| | | | | | | Presented By The Boeing Company | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · May 22, 2022 | | Happy Sunday. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,195 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by Jennifer Koons. 🍼 Breaking: The first shipment of Nestlé baby formula delivered to the U.S. to help alleviate the dire shortage arrived in Indiana today via a U.S. Air Force aircraft from Europe, Axios' Ivana Saric reports. | | | | | | 1 big thing: Waiting for robotaxis |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | Routine robotaxis are at least a decade away — much longer than the industry had hoped. - Back in 2016, autonomous-vehicle developers said we'd have them by 2021.
Why it matters: Immense obstacles — including engineering challenges, capital requirements, regulatory issues and liability questions — make it clear the industry will scale slowly, Joann Muller writes from Detroit in Axios What's Next. Zoom out: They'll roll out one neighborhood, one city at a time. A few pilots are close to being commercialized. But scale is a long way off. Zoom in: A big obstacle is teaching robots rules of the road in each city, which must be done block by block, street by street. - "Humans are naturally more adaptable than software is — it's just a reality," said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights, a research and consulting firm.
Where it stands: So far, only one company — Waymo — has a commercial robotaxi service that's up and running. - In suburban Phoenix, you can hail a driverless taxi using Waymo's app. But the service is limited to a 50-mile area around Chandler and Tempe.
- In San Francisco, GM-backed Cruise is giving free rides — but only in certain neighborhoods, during overnight hours. It hopes to get California's first permit for a paid robotaxi service as early as next month.
- In Vegas, autonomous, Motional, has been running its cars on the Lyft network (with safety drivers behind the wheel) for several years. It plans to launch a fully driverless service in Las Vegas in 2023, with other cities to follow.
- In Miami and Phoenix, Argo AI, backed by Ford and VW, this month began driverless rides during business hours.
Photo: Argo Look at the Argo fine print: The cars are only for employees and are confined to specific streets. - If the cars encounter heavy rain, they'll pull over and stop. The software doesn't let them operate in snow, dense fog or hail.
Other self-driving tech companies — including TuSimple, Nuro and Aurora — are focused on local delivery or long-haul trucking. What we're watching: AV developers are gradually expanding the limits of their vehicles — by geography, lighting conditions and weather. - But this is going to take a while.
Watch a video about Argo's launch in Austin and Miami ... Share this story. |     | | | | | | 2. 🛒 Stores' new problem: Too much stuff |  Data: National Retail Federation. Chart: Kavya Beheraj/Axios Walmart and Target took the extreme measures of chartering cargo ships when the supply chain locked up. But big retailers now "find themselves flush with clothes, televisions and other discretionary items that customers aren't buying," Bloomberg reports. - Why it matters: With inflations biting, "consumers are channeling "spending into basic needs and services. As a result, the companies took markdowns that eroded profits."
Target and Walmart said more customers are trading down from brand names to cheaper, private-label groceries. - John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., said on an earnings call that the switch is noticeable in "deli, lunch meat, bacon, dairy."
🛍️ Get a 2-week free trial of Axios Pro: Retail Deals. | | | | | | | | 3. 🗳️ Ballot snafu: Blurry bar codes |  | | | A Clackamas County, Ore., elections worker shows barcodes that are bad (top) and good. Photo: Gillian Flaccus/AP | | | | A ballot-printing fiasco in Clackamas County, Ore., will delay results from Tuesday's primary by weeks, with a key U.S. House race hanging in the balance, AP reports. - It's the state's third largest county, in the southern reaches of the Portland suburbs.
Why it matters: It's a reminder how many points of failure riddle our elections system. What's happening: Tens of thousands of ballots were printed with blurred barcodes, making them unreadable by vote-counting machines. - Elections workers must now hand-transfer the votes from those ballots to new ones that can be read in a painstaking process that also raises the possibility of errors.
Zoom out: The debacle has angered many in Oregon, where all ballots have been cast only by mail for 23 years and lawmakers have consistently pushed to expand voter access through automatic voter registration and expanded deadlines. Zoom in: As the scope of the crisis became apparent, local, state and federal lawmakers all escalated their criticism of Clackamas County Elections Clerk Sherry Hall, who acted slowly when the problem first became apparent. - In the Democratic primary for Oregon's 5th Congressional District, seven-term Rep. Kurt Schrader, a moderate, was trailing in the vote behind progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner. The outcome could have an outsized impact in November, with the possibility that voters could flip the seat for the GOP.
The printer — family-owned Moonlight BPO in Bend, which Clackamas County has used for 10 years — said: "We follow the exact same protocol and process every year and nothing changed." What's next: As many as 60,000 ballots are unreadable by machines. Up to 200 county employees have been redeployed to hand-transfer votes. - By Friday, just 27,342 ballots of more than 90,000 that were returned had been tallied.
Hall said the problem came to light May 3, when workers put the first ballots returned through the vote-counting machine. - As Election Day approached and ballots stacked up, Hall allowed elections workers to take the weekend off.
| | | | | | | | A message from The Boeing Company | | Committed to our communities | | |  | | | | In 2021, Boeing donated over $2.5 million to partners, such as the American Red Cross, for wildfire, tornado, hurricane and flooding relief in the U.S. and internationally. Discover more by visiting the 2022 Boeing Global Engagement Portfolio. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images As more-normal life returns to Kyiv, captured Russian armored vehicles are displayed in one of the city's oldest squares, outside St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Pet goats, Zita and Myra, interrupt a TV reporter as they explore a destroyed Russian tank. | | | | | | | | 5. 📊 Poll du jour | | Graphic: CBS News CBS News polling out today finds the percentage who call the economy bad has hit a high for the Biden presidency. - Between the lines: There's optimism about both jobs and COVID — messages the White House has emphasized. But those are outweighed in the public mood, the pollsters note.
Graphic: CBS News See more graphics. | | | | | | | | 6. 📺 1 for the road: SNL departures | | Pete Davidson, who joined the show in 2014, last night flashed back to an early appearance. Screenshot: NBC Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson, Kate McKinnon and Kyle Mooney bade farewell to "Saturday Night Live" during last night's Season 47 finale. When I got the show I was 20 years old and I had no idea what I was doing. I still don't but especially back then. I wasn't really a sketch performer I was just a stand up. I knew I could never keep up or go toe to toe with a Kenan Thompson or a Kate McKinnon so I was super scared at figuring out what I could possibly bring to or do for such a historic, respected show and platform. ... I got to share so much with this audience and literally grow up in front of your eyes. We were together through the good and the bad, the happiest and the darkest of times. I owe Lorne Michaels and everyone at SNL my life. Im so grateful and I wouldn't be here without them. Davidson, whose official bio notes he's the first "SNL" cast member born in the 1990s, signed the post: Resident young person Pete Davidson. Photo: Will Heath/NBC via AP McKinnon, 38, departs Earth as alleged alien abductee Colleen Rafferty during a "Final Encounter" skit that was last night's cold open. - Go deeper: Deadline, "'SNL' Starts Generational Shift."
| | | | | | | | A message from The Boeing Company | | Committed to our communities | | |  | | | | In 2021, Boeing donated $10.5 million to support global COVID-19 recovery and relief efforts and sponsored community vaccine events in the Seattle area and South Carolina. Discover more by visiting the Boeing Global Engagement Portfolio. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up here to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 200 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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