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This feels like a poorly written sentence or two Uber is obviously very pro-autonomy. They've invested in 20 companies and over $10 billion I think the debate here is: should you have a safety driver for the first 10,000 miles or 50,000 miles when you go to a new geography? Having a safety driver for a couple of months sounds like a small price to pay for building trust with regulators and with consumers. Why wouldn't you do it? In fact everyone is doing that, including Tesla and Waymo! So this just feels like the editor did not catch a strange unclear sentence in the story

We’ve autonomously driven more than 300,000 miles in Washington, D.C., safely navigating everything from crowded evenings in Chinatown to emergency scenes in the Third Street Tunnel. We are ready to serve Washingtonians, and to invest tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure and hundreds of local jobs needed to support our service in the nation’s capital.

Uber is continuing really grasp at straws here Waymo is literally ready to serve riders in DC and Uber is lobbying against it Their reasoning is it would give Waymo a monopoly?

I just went for my first drive with Tesla Self-Driving 14.3.5 in Los Angeles late at night It was very good, but 14.3.4 was also very good so need more time to notice the differences. But in my first hour with it, seemed great — maybe a little more confident than before. It nailed parking very quickly after entering the parking lot every time. That seems to be an area of improvement. I was impressed getting out of the UCLA parking lot when the way to exit was not obvious. The car backed out of it's parking spot, turned down a path that was a dead end, and then super smoothly without skipping a beat reversed and turned around and tried another path. that path was also a dead end. it then made a three point turn to turn around 180 degrees and finally tried the correct path out which was not obviously a path out at all (looked like a wall, but there was a space to drive between the two walls if you made a sharp right turn). It was cool to see it kind of reason through the situation, try all three paths, and then find it's way out in a way that felt smooth and comfortable throughout — not like it's confused or indecisive or jerky. The way it drives is starting to have this eerie sort of of supernatural quality to it — it knows exactly where to stop and exactly how much it has to brake to stop in time. It does it all in one smooth continuous motion, in a way that is beyond human ability. Even when a stop sign unexpectedly popped up it was able to slow down and stop at the stop sign in one smooth continuous deceleration motion that didn't feel abrupt or harsh despite the car only having seconds between the time the stop sign became visible and the time it reached the stop line. Will need to do more testing and videos tomorrow, but so far it looks like the Tesla AI team cooked again. Also love that you can now see when the car is self-driving from the Tesla mobile app

I continue to put butts in seats, this time my friend Ed’s first FSD ride: Grok sets the destination and we review basics.