Driverless Cars Hit the Freeways! - DTNS 5144

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for November 12th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, driverless cars hit the highways. Watch out, there's no one driving. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Alphabet's Waymo has become the first autonomous taxi service in the world to offer routes that take you on the freeway without anybody else in the car. Just you and the computer. and by freeway i mean controlled access motorway expressway whatever you call it it's the one where you go fast and there aren't stoplights waymo rides in los angeles phoenix and san francisco may now include freeways in their routes which waymo expects might reduce times by up to 50 at least in some cases the feature will roll out slowly and only to waymo riders who note the preference in the app so by default you're not going to go on the freeway you have to go in and say, I'm okay going on the freeway.

1:06And even then you might not get one every time they're going to roll it out slowly. However, you could get one anytime a day. It will be available 24 hours a day. It also isn't available on all the freeways in these cities. In fact, these cities don't even have the service available in the entire metro area. For instance, Sarah gets it, but I don't, just based on where we live in LA. But they are going to expand it over time. And one of the cool things is it will now let them add more airport service. So you can do curbside airport service at San Jose Airport. They were already doing Phoenix Sky Harbor.

1:40They also are working on adding it to SFO, San Francisco's airport, where they have a permit for tests right now. They just want to add the ability to pick up actual people. Now, some aspects of highway driving are simpler for autonomous systems. You may think, well, yeah, that's why my driver assist stuff only works on the freeway for following and lane guidance and all of that. It is simpler to do that stuff. It's the edge cases that are the problem. And that's why it's taken so long for these companies to add highway driving. Waymo says critical events happen less frequently on freeways. That means there are fewer opportunities to train and test these systems.

2:20So Waymo augmented its public road testing with closed course and simulations to get it up to a reliable level. Now, Waymo is the first, but they won't be the last. We ride in Abu Dhabi, Pony AI in China, and Tesla in the U.S. are all testing autonomous freeway service as well. But they all have humans inside at the moment. Waymo is the first one to pull the human. Yeah. So we talk about this all the time on DTNS Live, because in my area of LA, I've said to people, I mean, Waymo, like it's every fifth car. They're everywhere. People, kids are taking them to school. I mean, it is definitely something that has been adopted as a service.

3:03Now, of course, there are Uber drivers as well, you know, and Lyft drivers and a variety of other companies working on this stuff. But Waymo is very pervasive. I have noticed, so when I take the 10 freeway, for anybody who's not familiar with LA, if I'm going straight to the beach, I take the 10. It's due west from where I live. So, you know, east to west. And you take it downtown, a major freeway. And the first time I saw Waymo on the freeway, which was not that recently, maybe about a year ago, I was like, holy crap. And I'm kind of looking like, is somebody driving? Is someone in the back? I couldn't tell.

3:41They seemed to be empty. And I think that that was just test stuff because they weren't allowed to carry a passenger on the freeway. And, you know, for anybody who hasn't enjoyed the thrill of driving on LA freeways, it can be a little nutty sometimes. Not even just because there are a lot of people on the road, but people drive crazy. You know, you got motorcyclists. It's, you know, you got to be, you have to have your wits about you. So even I, as a Waymo enthusiast, I'm sort of like, do I do that? Boy, it would get me to the beach a lot quicker, you know, instead of going surfer streets the whole time.

4:17but does this feel safe? And then I think, well, does it feel safe for anyone to drive me on the freeway? Exactly. You know, so that's where the conversation doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel any less safe. In fact, it feels more safe, really. How many fatalities are there announced with autonomous driving versus how many fatalities are announced with human driving? And granted, the human driving sampling is way bigger right now. But even if you adjust for that, Uh, you, you, you rarely, in fact, if there's a fatality involved with an autonomous driving, uh, unit, it is huge news. You are going to know about it.

4:58Somebody dies in a car accident. You probably don't hear about it because it's just like, Oh, what a shame. Yeah, exactly. Um, I was actually on stuff and feel like that probably is safer right now. I was on, I wasn't on the freeway yesterday, but I was on a surface street. I was going around, I don't know, it was a garbage truck or something. And I saw a Waymo coming toward me. And I'm kind of in the Waymo's lane. But I had time to get around on my side. Oh, because you were passing. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, exactly. And I was sort of like, what if I just didn't stop? What does the Waymo do? What would the Waymo do?

5:34No, I'm not going to go ahead and be a test case for this. But I think the Waymo would just be like, I don't know, something weird is going on. I'm just sitting here. It would slow down, stop, try to get out of the way. But yeah. Yeah. And going back to human drivers, and I have no issue with, I've really, I mean, with very few exceptions. I've never had an issue with somebody who's driving for a living, taking me from point A to point B. But sometimes you think like, well, they're acting a little weird. I wonder if they're tired. Yeah, right. Exactly. You know, or just. Waymo doesn't get tired.

6:13Yeah, it doesn't. And if there's an issue, you've got people back at, you know, ground zero, you know, trying to figure out what's going on. So I actually feel safer in something like a Waymo. And that is the only autonomous car that I've ever used, because that's what I've got in LA. And I know that there are, you know, other companies trying to, you know, fix this problem. Some people are like, no, I don't like it. It freaks me out. I don't want that. And that is fine. you know but i think that's where we're going i think so too i mean i was coming back from lax last week i guess uh and saw waymo on the highway by the way notable the lax is not even mentioned in any of these stories as something waymo wants to attack yet uh and that's understandable given just how complex and they're changing things and building things anyway i was coming back from lax on the 405 which is another big freeway in los angeles and i saw a waymo and for a moment my involuntary reaction was like, what's it going to do?

7:12I haven't ever seen it on the freeway. Do I, you know, do I have to be careful? And then I realized like, yeah, I used to kind of think that when I'd see them on the surface streets and now I know it's not going to do anything. It's just going to drive normally. In fact, it's the least likely to do anything weird when you're driving because it's following rules and obeying the speed limit and all of that. Well, and you know, there are multiple cameras all around the car designed to, designed to figure out, what if someone else does something erratic? Yeah, exactly. And then I don't get into a car crash with them.

7:45Yeah. Well, I think this is the kind of milestone in the development of autonomous cars, because we've been covering them all 12 years of DTNS, that I've been looking for. When can you just, without thinking, get an autonomous car to take you from your house to the airport? You know, what doesn't matter what roads doesn't matter what weather. Granted, these are all warm weather. Well, San Francisco is warmish weather, warm compared to most places. These are all warm weather locations. But, you know, we are getting there. We are getting to where, sadly, I'm going up to San Jose this weekend to visit my family.

8:22And I will not be able to take a Waymo from the San Jose airport because they don't go to where my family lives. The way you prefaced that, I was like, why are you sad to go visit your family? But yes, sadly, I won't be able to take the Waymo. I'm very happy to visit the family, just to be clear. Well, if you have thoughts on this, we know you do. Thank you so much for all the feedback that you give to us. In that vein, let's just thank a few folks, because DTNS is made possible by you listening right now. Thanks to Howard Yermisch, John Atwood, Pat, and guess what? We've got some new patrons.

8:59We've got Didi, we've got Daniel, and we've got David. Welcome, Didi, Daniel, and David. Yeah, it's 3Ds. We're four, really. There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Even Realities released its new smart glasses model called the G2 Display. It pairs with the Even R1 smart ring. So let's talk about the glasses first. The display is still projected by micro LEDs and waveguides on the lens in green text. but there's added depth and sharpness. This lets them show notifications at a different depth than something else that you might be reading. So, you know, there's some eye context here.

9:39This comes with a new feature that they call Conversate, which can provide contextual information for you while you're talking to someone else. The G2 also supports a wider range of prescription lenses. It's also 54 % slimmer at the temples and is now IP67 rated for dust and water resistance. It promises two days of battery life, and the case can charge it seven times on a single case chart. So you got the case all charged up. You can go for a while with this. You can control it by voice or touchpad on the frame. But the R1 Smart Ring also has a touchpad and adds a heart rate sensor and accelerometer for step tracking.

10:19If you were interested, you can order both today. The G2 Smart Glasses are$599, and the R1 Smart Ring is$249. Yeah, this is an interesting way of going about it. These are comparable to the Meta Ray-Bans in a lot of ways, but they do have the AI assistant in it, just a different AI assistant. And the Smart Ring, certainly less capable than the hand controller that the Meta display ones come with. But kind of a cool way of doing it because you may say, well, it's just a touchpad there. It's not just your control, but you don't have to raise your hand every time you want to do a control. You don't have to raise it up to your face and touch your glasses.

11:00You can just keep it in your lap. Samsung Galaxy XR does a similar thing where you can do pinches without having to reach out and touch something, which is convenient when you're using this stuff for a long time. And then making that smart ring optional to kind of bring the price down, I think, was smart, too. You know, the smart ring, I don't know, the options that we have for smart rings now is very interesting to me. The Aura smart ring was the first one that I ever saw anyone wear. And I was kind of like, yeah, I don't know, too bulky. I'm not wearing that. But I wear an Apple Watch all day and all night.

11:37and the more smart ring stuff that we seem to be getting with various companies, the more I'm like, you know, this seems to be a form factor that's really working for people. Yeah. And I think even realities kind of saw that and said like, well, you know, for somebody who's not sure if they want a smart ring, but does want smart glasses, let's give them the option to have both and spend that money with us instead. Definitely, definitely continuing to shape up for 2026 to be the year of the smart glasses, though. We're getting these third-party brands, these independent brands with really compelling offers like this.

12:16Google says its new private AI compute lets you get the power of cloud computing for Gemini without sacrificing privacy. This is what Apple promises with Apple Intelligence, a private compute cloud where even it can't see your data. That's what Google is describing here. It runs on one stack. It uses Google's Tensor Processing Units, and those TPUs have an AMD-based trusted execution environment, a little secure enclave. So the way they've created this, your device has an encrypted link directly to that secure enclave in the cloud. That way, Google cannot even see what you're asking. It just runs in that enclave, sends it back to you.

12:56You're the only one who knows. Google also got an independent auditor, the NCC Group, to look at this and says it met NCC Group's privacy guidelines. Google will continue to offer local processing. They're not trying to get rid of that because Gemini models sometimes can take advantage of the lower latency and can work offline locally. But they want to do this hybrid approach so you get the best of both worlds because there's a lot more power when you can send it to the cloud. In related news, Google also dropped new features for its Pixel line of devices. The Pixel 9 and newer get notification summaries, so if you have longer chats and conversations.

13:30The aforementioned low power mode for maps, talked about that on previous shows, that arrives for Pixel 10 and later. It shows you just your root in the next turn, keeps the power draw low. And the Nano Banana model powers a feature called Remix that lets you change a photo in messages, as well as a help me edit button in Google Photos that lets you make natural language requests and edit your photos there. Now, I have never I've never played around with a pixel device, although they seem nicer and nicer to me these days. Why would you change a photo and messages? Oh, it's just like I sent you the wrong photo.

14:09No, it's more of like, you send me a picture of your dog. And then I'm like, make Rex wear a funny birthday hat, because it's birthday. And I send it back to you. That's I feel like it's that kind of stuff. Yeah. So these are, you know, these are little improvements, but, you know, still people are going to be excited about them. Going back to the privacy part of this. I mean, if Google can do this successfully, and Apple is obviously on the same on the same path, then this is, this is huge for consumer trust. Yeah. If you can trust it and having it independently audited goes a long way to helping me trust it, then yeah, you can start to say, all right, I want to tell my model something and the model knows it, but nobody else needs to know it.

14:58Right. And that's going to let you use it for a wider variety of things. And not like malicious things or even embarrassing things, but just stuff where you're like, I don't know. I don't need anybody else knowing that. Yeah. I mean, there are conversations where I'm like, I'm just not going to broadcast this to the world. I'm not saying anything weird. It's just, yeah. Right, right, right, right. I got to say, and maybe Google can do this better than Apple, I hate notification summaries. I have turned off all of that, you know, in iOS and Mac OS. Like, I just, I wanted to like it. And every time I was like, no, you just, you're scaring me with your notifications.

15:39You're making me think that the conversation's about something that it isn't. And it usually just makes me want to go like, wait, what? Is that really what's being said in there? Versus like, oh, that was helpful. So, yeah. Yeah. A couple notable hardware announcements today. Sony is launching a Japan-only version of the disc-free PS5 starting November 21st for 55 ,000 yen, which is about 350 US dollars. About 25 % cheaper than it sells anywhere else. It can only be used with the Japanese PlayStation account on Sony's Japanese game store. And it's the first region-locked PlayStation in 20 years.

16:17Samsung also announced a 27-inch rollable monitor on a display that has a three-hour battery life. It's called the Samsung Moving Style, and that sells for$1 ,199.99. Now, I don't live in Japan, so that's part of the reason I'm less excited about this, although it did make me start to go, oh, I wonder how you break that region lock. However, I really tried to find a reason to buy this 27-inch rollable monitor. I do not have one. No, like that's just so cool. You know, I like it, but then I'm like three hour battery life. Yeah. That's for a conference room where you're like, uh, Oh, let's roll it out here.

16:53You know, and then you, you roll it back and plug it in after your one hour meeting. Three hours is enough for something. Totally get that. And yeah, not every conference room has the nice monitor set up. So, you know, if you're, if you're a traveling salesman, um, and you can deal with something that's, I think it's 12 pounds, you know, without, without the stand. I mean, that's heavy, but it's doable depending on what your line of work is. I think it has HDMI out and then two USB-C outs. So yeah, it's a very specific use case. When I saw three hours, I was like, oh, so this is not something for your home.

17:32This is not for like, I'm going to move outside and work all day. No. Well, I mean, I guess it depends on where you live. But yeah, this feels like very, I take lots of meetings, I have to do presentations, and I can just take the whole thing with me. Independent streaming app Coda is trying to attract users by making it easier to sort generated music from human-made music. Coda launched tools that can find and label songs not made by humans. So they're running these tools, trying to identify and then label those artists. Coda will also review new artists and label them as AI if they have generated music.

18:10You can report an artist you suspect to be generated that's not labeled as well. And there's no punishment. They just put a label on it that says AI artist so that you know and added a setting for you to turn off all the AI artists. That way you just won't get any recommendations or music from them in your feed, should you wish. i know that there and stephanie humphrey and i talked about this on dtns which is going to be part of our weekend edition uh this weekend it was a great conversation but the idea that you know ai confuses people and uh because not everyone understands the tools that are at the ready and then on social media in particular sometimes things will spread like wildfire where like Half the people are like, it has a Sora watermark.

18:58What are you talking about? And everyone else is like, look, the president's dead. Whatever it is. And when it comes to music, that feels, certainly if you're in the music industry, you have more thoughts about this than I probably do. Because it would affect your bottom line more than mine. But this does feel like a really well-rounded way to go about this. Yeah, I like this a lot because it puts the control on me. It says, let me provide you information. And I know a lot of people are like, I don't want all that AI slop. Well, here you go. You can turn it off if you want. But it's not punishing artists who are experimenting with it, who might legitimately be saying like, no, this is a great tool.

19:40I want to use it. And saying, you can't be on our platform. It's like, you know, you can be on our platform. Just know some people don't want to hear music that's generated. So they may turn you off. And that's totally fair. Koda also does a lot of artist-friendly things. It lets you take a dollar of your subscription and give it to a particular artist per month, which doesn't sound like a lot, but over a lot of different people, that could build up. And it's certainly a bigger chunk of change than artists usually get from streaming royalties. Indeed. Indeed. Well, direct support. I mean, we're no strangers to that.

20:10It does add up. Absolutely, right? Yeah, it really does. Apple launched support for the U.S. Passport on iPhone and Apple Watch, which can be used at more than 50 airports in the U.S. The feature is called Digital ID and can be used in a dozen states and also Puerto Rico. With more on the way, it doesn't replace a passport for international travel. You still got to have a passport for that. But when you present it, you use either Face or Touch ID to verify that it's indeed you holding the phone. Then the phone transmits info using NFC. It'll also show you what information is being shared. Apple says businesses will soon be able to use it to verify ages as well.

20:49Yeah. And if you're wondering why only a dozen states, that's where the TSA gates have been updated to support it. So they're going to try to roll it out. Like all 50 states, if you have a US passport, you can add this to your Apple phone. It just might not be useful at your local airport until they update their equipment. But it's one of those like eventually they want to roll it out everywhere. And I love this idea of being able to get it used at businesses to verify age, because when you hand over your ID at a store to buy a beer, they see all your information. They don't need to know your address, but there's no other option.

21:21You hand them the ID to get the birth date. With this, you can say, yeah, in fact, I don't even think you need to know my birth date. Just am I over 21 or younger than 21? And that's the kind of thing that this consent. I never really thought about that. I mean, I don't get ID'd much these days, but the idea of handing over an ID that is legitimate. They don't care what your name is. They don't care what your address is. They're just looking for that birth date. But in the off case where somebody is like, well, no, I know where she lives. That doesn't feel good. So we don't have to add that stuff.

22:00With digital, they could be collecting that digitally and creating a database, right? And you may not want that either. And this way it wouldn't be. You're just like giving them the only the information they need for stuff. All right. We had no show yesterday because of the US holiday. So we've got a lot of headlines to catch you up on. These are the kinds of things that are good to know if you want to understand the news both now and in the future. The UK will introduce the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, which increases enforcement of security standards and mandates, auditing and regulation for companies that provide networking services to government initiatives like the National Health Service.

22:38Yeah, just make things mandated to be more secure. The UK also announced an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, which would allow child safety charities to assess new generative model safeguards against the creation of child pornography to be able to certify whether they are protecting people enough or not. The Wikimedia Foundation has created a voluntary program, emphasis on voluntary, that asks for companies to pay to use its enterprise API to gather training data. So Wikimedia to be like, just do the right thing. We're not going to enforce this. Yeah, we're going to remind you every single day.

23:14Exactly. We're not going to make you do it. IBM announced two new quantum computers, Nighthawk and Loon, that use a modular way to connect qubits. Allows for a lot of different kinds of connections and gets those quantum computers closer to error-free quantum computing. I wonder if somebody who used to work at Google was like, we have to call it Loon. Oh, yeah. I miss that. No floating network project. Speaking of Google, it filed a lawsuit in the US against a Chinese group called Lighthouse, which sells an online phishing service. If it can get the group's actions declared illegal, it can then pursue taking down the group's domain names and servers.

23:55Yeah. Even though that group's in China and they're not going to get them and throw them in jail, Well, they could take away some of their domains and servers, which would be good. Anthropic announced its own plans to build data centers in Texas and New York. They'll build these in partnership with cloud platform provider FluidStack. An extension of Gemini and Google Drive's PDF viewer can now make an audio overview right from the PDF without having to take it to Notebook LM. I hear some cheering. Very helpful. The first extended security update for Windows 10 came out yesterday on Patch Tuesday for the folks who have signed up for the ESU.

24:33If you're one of the people saying, like, I tried, but I couldn't, I was prevented from signing up. Microsoft also released an out-of-band update to fix a bug that prevented enrollments in the extended security updates for Windows 10. Apple announced a short and long version of a knitted crossbody iPhone strap that costs either$150 or$230, depending on how long it is. It's a limited edition collaboration with Japanese designer Isi Miyake coming November 14th. Yeah, if you want to see my legitimate reaction to that price, check out our office hours mailbag from Tuesday where I read the story cold and then saw the price was like, my God, but it's a designer thing.

25:18I get it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, people buy expensive belts. I kind of think of it as that category of stuff. Singles Day is the world's largest shopping day, speaking of shopping, with most of the shopping concentrated in Asia and especially China. So we always look at the Chinese companies to see how Singles Day did. Numbers are trickling out. A lot of anecdotal reports that it wasn't as big of a day as usual, but JD.com reported a 60 % rise in sales. Meta's chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, announced he will leave in the coming months to create a startup to develop world models, which learn from visual and spatial data rather than text.

25:58Yeah, add that to your buzzword list. World models. Spatial data. Yeah, world models are going to be big. Google just brought back Cameo. It's spelled C-A-M-E-Y-O, Cameo. Brought it back to Chrome OS. It allows enterprise users or enterprise administrators, I should say, to stream legacy Windows apps to Chrome OS. Good Windows 10 substitution. And the first permanent Pokemon-themed theme park will open on February 5th, 2026 in Tokyo's Yomuri Land. Yomuri Land! Yay! Yay! Okay, now my niece is going to want to go back to Tokyo again. Well, now I do, too. I know, me too. Hey, folks, we just updated the DTNS store with lots of cool new stuff.

26:48We've got a DTNS pint glass with the Len Peralta logo on there. What a wonderful gift. RW Nash is planning to test it this weekend and let us know how it does. My new e-book, Synced, Know a Little More About Tech, is available in there as a PDF in an EPUB. And we've got brand new holiday art from Len Peralta that you won't find anywhere else that you can get on a holiday card, on a postcard, on a hoodie, on a mug. It's all available at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store.

27:23We like to end every episode here on DTNS with some sharing. Today, Norm wants to share some good feelings about our weekend episode. Yeah, sometimes when you drop someone else's podcast onto your feed, you don't know how people will react. Well, Norm wrote, thanks for including the Kilowatt podcast in my weekend feed. It reminded me of how NPR uses their podcast network to introduce listeners to other great content. I'm not in the market for a new vehicle at the moment, but I really enjoy learning more about the topic. It was a nice surprise, and I'm glad the team didn't have to create extra weekend content to make it happen.

27:56Appreciate the thoughtful curation, as always. Oh, thanks, Norm. Yeah. And Bodhi was very appreciative that Norm was very appreciative. So it's a whole virtuous circle of appreciativeness. Yay. Kill what? Good stuff. What are you thinking about? Does something strike a chord that we talk about week after week? You have some insight into a story you think we should really know about. Share your thoughts with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Norm for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You keep us in business, folks. If you're not a patron already, please look at the coming one.

28:34Patreon.com slash DTNS. We'll talk to you soon.

28:43The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.