autonomous vehicles

California governor Gavin Newsom worked late last night, vetoing a law that would have banned self-driving trucks without a human aboard from state roads until the early 2030s. State lawmakers had voted through the law with wide margins,…

While Vasquez and Uber may find some closure in the plea deal, self-driving expert Bryant Walker Smith says the NTSB should revisit the Slack issue to find the truth. “I don’t want the story of the first automated vehicle fatality to be a…

What would Colin Chapman say? The late founder of Lotus was a restless innovator whose famous mantra was “Simplify, then add lightness.” Surely the new Eletre, a complex and heavy electric SUV, is the antithesis of everything Chapman stood…

This week, US senators heard alarming testimony suggesting that unchecked AI could steal jobs, spread misinformation, and generally “go quite wrong,” in the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (whatever that means). He and several lawmakers…

Self-driving-car developers initially held a similar philosophy of data maximization. They generate video from arrays of cameras inside and outside the vehicles, audio recordings from microphones, point clouds mapping objects in space from…

When will those trials lead to autonomous construction machinery doing real work on construction sites? “We'll get there,” Weiss says, but Caterpillar’s partners need to be comfortable with the technology’s maturity. “There are risks…

Zoox has designed a whole suite of sounds for its vehicles. The resulting audio palette sounds like the synthy soundtrack to an '80s movie that’s been sliced into tiny bits. The car's interior aura is a slow ambient hum, like something…

In most cases, driver-monitoring systems use an infrared camera or cameras on a car’s dash, steering wheel, or rearview mirror. Instead of streaming imagery to the cloud like a cellphone, they process imagery using software inside the car…

Tesla told the agency this week that customers had filed warranty claims matching the situations highlighted by NHTSA on at least 18 occasions between spring 2019 and fall 2022. The filing notes that the carmaker said it was not aware of…

US investors looking to build an EV portfolio are not exactly spoilt for choice. Aside from Tesla, many companies haven’t produced cars, or if they have, they’re in such small numbers it’s difficult to know their true potential.…