ID. Buzz recall: VW’s third-row bench is too big for its own good
Volkswagen of America is recalling nearly 5,700 2025 VW ID. Buzz vans because the NHTSA says the third-row bench seat is too spacious. (For real.)
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the third-row bench is physically wide enough for three people, but it’s only designed to hold two, so it’s only equipped with two seat belts. That mismatch violates Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 208, which covers occupant crash protection. A bench that invites three passengers but only protects two isn’t just awkward – it’s a safety risk. It simply makes it too easy to squeeze that third person in the back “just that once” without a seatbelt, and that’s inviting trouble.
Volkswagen will fix the ID. Buzz issue by having dealers install “fixed unpadded trim parts” that adjust the seat’s usable width, and they’ll do it for free, because recall repairs are always free. It’ll probably be hard plastic on the seat to ensure a third person can’t squeeze in. Owner notification letters are expected to go out starting June 20, 2025.
Volkswagen has reported that, to date, there have been “no field claims known” of safety issues caused by the extra-wide third row bench seat.
Read more: This is the 2025 VW ID. Buzz’s Electrify America charging package
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Elon Musk announced last night that Tesla is planning to “roughly double” its Robotaxi fleet in Austin next month. While an expansion of the pilot sounds positive on the surface, a look at the actual numbers reveals that Tesla is missing its own “end of year” target by a massive margin.
Just last month, Musk explicitly stated that Tesla aimed to have 500 Robotaxis in Austin by the end of the year. Now, “doubling” the current estimated fleet suggests the actual number will be closer to 60.
We have been closely tracking the rollout of the “Tesla Robotaxi” pilot in Austin, which launched back in June using Model Y vehicles.
Unlike the “Cybercab” unveiled in October, these vehicles are standard Model Ys equipped with Hardware 4, and critically, they are not driverless. They are part of a “supervised” pilot, meaning a Tesla employee sits in the front passenger seat (or driver’s seat for highway stints) to monitor the system with a finger on a killswitch ready to stop the car..
The service has been plagued by availability issues. As we reported recently, users in Austin are frequently met with “High Service Demand” messages, with wait times often exceeding 40 minutes. It’s not necessarily because there’s really “high demand”, but because Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi fleet” remains tiny.
In response to complaints about the service being “essentially unusable” due to lack of supply, Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) late Tuesday to promise relief:
“The Tesla Robotaxi fleet in Austin should roughly double next month.”
For those frustrated by the wait times, more cars are certainly welcome. But for investors and analysts tracking Tesla’s autonomous driving promises, this announcement serves as a confirmation of a significant missed deadline.
How many Tesla Robotaxis are in Austin?
To understand why “doubling” is actually a disappointment, we have to look at what Musk promised just a few weeks ago.
During his appearance on the All-In Podcast, which aired on October 31, 2025, Musk was explicitly asked about the scale of the fleet. His answer was unambiguous:
“We’re scaling up the number of cars to… probably we’ll have a thousand cars or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, probably 500 or more in the greater Austin area.”
Let’s do the math.
Based on observations from the Austin community and tracking of the vehicle VINs and plate numbers, the current Tesla Robotaxi fleet in Austin is estimated to be around 30 vehicles. In fact, 29 different Robotaxi license plates were spotted in Austin.
If Tesla “roughly doubles” that fleet in December, they will have approximately 60 vehicles on the road.
That is a far cry from the 500 that Musk projected just weeks ago. In fact, it represents a shortfall of nearly 90% against the target.
This massive miss in deployment targets is particularly ironic given Musk’s recent comments about competitors. When Waymo announced earlier this month that it had reached 2,500 active robotaxis across the US (with about 200 in Austin alone), Musk scoffed, calling them “Rookie numbers.”
Yet, the data shows that Waymo currently operates a fleet in Austin that is roughly 3x to 4x larger than what Tesla hopes to have after its expansion next month. And unlike Tesla’s pilot, Waymo’s Austin fleet is operating fully driverless, without human chaperones in the front seat.
Electrek’s Take
Another clear case of Elon Musk’s shifting the goalposts in Tesla’s autonomous driving programs, something we’ve unfortunately become accustomed to with Tesla’s autonomy timelines.
Musk said “500 cars by end of year” just a few weeks ago. It shows he is just saying numbers and nothing is grounded in reality.
Let’s be real about what this means. It means the “unsupervised” dream is still stuck in “supervised” reality. Scaling a fleet to 500 cars when you need 1,000+ human employees to drive them (staffing multiple shifts) is an HR nightmare, not a software update. The fact that they are only getting to ~60 tells me that the “supervised” requirement is the hard limit on their growth right now.
With 7 crashes in the first few months of operations, with supervisors preventing an unknown number of additional crashes, I don’t see Tesla removing them anytime soon.
Let me rephrase that. I don’t see Tesla safely removing the supervisors anytime soon.
As this whole operation appears to be more about optics than safety, I can see removing them before it’s ready.
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An aerial view of a 33 megawatt data center with closed-loop cooling system on October 20, 2025 in Vernon, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The data centers that power the artificial intelligence revolution are driving up electricity prices for households — and price relief may not be coming anytime soon, according to energy experts.
Residential retail electricity prices in September were up 7.4%, to about 18 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the most recent data from the Energy Information Administration.
Electricity prices closely tracked inflation from 2013 to 2023, but will likely outpace inflation at least through 2026, according to an EIA forecast from May. Some regions will be hit harder than others, it said.
Energy experts and economists point to electricity-hungry data centers that underpin AI projects as a key reason for the price inflation.
These data centers are vast warehouses of computer servers and other IT equipment that power cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other tech applications.
The basic reason for rising prices: Electricity demand — including actual and forecasted demand — is outstripping new supply.
Data centers are expected to consume anywhere from 6.7% to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated in December 2024.
John Quigley, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed to the “data center frenzy” as the primary driver of higher electricity prices for households.
“They’re pretty much the whole boat when it comes to increases in electricity demand,” Quigley said.
“It’s going to get worse,” he said.
Affordability is the ‘most salient issue’ in politics
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger delivers remarks during her election-night rally at the Greater Richmond Convention Center on November 04, 2025 in Richmond, Virginia.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
To be sure, data centers aren’t the only contributor to higher electricity prices, experts said.
But escalating electricity prices “can strain household budgets … undermine economic competitiveness … and hinder the electrification of energy systems,” researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in a recent analysis.
Rising electricity prices for U.S. households also come as politicians continue to leverage the affordability theme to garner support.
New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, both Democrats, promised to lower electricity bills for state residents. During her campaign, Spanberger said she wants to “make sure data centers don’t drive up energy costs for everyone else in Virginia.”
While on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump had also pledged to cut electricity and energy prices in half within his first 18 months of office.
“Affordability remains [the] most salient issue in politics,” Chris Krueger, a strategist at Washington Research Group, wrote in a research note on Tuesday.
Rising energy bills are pushing households deeper into debt, according to a recent analysis by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The average overdue balance on utility bills has risen 32% since 2022, to $789 from $597, it found. Utilities include electricity and other costs like gas and water.
Households that use electricity to heat their homes are estimated to see their winter heating bills rise to $1,205 this season, up about 10% from $1,093 last winter, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
“Consumers may again feel the pressure on their utility bills in the coming months, particularly if the winter is a cold one,” according to a Bank of America Institute report from October.
Booming electricity demand
the Google Midlothian Data Center in Midlothian, Texas, US, on Friday, Nov. 14, 2025.
Jonathan Johnson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AI euphoria has been driving the U.S. stock market ever higher — and fueling speculation that the market is in a tech-fueled bubble that might soon pop.
Regardless of whether the market’s AI rally proves sustainable, the scale of the technology’s growth is unmistakable. The International Energy Agency expects worldwide electricity demand from AI data centers to more than quadruple by 2030.
“Global electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double over the next five years, consuming as much electricity by 2030 as the whole of Japan does today,” Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, said in that analysis.
The effects will be “particularly strong” in countries like the U.S., where data centers are projected to account for almost half of the growth in overall electricity demand, according to the IEA analysis.
The U.S. economy is on track to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals, the IEA found.
Forecasted demand has fueled the need for new infrastructure like power lines, substations and power plants, the costs of which companies at least partly pass on to residential consumers, said Quigley of UPenn.
In other words, households are partially subsidizing the AI data center expansion, he said.
While AI-driven electricity demand is happening across the U.S., some electric grid managers are better at managing costs than others,” said Quigley.
“The amount of the [price] increase will vary by region,” he said.
Amazon’s largest AI data center has seven completed buildings, with 30 total buildings planned on 1,200 acres in New Carlisle, Indiana, shown here on October 8, 2025.
Erin Black
For example, extreme weather like hurricanes, storms and wildfires contributed to “sizable” price growth in some states like California, where wildfire risk mitigation and liability insurance were “major cost drivers,” according to an October report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Energy Department laboratory managed by the University of California.
After accounting for the impact of inflation, 31 states actually saw electricity prices decline from 2019 to 2024, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers. Seventeen states saw price increases after inflation, especially in states on the West Coast and in the Northeast, they found.
Nationally, average retail electricity prices increased by 23% over that period in nominal terms, meaning before accounting for inflation, they found.
Increasing residential electrification, including electric vehicles, is among other factors pushing up electricity demand, according to the Bank of America Institute.
Environment
Uber launches true driverless robotaxi operations in the Middle East with WeRide [Video]
![Uber launches true driverless robotaxi operations in the Middle East with WeRide [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/11/Uber-Middle-East-WeRide.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Just over a year after Uber announced a strategic partnership in the Middle East with autonomous vehicle specialist WeRide, the companies have officially begun offering the public robotaxi rides without a driver or safety operator present on board.
Today’s latest milestone involving robotaxi operations in the Middle East dates back to September 2024, when Uber and WeRide initially announced a strategic partnership to bring autonomous rides to the UAE.
Three months later, the partner officially launched autonomous rides in Abu Dhabi, but with a safety operator present in the vehicle. At the time, Uber and WeRide said the supervised rides were “laying the groundwork” for a true driverless commercial operations planned for 2025.
That day has come.
WeRide and Uber have confirmed that commercial robotaxi operations are officially underway in Abu Dhabi without any safety operators on board – a first for the Middle East.
Uber rolls out Middle East robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi
Uber shared details of its latest milestone late this evening or in the afternoon in the Middle East, depending on where you are.
Beginning today (Wednesday) customers in Abu Dhabi can select an UberX or Uber Comfort ride that enables them to be matched with a fully autonomous WeRide robotaxi without a driver inside. Riders in the Middle East can also increase their chances of hailing one of these driverless rides by select the “Autonomous” option in the Uber app.
In order to qualify, the prosepctive rider’s route must be part of WeRide’s operating territory in Abu Dhabi and a dedicated WeRide GXR Robotaxi vehicle (seen in the featured image above) must be available.
Similar to Uber’s partnership with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta, the global rideshare network will oversee fleet operations for WeRide vehicles, handling end-to end rider support. It has tapped Tawasul Transport to facilitate vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, charging, and depot management. WeRide will remain responsible for vehicle testing.
As you may recall last spring, Uber and WeRide announced an expansion to their strategic partnership beyond the Middle East (although Dubai will be the city for its next robotaxi rollout). Over the next five years, Uber and WeRide intend to deploy true driverless public rides in 15 additional cities, some of which will be in Europe.
As promised, here’s some b-roll footage from Uber showing how riders in Abu Dhabi can order a WeRide robotaxi:
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