February 22, 2026
Brakes on bots, mouths in overdrive
New York Just Killed Its Robotaxi Plan. The Real Problem Isn't the Technology
Robotaxis stall in NY as commenters cry politics, pay-to-play, and ‘show us receipts’
TLDR: New York pulled its robotaxi expansion, not over broken tech but because regulators don’t trust what they can’t independently verify. Commenters split: some yell politics and pay-to-play, others demand laws and standard tests, while many slam the story as a product pitch and ask, “Where are the receipts?”
New York slammed the brakes on robotaxis, and the internet did what it does best: went full courtroom. Governor Hochul withdrew her proposal, freezing plans to let companies like Waymo expand beyond NYC. The tech works—Waymo’s giving rides in six cities every week—but commenters say the real crash is a trust pileup. One camp swears it’s politics-as-usual, with echoes of the state’s congestion pricing drama. Another camp says you don’t need a fancy gadget to tell the truth—just pass reporting rules and make companies hand over data.
Then the pitchforks came out for the article’s star, PhyWare, which basically promises a “black box for robots”—a cryptographically sealed, can’t-fake-it log of what each car did. Skeptics called it “just a shameless plug,” while policy wonks argued it’s “a tech solution to a non-tech problem.” Others asked the obvious: if this is so vital, why isn’t Waymo or Google building it? The nerdiest burn: “cart before the horse”—without a standard, independent test for self-driving cars (aka AVs), who cares how perfect the receipts are? Meme of the day: “Fine, let the robots drive… but we want the receipts.” Whether you blame politics, Big Tech, or the rules themselves, everyone agreed on one thing: no trust, no rides—period.
Key Points
- •New York Governor Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal to amend vehicle and traffic laws, pausing near-term commercial robotaxi expansion outside NYC.
- •The article argues the main barrier is not AV technology performance but the lack of independently verifiable operational safety data.
- •Hochul’s plan included pre-approval safeguards: a $1M application fee, $5M financial security, commissioner approval, and a ban in cities over 1M people.
- •Operational data for AVs is currently controlled by companies, limiting regulators’ ability to verify safety and behavior.
- •PhyWare proposes PhyTrace and PhyCloud to create tamper-evident, cryptographically verifiable audit trails for autonomous systems.