After proving itself in the fog-shrouded hills of San Francisco, Waymo One is headed to Hollywood.

The Alphabet-owned autonomous ride-hailing company announced a six-month tour across Los Angeles that will give Angelenos the chance to sit in traffic sans a driver to chit-chat with. The demo is meant to stoke excitement for a coming rollout of full service in what will be the company’s second California city—and the country’s second largest metro area.

The move comes just weeks after Waymo and other robotaxi companies won permission to expand service in San Francisco from the California Public Utilities Commission, the latest gain in a big year of growth for the long-stalled tech. Waymo has been testing driverless cars in LA since February.

Taxis on tour: Waymo plans to make month-long stops in six different neighborhoods or cities across the LA area, starting with Santa Monica and Venice Beach on October 11. Other stops will include Century City, West Hollywood, Mid City, Koreatown, and Downtown LA.

Starting next month, the company will distribute early-access passes for the demo period via pop-up events and an online waitlist. Tickets will allow holders to hail free rides for a week at any time in the given service area that month.

Keep reading here.—PK

LiquidPiston is pioneering what could be the biggest engine innovation in the last 150 years.

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Yellow cabs, slice shops, and…electric cargo bikes?

Pedal-assisted mini-trucks could soon be a more common sight on New York City streets under a recent proposal from the city’s Department of Transportation. The agency has suggested a new rule that would allow golf cart-sized electric quadricycles as a way to slash the number of delivery trucks clogging up city streets.

Companies like UPS and Amazon have been testing these types of last-mile delivery vehicles in the city over the last couple of years. For them, the fleets have the potential to better navigate the always-challenging last-mile stretch of their supply chain in dense urban areas, while also making headway toward carbon emission goals.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams agrees: “These pedal-assist cargo bikes will help New Yorkers get the items they need while reducing carbon emissions and traffic congestion—and getting dangerous trucks off our streets,” he said in the announcement last month.

There’s plenty of debate, though, on how exactly this push should play out.

Keep reading here.—PK

HR pros have seen countless stories about how AI is primed to dramatically change the world of work, but how that tech can be used in a way that’s beneficial for a company and its workforce is still a bubbling question for many.

Maybe companies need a tech guru to spearhead how AI might best support employees or be used to transform workflows?

That’s where Richard Lyons comes in. Lyons—a former Googler who previously led the machine learning team at YouTube—joined the C-suite at staffing and outsourcing firm Cloudstaff this month to oversee the company’s approach to AI, both with an eye for clients and its workforce.

“Machine learning and data science has been around for 20-plus years. This is not new. This has been building up for a long, long time,” said Tevis Paget, Cloudstaff’s CTO. “We needed to invest in not just machine learning and buying and aligning with products in the market and emerging products, but actually to be a leader in the field and our industry.”

Paget hopes the tech company’s deployment of more AI capabilities will “supercharge” the workforce, and positioning an exec to oversee how the tech is developed and used will help to make sure both that it’s done ethically but also is aligned with the company’s business goals.

Keep reading here.—AD

Ready to take a wild ride into the future? Buckle up because our FREE virtual event, All Roads Lead to Innovation: What’s Ahead for EVs and AVs, is coming Sept. 27! Get the inside scoop on electric trucks, bidirectional charging, and more. RSVP today.

This editorial content is sponsored by NI.

Stat: 89%. That’s the percentage of New York City buildings already in compliance with Local Law 97, legislation designed to limit carbon emissions from buildings, according to reporting from Canary Media that cited a report from New York Communities for Change.

Quote: “Overall, the average person would probably struggle with this.”—Tony Hu, a director at MIT, to the New York Times about the difficulties faced by consumers wanting to switch their default search engine to something other than Google

Read: Slack is basically Facebook now (The Atlantic)

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Tweeting into the void: Are we still on Twitter? I mean, we know some of us are, but are we using it? Some deleted our accounts when Elon Musk demanded we pony up for a Twitter Blue subscription for the privilege of two-factor authentication. We’re the product, pal; we’re not paying you cash money for basic account security. It’s PSL season, after all. Like all good millennials, we’re perfectly capable of frittering away $8 a month.

Anyway. For the dwindling number of individuals who haven’t decamped to Bluesky or Mastodon (or, you know, decided to opt out of the whole circus and read a book or take a hike), allow us to direct you to this helpful visualization from The Markup detailing the precise extent to which Twitter (or, ugh, X. Ugh.) is throttling links to competitors’ sites. Which just seems petty!

So yeah, we’re on Bluesky sometimes, between books and hikes. Come say hi.