Public notes from activescott tagged with both #automobiles and #transportation
Shortly after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took office in February, the DOT suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, which was part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Biden signed into law in 2021.
The Trump administration has pursued a number of policies to boost the sale of gas-powered vehicles and cut EV incentives for automakers and consumers.
Vendors have taken a variety of approaches to the self-driving problem. Tesla's approach is to allow their "full self-driving" (FSD) system to be used in all ODDs as a Level 2 (hands/on, eyes/on) ADAS.[3] Waymo picked specific ODDs (city streets in Phoenix and San Francisco) for their Level 5 robotaxi service.[4] Mercedes Benz offers Level 3 service in Las Vegas in highway traffic jams at speeds up to 40 miles per hour (64 km/h).[5] Mobileye's SuperVision system offers hands-off/eyes-on driving on all road types at speeds up to 130 km/h (81 mph).[6] GM's hands-free Super Cruise operates on specific roads in specific conditions, stopping or returning control to the driver when ODD changes. In 2024 the company announced plans to expand road coverage from 400,000 miles to 750,000 miles (1,210,000 km).[7] Ford's BlueCruise hands-off system operates on 130,000 miles (210,000 km) of US divided highways.[8]
In 2017, Waymo reported 63 disengagements over 352,545 mi (567,366 km) of testing, an average distance of 5,596 mi (9,006 km) between disengagements, the highest (best) among companies reporting such figures. Waymo also logged more autonomous miles than other companies. Their 2017 rate of 0.18 disengagements per 1,000 mi (1,600 km) was an improvement over the 0.2 disengagements per 1,000 mi (1,600 km) in 2016, and 0.8 in 2015. In March 2017, Uber reported an average of 0.67 mi (1.08 km) per disengagement. In the final three months of 2017, Cruise (owned by GM) averaged 5,224 mi (8,407 km) per disengagement over 62,689 mi (100,888 km).[155]
BYD, a company Elon Musk once dismissed by laughing at their products during a 2011 Bloomberg interview, has overtaken Tesla to be the world’s top EV seller. BYD said on Thursday that sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units in 2025. Vehicle deliveries at Tesla dropped 8% year on year to 1.64 million vehicles delivered in 2025.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let’s explore the bad world of Cars!
HENRY GRABAR: Parking is the largest single land use in many American cities. If we were designing society from scratch, would we have placed car storage on the pedestal that it now occupies?
You know, one of the things that immediately jumped off the page for me when I was reading your book is the fact that, by square footage, there is more housing for each car in this country than there is housing for each person. And on its face, I have to say that statement feels incredibly problematic, but is it?
GRABAR: I don't think it's that surprising when you start to think about it. I mean, there are more - we build more three-car garages in this country than we build one-bedroom apartments. Almost every jurisdiction in this country requires parking as a part of every single building type, whether you're building a school, an apartment building or an office or a restaurant, the law requires a certain number of parking spaces. So we have parking minimums in every jurisdiction in this country, whereas for housing, we often have maximums. We say, on this plot, you can only put one unit of housing. You can only put two units of housing. So the fact that we've ended up with a surplus of parking and a shortage of housing is no surprise. In fact, it's by design.