebook groups run by armed militias, according to data shared with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project, as well as on extremist Telegram channels.
“I’m sorry for him and his family,” one member of a Facebook group called American Patriots wrote. “My question though, why did he go to these riots armed with a gun and extra magazines if he wasn’t planning on using them?”
Some extremist groups, such as the far-right Boogaloo movement, have been highly critical of the administration’s comments on being armed at a protest.
“To the ‘dont bring a gun to a protest’ crowd, fuck you,” one member of a private Boogaloo group wrote on Facebook this week. “To the fucking turn coats thinking disarming is the answer and dont think it would happen to you as well, fuck you. To the federal government who I’ve watched murder citizens just for saying no to them, fuck you. Shall not be infringed.”
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