Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said every year for the past decade that this is the year he’ll deliver on lofty promises of enabling millions of fully self-driving vehicles.

Spoiler alert: That hasn’t happened. But Tesla is now rolling out a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. The company has shared some information about what this venture entails, but there are more questions than answers.

“So far, this launch lags significantly behind the company’s promise and what competitors have already delivered,” Paul Miller, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, said in a statement.

What we know: Tesla is launching a robotaxi service with 10 to 20 Tesla Model Y SUVs (equipped with its Full Self-Driving, or FSD, software) in a geofenced area in Austin, with human safety operators in the vehicle (despite Musk previously saying this wouldn’t be the case) and a teleoperations team capable of accessing and taking control of the vehicle.

“Like all of Tesla’s competitors, these cars will only carry passengers around certain parts of the city,” Miller said. “Also, like competitors, the cars may stop operating in inclement weather. Neither of these limitations should surprise anyone.”

The service, open at first to a select group of invited users, will not initially involve Tesla’s robotaxi product, the Cybercab, which it revealed last fall and is supposed to go into production next year. It’s unclear what version of FSD will be used.

On Tesla’s Q1 earnings call in April, Musk again claimed that the “vast majority of the Tesla fleet that we’ve made is capable of being a robotaxi,” predicting that the company will be able to quickly scale to many other cities.

But at least for now, that’s not what the service looks like.

Keep reading here.—JG

On stage at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration in Redmond in the spring, CEO Satya Nadella showed a video of himself retracing the code of the company’s first-ever product, with help from AI.

“You know intelligence has been commoditized when CEOs can start vibe coding,” he told the hundreds of employees in attendance.

The comment was a sign of how much this term—and the act and mindset it aptly describes—have taken root in the tech world. Over the past few months, the normally exacting art of coding has seen a profusion of vibes thanks to AI.

The meme started with a post from former Tesla Senior Director of AI Andrej Karpathy in February. Karpathy described it as an approach to coding “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

The concept gained traction because it touched on a transformation—a vibe shift?—that was already underway among some programmers, according to Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of AI app development platform Replit. As LLM-powered tools like Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf—which is reportedly in talks to be acquired by OpenAI—have gotten smarter, AI has made it easier to just…sort of…wing it.

“Coding has been seen as this—as hard a science as you can get. It’s very concrete, mathematical structure, and needs to be very precise,” Masad told Tech Brew. “What is the opposite of precision? It is vibes, and so it is communicating to the public that coding is no longer about precision. It’s more about vibes, ideas, and so on.”

Keep reading here.—PK

The inconveniences caused by scooters controlled via smartphone contributed to something of a micromobility meltdown a few years ago.

But in 2025, the micromobility sector aims to learn from the mistakes of its past and ride a fresh wave of interest in solutions that can help people get from Point A to Point B without a car. Last-mile delivery of both goods and people, return-to-office mandates, and the soaring popularity of e-bikes are among the factors fueling micromobility’s next chapter.

“The big story is that, in my view, the next big winner in micromobility does not exist today. That company has yet to be built,” Jiten Behl, partner at venture-capital firm Eclipse Ventures, told Tech Brew. “It’s a wide-open field for an actual Tesla of micromobility.”

Lessons learned: The history of micromobility dates back decades, but in December 2001, the US saw the introduction of a product that would in many ways represent the sector’s promises and failures: the Segway, an electric scooter that never quite delivered on its mission to transform transportation (unless your name is Paul Blart).

Keep reading here.—JG