Oregon may open the door to driverless service in Portland
Oregon lawmakers are weighing a proposal (HB 4085) that would more explicitly recognize an automated driving system as the “driver” when engaged, create a pathway for operating autonomous vehicles without an onboard human, and give the Oregon DOT authority to grant exemptions from certain state equipment requirements. The bill also layers in operational guardrails—collision-reporting responsibilities, standard financial responsibility requirements, and an additional $1 million combined single-limit third-party liability coverage requirement when the automated driving system is engaged. Locally, the policy debate is already heating up in Portland, with some officials and advocates raising safety, street design, and mode-shift concerns as robotaxi expansion discussions move from hypothetical to near-term planning.
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A popular robotaxi company returns to Boston, but policy may decide the pace
A popular robotaxi company says it is bringing vehicles back to Boston for additional mapping and training runs, starting with trained specialists driving manually—positioning the effort as groundwork for eventual commercial deployment. The bigger near-term question is regulatory: state bills under consideration would require a human safety operator in the vehicle to transport people or goods, and local skepticism remains, including labor and traffic and safety concerns. The company is also leaning into the “winter readiness” narrative by highlighting sensor-heating and camera-wiper hardware and broader testing in snowy cities while arguing its safety performance exceeds human drivers where it operates today.
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Senate Commerce spotlights the push for a national AV framework
The Senate Commerce Committee convened a February 4 hearing focused on how and whether Congress should set clearer federal rules of the road for autonomous vehicles, framing it as both a safety issue focused on reducing human-error crashes and a competitiveness issue for U.S. technology leadership. The witness list included a representative from a popular electric vehicle company and the chief safety officer of a popular robotaxi company, alongside industry and academic voices, underscoring the ongoing tension between scaling innovation quickly and standardizing oversight across a patchwork of state approaches.
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Simulation gets a boost: “world models” for robotaxi edge cases
A popular robotaxi company says it is using an AI simulation approach built on DeepMind’s “Genie 3” to generate realistic virtual environments and train its autonomous driving stack on edge cases—scenarios that are rare on real roads but critical for safety validation and scaling into new markets. The company is positioning this approach as a way to expand more confidently and faster by stress-testing vehicle behavior in high-fidelity digital environments before encountering comparable situations in live operations.
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UK insurers brace for liability reshuffling as “driver” responsibility moves upstream
UK insurers are preparing for an autonomous liability framework shaped by the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, which shifts the core question from identifying a driver to determining which entity is responsible for the automated driving system and the service. Coverage discussions center on two emerging legal actors, often the manufacturer serving as the Automated Self-Driving Entity and a mobility service provider serving as the No-User-In-Charge operator. Insurers are also raising practical challenges, including limited real-world loss data, potentially higher repair severity due to expensive sensor technology, greater reliance on vehicle data recorders to reconstruct incidents, and a regulatory rollout timeline that may not fully mature until late 2027.
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