Tag: Self-driving car

April 12, 2021

Huawei Technologies Co. will invest $1 billion on researching self-driving and electric-car technologies, accelerating plans to compete with Tesla Inc. and Xiaomi Corp. in the world’s biggest vehicle arena. Huawei’s autonomous-driving technology already has surpassed Tesla’s in some spheres, for […]

October 26, 2020

The promise of self-driving cars and robotaxi fleets once seemed just around the corner, but reality is setting in. Makers of the underlying technology are pivoting to more realistic ways of making money in the here and now. Among the […]

September 23, 2020

Legislation that would allow carmakers to sell as many as 100,000 self-driving vehicles per year in the U.S. is being reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, but one of its biggest cheerleaders is staying on the sidelines until next […]

July 24, 2019

CRUISE, THE STARTUP General Motors acquired to develop its self-driving car, will launch an autonomous taxi service on the gnarly, crowded streets of San Francisco, CEO Dan Ammann said Wednesday. It will not, however, do so by the end of […]

April 22, 2019

READ THE BREATHLESS articles and bold tweets and you could be forgiven for thinking that the fully autonomous vehicle is around the corner, with a collision- and congestion-free future riding shotgun. Prepare for disappointment. A decade of massive investment in […]

December 5, 2018

Waymo, the frontrunner in the self-driving car industry, today announces the moment everyone has been waiting for: It is officially “launching” a robo-taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, wherein riders will use an app to hail the vehicles to take them […]

October 29, 2018

Until a self-driving Uber killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg im March, autonomous vehicle tech felt like a pure success story. A hot, new space where engineers could shake the world with software, saving lives and banking piles of cash. But […]

September 21, 2018

Of the many acronyms engineers spend their lives internalizing, few are more valuable than KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Constrain the problem, reduce the variables, and make life as easy as possible when designing novel systems — like, say, a […]

September 12, 2018

Self-driving cars virtually have made every mistake imaginable inside the office of Applied Intuition. One braked hard to miss a pup that had run into the street, another barely avoided a truck with a blown tire barreling down the freeway. […]

September 11, 2018

Automakers make concept cars for one of two reasons. A: They have a good idea of what their next car will look like and want to share, but aren’t ready to reveal a final version yet. B: They have a […]

September 6, 2018

They are going to be a lot more than just cars that drive themselves. We’re giving a free annual subscription to the TreeHugger newsletter to the first person who tells us where this Volvo 360C is parked. But ignore the […]

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 13, 2018

TreeHugger has said it many times before, but fully autonomous cars probably won’t look much like cars anymore. And still, cars are so ingrained in our popular consciousness that I, personally, have a hard time picturing what comes next. Fortunately, […]

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 24, 2018

Just over an hour into Tuesday’s California Public Utilities Commission public meeting on the future of self-driving taxis, the machines took over. “Please pardon the interruption,” a kindly robotic voice said, cutting into a government official’s prepared remarks. “Your conference […]

January 25, 2018

OVER THE PAST few years, Uber has schemed to boost its self-driving efforts by spying on rivals, poaching staff, and acquiring their software, according to newly released court documents. Though competitor intelligence work is standard among large companies, the details […]

December 20, 2017

LAST FRIDAY, THE Northern District Court of California finally posted a long-awaited document, a letter written by the lawyer of an ex-Uber security employee. It was a doozy, a 37-page compendium of alleged criminal and unsavory activity witnessed by that […]

November 20, 2017

ALMOST HALF OF Americans will hop in their cars for a Thanksgiving trip this year. But if you were being very precise—if you were a team of Massachusetts of Technology researchers who study human-machine interactions—you wouldn’t say that all those […]

October 21, 2017

George Jetson had a flying car. Yet he still commuted to work. Even though the Jetsons lived in a world where everyone teleconferenced, and even saw the doctor via telemedicine, it still didn’t occur to the Jetsons’ creators that people […]

October 5, 2017

Waymo is about to announce that its robocar ride-sharing program in Phoenix will dispense with its backup driver, according to a story in TheInformation.com. That would make it the first-ever commercial application of true self-driving technology. The report cites two […]