America’s best-selling vehicles are still SUVs. China’s next full-size six-seat PHEV flagship is not for sale here. Adrian Leung at CarNewsChina reported October 25 that BYD’s Fang Cheng Bao Ti 9 launches in China after November 15, 2026. Six seats. Claimed 310 km of electric-only range on WLTC. The Shark PHEV pickup follows late November or early December. China market. Not a U.S. consumer offer. Experian’s trailing cut into early 2025: SUVs were 62.8% of new U.S. retail registrations. In 2025, Toyota’s RAV4 led SUVs at 479,288. Honda’s CR-V was next at 403,768. Through September 2026, CR-V still led the SUV chart. Tesla Model Y was second. One battery-electric name sits at the top of the SUV race. Tesla ended Model S and Model X production. Inventory only. Cybertruck is still produced in Texas; Australia and New Zealand plans were cancelled. Different story. A low-volume pickup is not a conventional family SUV. Independent observation. No partnership. ASCENDING builds the operator layer in the Phoenix East Valley. We carry no passengers today. My belief, labeled as belief: a Tesla-built family SUV offered with FSD (Supervised---hopefully we're way past that) would be an extraordinarily "hot" item in an SUV-first America, especially with Model X off the line while China packs the three-row electrified shelf U.S. buyers cannot buy as Fang Cheng Bao. The car is the part @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy keep pushing (---thank goodness). The work after the sale is still charging, cleaning, turnaround, and local uptime. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #Tesla #FleetOperations X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Nearly ten feet of water showed up at Lake Powell after rain that also flooded the Four Corners. ⠀ @SeanPMeans at @sltrib on October 26 put Saturday’s elevation at 3,526.1 feet. ⠀ Up 1.1 feet from the day before. Up 7.1 feet in two weeks. Up 9.5 feet from the September 15 low. ⠀ Gene Shawcroft, chair of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, called it “phenomenal this time of year.” About 600,000 acre-feet. Roughly twice Jordanelle Reservoir. ⠀ He also said it does not solve the problem. ⠀ Still 19.55 feet below a year earlier. September’s low about 180 feet below full. Full last happened in 1983. ⠀ Paul Miller at @nwscbrfc called the jump “a drop in the bucket,” and still “a nice start to the water year.” ⠀ Most of the rain fell upstream of Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Mead rose about 0.06 feet in the same two weeks. ⠀ The San Juan ran hard enough to force evacuations in Bluff, Montezuma Creek, and Aneth on the Navajo Nation. Miller said it was sending about a third of Powell’s October inflow, against a usual October share near 13 percent. ⠀ Here is the part that lands differently in the Valley of the Sun. ⠀ Phoenix does not get to treat the Colorado River as someone else’s weather. Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, and Tempe sit on the same ledger. ⠀ A drop that does not fix a drought is still a drop. At 115°F, the operator math is the same on charge, shade, and uptime. ⠀ Not a flood. Not a fix. Capacity, counted one unit at a time. ⠀ Every single rain drop matters in the Valley of the Sun. ⠀ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ⠀ #Arizona #ColoradoRiver #LakePowell #FleetOperations ⠀ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing ⠀ Source: Sean P. Means, Salt Lake Tribune (Oct 26, 2026) sltrib.com/news/2026/10/26/l…

They will let you rent a Tesla the listing can call “Self-Driving.” On October 26, @turo said U.S. guests will be able to search and book Teslas with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on, starting October 28. Hosts link a Tesla account. @Tesla’s API verifies FSD status. The badge is not a typed Extra. Eligible U.S. hosts can get a free one-month FSD (Supervised) trial. Turo’s host note puts the complimentary month at November 16 for hosts who clear the hardware and ownership rules. Model 3 and Model Y are already the third- and fourth-most popular vehicles on Turo this year, per the company. Sean O’Kane at @TechCrunch put it next to Tesla’s FSD numbers: about 1.7 million paid FSD customers globally, and more than 75 percent of North America deliveries in Q3 took an FSD subscription. @elonmusk’s line last week was the tell: people are buying FSD with a car attached, not the other way around. Turo’s own host FAQ is clearer than the marketplace copy. FSD (Supervised) needs a driver who stays attentive and ready to take over. It does not make a Tesla autonomous. Curiosity is real. Turo cites research that 55 percent of Americans are interested in driverless technology for travel, 71 percent among Gen Z. Interest is not a depot. A weekend try-before-you-buy is a distribution channel for supervised software. It is not shade at 115°F. Not cabin turnaround. Not boarding. Not escalation when the East Valley does something the model did not expect. Tesla and others are solving the driving. The unglamorous local operator layer is the job that is left. That is the stack ASCENDING is building in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe. Pre-operational. Independent of Tesla. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #Arizona X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing Sources: Turo host update; Turo PR; TechCrunch (Sean O’Kane) techcrunch.com/2026/10/26/te…

The sky fell in Orlando. No. 2 @BYUfootball lost to unranked @UCF_Football, 39–31, in double overtime. A top-two loss to an unranked team is not new this year. Last week’s top-ten chaos already wrote that chapter. BYU wrote half of it by beating @NDFootball. Saturday was the sequel nobody wanted. @PaulMyerberg at @USATODAY said stop taking the Cougars seriously. Hogwash. One loss does not delete Notre Dame. UCF was still the better team for four quarters. That is my read. 463 yards to 373. They earned it. Here is the part the take misses. Those same young men flew through the night from Orlando to Provo. Most of them are in a chapel today. Serving. Respecting the Creator. Still asking who they are when the scoreboard goes dark. At 2 p.m. Eastern the poll drops. They should fall. They will. Not to 14. Not out of the top twelve on a “pretender” headline. @kalanifsitake built something that does not evaporate in one Bounce House Saturday. What does deserve the hard look are the adult mistakes. Holding to their own 8. Unnecessary roughness after an 11-yard run. Unsportsmanlike after a replay. I do not agree with the roughing the kicker in 2OT that wiped a made field goal and gave UCF new downs. Sitake told @drewjay at Deseret News the midseason mistakes are on him. Valiant. Incomplete. Legal adults know better. Bear Bachmeier still belongs in the Heisman race. He put the team on his back again. Undeniable. No. 8 @TexasTechFB also fell at @GoBearcatsFB. My fear, labeled as fear: both losses will be used to ding the @Big12Conference’s multi-bid case. I hope I am wrong. My belief: BYU still has an at-large path and the firepower for a first Big 12 title. Those goals are now on the line. Sabbath ends. Monday starts the proof. @ASUFootball comes to Provo next Saturday. @Utah_Football, 7-0 after beating @UHCougarFB 21–13 at home late, waits November 7. Stay on the path. Or don’t. We will know. Stephen Snyder writes from Gilbert, Arizona, where he is building something else entirely. Lifelong Cougar. Go Cougs. #BYU #GoCougs #HearHim #Big12 X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Tesla put Robotaxi next to the car lineup. ⠀ On October 24, Sawyer Merritt posted that Tesla’s site now carries dedicated top sections for Robotaxi and the Tesla Semi. The first thing on the homepage is the Roadster. ⠀ Website navigation is not a launch date---it is however a priority signal. ⠀ The part that matters in Arizona is quieter. ⠀ Tesla’s Robotaxi safety page lists Phoenix under Coming Soon, alongside Las Vegas, Jacksonville and San Antonio. No Arizona date. I will not invent one. ⠀ Naming a market is the easy line on a webpage. Running unsupervised miles in six cities is the manufacturer’s work. Keeping a local fleet up at two in the morning is someone else’s. ⠀ Store. Clean. Charge. Repair. ⠀ That is the operator layer. ⠀ When a platform puts Phoenix on a Coming Soon list, the unglamorous questions arrive with it. Which depot. Which transformer. Which overnight clean. Which technician answers when a Cybercab is down before the morning rush. ⠀ ASCENDING is being built for that work in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe. We are not on the road yet. We operate no vehicles today. ⠀ Tesla and others are solving the driving. The local work around the ride is the job that is left. ⠀ Independent. No partnership. Just the layer that has to exist when the cars finally need a home here. ⠀ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ⠀ Sources: Sawyer Merritt on X (Oct. 24, 2026, 10:48 p.m. America/Phoenix): xitter.cf/SawyerMerritt/status/2… Tesla Robotaxi Safety (Coming Soon markets): tesla.com/robotaxi/safety ⠀ #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #Arizona #TeslaRoadster @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy ⠀ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Sixteen used to mean a license. Now it often means a ride. FHWA puts 1983 at about 46 percent of sixteen-year-olds licensed. 2024 sits near 26 percent. About one out of two, then about one out of four. Parents. Uber. Lyft. Waymo in Phoenix. The wheel is optional longer than it used to be. When that same cohort finally buys, they lead with the glass. Media. Always-on cell. ICE, the internal combustion engine, feels like their parents' story. EV, the electric vehicle, feels like theirs. Harris: 78 percent of Gen Z and Millennial owners say in-car tech played a large role in the purchase. Nearly four in five. Here is the next transformation. @elonmusk is not only stacking Cybercabs for the Robotaxi app. I think he is stacking bandwidth, compute, and a media library so the cabin becomes the most valuable screen in the city. Verified first. Factory Starlink V5 in the Cybercab. SpaceX buying spectrum for Starlink Mobile. Tesla's AI lead, @aelluswamy, has said Starlink is not required for safe driving. Fair. Onboard still does the hard work. My belief is different in emphasis. I think the commercial product still wants a pipe that does not drop when the tower does. Then the library. On October 6, Paramount closed Warner Bros. Discovery into a company now named Skydance. Warner Bros. HBO. CNN. CBS News. On October 22, Semafor and CNBC reported Musk put roughly a billion into Skydance. Neither side confirmed on the record. Treat that as reported, not notarized. I do not think a man who owns X and just wrote a check near a studio-news conglomerate is collecting baseball cards. I think he wants X to compete with Netflix and YouTube. AI shorts. Long films. News that does not look like 1998 cable. Delivered into a Cybercab while the car handles the street. That is what I think he is doing. Inference. Labeled. ASCENDING AUTONOMY is not on the road yet. We are building the unglamorous operator layer in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe. He builds the intelligence that drives. We are building the intelligence that keeps a fleet honest. Different jobs. Same decade. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #Tesla #Cybercab

At its peak, 13.2 million people were watching BYU and Notre Dame on Saturday night. Almost none of them saw the best play. With 8:05 left and Notre Dame up 24-21, Bear Bachmeier threw for Kyler Kasper (@KasperKyler). Sophomore corner Jayden Sanders (@JSanders2025) took it away at the Irish 15. First interception of his college career. The Notre Dame sideline erupted. Kasper stayed on the turf, head down, arms over his knees. @Marcus_Freeman1 was running toward his own team’s celebration. He noticed Kasper, walked over instead and pulled him to his feet. BYU President C. Shane Reese caught it. This week he wrote about it for @Deseret: “It was a small gesture that took place while the camera’s attention was focused elsewhere.” Not the replay. Not the highlight. A hand. Reese reaches for Mark 10: “whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.” He credits @NotreDame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, and @Baylor President Linda Livingstone, whose school invited BYU into its homecoming parade. BYU’s ice cream, joint service projects and uplifting stories about opponents, he writes, were inspired by schools like those. Here is the part that makes it count. Freeman didn’t stop after a win. He stopped while protecting a lead. Six minutes and eighteen seconds of game clock later, Bachmeier hit Walker Lyons for the go-ahead touchdown. @BYUfootball won 28-24. On Sunday the AP poll had BYU at No. 2, its best ranking since 1984. The man with the outstretched hand lost. He reached down anyway. Last week I wrote that I knew exactly how Freeman was raised: Huber Heights, Ohio, then Ohio State. Saturday he showed the rest of it. One more detail. Kasper’s hometown is Chandler. He played high school ball at Williams Field, in Gilbert. Notre Dame recruited him. Those are the streets where I’m building ASCENDING, for neighbors who no longer drive. We carry no riders yet. When we do, I want us known for noticing who is still on the ground. The scoreboard has no column for who stopped. Shane Reese kept one anyway. @NDFootball @BYU #BYU #GoCougs #HearHim #GoIrish

Tesla named Phoenix again on Wednesday. This time it left the date off. @SawyerMerritt was among the first to spot it. Tesla’s new Robotaxi Safety Report page lists four cities under “Coming Soon”: Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix and San Antonio. @wholemars posted the list minutes later, and @robotaxi confirmed it that afternoon. The page went up hours before Tesla’s Q3 call. Read it for what’s missing. No launch date. No service area. No word on whether the first Phoenix rides carry a safety monitor. Phoenix never came up on the call. Back in January, @robotaxi posted a coverage chart that marked Phoenix for the first half of 2026. Not a knock. Schedules move. I would take a date that holds over an early one that slides, every time. The paperwork side: Arizona gave Tesla a ride-hailing permit in November 2025. @Reuters reported then that the permit alone does not cover driverless operation, and @ArizonaDOT asks driverless operators to file a law enforcement interaction plan. Whether Tesla has finished that side here isn’t public, as far as I can find. So what does an operator hear in “Coming Soon”? A first service area gets drawn somewhere in the Valley. Before the first ride inside it, someone needs working chargers, cars cleaned between riders, a place to stage them, and curbs that don’t leave a grandmother across the street from her clinic. None of that waits for a date. Most of it takes longer than the announcement did. The car is the part @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy are solving. The ground it lands on in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe is the part I’m building ASCENDING to run. We aren’t on the road yet, and we carry no riders today. Riders can wait for “coming soon.” Depots can’t be built on it. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... @Tesla @robotaxi Sources: tesla.com/robotaxi/safety; @Reuters, Nov. 18, 2025. #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations #Arizona X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

The product news from Tesla's Q3 call came out of the say.com queue, from a shareholder with a complaint about maps. ​ Speed limits it gets wrong. Parking. Routing. The shareholder listed all three and asked a fair question: why keep using third-party maps when verified Tesla owners could supply the input? ​ @aelluswamy took it, and he opened by agreeing that Tesla "shouldn't be depending on external people's maps." ​ Then he laid out what Tesla is building. A new architecture for AI-based mapping and navigation, made in-house. Voice built in, so you can just ask it for another route. It learns each driver's preferences, and on top of that, what the whole fleet prefers. ​ This was the response. With Full Self Driving (FSD) v15, the start and end of trips move onto the new system first. Over the next several months FSD takes over navigation, parking and destination handling. ​ For somebody who runs cars here is my reality. The first thing to change is the pickup and the drop-off. ​ Those are the minutes a rider judges you by. Nobody screenshots a clean left turn. Everybody screenshots the car that parked on the wrong side of the hospital. ​ @vaibhav_taneja Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla's CFO, described the same ground from another angle on that call. As the fleet scales, Tesla is learning the operating side of it: pickup, drop-off, cleaning and the rest. ​ I read that as good news for the whole robotaxi network. A map trained by every car on the road should get the streets right, and Tesla is the company to build it. ​ What stays with people on the ground is the local layer. Which entrance a clinic wants riders at. Which office park locks its gate at six. Where the school pickup line stacks up at dismissal. ​ That layer is the job I am building ASCENDING to do across Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe. ​ @KlenderJoey at @Teslarati pulled this exchange out of a long call, and @themotleyfool published the transcript his quotes rest on. Both are worth the read. ​ Credit as well to @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy for a call where a retail shareholder's question got a straight answer and a timeline. ​ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Saturday morning, @CollegeGameDay set up in Provo. ​ The show reached 3 million viewers, according to ESPN. That was its biggest audience of the season and the third-biggest for any regular season episode it has ever aired. ​ Then they played the game. ​ The visitors came in at No. 2 in the nation. Golden helmets. A century of mystique. The kind of team you circle on the calendar and quietly hope you can hang with for four quarters. ​ The home team beat them by four, 28-24, and a tight end scored the go-ahead touchdown. ​ The country saw it. ESPN says ABC averaged 9.2 million viewers for the game, and the audience peaked at 13.2 million. ​ Ohio State and Indiana, with 10.4 million on FOX, was the only game that day to draw more. ​ It aired in ABC's Saturday Night Football window. ESPN's networks carried three of the week's four most-watched games, and this was the biggest of them. Alabama and Tennessee was next at 8.1 million. ​ It also topped last year's Big 12 title game (8.99 million) and the Pop-Tarts Bowl (8.7 million). By ESPN's count, it was the Big 12's most-watched regular season game since 2022. ​ The home team was @BYUfootball. The team they beat was Notre Dame, @NDFootball. ​ Walker Lyons was the tight end. The win gave BYU its largest TV audience of the modern era, passing last year's Big 12 title game against Texas Tech. ​ As a founder, I keep coming back to one thing. Nobody gives you the attention of 13 million people. ​ You cannot purchase it or request it. It builds for years where no one is looking, then arrives in a single Saturday night. ​ BYU got there by winning, week after week, until the country had a reason to tune in. ​ Put in the quiet work, even on the days nobody is filming it. The cameras show up later. ​ Now you see the whole picture. ​ @BYUfootball | @NDFootball | @CollegeGameDay | @ESPNPR ​ The chart of BYU's most-viewed games since 2011 and the research behind it are the work of @casey_lundquist of @BYUOnSI. Read his full story: xitter.cf/BYUOnSI/status/2112688… ​ Figures via @ESPNPR, reported by @jackson5payne of @Deseret and Mitch Harper of KSL Sports. ​ #BYU #GoCougs #HearHim ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

The @Tesla Robotaxi app just turned the curb into a fixed address. ​ @ethanmckanna was one of the first to post it: the iOS app now shows the nearby pickup spots, and the pin holds its real location instead of drifting to wherever you tapped. ​ @RobotaxiRadar posted the screenshot below. ​ Riders get a cleaner pickup. An operator sees a list of promises about specific stretches of curb. ​ Each spot needs someone local who decides it belongs there and keeps checking that it still does. Open at shift change, shaded in July, lit late at night, free of delivery trucks. ​ A single downtown block holds a handful of spots. A whole metro holds a long list that keeps moving with construction, school schedules and every new apartment complex. ​ Software draws the pin. A person on the ground keeps it right. ​ That daily curb work is part of what I'm building ASCENDING to run in the Phoenix East Valley. No riders yet. The curb comes with the job. ​ I haven't seen Tesla announce the change; riders found it. ​ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ​ @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy ​ #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Not that long ago it was a research project. A few cars, safety drivers behind the wheel and plenty of people saying it would never work. ​ Today the fleet is about 4,000 cars. ​ The target for the end of this year is 8,000. ​ For the end of next year, 20,000. ​ Those targets come from people familiar with the plans, per @semafor, and @Reuters picked the story up. The company declined to comment. ​ That is five times the fleet in roughly 14 months. ​ Here is the part most people will skim past. Much of that growth is being paid for with debt. ​ Earlier this month it closed a $5 billion term loan, its first ever. @PIMCO, @blackstone and Sixth Street led the lenders, and Goldman Sachs ran the books. ​ Lenders want assets that throw off steady cash, year after year. Semafor says this deal also opens the door to borrowing against leases on the fleet. ​ It already serves 15 U.S. cities and has announced London, Tokyo, Singapore and Canada. It also raised $16 billion in equity earlier this year at a $126 billion valuation. ​ Its own X bio counts more than 20 million trips served. ​ Who is it? ​ @Waymo. And its parent, Alphabet, did not guarantee the loan. ​ The old question was whether a car could drive itself. That one is answered. The new question is who can operate 20,000 of them. ​ Someone has to charge them, clean them, staff the depots, pick up when a rider calls at 2 a.m. and keep every car in revenue service instead of parked. ​ That is an operations problem far more than a technology problem. ​ When lenders start writing checks against fleets, the business has turned a corner. ​ It is the work I am building ASCENDING to do in the Phoenix East Valley. ​ The cars are on their way. The race now is running them. ​ Now you see the whole picture. ​ @Waymo | @semafor | @Reuters | @PIMCO | @blackstone ​ @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy ​ Sources: Ellen DiMauro, @semafor, Oct. 19; @Reuters, Oct. 19; Waymo's own Oct. 8 loan announcement. ​ #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Last Friday night he played in front of the community that raised him. It took a lawsuit to get him there. ​ Go back four years. He left home for the Big Ten and spent four seasons in East Lansing, Michigan, doing bruising work under the basket through winters that never seemed to end. ​ He kept getting better. As a senior he was one of four team captains, led the team with 8.9 rebounds a game, posted 12 double-doubles and was an honorable mention All-Big Ten pick by the league's coaches. ​ He made Academic All-Big Ten three years running, and he won eight NCAA Tournament games along the way. ​ Then the calendar ran out. He graduated from high school in 2022, and the NCAA's new five-in-five eligibility model left his class out. No fifth year. ​ Most players would have packed it in. He joined more than 70 other athletes in a California case called Glancey v. NCAA. ​ In August a temporary restraining order opened the transfer portal for him. He picked home. ​ Friday at the Marriott Center against Nebraska he had 10 points, 10 rebounds--a "Double-Double"--two 3-pointers and a plus-16 in an exhibition. Coach Kevin Young said nobody could fit this group better. ​ Kohler said that "being home" felt almost too good to be real. ​ Still, a restraining order is a short leash. Every practice carried an asterisk. ​ On Tuesday a California court granted the preliminary injunction. He is eligible at least until a final trial, and nobody has set a date for one. ​ The NCAA will appeal, according to CBS Sports' Jon Rothstein. A similar case in Indiana already went the players' way. ​ His name is Jaxon Kohler. ​ @BYUMBB starts the season ranked No. 25, its eighth preseason ranking ever, and it keeps him. ​ The founder in me takes one thing from this. A rule built for last year's world won't always fit the person in front of you today. ​ So file the paperwork, keep showing up and play like the spot is already yours. ​ Now you see the whole picture. ​ @jaxonkohler on X and Instagram | @BYUMBB ​ h/t @rtmccombs of @VanquishTheFoe, who broke it, and @jackson5payne of @Deseret. ​ #BYU #GoCougs #HearHim ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Young people shopping for cars like phones is the headline of Svetoslav Georgiev's new essay for @ConversationUK. The ones I care about skip the purchase entirely. ​ Georgiev, who teaches at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, says software and charging now outrank horsepower and badge history for younger buyers. ​ Then he steps out of the showroom. By his account, younger people decide how to travel on time, cost and reliability. ​ They weigh their transport options on reason alone. ​ Shared services such as Uber and Grab, he writes, are winning them over from private ownership. ​ Nearly ten years on Arizona showroom floors taught me what a car purchase runs on: feeling. This rider is running a different test. ​ The test is simple. Did the car arrive when the app said it would? ​ That answer is not engineered in a lab. It is settled overnight in a depot, by whoever plugged the car in and wiped it down after the last trip. ​ Georgiev also writes about data. Younger drivers, he says, look at a connected car the way they look at an app asking for permissions, and trust in how that data is handled now stands as a main barrier to adoption. ​ A shared vehicle raises the stakes. Riders want their settings waiting in whichever car arrives, which means the car must recognize you for one trip and then deliberately let you go. ​ The rider owns nothing here. She is handing the fleet operator a record of where she went and when. ​ He also points to an old and famous gap. @bainandcompany published it in 2005 from a survey of 362 companies: 80% thought they were delivering a superior experience, and customers gave that credit to 8%. ​ Seventy-two points. No larger touchscreen closes that. ​ Earning that trust is the work I am building ASCENDING to do in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe. We have no vehicles on the road and no riders yet. ​ A buyer chooses once. A rider chooses again every single morning. ​ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ​ Source: Svetoslav Georgiev, The Conversation, Oct. 19, 2026: theconversation.com/digital-… ​ Bain & Company, 2005: media.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/… ​ @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy ​ #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations ​ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

The company Waymo picked to keep its Toronto robotaxis running has never built a car or written a line of driving software. ⠀ That is the point. ⠀ On October 16, @Waymo said it is coming to Canada. Mapping with drivers begins in the coming days under Ontario’s Automated Vehicle Pilot Program. First riders are targeted for 2028, hailing from the Waymo app. ⠀ @ElementFleet, headquartered in Toronto, will run onsite operations. Lifecycle management, maintenance, charging, energy management, and cars cleaned and ready to go. Element has supported Waymo in San Diego since June. ⠀ Kaan Can G., who writes The AI-First Founder, read the news and called it a pricing story. Whoever owns the service layer behind the robotaxi captures the new revenue. ⠀ He is right about the layer. Two numbers in his version need a correction. ⠀ The fleet manager is paid by Waymo, not billed to the rider. And nobody is undercutting a $15-per-mile ride. @rideobi’s January data from San Francisco put Waymo at about $9 a mile and Tesla near $3. The $15 in that report is what an average Lyft ride cost. ⠀ Now look at who else holds the keys. ⠀ Moove in Phoenix. @Avis in Dallas. In Nashville, @flexdrivecars, which is owned by @lyft. ⠀ Kaan’s advice was that ride-hailing has to reinvent its own service bundle. One ride-hailing company already did. It built a depot for the robot. ⠀ @kirstenkorosec at @TechCrunch put the pattern plainly in April. Waymo wants to be a technology supplier, not an operator. ⠀ Somebody still has to be the operator. ⠀ Not the software. Not the network. The depot, the charger, the cleaning crew and the person who answers at two in the morning. ⠀ That is the job ASCENDING AUTONOMY is building in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe, on the @robotaxi network from @Tesla and our own contracted-rides app. ⠀ We carry no riders yet. That waits on Tesla, ADOT and AZ DPS clearing driverless operation. ⠀ The robot gets the headline. The depot gets the margin, if it earns it. ⠀ Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... ⠀ #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations #Waymo ⠀ X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Notre Dame offered him a scholarship in July 2023. On Saturday night he scored all four touchdowns against them. ⠀ He got the offer at his grandmother’s house in Lemoore, California. His late grandfather had been an Irish fan his whole life. He called it “truly special.” ⠀ Two months later, Notre Dame took another quarterback. ⠀ The family keeps a different kind of score. A great-grandfather flew fighters. His father, Michael, is a Naval Academy graduate who was commissioned as a Marine. ⠀ MURRIETA VALLEY HIGH: 6,810 passing yards. 59 passing touchdowns. 33 more on the ground. ⠀ He picked Stanford in February 2024, because his older brother Tiger was already there. ⠀ Stanford fired its coach in March 2025. On May 3, the brothers committed to BYU on the same day. ⠀ Then there is Hank, his older brother and another quarterback. On October 9, 2021, Hank brought Boise State into LaVell Edwards Stadium and left with a 26-17 win, BYU’s first loss of that season. ⠀ Saturday, No. 2 Notre Dame came to the same field. ⠀ PASSING: 23 of 36, 224 yards, 1 touchdown. RUSHING: 2 touchdowns. RECEIVING: 15 yards, 1 touchdown, on a double pass from @KasperKyler. ⠀ Notre Dame went ahead 24-21 with 9:31 left. His next throw was intercepted. ⠀ His next drive went 55 yards. Third and goal from the 6. Walker Lyons. 1:47 on the clock. ⠀ BYU 28, Notre Dame 24. ⠀ No FBS player had run, thrown and caught a touchdown against an AP top-five team in 30 years. No Cougar had done all three in a game since Steve Young in 1983. ⠀ Then he said the part he had been carrying. “Kalani won’t like this because I’m talking about myself, but out of high school, Notre Dame disrespected me and my family pretty badly. I wasn’t going to lose to those guys.” ⠀ After the press conference ended, he told reporters he loves Notre Dame and praised CJ Carr. Receipts kept. Grace too. ⠀ Early this week the Heisman books had him at 125 to 1. By kickoff Saturday he was sixth, at about 24 to 1. That was before he played. ⠀ Hank beat BYU in Provo. Tiger came with him to Provo. He defended it. ⠀ His name is Bear Bachmeier. ⠀ Now you see the whole picture. ⠀ @bearb47 @tigerbachmeier @BYUfootball @KalaniSitake @NDFootball @BroncoSportsFB ⠀ Stephen Snyder writes from Gilbert, Arizona, where he is building something else entirely. ⠀ #BYU #GoCougs #HearHim #Heisman

Arizona wrote the robotaxi rules early. Texas is planning what robotaxis plug into. The second half comes from @jjdecoux , who posted this week about @txcomptroller @DonHuffines and the Texas Broadband Development Office's Strategic Plan Blueprint. His argument: Texas can turn historic broadband capital into the physical foundation for Intelligent Infrastructure Economic Zones. A statewide host layer for network nodes, digital twins and edge AI, resting on accurate public maps, granular data, challenge processes and open dashboards. The blueprint is a draft. Comments close October 30. Final plan to the Legislature in December. BEAD allocation: about $3.31 billion. Mission: all 254 counties, lowest public cost. The blueprint itself is about broadband. The leap to physical AI is Jeffrey's. It's the right leap. So I ran Arizona through it. PERMISSION: Executive Order 2015-09. EO 2018-04. The Institute of Automated Mobility, October 2018. HB 2813 in 2021. FIRST RESPONDERS: A.R.S. 28-9702 requires a law enforcement interaction plan filed with @ArizonaDOT and DPS before a car runs driverless. CONNECTED ROADS: @maricopacounty has tested V2X in Anthem since 2008. Its $20 million CVAZ project plans 750 connected signals. CURBS: @cityofchandler wrote passenger loading zones into its zoning code in 2018. BROADBAND: about $993 million in BEAD. SCALE: @Waymo covers about 350 square miles of the Valley, Gilbert included. Arizona has the pieces. Texas is trying to draw the whole board. Now take one rider. Hypothetically, 82, Mesa, a cardiology appointment. Her trip needs a loading zone at the clinic door. A charger near the work, not across town. Signal inside the parking structure. Lane paint somebody repaints. A responder who has the number. Some of that may already be mapped. Where? What would an East Valley version of Jeffrey's zone look like if it started at the curb of a cardiology office? The car is the part @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy are solving. Where it stops, charges and waits is the part I'm planning. We're not on the road yet. Tesla, ADOT and AZ DPS clear driverless operation first. Permission put the cars on the road. Infrastructure decides where they can stop. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #PhysicalAI #Arizona X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Tell a robotaxi it can't wait at the curb and it doesn't go home. It drives around in circles. A UC Irvine and @UCBerkeley team simulated 1,700 robotaxis serving 68,000 daily trips in San Francisco. Banned from staging between rides, the fleet ran 564,650 km a day, more than 200,000 km above fleets allowed to stage. Nearly 60 percent more driving. Michael Hyland of @UCIrvine walked through it with Ben Hubbard at @TheRideshareGuy's The Driverless Digest. The software literally hands idle cars short "fake" trips to burn time. His pricing view: "If a passenger vehicle has to pay to park, a robotaxi should have to pay to park." @BernGrush of the Urban Robotics Foundation pushed back. Pricing, yes. One rule for all, no. Each rider type exacts a different externality. Monica Waggoner offered a bridge: price that rises with duration. Ten minutes between rides costs less per minute than two hours at dinner. Good rule. Now run my rider through it. Picture a hypothetical 82-year-old in Chandler at a cardiology appointment. My car isn't waiting for the next stranger. It's waiting for her, and nobody knows when she walks out. On a duration curve, that wait gets priced like dinner. With nowhere to wait, the car circles or drives home and back. The study already told us what circling costs. Meanwhile a car waiting for her uses the same curb as the car she gave up. My modest proposal: keep the duration curve. Let a clinic or senior community reserve a few off-street bays for rides tied to a scheduled appointment, and start the clock at the appointment's scheduled end, not at drop-off. Same rule for everyone. Different clock for a different externality. The car is the part @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy are solving. Where it waits for an 82-year-old is ours. We're not on the road yet. Tesla, ADOT and AZ DPS clear driverless operation first, and no clinic has signed anything. A robotaxi between rides is idle. A car waiting for her is working. Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever... #AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #FleetOperations #Arizona X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Before the surgery, his parents signed a waiver for his throwing arm. He was sixteen. In June 2016 his mother noticed a mole on his forehead that kept changing. His great-grandfather had died of melanoma. Half a dozen biopsies. One positive. The surgeons at UC Irvine also removed two lymph nodes from his neck. One sat next to the nerve that controls his right arm. When he woke up, he made a throwing motion before he said a word. Then he told his mom, "We are all good." No chemo. No radiation. A scar below the hairline. And from then on, a bucket hat. At the 2017 @Elite11 competition the hat wasn't in the gear bag. When the event's president heard why he wore it, every quarterback in the field got one. Alabama recruited him that year. He visited Tuscaloosa the weekend @JalenHurts beat LSU. He passed. Twenty-one months in Brazil, then @StanfordFball: 5,336 yards, 28 touchdowns, 2021 team MVP. @Eagles took him 188th overall in 2023. He waited. January 5, 2025, first start: 27 of 41, 269 yards, two touchdowns, a win over the Giants. This summer he lost the backup job to Andy Dalton. Dalton threw one pass this season. Intercepted. Twelve days ago he was QB3. Thursday, the Eagles walked out for walkthrough and found him running the offense. Hurts is out with a blood clot in his calf. "You're walking out to walkthrough, and it was like, 'OK, well, I'm taking the one reps now,'" he told @NBCSPhilly's Reuben Frank. "I feel like I was ready at any moment the last few weeks," he said. Now the part nobody scheduled. Sunday's game against @Panthers is the Eagles' Crucial Catch game, the NFL's cancer-screening campaign with @AmericanCancer. Last October he was one of 19 ACS player ambassadors. "My case was very mild because I was able to catch it early," he told @PhillyInquirer. KICKOFF: Sunday, 1 p.m. ET, CBS MOUNTAIN: 11 a.m. ARIZONA: 10 a.m. His name is Tanner McKee. His mother caught it early. Sunday the league plays a game about catching it early, and her son starts it. Now you see the whole picture. @McKeeTmckee #RestOfTheStory #FlyEaglesFly #NFL #CrucialCatch Stephen Snyder writes from Gilbert, Arizona, where he is building something else entirely. X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing