Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program on April 9, 2026, using Waymo's perception and physical feedback systems to detect potholes and provide the data to cities and state Departments of Transportation.
The data will be available through the free Waze for Cities platform to municipal officials and visible to Waze app users in Waymo-operating cities, with user verification improving detection accuracy.
Potholes cause significant vehicle damage and contribute to crashes; cities currently rely on non-emergency 311 reports and manual inspections, which provide incomplete road maintenance coverage.
Aseon Labs, co-founded by the Pushme battery-swapping team, has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners to build parking space-sized automated pods for robotaxis.
The pods address deadhead miles—unprofitable miles driven without paying passengers—by enabling robotaxis to be inspected, cleaned, and charged at distributed locations throughout cities rather than at distant depots.
The six-person team will use funding to build five prototypes, expand to about a dozen employees, and acquire real estate for a network of robotic pit stops, backed by Y Combinator, Expa, and investors including former Google executive Adrian Aoun and operators from Anthropic, Nuro, Turo, and Revolut.
Waymo and TU Delft published research in Nature Communications introducing ReD (Reference Driver), an active inference model that simulates how a careful, competent human driver avoids collisions.
ReD models the complete cognitive process including how drivers update beliefs about road situations, manage uncertainty about other vehicles' intentions, and select evasive maneuvers such as braking or swerving.
The model extends Waymo's established NIEON framework and represents the latest of a dozen published papers on behavioral reference models, serving as a human-performance benchmark for autonomous vehicle safety assessment.