A driverless Tesla robotaxi and a Waymo autonomous vehicle make their way through roadwork on a residential street in Austin (Jay Janner/Getty Images)

Tesla says cameras are better than other sensors. Americans disagree.

70% of Americans would prefer autonomous cars to use both cameras and lidar.

Rani Molla

8/29/25 9:10AM

Tesla has staked its autonomous driving future on a relatively cheap solution: using cameras alone rather than a combination with the much more expensive lidar that its competitor, Google’s Waymo, employs to operate its self-driving cars. It’s a stance that puts Tesla at odds with most Americans, new data shows.

According to new survey data from Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report, some 70% of Americans said in August that autonomous vehicles should employ both cameras and lidar, while 71% said the government should require companies to use both.

(Of course, the vast majority Americans also say they wouldn’t consider riding in a robotaxi in the first place.)

Tesla is hoping that by keeping costs low for its cars, which are just a fraction of the price of Waymo’s, it will be able to scale its autonomous ambitions much more quickly and cheaply, since it says pretty much any of its cars on the road could potentially be self-driving with updated software.

Musk earlier this year predicted “millions of Teslas operating autonomously” by the end of 2026. So far Tesla’s Austin robotaxi program, which doesn’t have a driver but does have a safety monitor sitting in the passenger seat, has about 30 autonomous cars on the road.

Meanwhile, Waymo so far operates about 2,000 autonomous vehicles.

In a post on X Thursday, Tesla reiterated its stance, saying, “Pure vision beats sensors,” while showing a 3D map of traffic surrounding a Tesla, generated from its cameras.

Pure vision beats sensors pic.twitter.com/1z1sNaiOY4
— Tesla (@Tesla) August 29, 2025

Rani Molla3h

Tesla’s Chinese-made EV sales jumped 10% in November

Tesla sales from its Shanghai plant jumped 10% in November, only the third time those sales have risen in a month this year, Bloomberg reports. These figures don’t break down what share of sales are within China — Tesla’s second-biggest market — or exported, but typically most made there are sold locally.

The news is a rare bright spot these days for the company’s car sales, which are continuing to decline in much of the world amid fierce competition, especially from Chinese automakers, against Tesla’s aging lineup. The FactSet analyst consensus expects Tesla’s global sales to drop 7% in 2025, the second annual decline in a row.

Rani Molla3h

Apple retires AI head to show it’s serious about AI

Yesterday, Apple announced that its AI head, John Giannandrea, who presided over the company’s largely subpar endeavors into generative AI, would retire at the relatively young age of 60.

Giannandrea is set to leave the company this spring — right around the time Apple’s long-delayed, AI-powered Siri is expected to debut, with Microsoft’s corporate VP for AI, Amar Subramanya, taking the reins.

The move signals that Apple, which has invested far less in AI than its Big Tech peers — and has comparatively little to show for it — is finally getting serious about the technology.

“We believe that Subramanya represents the right hire at the right time with the clock ticking on Apple’s AI strategy heading into next year with outside hires a necessary move to improve the AI strategy,” writes Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “We believe that this was a major reset while expecting more outside hires from Cook & Co. to get Apple on the right track when it comes to AI while further preparing the company for its AI Siri launch by mid 2026 which has been delayed due to development challenges and now represents a major turning point in the company’s history.”

The company put it this way: “This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.”

John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

The move signals that Apple, which has invested far less in AI than its Big Tech peers — and has comparatively little to show for it — is finally getting serious about the technology.

The company put it this way: “This moment marks an exciting new chapter as Apple strengthens its commitment to shaping the future of AI for users everywhere.”

Rani Molla4h

OpenAI declares “code red” on Google three years after Google declared “code red” on OpenAI

Google’s recent AI hot streak, which includes the much-lauded release of Gemini 3 last month, has OpenAI worried — so much so that CEO Sam Altman has declared a “code red” to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Scholars of chatbot history might remember that after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, Google declared a “code red” to fight the existential threat the new AI technology posed to Google’s search dominance.

And here we are today!

Rani Molla22h

Tesla sales continued to fall in Europe last month — but there were a few bright spots

Tesla’s self-proclaimed “weakest market” continued to look weak in November, as sales mostly kept dropping year over year across European countries, including Sweden, France, and Spain, Reuters reports.

However, there were a couple of notable bright spots for Tesla, which has suffered due to strong competition and an aging lineup. In Norway, as consumers face the end of certain EV subsidies, Tesla sales jumped 175% in November and about 35% for the first 11 months of 2025. Meanwhile, in Italy, sales increased 58% year on year after declining for six months. From January to November, Tesla sales fell 28% there.

Jon Keegan23h

More AI startups are reportedly turning to free Chinese AI models

The biggest tech companies in the world, like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, are racing to build dozens of gigawatts of AI computing infrastructure to meet what they say is incredibly high demand.

But free, open-weight Chinese AI models like DeepSeek and Qwen have been rapidly catching up to the leading frontier models.

According to a report from NBC News, more AI startups are deciding that these Chinese models might be cheap enough and good enough to pass on the state-of-the-art offerings from OpenAI, Meta, and Google. This, of course, would be very bad news for the AI capex orgy that is currently consuming the tech sector.

As the huge, all-purpose models try to do it all, startups are taking advantage of these open-weight models, which can be distilled and customized for specific applications, and usually for a much lower cost.