Tag: Uber

September 13, 2018

In today’s transportation landscape, opening the Lyft app on your phone is a sing of intent. It means that wherever you’re going, you’ve decided you won’t biking, or walking, or taking the bus. Maybe you’ll share the ride with a […]

August 29, 2018

Uber didn’t necessarily get into self-driving cars to make friends. It launched its program in Pittsburgh by gutting the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, after all. But in the three years since – as the company has struggled with […]

August 20, 2018

SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE like snowbird retirees. Given the freedom to live, or operate, anywhere in the country, they turn their backs on wintry states and flock to the sun. There’s a reason Waymo, Uber, and even grocery story giant, Kroger, […]

August 7, 2018

FOR THE DEVELOPERS of self-driving vehicles, semi-trucks are a potential low-hanging fruit. Although big rigs are imposingly, intimidatingly huge, they also predominantly run on freeways and other fixed routes that are simpler to automate. Fleet managers are easier to convince […]

July 17, 2018

IN THIS WACKY new world of bike shares, electric scooters, OneWheels, and transit apps, automotive companies aren’t quite famous for their inspired, innovative business moves. But today, BMW is sending up the industry’s latest trial balloon. And it’s headed straight […]

July 13, 2018

AT THE BLOCKBUSTER plenary sessions, the chairs stretched so far back that even the most youthful Silicon Valley college dropouts-turned VC hoovers had to squint to see the action up in front. A handful of large projection screens hung between […]

July 11, 2018

FOR NEARLY AS long as there have been ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, there have been apps that help riders compare fares and travel times. These aggregator apps allow riders to survey all the services in an area and […]

June 15, 2018

ELECTRIC, VERTICAL-LIFT AIR-TAXIS may someday criss-cross the skies, but the timelines their advocates are proposing are ambitious, to say the least. Uber, for example, predicted at its Elevate conference last month that it would begin deploying its system, UberAIR, in […]

May 29, 2018

In medicine, false positives are expensive, scary, and even painful. Yes, the doctor eventually tells you that the follow-up biopsy after that bloop on the mammogram puts you in the clear. But the intervening weeks are excruciating. A false negative […]

May 8, 2018

IF YOU TRUST the folks with their eyes tilted upward and their hands waving in the air, flying taxis could be a traffic panacea, leveraging the third dimension to make room for everyone. Uber is among the most fervent believers, […]

May 7, 2018

Indeed, if you live along the millions of miles of U.S. roads that are unpaved, unlit or unreliably marked, you’re out of luck. Such streets are often much more complicated to map, and get a lot less traffic, so companies […]

April 20, 2018

OFTEN, STREETS ARE a futile exercise in organizing disorder. Cars are meant to go here, walkers there, cyclists in that shoddy excuse for a bike path—yet no one’s that great at staying in their lane. This month, the chaos got […]

April 16, 2018

THE TRUCE BETWEEN two old foes—city governments and secretive private companies like Uber—began at the curb. If you think the curb seems an unlikely Appomattox, you haven’t been pay attention. Today, the curb represents the most contested space in the […]

April 13, 2018

THIS WEEK, WE learned the future of the car is not owning one—at least not if Uber gets its way. The ride-hailing giant came out with twin announcements: On Monday, it said it would acquire the bike-share company Jump, in […]

April 11, 2018

UBER: IT’S NOT just for cars anymore. Less than a decade after launching, it has rolled out rides for the normies (UberX), for those who don’t mind sharing (UberPool), and for those who don’t mind walking (Uber Express Pool). It […]

April 6, 2018

ABOUT 8 MONTHS ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned his troops that building the Model 3 would require “production hell.” For once, the man known to sometimes be a bit too optimistic about timelines nailed it. Last year’s Tesla’s production […]

April 3, 2018

California began accepting applications April 2 for permits to deploy self-driving cars on public roads without a human backup driver at the wheel. Recent fatal crashes by a self-driving Uber car in Arizona and a Tesla car operating in semiautonomous […]

March 27, 2018

A fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber vehicle has prompted Arizona’s governor to order the ride-sharing company to cease testing of its autonomous vehicles on the state’s public roadways. In a letter addressed to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Gov. Doug […]

March 26, 2018

The companies and officials influencing the development of self-driving technology offered a wide variety of reactions to the death of a pedestrian struck by an Uber autonomous vehicle March 18. Uber Technologies Inc. suspended the testing of its self-driving cars […]

March 23, 2018

IF YOU’VE SPENT enough time with the people building self-driving cars, you’ll know they’ve seen this coming for a while. No matter how good the tech, no matter how much better than humans it might be—eventually, everyone agreed, someone would […]