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Amazon's robotaxi effort will begin testing in Los Angeles

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Amazon's robotaxi effort will begin testing in Los Angeles

Zoox, the autonomous driving technology company owned by Amazon, is preparing to begin testing its vehicles in Los Angeles this summer.

The city will be the sixth testing location for the Bay Area-based venture, which does not yet offer rides to the public.

Founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020, Zoox is one of several efforts to bring self-driving technology into the mainstream.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been touting the potential of autonomous driving for years, and Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is already operating driverless taxis in multiple cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix.

Zoox’s testing in Los Angeles will lay the groundwork for future commercial service, a company spokesperson said. The company plans to welcome its first public riders in Las Vegas and San Francisco by the end of the year.

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“We’re going to keep moving towards self-driving tech and it’s not always going to be this obscure enigma that’s only available in a few places,” said Karl Brauer, an analyst at iSeeCars.com. “Amazon wants to start to have the technology in place to take advantage as the capabilities roll out.”

What will Zoox testing look like in Los Angeles?

Zoox will deploy a small number of retrofitted Toyota Highlander test vehicles in Los Angeles, all with human safety drivers, the company said. The SUVs will operate in a limited area within the city, though the company has not disclosed specific routes or geographical boundaries.

As is standard when driving in a new city, the test fleet will complete manual mapping missions to identify challenging routes and road features specific to Los Angeles. Commercial service in the city is still far off and will require regulatory approval.

“Even when the technology is theoretically ready, the regulations and the approval processes are still going to be restricting,” Brauer said.

Zoox will not offer the public rides in its test vehicles or operate them without a human driver, the company’s website says. The company plans to eventually offer an on-demand ride-hailing service using purpose-built autonomous vehicles with no steering wheel and bidirectional capability.

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How do Zoox vehicles work?

Zoox’s test vehicles are retrofitted SUVs, but the company is also developing a pill-shaped driverless vehicle that’s meant to be “closer to a living room on wheels than a traditional automobile interior,” the Zoox website says.

The robotaxis will be equipped with sensors and a type of laser-based radar called lidar that enables them to navigate dense urban areas, according to the company. Unlike Waymo vehicles, the taxis will have no driver’s seat or gas pedal.

The vehicles will be equipped with sliding doors and large windows, the spokesperson said, and the seats for passengers will face each other.

Are the vehicles safe?

For the record:

2:28 p.m. April 15, 2025An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Zoox’s pill-shaped robotaxis have not been tested on public roads. The robotaxis have been testing on public roads since 2023 in San Francisco, Foster City and Las Vegas.

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Zoox vehicles are built to prevent collisions and protect passengers in the event of an unavoidable accident, the company’s website says. The vehicles feature more than 100 safety innovations that don’t exist in traditional cars, according to the company.

The pill-shaped robotaxis are not yet ready for commercial service, but they have been testing on public roads in San Francisco, Foster City and Las Vegas since 2023.

Data suggest that automated driving could be safer than traditional driving. The insurer Swiss Re found that Waymo vehicles are safer than those with human drivers, but Zoox’s technology is not identical.

Both Teslas in Full Self-Driving mode and Waymo vehicles operating without a driver have been involved in accidents and collisions, generating doubt about the safety of self-driving technology. Waymo customers have reported various glitches on social media, including one Reddit user who posted a video of a Waymo driving the wrong direction into oncoming traffic.

Based on data collected by Waymo, its driverless vehicles had 81% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 78% fewer injury-causing crashes and 62% fewer police-reported crashes than traditional vehicles driving the same distance.

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What is Amazon planning to do with self-driving technology?

Amazon acquired Zoox five years ago as a wholly owned subsidiary for more than $1.2 billion.

Zoox is aiming to launch a commercial ride-hailing service similar to Uber and Lyft that relies on its purpose-built bidirectional vehicles. But Amazon may have other ideas for the future of autonomous driving, Brauer said. The e-commerce giant could use driverless vehicles to make deliveries, for example, saving money and resources.

“Self-driving tech is a massive change, and if you’re a company like Amazon, you’ve got to be involved in it as quickly as possible,” Brauer said. “Whether it’s moving people or cargo or other things we can’t even conceive yet, Amazon doesn’t want to be caught flat-footed.”

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

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Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.

In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”

“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”

Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.

In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.

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The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.

“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.

Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.

Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.

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Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

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Senate committee kills bill mandating insurance coverage for wildfire safe homes

A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.

The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.

The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.

The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.

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It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.

However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.

Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.

Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.

“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.

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In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”

The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.

“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.

Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.

Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.

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Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.

The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.

But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.

Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.

A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.

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“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .

Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.

Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.

Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

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How We Cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.

But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.

While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.

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“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.

It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”

Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.

“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.

The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.

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Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.

Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”

Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.

Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.

“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”

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For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.

“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”

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