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The robotaxi race is heating up in Austin. A decade after Googles self-driving car project quietly tested on the citys streets, a new wave of autonomous vehicle companies is setting up shop. Waymo, now a dominant force in San Francisco, is expanding to the city. Tesla is preparing to debut its long-promised robotaxi. And smaller players like Zoox, Avride, and ADMT are using the Texas capital as a proving ground. What was once a fringe experiment is now a high-stakes industry comeback, deep in the heart of Texas. You have a regulatory environment thats keen to capitalize on these developments, says Alison Brooks, research vice president for worldwide public safety at IDC. At the same time, its a blue city in a red state thats predisposed towards alternative vehicles that are more environmentally friendly. The self-driving companies converging on Austin The only fully deployed and operational robotaxi company in Austin is Waymo. In 2023, the company announced it was expanding testing to the city that keeps it weird, more than two years after its Phoenix launch. Since its March launch, Waymo now has about 100 robotaxis in Austin, making up 20% of local Uber trips. By expanding our partnership with Uber to Austin, we were able to bring Waymo rides to residents and visitors in Austin even faster, a representative for Waymo tells Fast Company. Tesla is now gearing up for deployment in the city. The robotaxiwhich Elon Musk has been teasing since 2019appears finally ready for the streets. Musk, who once operated out of the Bay Area, relocated his companies to Texas and brought his robotaxis with him. According to his posts on X, some of the vehicles have already begun driving. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.) For the past several days, Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in drivers seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents. A month ahead of schedule.Next month, first self-delivery from factory to customer.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 29, 2025 Several smaller robotaxi companies are also testing in Austin. Zoox, owned by Amazon, is operating vehicles with safety drivers across multiple districts. Avride is running tests as well, though its planned debutthrough a partnership with Uberwill take place in nearby Dallas. ADMT, Volkswagens robotaxi subsidiary, has been testing in Austin since 2023. As these autonomous vehicle companies converge on Austin, the city is becoming a key arena for robotaxi competition. It may not have the highest adoption of self-driving vehiclesPhoenix and San Francisco still lead in that regardbut with Teslas entry, Austin is fast becoming the most competitive testing ground. A friendly regulatory environment Why Austin? Many point to the citys favorable regulatory environment. In Texas, state law preempts local law, which means the relatively relaxed Senate Bill 2205passed in 2017sets the statewide standard for AV regulation. Still, Austins active local government has played a key supporting role, offering infrastructure and coordination through efforts like the Autonomous Vehicle Working Group, which brings together staff from several city departments. A spokesperson for the City of Austin tells Fast Company that, while the city cannot directly regulate AVs, it can support companies with valuable information. Each robotaxi company has received maps of school zones, schedules for special events, and guidance on emergency vehicle protocols. The spokesperson notes that Tesla, though not required to inform the city of testing, has communicated with the Working Group. Many companies view this top-down modelless restrictive than frameworks in states like Californiaas an advantage. While California has an extensive permitting system, Texas only mandates that AVs are registered, insured, and have systems to record crash data. A representative for Avride cited the favorable regulatory environment in Austin, adding: The state has clear and supportive laws that allow us to operate and scale our technology confidently, in a statement to Fast Company. Of course, regulations carry weightboth protective and limiting. They can restrict innovation but also safeguard the public. IDCs Alison Brooks and Remi Letemple, a senior research analyst at the firm, both reference the Cruise crash in San Francisco as a cautionary tale. In 2023, a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian along the street, prompting a full recall of the companys fleet. How do we get an environment that balances innovation with regulation in a way that avoids catastrophic events? IDCs Brooks asks. Thats the tension that I think exists in all of those markets. When I talk to adjacent mobility folks, theyre watching this market very carefully as well for the same reasons. When asked about the risk of crashes or technical failures, the City of Austin spokesperson responded: The City works with AV companies before and during deployment to obtain training for first responders, establish expectations for ongoing communication and share information about infrastructure and events. Austins intrinsic benefits Beyond regulations, Austin offers several regional advantages. Its consistently high temperatures tend to keep pedestrians off the streets, reducing unexpected interactions for autonomous vehicles. The city is dense enough to challenge AV systems but not so congested as to make navigation unmanageable. A representative from Avride also highlighted the presence of the University of Texas, noting its strong tech talent pool. Demographics add to Austins appeal as a testing ground. The city has a sizable base of affluent residentsit now ranks tenth among U.S. cities with the most millionaires. Despite the tech influx, Austin remains largely liberal. Local disability advocates have especially championed robotaxis for broadening access. A representative for Zoox tells Fast Company that locals have established that they like to move around with on-demand rideshare. Austin also presents unique environmental features including horizontal traffic lights, suspended cable traffic signals, and train track crossings that will help train our AI to better understand and navigate various road patterns and driving conditions, the Zoox representative writes. Pushback to the AV surge has been muted. Some Austin residents worried about Cruise, specifically cyclists who watched a Cruise vehicle veer into a bike lane in 2023. Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says that the only safety worry she’s heard from Austinites was that Cruise cars “came too close to their vehicle.” Now, Cruise AVs are gone from the city’s roads. “With Waymo, [Austin residents] only complain if it obeys the speed limit,” Kockelman says. “They drive really well, but they do need to speed up.” Still, Austins local benefits may not translate elsewhere. Other cities have more pedestrians, more complex roadways, or more cautious consumers. I dont think Austin can be patient zero, even if it becomes a success. Its not scalable to other states, says IDCs Remi Letemple. Every city has its own infrastructure and its own barriers.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a sprawling, 6-square-mile plot of land in rural West Tennessee, the Ford Motor Co. is building a massive new electric vehicle assembly plant it’s calling BlueOval City. Estimated to cost more than $5.6 billion and create more than 6,000 jobs, the industrial park is envisioned as the world’s most modern automotive manufacturing facility since Ford pioneered the assembly line. It will also remake this part of Tennessee, which has seen little, if any, economic development in decades. But despite this scale and ambition, the most impactful part of the project may be tucked inside a 3,600-square-foot dilapidated schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is being transformed into the new Ford Community Center for the city of Stanton, population 415, which sits closest to the edge of BlueOval City. Located 50 miles outside of Memphis, Stanton is a predominantly Black community built on former plantation land. Once the heart of the community, the schoolhouse was decommissioned after desegregation. Now through an unusually community-centric process, the building is being converted into a resource center that provides residents with job training, financial literacy, healthcare access, legal services, and more. It’s a front door for helping people who wish to participate in the rising tide of BlueOval City, says Josh McManus. His consultancy, M|B|P, spearheaded this community-focused approach, which involved more than 2,500 hours of community meetings and input sessions to understand what was needed before any investment was made. Josh McManus [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] What you find very fast is there are a lot of lifelong residents in the area who, because there’s been next to no economic activity there for a long time, are in need of hard skills and soft skills, McManus says. Working directly with Ford Philanthropy, the automaker’s philanthropic arm, and Civic, a New York-based creative and marketing agency, M|B|P did on-the-ground research to learn about the conditions in the community, and used that information to set a 15-mile radius around the plant as the zone of its greatest potential local economic impact. Little by little we came to realize that there’s no physical space for the community to gather. There’s no physical space from which to conduct these forward and upward social services, McManus says. Dialing in on the needs of the people within that zone, M|B|P suggested creating a central space where community members could access the services, training, and resources they would need to either get a job at the BlueOval City plant or play some other role in the economic development it would bring to the region. The empty schoolhouse, known to nearly everyone in the community, was an obvious location to focus this corporate giving. Anticipated to fully open by early 2026, the new community center is part of a $9 million investment by Ford Philanthropy in the community around BlueOval City, which has been under construction for three years. Ford announced in September 2024 that production at BlueOval City would be delayed by 18 months, pushing back its opening until 2027. Earlier this year, the company projected up to $5.5 billion in losses on its electric vehicle and software operations in 2025. Mary Culler is president of Ford Philanthropy, which was founded in 1949 and made more than $76 million in philanthropic contributions in 2024. She says McManus was instrumental in helping ensure the project was more than just a tone-deaf exercise in corporate social responsibility. It’s easy to say let’s do a community center, we’re open to everybody, we’re going to help you or support you. But in some ways you could end up with a big peanut butter smattering of nothingness if you’re not really focused, Culler says. [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] McManus has come to understand the importance of using community data and community input to guide these kinds of place-based corporate giving efforts. Born into a middle-class family in a factory town in the South, he started his career at the United Way in Atlanta and then Chattanooga. He went on to found his own nonprofit, CreateHere, focused on arts, economic, and cultural development initiatives in Chattanooga. In 2015 he relocated to Detroit to serve as chief operating officer of Rock Ventures, the family office of Rocket Mortgage founder Dan Gilbert, who had been investing heavily in redeveloping the struggling city’s downtown, restoring abandoned buildings and leading a surge in downtown’s residential population. Working as Gilbert’s right hand on these interventions, McManus saw the transformative potential of applying a corporation’s deep pockets to projects with both a bottom line and a broader community impact. I had the aha tht [capitalism] wasn’t to be avoided, it was to be harnessed, McManus says, and that there was a way to find the intersection of moral imperative and market imperative. After leaving Rock Ventures in 2017, McManus dabbled in other place-focused philanthropy and even founded a fintech startup before establishing M|B|P in 2020. Since then, he’s been working with major corporations like Ford, large foundations, and smaller nonprofits to use their philanthropic and mission-driven investments to create more impactful benefits in communities. This approach is a redesigning of corporate social responsibility, engaging more deeply in communities and working to provide the kinds of resources they actually need. When so much corporate giving takes the form of sprinkling money out into small-scale nonprofits, McManus sees a more targeted and personal strategy that he believes can give both the corporations and the communities more desirable outcomes. I believe that the spray-and-pray model of corporate philanthropy that’s existed before can be improved upon, he says. The community center connected to BlueOval City is one example of this change. Ford Philanthropy’s Culler says the project shows that there’s a shift underway, and that a growing number of companies are seeing the wisdom in using their dollars more strategically than performatively. She says McManus helped the BlueOval City project to make as comprehensive an impact as it could. [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] Instead of bringing in a caterer from Memphis for events, they hired a local cook, and helped turn her into a caterer. Instead of renting tables and chairs from an existing rental company outside of town, they helped locals form their own furniture rental business. Corporate philanthropy has learned that it’s less about dictating programs that they think are important and more about listening to the community and building capacity for organizations to really deploy and do what they probably know best to do right there on the front line, Culler says. McManus says M|B|Pan homage to architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham’s famous 1909 advice to make big plansis actively working on projects with other Fortune 500 companies, as well as some foundations and family offices like Gilbert’s Rock Ventures. Even at a moment when political friction and economic uncertainty have clouded many companies’ short- and long-term vision, McManus is seeing growing interest in his approach to corporate giving and investment. If you don’t like the big plan that’s in place, he says, posit your alternate scenario and then build audience for that as fast as you can. That’s the gumption behind the community center in Stanton, and why McManus sees it as a model for corporate giving that actually makes an impact on a community. I mean, it’s a tiny, tiny intervention, he says. But it’s built on a much bigger idea.
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E-Commerce
The likelihood that everyone in your office has the same shoe size is probably really low. Between differences in height, gender, and age, shoe sizes can vary widely. So when all of your officemates are using the same standard desks and chairs, it would track that a lot of people find that their work environment doesnt quite fit right either. Compounding this problem is the fact that the average American spends approximately eight to nine hours a day sitting at work. No wonder 42% to 69% of office workers are estimated to have neck pain and 31% to 51% to have lower back pain. Some of the main risk factors that are leading to those injuries are awkward and non-neutral postures, says Lora Cavuoto, director of University at Buffalos Ergonomics and Biomechanics Lab. Luckily, learning some of the basics from the field of ergonomics can help you adjust your working environment and lower your risk of developing long-term injuries from sitting improperly at work. Here are some ways Cavuoto recommends adjusting your work environment: 1. Maintain a neutral position To begin assessing how ergonomically your office set up is, its important to begin by finding your bodys neutral position. When your body is in neutral posture, your joints are aligned and there is minimal stress on your muscles, tendons, bones, and nerves. When sitting at a desk, this means positioning yourself so that your feet are resting on the floor, you are sitting up straight with your head aligned with your shoulders and hips, your shoulders and neck are relaxed, and your elbows and knees are at 90 degrees. If your chair and desk do not comfortably allow you to maintain this position, you should consider making some adjustments. Lets say your table is too high, for example, says Cavuoto. Then, in order to rest your arms on the table, you’re winging your arms out so you’re needing to hold up the weight of your arms. All the muscles in your neck and your shoulders really need to engage to do that. Or if your chair is too high and your legs are hanging . . . then you might be putting pressure on the back of the knee, and that can lead to some stopping of blood flow down to the feet, causing your feet to fall asleep. The solutions for these can be as simple as adjusting your chair height or adding a foot rest under your desk. Adding a box under your desk so that you raise your feet to get your knees into a good position and rest your feet on the ground, or adding a riser to your monitor so that it’s in a good position for you to look comfortably are low-budget ways that can make a big difference, says Cavuoto. Its also important to consider how these adjustments may need to differ from day to day depending on what you are wearing and what tasks you are completing. One thing we often forget is if you wear different shoes, you may need to adjust the height of your chair, or add or remove a foot rest, Cavuoto says. Even if you’re switching from using a keyboard to writing something on a piece of paper, you might need to adjust the chair a little bit so that your arms are in a better position, because . . . the keyboard has maybe an inch or 2 of elevation. 2. Move your body regularly Even if you did maintain perfect neutral sitting posture throughout the workday, you might still encounter problems like blood pooling in parts of your body if you arent moving enough to circulate it. Additionally, sitting for long uninterrupted periods of time can lead to your blood sugar levels rising, causing the body to release insulin. Over time, as the body gets used to this, this could lead to inflammation and plaque buildup in your arteries. Cavuoto recommends getting up and taking regular movement breaks throughout the day to avoid these adverse effects. She also recommends paying special attention to areas of the body that tend to be under a lot of stress over the workday. Doing regular wrist extensor and wrist flexor exercises are important to stretch those tendons and ligaments in the wrists to reduce pain for people who spend a lot of time typing, she says. Similarly, she recommends taking a few moments throughout the day to stretch your neck. 3. Use a chair with proper back support Using chairs without good back support for long periods of time can put a lot of stress on your back and leg muscles to hold up your body. If you dont have fully fit core musculature, [and] you’re engaging those muscles all the time . . . those muscles can be tired, causing you to slouch and put pressure on your spine and other muscles, Cavuoto says. If youre able to choose your work chair, she recommends looking for one that can recline and has a headrest which allows you more flexibility to relieve pressure and adjust your body throughout the day. That allows you to rest your neck, your head, and your shoulders . . . so you can offload that head weight right off your neck, she says. 4. Consider your lighting environment Its important to note the impact that lighting has on our eyes throughout the day. Eye strain can cause a number of unpleasant effects, from migraines to neck and shoulder pain. While an office setting likely provides more even lighting conditions, Cavuoto says that a lot of people dont think about light sources as much when working from home. She recommends setting up your work environment with lighting that you can control over the day and to avoid settings that cause strong glare off your screen. 5. Use a monitor or a laptop screen, not both I don’t really use my laptop screen at all, actually, says Cavuoto. While using an external monitor is helpful because it enlarges the screen, another challenge when youre using a laptop and an external monitor on a desk is that the laptop is down on the surface and the monitor is a little bit raised. Ideally, to maintain a neutral posture, your screen should be at eye level. But when switching between a laptop and monitor, you may experience some neck pain and eye strain from switching focus between two screens at different heights and scales. If you dont have access to a monitor, try raising your laptop on a stand or stacking books underneath it to get it to eye level.
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E-Commerce
The business of college sports was upended after a federal judge approved a settlement between the NCAA and former college athletes on June 6, 2025. After a lengthy litigation process, the NCAA has agreed to provide $2.8 billion in back pay to former and current college athletes, while allowing schools to directly pay athletes for the first time. Joshua Lens, whose scholarship centers on the intersection of sports, business, and the law, tells the story of this settlement and explains its significance within the rapidly changing world of college sports. What will change for players and schools with this settlement? The terms of the settlement included the following changes: The NCAA and conferences will distribute approximately $2.8 billion in media rights revenue back pay to thousands of athletes who competed since 2016. Universities will have the ability to enter name, image, and likeness, or NIL, agreements with student-athletes. So schools can now, for example, pay them to appear in ads for the school or for public appearances. Each university that opts in to the settlement can disburse up to $20.5 million to student-athletes in the 2025-26 academic year, a number that will likely rise in future academic years. Athletes NIL agreements with certain individuals and entities will be subject to an evaluation that will determine whether the NIL compensation exceeds an acceptable range based on a perceived fair market value, which could result in the athlete having to restructure or forgo the deal. The NCAAs maximum sport program scholarship limits will be replaced with maximum team roster size limits for universities that choose to be part of the settlement. Why did the NCAA agree to settle with, rather than fight, the plaintiffs? In 2020, roughly 14,000 current and former college athletes filed a class-action lawsuit, House v. NCAA, seeking damages for past restrictions on their ability to earn money. For decades, college athletics primary governing body, the NCAA, permitted universities whose athletics programs compete in Division I to provide their athletes with scholarships that would help cover their educational expenses, such as tuition, room and board, fees, and books. By focusing only on educational expenses, the NCAA was able to reinforce the notion that collegiate athletes are amateurs who may not receive pay for participating in athletics, despite making money for their schools. A year later, in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in a separate case, Alston v. NCAA, that the NCAA violated antitrust laws by limiting the amount of education-related benefits, such as laptops, books, and musical instruments, that universities could provide to their athletes. The ruling challenged the NCAAs amateurism model while opening the door for future lawsuits tied to athlete compensation. It also burnished the plaintiffs case in House v. NCAA, compelling college athletics governing body to take part in settlement talks. What were some of the key changes that took place in college sports after the Supreme Courts decision in Alston v. NCAA? Following Alston, the NCAA permitted universities to dole out several thousand dollars in whats called education benefits pay to student-athletes. This could include cash bonuses for maintaining a certain GPA or simply satisfying NCAA academic eligibility requirements. But contrary to popular belief, the Supreme Courts Alston decision didnt let college athletes be paid via NIL deals. The NCAA continued to maintain that this would violate its principles of amateurism. However, many states, beginning with California, introduced or passed laws that required universities within their borders to allow their athletes to accept NIL compensation. With more than a dozen states looking to pass similar laws, the NCAA folded on June 30, 2021, changing its policy so athletes could accept NIL compensation for the first time. Will colleges and universities be able to weather all of these financial commitments? The settlement will result in a windfall for certain current and former collegiate athletes, with some expected to receive several hundred thousands of dollars. Universities and their athletics departments, on the other hand, will have to reallocate resources or cut spending. Some will cut back on travel expenses for some sports, others have paused facility renovations, while other athletic departments may resort to cutting sports whose revenue does not exceed their expenses. As Texas A&M University athletic director Trev Alberts has explained, however, college sports does not have a revenue problemit has a spending problem. Even in the well-resourced Southeastern Conference, for example, many universities athletics expenses exceed their revenue. Do you see any future conflicts on the horizon? Many observers hope the settlement brings stability to the industry. But theres always a chance that the settlement will be appealed. More potential challenges could involve Title IX, the federal gender equity statute that prohibits discrimination based on sex in schools. What if, for example, a university subject to the statute distributes the vast majority of revenue to male athletes? Such a scenario could violate Title IX. NCAA President Charlie Baker, who has served in his role since 2023, has overseen major changes in conference governance and athlete compensation. [Photo: David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images] On the other hand, a university that more equitably distributes revenue among male and female athletes could face legal backlash from football athletes who argue that they should be entitled to more revenue, since their games earn the big bucks. And as I pointed out in a recent law review article, an athlete or university may challenge the new enforcement process that will attempt to limit athletes NIL compensation within an acceptable range that is based on a fair market valuation. The NCAA and the conferences named in the lawsuit have hired the accountancy firm Deloitte to determine whether athletes compensation from NIL deals fall within an acceptable range based on a fair market valuation, looking to other collegiate and professional athletes to set a benchmark range. If athletes and universities have struck deals that are too generous, both could be penalized, according to the terms of the settlement. Finally, the settlement does not addresslet alone solveissues facing international student-athletes who want to earn money via NIL. Most international student-athletes visas, and the laws regulating them, heavily limit their ability to accept compensation for work, including NIL pay. Some lawmakers have tried to address this issue in the past, but it hasnt been a priority for the NCAA, as it has lobbied Congress for a federal NIL law. Joshua Lens is an associate professor of instruction of sport and recreation management at the University of Iowa. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
The first four months of the Trump administration have seen the largest destruction of our federal governments capacity in history, with the reckless and illegal dismantling of agencies, the arbitrary slashing of the workforce, and the elimination of countless programs and critical public services. President Trump has literally set the house on fire, requiring a public response to this five-alarm emergency that shouldnt involve only the political process and the courts. The fight must involve foundations, philanthropists, nonprofits, and state and city governments, which either fund or become the home for the abandoned federal initiatives, services, and civil servants. Theres no way, of course, to replace the depth and breadth of the federal governments brazenly and often illegally discarded work, but even saving some of the contents of the burning house will have value. A number of efforts are already taking place to preserve the knowledge, expertise, and critical services and programs, but so much more needs to be done. Several organizations, for example, have retrieved thousands of data files that the Trump administration purged from agency websites containing public health information, scientific research, environmental risk alerts, crime statistics, and mental health information. Harvard University recently announced that its librarys Innovation Lab is making available 311,000 datasets retrieved from 2024 and 2025, representing a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov, while the National Security Archives Climate Change Transparency Project has published information on climate change and environmental justice that had been removed from agency websites. Even without any new data in the coming years, these efforts will preserve institutional knowledge for scientists, policymakers, and researchers, and provide a starting point for collecting important data again in the future. Bloomberg Philanthropies and others have pledged to help cover the U.S. contribution to the U.N.’s climate change budget, filling a gap left by the Trump administration, while the Rhode Island Foundation announced it will award $3 million to local nonprofits that lost federal funding for a range of local services in areas such as healthcare, housing, education, and public safety. Several colleges and universities, including Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern, are providing funding to temporarily support graduate students and faculty who have had research grants cut off by the Trump administration, while the MacArthur Foundation has committed an additional $150 million in funding in 2025 and 2026 for organizations that have lost federal aid and are involved in maternal health, climate, justice, and human rights. Several former employees of the depleted Consumer Financial Protection Board have been discussing ways that state attorneys general, through umbrella organizations, might gather lawyers, advocates, and researchers for the shared purpose of helping victims of financial fraud. In addition, a number of federal labor unions, legal entities, and nonprofits (including my own organization) recently launched a legal defense fund to help federal employees who were fired or are facing termination, and a number of state governments have been actively recruiting federal employees who were laid off by the Trump administration. The opportunities for outside parties to act are far more plentiful than these few examples. My organization recently published a list100 Harms in 100 Daysof the damaging and senseless cuts dealing with veterans, education, public health, scientific and medical research, the environment, public lands, and agriculture. Even that breathtaking list just scratches the surface, but it does offer a starting place for those wondering what they can do to help. So ask yourself how you can help, perhaps through specialized expertise, financial resources, passion for a cause, a willingness to donate your time, or any number of other ways. We can all play a role. The harsh reality is that we are watching the arson of our government. As I see it, those of us with the capacity to helpas individuals or organizations or bothhave two options: We can stand by and watch in horror as the Trump administration burns down our collective home, or we can try to save as much as we can from the indiscriminate destruction. To be clear, this isn’t a permanent solution. No other entity can replace the scale and resources of the federal government. And the administration should not be superseding Congresss constitutional role and shuttering agencies, freezing appropriated dollars, and destroying the nonpartisan, expert civil service. This is about making sure we will be more ready to rebuild better when the time comes.
Category:
E-Commerce
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