Ford's appointment of Jim Hackett as its new president and CEO reflects how the company is largely pinning its long-term survival hopes on its driverless business. Following his previous role as head of Ford's Smart Mobility division, which overseas Ford's autonomous driving activity, Hackett will help the company take a more self-driving direction as a whole.
In the driverless race, technological advances can sometimes just add more tension to an already heated competition, if Waymo suing Uber over their allegedly stolen LiDAR technology is any indication. Now, Sony is offering a new camera sensor, one that should help self-driving cars "see" the road with much more accuracy than any other camera sensors available for vehicles currently.
Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski's scathing accusations challenging the physics behind Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk's claims about Autopilot should force Musk to make his case that self-drive cars don't need LiDAR in the next few months.
Volvo Cars' "all-electric" announcement last week was seen as a direct threat to Tesla's electric vehicle (EV) and driverless lead, but German auto giant Volkswagen (VW) says it is in a better position to challenge Tesla.
Google quickly learned over five years ago electric vehicles (EVs) were the powertrain of choice for its then fledging driverless car program and the industry has since followed its lead.
Data for mapping and other applications is the lifeblood of machine-driven cars, and so far, Tesla has taken a definitive lead in information it has gathered ahead of other driverless players, including Waymo.
Ex-Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick's bad and likely illegal behavior aside, his vision of not wanting to pay "the other dude in the car" has lead to a ground-breaking driverless test fleet.
The AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Division, which represents 32 unions in the US, has successfully lobbied for the removal of 10,000-lb. and heavier commercial trucks from provisions in bills expected to pass that could allow for millions of driverless vehicles on public roads and streets, Bloomberg News reported.
The Chinese government's tight restrictions on gathering data by foreign firms for 3D mapping, the lifeblood of machine-taught driverless systems, could at least slow down access to the market by Waymo, Tesla, General Motors (GM), Ford, and other players hoping to make inroads there.
Many wonder how driverless cars will ever be able to navigate through any driving condition imaginable — but the point is self-taught machines, in theory, have the innate ability to adapt to chaotic and extreme driving conditions in ways far superior to what humans are capable of.
Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick is taking an indefinite leave of absence from the company, as Uber's recent upheaval has far overshadowed any developments in its driverless initiative during the past few days.
Uber has been in the hot seat for awhile now, for many reasons, especially for being sued by Waymo over stolen LiDAR designs. But now, perhaps the attention will be taken off both Uber and Waymo as a new contender enters the LiDAR arena; A small, independent company called Luminar has finally let the world in on what it has been cooking up.
The automotive industry is traditionally very conservative, so when a carmaker says it will launch a particular model or feature by a certain date, it means a lot.
The US driverless market has become a competitive – and crowded – arena, with big names like Google, Apple, Uber, and even Intel intent on leading the pack. Not to be outdone, the EU is also getting in on the automated car action with self-driving fleets launching in both the UK and the Netherlands within the next two years.
Argo AI is coming late to the party, but has begun testing a fleet of driverless cars in hopes of developing robo-taxi services to eventually compete against those that Waymo, Uber, Cruise Automation, and others plan to offer.
Honda president Takahiro Hachigo has just announced that Honda will complete development of fully self-driving cars by 2025. While the company aims to have level 3 — or conditionally autonomous cars requiring human intervention only in emergencies — on the road in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, these level 4 cars would require no intervention in most environments and thus bring Honda one step closer to producing fully driverless cars.
Leaked documents from Uber, obtained by Re/code, detail the ride-hailing app's latest wins and failures in their self-driving experiment. The reports detail the number of autonomous miles traveled, the number of driver interventions needed, and the number of times the drivers had to avoid serious damage.
The launch of the Audi A8 marks the world's first Level 3 car on offer in retail channels, except there is one catch: it can only take full control of driving at speeds of 37.3 mph or less.
Solid-state LiDAR is cheap, robust, and compact in size — this is why the device is seen as the LiDAR of choice for future high-volume production of level 3 and level 4 cars.
A top executive from Baidu's telematics division believes the company will become the word leader in driverless by 2020, according to a report in today's South China Morning Post.
The status of Uber's driverless program remains a big unknown amid the company's recent woes, but a reported multibillion-dollar shot in the arm by Japanese tech giant Softbank could change all that.
Research group OpenAI, a research institute co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, says it is possible to trick driverless cars' neural networks into mistaking images for something else.
Demand for Tesla's driverless features as well as its ultra-long battery ranges and a reputation for offering the best-in-class electric car driving experience helped Tesla see a 32% surge in its value as a brand, topping out at $5.9 billion in the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study, released June 5.
An expert in the driverless market has earmarked Porsche as the company to watch in the automated car race.
Tesla has confirmed the EV carmaker has begun to upload videos from models equipped with its latest flavor of Autopilot, as Tesla seeks to "fleet source" data to help improve its cars' machine learning capabilities.
Things aren't looking good for Uber after its driverless experiment in Pittsburgh soured relations with local authorities. Surprised? Me neither.
The driverless competition is heating up as Detroit automakers attempt to woo tech talent away from some of Silicon Valley's biggest players.
Uber wants you to forget about cars and start thinking about fully autonomous flying as an alternative—a more "economically favorable" way of getting to your grinding nine-to-five.
The fatal crash of Air France Flight 447 is one of the most tragic accidents in avionic history — while it also serves as a stark reminder of what can go wrong when humans rely too much on driverless vehicles.
Stakeholders in the driverless industry are anxiously awaiting changes the US Department of Transportation (DOT) is making to self-driving vehicle guidelines.
General Motors Co. (GM) is set to expand their fleet of driverless cars in San Francisco, Detroit, and Scottsdale, according to documents filed by the company.
Alphabet's moonshot factory, X (formerly "Google X"), is a secretive place, but it seems that when they are close to graduating a project, then they need to staff it up quickly. Watching for these job ads is one easy way to know they're close to budding off a baby.
Cruise Automation, the driverless car startup General Motors (GM) bought for $1 billion in 2016, is readying a formidable fleet of robo-taxis for rollout in cities throughout the US. But when it comes to details about how the company plans to realize these lofty goals, it's been fairly tight-lipped.
Hyundai Motor Company says it will launch its driverless tech ahead of schedule, but the Korean carmaker will remain behind mainstream rivals, including General Motors (GM), Nissan, and Honda.
The US Department of Transportation says it is actively completing a previously promised revision of voluntary guidelines for driverless vehicles originally drafted by President Obama's administration.
Any truck driver who breathed a sigh of relief when US Secretary of Commerce Steve Mnuchin recently stated that driverless cars "will not affect jobs in a meaningful way for roughly 50 to 100 years" can go back to being anxious about job security again.
Uber resumed its pilot program for driverless cars after one of its autonomous vehicles crashed in Tempe, Arizona last weekend.
The ride-sharing firm Lyft and Faraday Future, a troubled electric carmaker and potential Tesla competitor, have quietly appointed new top executives, but like the rest of the industry, they struggle to find talent for their driverless programs.
A Norwegian carrier's launch of a pilotless container ship next year could lead the way to a new era in sea transportation and shipping if successful.
The laws and regulations in place in the US for driverless vehicles are a mess, but Republican congressional members say they can fix it.
