Welcome in, today is Monday, July twenty-seventh, and we begin with word, from WebProNews, that Waymo is preparing to break from Uber. WebProNews reports that Waymo has notified Uber it will launch its own rider app in Austin and Atlanta in January of twenty twenty-eight, ending the exclusivity deal that has routed every Waymo robotaxi ride in those two cities through the Uber platform. Per that reporting, hundreds of the driverless vehicles stay available on Uber until at least May of twenty twenty-eight under the current contract, so nothing changes for riders in the near term. What changes is the direction of travel. Alphabet's Waymo now runs its own app across eleven US metro areas and logs more than five hundred thousand paid rides a week, and that scale is what gives the unit the confidence to go direct to riders rather than lean on a ride-hail partner. An Uber spokesperson confirmed the notification, framing it as an opening to bring rival autonomous providers onto its network in those Texas and Georgia markets. The stakes read straight through to Uber's stock, which fell more than four percent Friday to close below sixty-six dollars, down roughly twenty percent on the year, as investors weighed the loss of exclusive access to the leading robotaxi operator. A recurring concern in the channel is an operational gap that could sharpen as fleets scale: today's autonomous systems can't ingest published road-disruption data, construction or planned events, and instead learn those conditions reactively. The split marks a broader turn, with robotaxi operators moving to own the customer relationship and platforms wanting diverse supply to hold their network effects. Staying with Waymo, a new safety benchmark landed this week. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Waymo's driverless vehicles were involved in sixty-eight percent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police than the average human driver, drawing on federal crash data from twenty twenty-one through twenty twenty-four. Electrek reports the gap in plain terms: per million miles traveled, human drivers crashed just over four times, Waymo just under one and a third, across a sample of about fifty million autonomous miles. That same read found Waymo's crashes tended to be less severe and less often its fault. TechBullion adds that the vehicles were ninety-one percent less likely to rear-end another car and eighty-one percent less likely to be in an injury crash. That independent confirmation matters because Waymo's earlier safety studies were largely its own. But the institute is careful about the limits. Waymo actually posted a slightly higher crash rate than humans in Austin, which the researchers tie to a small sample there, and it logged a higher share of crashes in dark conditions. Industry reaction leans skeptical on the method, a recurring concern being that Waymo's miles may skew toward simpler, lower-speed streets, which could overstate the advantage against the mixed traffic a human handles. Automotive World frames it the same way: a meaningful edge, but patchy federal data and the Austin result mark the edges of what the numbers can yet claim. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Hyundai's second-quarter profit dropped twenty-one percent, Automotive News reports, missing estimates as European and Chinese sales slumped under Chinese EV competition and US tariffs. General Motors posted forty-eight billion dollars in second-quarter revenue and lifted its full-year guidance again, per WardsAuto, though fresh EV write-downs and onshoring costs pulled net income lower. Volkswagen scrapped its twenty twenty-six revenue-growth forecast after second-quarter operating profit fell nine and a half percent, Automotive News reports, as CEO Oliver Blume pushes a restructuring involving one hundred thousand job cuts. Europe logged its biggest car-sales jump since twenty twenty-three in June, Automotive World reports, driven by a battery-EV surge and incentives, with Tesla's Model Y reclaiming the top monthly sales spot. Mobileye's Amnon Shashua will step down as chief executive, Automotive News reports, shifting toward the chairman role as the firm guides to a softer third quarter and expands into robotaxis and humanoid robotics. And finally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has ordered Waymo, Tesla, Zoox and other developers to explain, by the end of July, how they will keep driverless vehicles from interfering with first responders, the Austin American-Statesman reports.