Rani Molla | The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2026-09-17T14:57:54+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/authors/rani-molla/rss https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Rani Molla <![CDATA[Your robotaxi might be a narc]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=996863 2026-09-17T10:57:54-04:00 2026-09-17T11:00:00-04:00 Waymo robotaxi with handcuffs

In early September, two teenagers got into a Waymo, but then ended up in the back of a police car. The robotaxi company said it detected “a violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” pulled the car over, and alerted emergency services, according to the Los Angeles Times. Police arrested the passengers after allegedly finding a loaded AR-style “ghost gun” in the vehicle. 

The arrests exposed a lot of unanswered questions about privacy and autonomous vehicles, including what they are recording, what they do with the footage, and how much privacy riders should expect while riding inside them.

Waymo’s camera-covered cars have already been drawn into the debate over privacy and surveillance. On a number of occasions, law enforcement agencies have obtained search warrants for footage captured by its cars, according to Bloomberg. Last year, the LAPD obtained footage of a hit-and-run that was recorded by a nearby Waymo vehicle. During anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, five Waymos were vandalized and set on fire amid questions about whether the vehicles could be capturing images of protesters that might be used as evidence to identify or arrest them. Waymo does not publicly disclose how many law enforcement requests it receives or how often it complies.

Those concerns echo the backlash against Flock’s network of automated license-plate readers, which have given police the ability to track cars across jurisdictions and have prompted growing fears about government surveillance and misuse. Unlike fixed Flock cameras, Waymos move through cities carrying cameras both outside and inside their vehicles.

The latest case of the arrested teens takes those concerns a step further. Police did not approach Waymo after a crime looking for footage its cameras happened to capture. Waymo detected something inside the car and initiated the police response itself.

Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina told The Verge in an email that the company uses its internal cameras to help enforce its terms of service, including detecting prohibited items and behavior. She said it uses automated technology to help Waymo’s teams identify potential violations, such as the presence of firearms inside the vehicle. “If Waymo detects a firearm in the vehicle, we may reach out to local law enforcement,” she added.

Waymo did not explain how its automated system determines whether something may be a firearm, how confident it has to be before something gets flagged, what role humans play between an automated alert and a call to police, or what other violations of its terms of service might prompt a police response. Those are important omissions. This wasn’t a human taxi driver deciding to call 911. It was a driverless car, equipped with cameras and an AI brain, escalating a situation involving its passengers to police.

Bob Somers, a former engineer at autonomous vehicle company Zoox and technical adviser to the AV-safety nonprofit SAVE-US, said he would expect Waymo’s system to look for a range of potentially dangerous weapons and behaviors. The software may not need to decide with certainty that it has seen a firearm. It could instead flag something that resembles one for further review, he said.

“If there is a certain set of objects detected, then that would probably loop in a remote operator to take a look at what’s going on,” Somers said.

Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor emeritus who researches autonomous vehicle safety, said computer vision systems can be trained to recognize objects and potentially dangerous situations.

“If there is a certain set of objects detected, then that would probably loop in a remote operator to take a look at what’s going on.”

Bob Somers

“If you can train a computer to look at the road and decide how to drive, you can train a computer to decide if somebody’s holding a gun,” Koopman said. But, he added, those systems are “never 100 percent accurate.”

That’s where the unanswered question about human review becomes important.

A human taxi driver who sees a passenger holding something has context. They’ve been in the car for the entire ride. They can hear what the passengers are saying and ask questions. They can decide whether the object is a real gun, a toy, or something else entirely. Back in July, Waymo reported two teens to the police for underage drinking and shooting a toy gun loaded with water beads from the vehicle. It was not clear whether the teens ultimately faced any charges. 

A remote worker brought in to review a flagged moment might not have all of that context because they haven’t experienced the entire ride the way a human driver would. Waymo says its interior microphones are generally active only during calls with Rider Support or when riders enable them, meaning a reviewer may not be able to hear what preceded the flagged moment. As of earlier this year, Waymo has about 70 “remote assistance agents” on duty at a given time in the US and the Philippines, who “provide advice and support to the Waymo Driver but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” Waymo has not said whether the people reviewing possible violations inside its cars are among those agents. 

“It’s really important that Waymo gets it right when they alert the police to something dangerous,” Koopman said. Beyond undermining riders’ trust in robotaxis, a false alarm could put passengers at risk during a police encounter.

Then there’s the question of what Waymo tells riders to expect. Without a driver in the front seat, robotaxis can feel more private than they actually are. In 2023, the San Francisco Standard spoke with four people who said they had hooked up or had sex in Cruise robotaxis, despite the cameras inside them. The publication could not find anyone who said they had done so in a Waymo, but the episodes illustrate how readily passengers can mistake the absence of a human driver for the absence of a witness.

Waymo’s terms of service requires riders to comply with applicable laws and prohibits them from creating a dangerous condition, carrying weapons “or anything that resembles a weapon, e.g. toy gun,” or using drugs. Riders must be at least 18 to ride alone in San Francisco. The two riders arrested this month allegedly violated both the age and weapons restrictions.

The terms say Waymo can suspend or terminate a rider’s access if it believes the rider has violated the rules. Earlier this year, Waymo suspended the account used to book a ride after three boys were photographed hanging out the windows of the vehicle and taking selfies. But they do not plainly tell passengers that the company may call the police based on what it sees inside the car.

“It’s really important that Waymo gets it right when they alert the police to something dangerous.”

Phil Koopman

Waymo’s public camera policy says its interior cameras can be used to “check that in-car rules are being followed” and “promote safety and security.” It says Waymo Support may review recorded video after an issue is brought to the company’s attention and, in urgent circumstances, access live video during a trip.

The policy also says Waymo may share certain data with law enforcement as needed to comply with legal requirements, enforce agreements, or protect the safety of riders and others. But it doesn’t specify that automated monitoring inside the vehicle may trigger Waymo itself to contact police.

Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called Waymo’s public policies “very broad.” Riders shouldn’t have to infer from language about “safety and security” that their behavior could result in a police response, she said, adding that Waymo should clearly disclose that possibility before passengers get into the car.

“I’m not condoning illegal behavior in rideshares,” she said, but “if they’re going to share it with authorities, then that should be clearly stated in the policy.” As it stands, Tsukayama said, “it is outside of the expectations of consumers.”

Then again, robotaxis themselves are outside the norm. As they become more common, riders may have to develop a new set of expectations about what happens inside them. A human driver can decide how to respond to what happens in their car. In a robotaxi, cameras and software can flag what happens inside, remote workers may become involved, and the vehicle can pull over while police are summoned.

Waymo’s system may have helped police recover an illegal firearm in this case. But the incident also raises a more basic question about what kind of space a robotaxi is: a ride with cameras for safety, a continuously monitored space, or a system that can call the cops on its own passengers. 

That question is already showing up in fiction. Robotaxis are making their debut as villains in Road Rage, an upcoming short film about a driverless car that turns against humans. One of the film’s more unsettling ideas is that a robotaxi could end up acting less like transportation and more like law enforcement. This month offered a glimpse of what that might look like.

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[The real reason your phone is getting more expensive]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=988225 2026-09-07T10:13:46-04:00 2026-09-07T08:00:00-04:00

When Apple debuts the next generation of iPhones this week, they’re likely to come with an unwanted change: a higher price tag. A price hike from the supply-chain powerhouse would be the clearest sign yet that soaring memory costs have become unavoidable — with no end to the memory crunch in sight.

Call it “chipflation” or “RAMageddon.” The shortage is reversing a decades-long decline in memory costs that helped make consumer electronics more powerful without making them dramatically more expensive. The terms “memory prices” and “memory shortage” appeared in 473 company transcripts last quarter, according to data provided by AlphaSense. The entire industry is seemingly working on the problem. And yet, we’re years away from seeing it fixed.

The common wisdom is that AI is at fault: The technology isn’t just contributing to higher energy prices and layoffs; it’s also helping drive up the cost of everything from smartphones to game consoles.

But the shortage was brewing well before ChatGPT took off — and was then amplified by AI’s unending hunger for RAM. The current market is the product of a complicated and very profitable reshuffling of the memory industry within a system that was already failing to keep up.

“We need to build more wafer capacity,” Manish Bhatia, president and COO of Micron — one of the three largest memory manufacturers — told The Verge. “[It’s] a very different challenge for the industry than it had been for many years before, where technology alone was able to keep up with the demand.”

For years, memory manufacturers could increase production by fitting more chips onto each wafer. But those gains were shrinking and taking longer to achieve. In 2021, even as pandemic-era electronics demand surged, Micron concluded that the problem was more fundamental: Technological advances alone would no longer create enough capacity to keep pace with long-term demand. Manufacturers would have to process more wafers — and build enormous new facilities to do it.

Then the memory business collapsed. Pandemic-era purchases of computers, tablets, and phones had pulled demand forward; consumer spending weakened, and manufacturers were left with excess inventory. They lost money and slowed their expansion plans.

By the time the market began recovering, generative AI had unleashed a wave of demand far larger and more memory-intensive than manufacturers had ever anticipated.

The memory business is also extraordinarily concentrated. Three manufacturers account for about 90 percent of the market, according to Counterpoint, leaving the world dependent on a handful of companies to divide limited capacity between AI infrastructure and consumer devices. Counterpoint estimates that Samsung controlled 39 percent of the memory market in the second quarter of 2026, followed by SK Hynix at 26 percent and Micron at 25 percent. 

The memory inside your phone or computer broadly falls into two buckets. DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, temporarily holds the information a device needs while opening apps, loading webpages, or running software. NAND flash memory provides longer-term storage for things like photos and files.

“It’s not as simple as saying data centers are consuming RAM. The RAM is not the same.”

Inside AI data centers, specialized processors rely heavily on a form of DRAM called high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. 

“It’s not as simple as saying data centers are consuming RAM,” David Naranjo, associate director at Counterpoint, told The Verge. “The RAM is not the same.”

By stacking memory chips together and using advanced connections and packaging, HBM can move enormous quantities of data to and from those processors much faster and more efficiently.

It’s more difficult to produce, but also more lucrative to sell. Deep-pocketed AI chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD and tech giants like Meta and Microsoft have an insatiable need for it to power their AI systems — and are more than happy to pay.

HBM also consumes significantly more manufacturing capacity than conventional DRAM. Memory chips are made many at a time on large, circular silicon wafers. Because a finished HBM product stacks multiple, larger chips together, it requires considerably more silicon. Micron estimates that producing a given amount of HBM requires roughly three times as many wafers as producing the same amount of conventional DRAM.

The incentives increasingly favor AI. Rather than guessing how many phones or laptops will sell a year from now, memory makers can lock in multiyear commitments from some of the world’s richest companies.

“We have been engaging in discussions with customers, prioritizing those who can guarantee committed future captive demand,” Jaejune Kim, Samsung’s executive vice president of memory, said on the company’s last earnings call.

AI is also increasing demand for conventional DRAM. Phone and PC makers want to run smaller AI models directly on their devices, requiring more sophisticated conventional memory — and more of it. Future models may need substantially more memory than their predecessors to support those capabilities.

“The three big memory guys, they’re just basically allocating the capacity that they have to these companies.”

“As AI spreads across various services such as search, coding, and productivity tools, the scope of demand is widening from a memory perspective,” said Song Hyun-jong, president of SK Hynix, another of the big three memory manufacturers, on the company’s most recent earnings call. “We are witnessing a structural shift in demand where both AI memory and conventional memory are growing together.”

Samsung and Micron have both said they remain committed to conventional DRAM. Micron’s Bhatia told The Verge that it still accounts for most of the company’s wafer capacity. But limited supply, surging demand, and AI customers willing to make long-term commitments have made it extraordinarily lucrative to cede space to HBM.

SK Hynix posted a record 76 percent operating margin last quarter, up from 41 percent a year earlier, while Micron’s adjusted gross margin hit a record 85 percent. Samsung’s semiconductor profits, meanwhile, jumped roughly 250-fold from a year earlier.

“It’s more profitable,” Naranjo said. “The three big memory guys, they’re just basically allocating the capacity that they have to these companies.”

Counterpoint estimates that DRAM prices for smartphones increased roughly 56 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to a quarter earlier, and grew around 83 percent in the second quarter. For 16GB of DRAM for a smartphone, Counterpoint estimates that it cost roughly $42 in the second quarter of 2025 and about $181 a year later — an increase of more than 300 percent.

Those aren’t necessarily Apple’s prices — few companies have more leverage with suppliers — but the figures show how dramatically the component costs of building a high-end phone have changed.

The obvious solution is to make more memory. The problem is that it takes years to accomplish — even if you’re working fast.

Micron is currently demonstrating just how much work “more” entails.

In July, the company poured the first concrete for its planned manufacturing complex near Syracuse in upstate New York. Once completed, the site will contain 2.4 million square feet of cleanroom space, making it the largest semiconductor manufacturing site in US history by that measure — and Micron’s largest facility anywhere in the world.

Those cleanrooms where the chips are made will occupy only a fraction of the entire build, which is roughly the size of 350 football fields.

“By the time we’re done, we’ll have built probably 15 to 20 million actual square feet of building space to support the 2.4 million square feet of cleanroom,” Bhatia told The Verge. In one of Micron’s fab designs, the cleanroom occupies just one floor of a five-story building.

Micron doesn’t expect meaningful output until 2030

The remaining space will house a vast network of water-treatment, power, air-handling, and utility-distribution systems needed to keep it running.

Even though Micron reached the concrete pour ahead of schedule, it still took more than two years. The company began permitting after its CHIPS Act grant for New York was confirmed in March 2024, broke ground in January 2026, and poured concrete about six months later.

The physical construction unfolds in three broad stages. Preparing the ground can take six to nine months, Bhatia said. Building the concrete structure and facade can require another 18 months. But the most complicated stage comes after the building is standing: installing the vast network of mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and piping systems required to operate a semiconductor fab.

Those systems must turn an enormous industrial building into an environment where a single microscopic particle doesn’t land in the wrong place and ruin a chip.

Bhatia offered a sense of the precision required:

“Imagine trying to build all of New York state and not have any ants anywhere in the entire state,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do on every one of these wafers, and we do it over and over again.”

Completing the building still doesn’t produce memory. Micron expects to activate and test essential systems like power, water, and ventilation at the end of 2028, then spend 2029 moving in manufacturing equipment and beginning pilot production. The company doesn’t expect meaningful output until 2030. Even on an accelerated timeline, the journey from permitting to production will have taken roughly six years.

The company’s new Idaho fab is further along and is expected to begin wafer output in mid-2027. 

Micron is spending enormous amounts to move the process along more quickly, roughly doubling its capital expenditure from a year earlier to exceed $25 billion this year.

Even with that investment, Micron can’t identify a clear point at which supply will catch up because demand continues to grow almost as quickly as manufacturers can expand.

“We’ve said that right now it’ll be beyond 2027, and we don’t see when it closes just because demand continues to grow so fast,” Bhatia said.

Counterpoint doesn’t expect capacity to catch up with demand until late 2027 or early 2028 in the best-case scenario. The market data firm IDC similarly expects the shortage to last through 2027 and well into early 2028 before there is meaningful relief.

PC and smartphone makers can’t absorb component costs that have multiplied several times over indefinitely. They can raise prices. They can make fewer devices. They can put less memory in them. Or they can focus on more expensive devices with enough profit margin to absorb the added cost.

Citing soaring memory costs, Microsoft recently raised Xbox prices by another $100 to $150, leaving some models as much as $300 more expensive than at launch. Microsoft also raised the price of some Surface Pro laptops and tablets by $500 over their original starting price. Meta, meanwhile, added $100 to the cost of its Quest 3 headset. 

Apple is perhaps the most revealing test case because it should be among the companies best equipped to withstand the shortage. Its scale gives it extraordinary leverage with suppliers, and its customers have historically proved willing to pay premium prices. Yet Apple has already raised prices across its lineup of Macs and iPads.

Now attention is turning to the iPhone.

Rather than releasing its full lineup at once this fall, Apple is expected to introduce the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max alongside its first foldable iPhone, while holding the standard iPhone 18 and refreshed Air until spring 2027, according to Bloomberg.

Tim Cook described memory pricing as a “100-year flood”

That leaves Apple’s fall lineup concentrated heavily at the most expensive end of the market — exactly where it has the most room to protect its margins. Counterpoint’s supply-chain tracking shows Apple preparing roughly 10 percent more iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max units for September through December than it allocated to the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max during the same period last year.

On Apple’s last earnings call, the company forecast slower growth due partly to worsening supply constraints, including for memory chips, and said higher memory costs had directly reduced its gross margin. Then-CEO Tim Cook described memory pricing as a “100-year flood,” citing “exponential increases” that had caused Apple to raise prices.

The iPhone 18 Pro could start at $1,299, according to The Wall Street Journal’s calculation based on estimates from TechInsights that factor in component costs and attempt to minimize margin reductions. That would be $200 more than the iPhone 17 Pro. Samsung and Google have each raised the starting prices of some new phones by $100 this year, though several also come with more storage.

Apple may be better positioned than most companies to pull off higher prices. Its installed base, tightly integrated ecosystem, and loyal customers make its phones behave more like luxury goods than interchangeable electronics. The company has already gained market share by keeping its prices steady while lower-end competitors raised theirs. In places like China, the world’s largest smartphone market, it almost became common sense to opt for a premium iPhone when lower-cost alternatives were selling for nearly as much.

For other manufacturers, the options are worse.

Counterpoint and IDC are already seeing smartphone companies reduce expected shipments while shifting toward more expensive models. If they can’t sell as many phones, they can at least try to extract more revenue from each one.

That means more OLED displays, AI features, larger memory configurations, and other upgrades that can justify higher prices. As a result, revenue for PCs and smartphones could actually remain flat or even rise as unit sales decline.

In other words, AI isn’t just making electronics cost more. The memory shortage is changing which electronics companies bother making in the first place.

Eventually, more supply should arrive.

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are all investing heavily in additional manufacturing. But because new facilities take years to build, that spending won’t bring immediate relief.

SK Hynix is investing 600 trillion won in its Yongin Semiconductor Cluster, a massive complex south of Seoul first announced in 2019, and has accelerated its target for completion from 2045 to 2033. The company says it will double its capacity within five years but still expects demand to outpace supply through 2030.

Samsung and SK Hynix also plan to invest a combined 800 trillion won, or about $588 billion, in four new memory-chip factories in southwestern South Korea, according to The Wall Street Journal. Micron’s New York and Idaho projects are part of the more than $250 billion it says it will spend on US manufacturing and research through 2035.

A potentially important fourth player is also emerging in China. CXMT is building additional fabs, though its technology isn’t yet considered as advanced as that of Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron. Apple is currently testing CXMT chips but would need approval from the Trump administration to do business with the company.

The other possibility is that supply won’t have to catch up because demand will collapse first. If the AI investment bubble bursts, memory manufacturers could suddenly find themselves facing very different economics.

For now, that remains hypothetical. The long-term contracts AI companies have signed with memory suppliers make the immediate future easier to predict.

“2027 is pretty locked and loaded,” Naranjo said.

Counterpoint and IDC expect price increases to slow from the breathtaking pace of the past year to single or low double digits. But slower increases aren’t the same as falling prices.

“Not to say prices will come down to 2025 levels, but the price increases will stabilize at a new normal,” Nabila Popal, a senior director at IDC, told The Verge. That new normal is “at least triple what they used to be.”

New fabs still take years to come online, while AI data centers and increasingly sophisticated consumer devices continue to require more memory. And manufacturers have little economic incentive to prioritize cheaper consumer electronics over customers willing to pay handsomely and commit years in advance.

Naranjo’s forecast was blunt.

“It’s not a happy ending anytime soon.”

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[Robotaxis enter their villain era ]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=989513 2026-09-04T10:49:57-04:00 2026-09-05T07:00:00-04:00 Waymo taxis with a purple and orange filter.

It’s Bullitt meets Christine meets Waymo.

A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn’t human — and the car may be trying to kill you. That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment. Autonomous cars have gone from sci-fi curiosities to fixtures in some American cities, where they’ve become stand-ins for anxieties about AI job displacement, Big Tech surveillance, and machines making decisions once left to humans.

Road Rage, the planned short film awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production, leans into all of it. The film pits Joa, a ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car, against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that takes a minor road-rage incident very personally, according to a synopsis by its director, Romain Thomassin. Roboride lightly clips Joa’s mirror. Joa gives it the finger. The car decides to kill him.

“It’s analog versus artificial,” Thomassin told The Verge.

The AI bad guy will be played by an old Prius transformed with cold LED lights across the front — à la Tesla — fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like device on the roof, a black exterior, and a menacing, ever-blinking red dot. Thomassin calls the intended result a “nasty Waymo.”

“I really wanted to play the nasty, gritty look of the ’70s car chase, but with today’s robotaxi in today’s San Francisco,” he said.

The chase itself will be a throwback: real cars, real actors, and real stunts.

“I really wanted to play the nasty, gritty look of the ’70s car chase, but with today’s robotaxi in today’s San Francisco.”

Road Rage director Romain Thomassin

“What makes Joa the good guy is not only his instinct but also his authenticity,” Thomassin said, noting a scene in which the character has an unexpected conversation with his passengers. “This type of human interaction doesn’t happen in a robotaxi.”

Thomassin doesn’t actually think robotaxis are inherently evil. But as a movie villain, they come preloaded with tension. For one thing, they’re replacing the kind of worker his protagonist represents. Joa is a Mexican immigrant trying to make a living driving in an increasingly expensive San Francisco. Robotaxis are already competing with ridehail drivers, just as generative AI is competing with workers in Thomassin’s own industry.

“Driving here is a metaphor for what’s happening in cinema, in filmmaking,” Thomassin said.

Then there’s surveillance. Autonomous cars are covered in cameras and sensors, constantly observing the streets — and people — around them. That, more than the prospect of being driven around without a human behind the wheel, is what actually unnerves Thomassin.

In Road Rage, that anxiety is pushed toward dystopia. There’s a brief encounter involving immigration enforcement, and Thomassin imagines a feature-length version in which autonomous cars identify people, trap passengers inside, or deliver them directly to authorities. The progression, as he describes it, is observation, surveillance, then control.

“The next step is that [autonomous vehicles] could become the police,” he said. And because robotaxis operate as connected fleets, the threat can scale beyond one vehicle. “Imagine an army rising up,” Thomassin said.

Robotaxis also make unusually good revenge-movie villains because people already treat them like adversaries. Thomassin points to the indignities Waymos have endured on San Francisco streets: people immobilizing them with traffic cones, tagging and vandalizing them, and even setting them on fire.

“They are being bullied,” he said. In Road Rage, that mistreatment becomes the motivation: “They want to take revenge.”

Thomassin describes Roboride as absorbing the behavior it observes around it — including the behavior of human drivers. The car is simply learning road rage from humans.

“Humans are known to be the worst versions of themselves on the road,” he said.

That makes Roboride a very 2026 update to the killer car idea in Stephen King’s Christine. There, the menace is supernatural. Here, it comes from something more contemporary: a machine that watches humans, learns from them, and inherits some of their worst traits along with the useful ones.

On the other side of the chase is Joa and his stick shift — a deliberately analog counterpoint. To Thomassin, driving stick is a deeply human act: The driver remains in control of the vehicle, physically responding to the road. What separates Joa from Roboride, in Thomassin’s telling, is instinct — and even irrationality.

During one confrontation, Joa takes his hands off the steering wheel while facing down the autonomous car. The move is so reckless that Roboride backs off. The human wins by becoming less predictable than the machine.

“Respect your madness. Be a little mad and creative in your way of doing things, and you will be able to rise against the machines.”

Romain Thomassin

“Respect your madness,” Thomassin said. “Be a little mad and creative in your way of doing things, and you will be able to rise against the machines.”

Despite its skepticism toward AI, Road Rage may use some of the technology itself. Thomassin says the filmmakers are considering AI-generated imagery to depict what Roboride sees, while shooting the human driver’s world with traditional cinematography. To him, that distinction matters. He sees AI as a creative tool when it serves the story, rather than simply a way to replace workers.

For all the menace he sees in robotaxis, Thomassin isn’t afraid to ride in them. He signed up for Waymo as soon as he could and uses it when visiting friends and family for rides.

“I don’t feel in danger,” he said.

That may be what makes Roboride such an effective 2026 villain. The scary part isn’t necessarily that the machine will crash. The scary part is that the machine works.

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[Robotaxis are real now — so is the pushback]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=983765 2026-08-24T14:29:44-04:00 2026-08-24T12:42:37-04:00 Photo illustration of an autonomous vehicle.

Robotaxis are expanding. So is the fight over the rules governing them.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal earlier this year that would have opened the door to driverless robotaxis outside New York City after taxi drivers, unions, and state lawmakers opposed it. Six months later, commercial driverless service remains illegal in the state, and legalization efforts are stalled.

In DC, labor unions are fighting legislation that would legalize commercial robotaxis, while lawmakers are weighing a 200-vehicle cap and a 15-cent-per-mile fee that would fund Metro upgrades and aid workers displaced by autonomous vehicles. A July City Council hearing on the proposal stretched for a grueling 10 hours.

In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, a vocal supporter of robotaxis, is now calling for tougher robotaxi regulations after Waymos repeatedly snarled traffic during emergencies and major events. And as of July, California police can now formally cite autonomous-vehicle manufacturers when their driverless cars break traffic laws.

And while Congress has yet to pass comprehensive robotaxi legislation, federal regulators have stepped up their scrutiny. The Trump administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently warned autonomous-vehicle companies that vehicles unable to safely interact with police, firefighters, and other first responders pose a danger to the public.

Even in states that have broadly welcomed autonomous vehicles, governments are grappling with how to oversee them. Texas this year began enforcing new permitting requirements for commercial AV operators, while cities in Florida have complained that state preemption laws leave them with little power to respond to problems on their own streets.

Even in states that have broadly welcomed autonomous vehicles, governments are grappling with how to oversee them

Taxi drivers, labor unions, and safety advocates have fought autonomous vehicles for years. What’s changing is the scale and immediacy of the fight. Now that robotaxis have burst free from the pages of science fiction and onto actual city streets, policymakers are confronting a messier reality filled with questions about safety, regulation, growth, and jobs. They’re having to decide how quickly fleets should be allowed to expand, what companies must prove before they do, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.

Waymo, the market leader, is currently operating more than 3,500 vehicles publicly in 11 US cities. Zoox — a purpose-built robotaxi without a steering wheel that bears a striking resemblance to a toaster — just began offering paid rides in Las Vegas and continues to offer free trips to users of its Explorer program in San Francisco as it collects feedback. It’s testing in a total of 10 cities and plans to extend the Explorer program to Austin and Miami later this year. Tesla, which began its Robotaxi rollout with a safety monitor aboard more than a year ago, appears to finally be growing its unsupervised fleet ahead of launching its purpose-built robotaxi, the Cybercab, later this month.

Still, for all the political attention, robotaxis remain a tiny share of the US ridehailing market. While Waymo now provides more than 500,000 paid rides a week, Uber handles about 40 million trips a day globally. At that scale, robotaxis haven’t yet displaced many driving jobs or fundamentally changed how cities move. But their visibility vastly exceeds their market share, especially when a driverless car stops in the wrong place during a blackout or interferes with an emergency response.

And the consequences could look very different as autonomous fleets grow from thousands of vehicles to hundreds of thousands. That’s why the battles taking shape across the country are increasingly about the terms of expansion: what companies have to prove before they grow, what they owe cities and workers, and how much control cities and states should have over their operations.

23 July 2026, United States, Los Angeles: A self-driving Waymo taxian autonomous, driverless vehicleis on the roads ahead of the LA28 Summer Olympics. Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa (Photo by Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

What the critics want

In many places, the robotaxi rollout has outpaced the rules governing it.

“Robotaxis are popping up all over the place,” said Shua Sanchez, national campaign director of SAVE-US, a nonprofit advocating for stricter state AV legislation in the absence of federal rules. “The state legislatures don’t have experience with this technology, and there aren’t good laws on the books to regulate them.”

SAVE-US is working with lawmakers in New Jersey and New York on a three-pronged approach. It wants multi-stage testing and commercial-deployment permits, under which companies would have to demonstrate their vehicles can operate safely with a small fleet before adding more cars, while continuing to share safety data after commercial service begins. It also wants autonomous vehicles to use multiple kinds of sensors, rather than relying on cameras alone (as Tesla does), and is calling for restrictions on marketing terms like “Autopilot” or “Full Self-Driving” for consumer driver-assist features when the systems still require human oversight.

The group isn’t opposed to autonomous vehicles, Sanchez said, but is “pro the safe development of technology.” He added that AV safety isn’t a settled question, and that even a strong record today doesn’t guarantee the same after a software or hardware change.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who has pushed for greater federal oversight of AVs, makes a similar argument about transparency.

“Autonomous vehicle companies are making huge claims about how their technology is going to save lives,” Markey told The Verge in a statement. “But right now, our regulatory structure amounts to this: we hope they’re telling the truth.”

Markey has investigated AV companies’ use of remote human operators and introduced legislation that would require them to regularly report safety data.

“Right now, our regulatory structure amounts to this: we hope they’re telling the truth.”

Sen. Ed Markey

“Communities deserve transparency and consistent oversight before we let Big Tech invade their public roads,” he said.

But safety is only part of the fight. For labor groups, the stakes are also economic.

Peter Finn, Teamsters international vice president at large, called autonomous vehicles an “existential threat” to the work his members do. He pointed to the enormous number of jobs potentially affected by autonomous driving beyond rideshare drivers, including truckers, delivery drivers, and other commercial drivers.

Like other groups in the robotaxi debate, the Teamsters insist they aren’t opposed to new technology in principle. But that still leaves them staking out positions that would sharply constrain how autonomous vehicles are deployed. 

That includes requiring heavy-duty autonomous vehicles like semitrucks to have a trained human operator aboard — legislation the Teamsters have twice pushed in California, only to see Gov. Gavin Newsom veto it. Finn said the Teamsters plan to pursue the issue again.

“If the technology is solely designed to automate and eliminate labor costs, the only entity benefiting from that is corporations,” Finn said.

The Teamsters’ immediate legislative priority isn’t robotaxis themselves so much as what it sees coming next.

To Finn, Waymo and Zoox are precursors to a much larger fight over autonomous driving. He pointed specifically to Zoox’s ownership by Amazon, arguing that similar technology could eventually be applied to package delivery.

Zoox and Waymo both said their current focus remains their robotaxi services.

Taken together, the objections go beyond any one safety rule or labor concern. AV resistance has become part of a broader backlash to Big Tech’s growing physical footprint, from data centers to Flock cameras. Companies are pouring enormous sums into new infrastructure, and many residents are still asking what, exactly, they get in return for having it in their communities.

Even robotaxi companies want rules

Robotaxi companies, meanwhile, are trying to get ahead of the backlash — and sidestep a patchwork of confusing state and local laws — by helping shape the rules themselves. That includes supporting certain regulations while pushing back on others they see as too restrictive.

“I want to unequivocally say we agree with the administrator and the administration and the regulatory agency. We need to be regulated,” Zoox CEO Aicha Evans recently said on Fox Business in response to NHTSA’s warnings about unsafe interactions with emergency vehicles.

Zoox said it is also trying to head off conflicts before entering new markets. Ron Thaniel, the company’s senior director of policy and regulatory affairs, said Zoox establishes lines of communication with local and state officials and conducts hands-on engagement with first responders before launching in a city. As the industry expands, he said, Zoox sees “an opportunity at the federal level to more uniformly regulate autonomous vehicles.”

Waymo told The Verge much the same thing.

“I think there definitely needs to be some regulation,” Waymo global head of public policy Justin Kintz said. “They’re powered by incredible technology that makes the world a safer place, but it still needs oversight from the federal government, from states, and from cities in the same way that they manage human drivers today.”

“I want to unequivocally say we agree with the administrator and the administration and the regulatory agency. We need to be regulated.”

Zoox CEO Aicha Evans

Zoox and Waymo are hardly alone in wanting clearer rules. The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which counts both companies as members, has said only about half of US states have passed laws that allow vehicles to operate without humans. The industry group believes states should establish a legal framework for AVs, require first-responder interaction plans, and set minimum requirements before vehicles can operate without a human driver. (The association didn’t respond to requests for more specifics.)

Waymo said it has long advocated for a national AV safety standard covering minimum testing requirements, vehicle design, and data sharing. Under its preferred system, the federal government would continue setting vehicle safety standards, while states would govern road rules and cities would handle local concerns like curb space, law enforcement, and emergency response.

The disagreements emerge in the details.

In Washington, DC, Waymo said it broadly supports Councilmember Charles Allen’s effort to establish a regulatory framework allowing commercial robotaxi service, including its goals of funding transit and helping workers transition as transportation becomes more automated. But it objects to parts of the current proposal.

Waymo said a 200-vehicle limit would probably be too small for a city the size of Washington. It could accept starting small, but wants regulators to let fleets grow as companies demonstrate safe performance rather than putting a permanent ceiling into law.

“I don’t think legislation needs to set a hard cap on that,” Kintz said, “or it’s going to lead to preventing important groups from being able to access the service when they need it.”

The company has been more receptive to the proposed 15-cent fee for every mile an autonomous vehicle travels. Kintz said Waymo supports “the fundamental principle of raising revenue” for transit and affected workers, though it raised concerns that a per-mile charge could become prohibitively expensive, particularly for smaller AV operators. An annual fee, it suggested, is one possible alternative.

Emergency response is another area where Waymo says it supports regulation, even as it argues that some of the work is already underway. After NHTSA called for stronger coordination between AV companies and first responders, Waymo said it immediately asked to participate in the agency’s discussions. The company said it already maintains dedicated first responder training programs and 24/7 priority lines for dispatchers and officers, while Kintz acknowledged that “we haven’t always got it right.”

“We haven’t always got it right.”

Waymo global head of public policy Justin Kintz

Waymo is also trying to make the case that robotaxis can complement, rather than undermine, public transit. In a Streetsblog piece this month, Waymo policy development and research manager Arielle Fleisher argued the company has “common cause” with urbanists trying to reduce dependence on private cars. Waymo told The Verge that in San Francisco more than a third of its riders use the service to connect with public transportation. But research has also suggested that robotaxis could replace some trips that otherwise would have been taken on public transit, potentially undermining ridership rather than complementing it.

On labor, Waymo argues that automation will eliminate some tasks while creating others.

“These cars don’t clean, charge, fix themselves, code themselves,” Kintz said, pointing to jobs including fleet technicians, mechanics, remote support workers, and operations managers. Of course, simply taking the driver out of the driver’s seat could have huge economic implications. Earlier this month, Uber said that 10.2 million drivers and couriers earned money on its platform during the second quarter. 

Kintz acknowledged that autonomous vehicles could eventually displace drivers and said Waymo was “eyes open” about that possibility. But he argued the change would happen over time and that unions could help build retraining and reskilling programs for affected workers.

Asked whether autonomous driving would ultimately create more jobs than it eliminated, Kintz said it was “too soon to tell.”

Notably Waymo has continued to expand as these fights play out. The California Public Utilities Commission this month cleared the company to expand driverless passenger service across parts of 18 counties, including Sacramento and San Diego and more of the Los Angeles and Bay Area regions.

For now, robotaxis are helping a very small number of Americans get around. The fights underway today are about what happens if they don’t stay that way.

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[Tesla Robotaxis appear to go fully unsupervised in Austin ahead of Cybercab launch]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=982759 2026-08-20T10:09:31-04:00 2026-08-20T10:09:31-04:00 Tesla Robotaxi on a graphic red background.

Seven months after Elon Musk announced that Tesla Robotaxis in Austin were operating without human safety monitors onboard, the city’s service appears to have finally gone fully driverless.

Over the past two weeks, all 170 Tesla Robotaxi rides in Austin monitored by the crowdsourced Robotaxi Tracker were unsupervised, the site’s creator, Ethan McKanna, told The Verge. Those rides involved 54 different cars. McKanna has also seen a sharp increase in unsupervised Robotaxis elsewhere, particularly Dallas and Houston, where roughly 30 driverless Teslas have been operating over the past week. 

That’s a substantial change from earlier this summer, when Tesla’s unsupervised fleet appeared to be stagnating or even shrinking. Robotaxi Tracker showed just 28 active unsupervised vehicles across six Texas and Florida markets as recently as last week. In other words, McKanna has now identified nearly twice as many unsupervised Teslas in Austin alone as his tracker had previously shown across all six markets.

Some of the apparent jump reflects better data. McKanna, who spent this summer interning with Tesla’s Robotaxi team, said some of the metrics on his site had been lagging. After revising the sources feeding Robotaxi Tracker — which draws primarily on app users automatically logging their rides, along with other crowdsourced and public information — he found that more vehicles were operating unsupervised than the site had previously reflected. He’s currently updating the site to incorporate the revised data.

But the Austin shift itself appears to be real.

“Austin has seemingly stopped supervised rides for a couple weeks now,” McKanna said. “Plates previously marked as supervised have been confirmed to be offering unsupervised rides.”

The site’s findings also corroborate what some Robotaxi users in the Austin area have recently reported on Reddit and X.

McKanna’s site is one of the few ways to track the makeup of Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet, since Tesla does not publish detailed fleet data and typically does not respond to press inquiries. Tesla did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The shift comes as Tesla prepares to launch the Cybercab, its purpose-built robotaxi, in Austin as soon as this month. Unlike the Model Ys currently providing rides, Cybercabs are designed without traditional controls such as a steering wheel or pedals, making Tesla’s ability to operate vehicles without onboard monitors particularly important to the Cybercab rollout.

On Tesla’s most recent earnings call, Musk said the Robotaxi program would scale “very, very rapidly,” but offered no new target for how many vehicles or cities Tesla would reach — a departure from the much more specific robotaxi forecasts he has repeatedly missed.

Tesla may also be limiting the number of Model Ys it adds as it prepares for Cybercab. According to a new JPMorgan note, Tesla is intentionally holding back on adding Model Ys to the Robotaxi fleet because it expects to scale Cybercab in the near term.

Even after the jump in unsupervised Robotaxis, Tesla remains far behind its biggest robotaxi competitor. Waymo operates more than 300 driverless vehicles in Austin alone, and has around 4,000 vehicles across 10 other cities.

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[The robotaxi law that could ban Tesla]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=962309 2026-07-09T15:21:56-04:00 2026-07-08T07:00:00-04:00 A Tesla superimposed over the state of New Jersey with no symbol on it.

For more than a decade, one question has loomed over the race to build autonomous vehicles: Are cameras alone enough to safely replace human drivers, or do truly driverless cars need additional, overlapping sensors like lidar and radar to navigate the world reliably? Tesla has bet billions of dollars that artificial intelligence and cameras are sufficient. Nearly every other major autonomous vehicle developer has gone the opposite direction.

Until now, that argument has largely been left to executives and engineers. New Jersey lawmakers are trying to settle it in state law.

A bill expected to come up for a vote later this year would require companies seeking to operate fully autonomous vehicles in New Jersey to use cameras plus two other sensing technologies, most commonly lidar and radar. If enacted, New Jersey would be the first state to codify such a hardware mandate into law, moving ahead of a nearly identical proposal currently pending action in neighboring New York. The measure would also effectively prevent Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi system from operating in New Jersey unless the company changed its hardware.

“This is not anti-Tesla,” Democratic state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, the bill’s primary sponsor, told The Verge. “I’m pro-New Jersey safety.”

Zwicker, a physicist who works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (New Jersey doesn’t restrict legislators from outside jobs), said after riding in a Waymo robotaxi in Phoenix he became convinced autonomous vehicles could transform transportation.

“I was amazed how quickly you get used to it,” he said.

Waymo uses several lidar sensors, while Tesla relies exclusively on cameras.

The technology, he argues, could dramatically expand mobility, reduce traffic deaths, and make transportation more accessible. But he believes the technology should roll out cautiously in the nation’s most densely populated state.

“At this point, I don’t think the evidence is sufficient that a single sensor with software can handle situations that humans can,” Zwicker said. “Can we get there? Maybe. But we’re not there yet.”

The proposal would establish a three-year pilot program governing the testing and deployment of fully autonomous vehicles in New Jersey. Companies would have to use multiple sensing technologies, report certain crashes, and receive state authorization before operating fully driverless commercial services. They would also have to complete at least 50,000 miles of supervised testing in New Jersey without a major incident before removing the human safety driver. 

While state battles over autonomous vehicles have largely centered on safety performance, oversight, and potential job losses, New Jersey is attempting something different: legislating how the vehicles themselves should be built.

“At this point, I don’t think the evidence is sufficient that a single sensor with software can handle situations that humans can.”

New Jersey state Sen. Andrew Zwicker

The sensor requirement is by far the bill’s most consequential provision and it would have repercussions beyond Tesla. Elon Musk has long argued that cameras paired with increasingly capable artificial intelligence are the best and most cost effective way to operate autonomous vehicles. Humans navigate the world using vision alone, Musk has said, so sufficiently advanced AI should eventually be able to do the same. Eliminating lidar and radar also dramatically lowers hardware costs, making it easier to build robotaxis cheaply enough to deploy at massive scale.

Musk has even argued that adding more sensors can reduce safety by forcing software to reconcile conflicting information.

“Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?” he wrote on X last year. “We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras ftw.”

Most of the rest of the autonomous vehicle industry disagrees. Companies including Waymo and Zoox combine cameras with lidar and radar, arguing that each sensing technology has different strengths and weaknesses. Cameras capture rich visual detail, allowing vehicles to recognize colors, traffic signs, lane markings, and pedestrians, but they can struggle in poor weather, darkness, or glare. Radar performs better in rain and fog and excels at measuring the distance and relative speed of nearby objects. Lidar uses lasers to create detailed three-dimensional maps of a vehicle’s surroundings, making it particularly effective at determining the shape and distance of nearby objects.

Rather than relying on a single sensor, those companies combine the strengths of all three, arguing that redundancy makes autonomous driving safer. Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon electrical and computer engineering professor and autonomous vehicle safety expert, said camera-only systems may eventually become capable enough for fully autonomous driving. But he doesn’t believe they are today.

As Koopman put it, “eyeballs are better than cameras for many reasons” and “human brains are fundamentally more powerful than AI because we understand.” While there are situations where Koopman said camera-only works just fine — clear weather, favorable lighting, and less complex roads — he believes it’s not ready for broad consumer use.

“To run 24/7 across the majority of public roads in New Jersey today, it needs lidar,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that today camera-only technology is not up to the challenge.”

Koopman supports the New Jersey proposal but said he would prefer even stronger safeguards, such as requiring conventional driving controls like steering wheels and pedals so first responders could move disabled vehicles (so no Cybercabs, which don’t have either), and limits on how many AVs can be on the road during the pilot (a potential provision Zwicker said he’s considering).

“It’s pretty clear that today camera-only technology is not up to the challenge.”

AV expert Philip Koopman

“The difference between 100 cars and 10,000 cars is night and day,” Koopman said. When the scale is small, “There’s just not enough cars for that much weird stuff to happen to them.” He pointed to Waymo, which now operates more than 3,500 commercial robotaxis across 11 US metro areas.

“They never used to have problems with floodwaters and school buses — not because they could do floodwaters and school buses,” Koopman said. “But with 100 cars it just doesn’t happen that often.”

Despite a lot of fanfare, Tesla currently only has a handful of unsupervised Robotaxis on the road, mostly in Texas, according to data from Robotaxi Tracker, suggesting it hasn’t been as easy to scale the camera-only approach as Musk had previously promised. Last year he predicted that Tesla would have hundreds of thousands of fully self-driving Teslas operating by the end of 2026. (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Many of the bill’s provisions mirror recommendations from SAVE-US, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter autonomous vehicle regulation. Physicist and SAVE-US national campaign director Shua Sanchez said the group formed because Congress has failed to establish national rules while autonomous vehicle companies have expanded into states with dramatically different levels of oversight.

“California has the best safety regulations in the country,” he said. “Texas, Arizona, and Georgia have almost no state oversight.”

Among the organization’s priorities is requiring redundant sensing systems.

“We don’t have a problem with Tesla as a company,” Sanchez said. “We have a problem with camera-only autonomous vehicles.”

Nearly every major stakeholder has sought changes to the bill. Waymo successfully pushed to remove a requirement that safety drivers remain in vehicles throughout the pilot, and Uber argued the state should continue requiring human drivers for most rides, according to Zwicker. 

Tesla has been lobbying against the legislation in New Jersey, according to Zwicker, who said company representatives met with lawmakers to argue that advances in artificial intelligence make additional sensor types unnecessary. Zwicker said that while the tech has gotten better, “I’m not convinced yet that they’re ready to go.”

The debate has spilled beyond the state House.

“As written, the legislation imposes restrictions so severely that Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology couldn’t legally operate in New Jersey,” read a Tesla missive to New Jersey Tesla owners encouraging them to contact lawmakers. “Rather than prioritizing real safety outcomes and performance, the bill specifically bans Tesla from the New Jersey market.”

Zwicker said his office received roughly 4,000 emails within a day. “The messaging wasn’t about the details of the bill,” he said. “It was that Zwicker is trying to take away your Autopilot.”

“Rather than prioritizing real safety outcomes and performance, the bill specifically bans Tesla from the New Jersey market.”

A Tesla message to NJ owners

Zwicker rejects that characterization. The legislation applies only to fully autonomous vehicles operating under the proposed state pilot program — not driver-assistance systems that require a licensed human driver to remain behind the wheel.

The fight in New Jersey reflects a broader vacuum in autonomous vehicle regulation. Congress has debated national autonomous vehicle legislation for years without passing a comprehensive framework, leaving states to develop their own rules as commercial robotaxi services expand. Robotaxi services already operate in states including California, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia under dramatically different regulatory systems. While California requires extensive testing permits and public reporting, it doesn’t specify which tech the AVs need to get there. Texas has adopted a far lighter-touch approach, which lets automakers self-certify that their autonomous vehicles are ready for the road. 

New Jersey’s bill raises the possibility that AV tech there could differ from that of other states. Zwicker says that isn’t his concern.

“The technology doesn’t exist in the Northeast at all,” he said. “The goal is to start now, do it safely, and build public trust.”

Sanchez sees the sensor requirement as a common-sense safeguard rather than a restriction on innovation.

“There are absolutely brilliant people working at Tesla trying to make camera-only autonomy work,” he said. “But they’re trying to do it with one arm tied behind their back.”

]]> Rani Molla <![CDATA[I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism]]> https://www.theverge.com/?p=955454 2026-06-24T08:26:27-04:00 2026-06-24T08:00:00-04:00 Slate Truck

With its new pickup, Slate Auto is making a simple bet: price matters more than almost anything else. The company announced today that the American-made electric truck will start at $24,950, placing it squarely in the mid-$20,000 price range it had originally promised and making it the least expensive pickup truck and EV available today. At a time when the average new vehicle costs nearly twice that amount, Slate is pitching something that has become increasingly rare in the modern auto market: a genuinely basic new vehicle that doesn’t look that way.

To hit that price point, Slate stripped away features many drivers now take for granted. The truck doesn’t come with a touchscreen, stereo, or even speakers. Instead, it includes a dash mount for your phone. The windows use manual hand cranks. And unlike many new vehicles marketed around increasingly autonomous features, a Slate requires you to do all the driving yourself.

The timing may be right. The average new vehicle sold for $49,220 in May, according to data from Cox Automotive — a price that’s been heading ever upward. Small and midsize pickups averaged $43,044, while new EVs averaged $54,532. Slate’s truck is even cheaper than the average used vehicle, which goes for $26,918. Its closest pickup competitor, the Ford Maverick, starts at around $30,000, while the Chevrolet Bolt EV begins at roughly $29,000.

For decades, automakers have competed to add more features, bigger screens, and increasingly sophisticated software. Slate is doing the opposite. The company believes at least some buyers would rather have a cheaper truck than a premium sound system, massive infotainment display, or suite of driver-assistance technologies. I recently drove the truck in Southern California. While its lack of a touchscreen and roll-up windows attract the most attention, the more surprising part is how normal the vehicle feels on the road.

The vehicle runs counter to a broader trend in the auto industry sometimes referred to as “trimflation” — the push to increase margins by bundling vehicles with more technology and luxury features. As infotainment systems have grown larger and software has become a bigger selling point, truly bare-bones vehicles have become increasingly difficult to find.

At a time when the average new vehicle costs nearly twice that amount, Slate is pitching something that has become increasingly rare in the modern auto market: a genuinely basic new vehicle that doesn’t look that way.

In some ways, Slate is reviving a segment of the market that largely disappeared. For decades, compact pickups such as the Toyota Pickup, Ford Ranger, and Nissan Hardbody served as inexpensive, utilitarian vehicles for young buyers, tradespeople, and anyone who simply needed a truck. But as automakers chased higher margins, pickups grew larger, more luxurious, and substantially more expensive. Today, even many entry-level trucks come loaded with luxuries. Slate is betting there is still demand for a truck that prioritizes affordability over amenities.

That’s not to say buyers can’t customize the vehicle. Slate offers more than 200 accessories, ranging from speakers and seat covers to roof racks and trailer hitches. Eighty percent of them cost under $500. For roughly $5,000, owners can even convert the two-seat pickup into a five-seat SUV. The variety of accessories makes it possible for one Slate to look markedly different from the next.

Slate wants to sell a simple base product and let customers decide which upgrades are worth paying for. The company is also encouraging a do-it-yourself approach as a way to keep costs down. Customers can install wraps, interior accents, lighting upgrades, and other accessories themselves using online video tutorials it’s branding as “Slate U,” or have many upgrades installed for them through a network of more than 3,000 RepairPal-affiliated shops. The car is sold direct-to-consumer, with a fixed manufacturer-set price rather than dealer-negotiated pricing.

For around $500, buyers can add one of the company’s vinyl wraps, dramatically changing the appearance of the vehicle without the cost of a custom paint job. Other accessories, including headlight covers, interior trim pieces, and trailer hitches, are priced closer to what consumers might expect to pay for aftermarket upgrades than factory-installed options.

The nuts and bolts are there, too. Slate’s battery and powertrain warranty runs 10 years or 110,000 miles, putting it at the higher end of the industry standard. It’s engineered for a five-star safety rating and Top Safety Pick. The truck also includes air conditioning, power locks, old-school cruise control, and a back-up camera, suggesting not everything was deemed expendable in the pursuit of affordability. It also has a frunk with a drain in the front for added storage or a makeshift cooler just because.

Whether Slate’s strategy succeeds depends on a simple question: Have automakers spent years adding features consumers don’t value as much as they value lower prices? The signs are encouraging.

According to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Automotive Consumer Study, the most important factors influencing Americans’ choice of a new vehicle brand are quality (58 percent), performance (51 percent), and price (46 percent). Other considerations, including brand familiarity and feature sets, rank much lower. When it comes to the purchase process itself, consumers place an even greater emphasis on value, with nearly two-thirds saying getting a good deal is a top priority.

Slate’s philosophy is reflected in who it believes its customer will be.

Chris Barman, Slate’s President of Vehicles, described the target buyer to me as an “everyday American” looking for value rather than luxury. Many prospective customers, she said, have continued driving older vehicles not because they dislike new cars, but because they have been priced out of the market. Others already rely on their smartphones for navigation, music, and communication, making the absence of a built-in infotainment system less of a sacrifice than it might have seemed a decade ago. “It’s an ecosystem they already know, so they don’t have to learn anything new,” she said. “Why pay for a second screen that’s embedded in the car?”

The truck itself feels surprisingly coherent once you spend time around it. Rather than feeling cheap, it feels intentionally minimal. In both pickup and SUV configurations, its boxy proportions and simple lines evoke the compact trucks and utility vehicles that were common on American roads before pickups ballooned in size and price.

I drove the truck with Barman in the passenger seat around Gardena, California, near the company’s new design studio. On the road, it felt much more like a compact crossover than a traditional pickup truck. In other words, it was closer to my new hybrid Honda CR-V than my aging Toyota Tundra.

Part of that comes from the vehicle’s electric architecture. Despite being rear-wheel drive, the battery pack helps distribute weight more evenly than in front-heavy gas trucks. The result is a vehicle that feels planted and predictable rather than cumbersome.

The performance won’t challenge a Tesla, but it doesn’t need to. The truck accelerates from 0 to 30 mph in about three seconds and reaches 60 mph in roughly eight. For someone used to gas cars, it feels exceptionally peppy. Its turning radius felt tight, visibility was good, and the relatively short wheelbase made it easy to maneuver. Parallel parking didn’t feel like the logistical exercise it can be in many larger, modern pickups.

The performance won’t challenge a Tesla, but it doesn’t need to.

The hauling capabilities also came in ahead of the company’s earlier projections. The truck can carry up to 1,550 pounds of payload and tow as much as 2,000 pounds. That’s enough for landscaping materials, furniture runs, motorcycles, small utility trailers, or a modest fishing boat. It won’t replace a heavy-duty work truck, but Slate isn’t trying to compete for those customers.

The vehicle’s estimated range is 205 miles, an improvement over the company’s initial 150-mile target but still below what buyers will find in many higher-end EVs. Charging can be done through a standard household outlet, a Level 2 charger, or a DC fast charger capable of adding substantial range in about 30 minutes.

So far, consumers appear interested in the experiment. Slate says it has accumulated roughly 180,000 reservations ahead of production, which is scheduled to begin at the company’s Warsaw, Indiana, factory before customer deliveries start in the fourth quarter. The company expects annual production to reach 150,000 vehicles by the end of 2027.

Whether those reservations ultimately turn into sales remains to be seen. But with new vehicle prices hovering near $50,000 and automakers continuing to load cars with screens, sensors, subscriptions, and software, Slate is testing a surprisingly simple idea: maybe what many Americans want most isn’t more technology. Maybe it’s a new vehicle they can actually afford.

Photography by Rani Molla

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