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The free rides in self-driving cars that Uber began offering in Pittsburgh Wednesday wouldn’t be allowed in California. In Michigan, legislators are considering changing a law that requires a safety driver to be behind the wheel of self-driving vehicles to handle unexpected or emergency situations. A Chicago alderman wants to ban them completely. And the […]
Silicon Valley is creating a crash course in self-driving car technology to address a shortage of engineers with help from a startup in a different field: online education. Nearly every major tech company, car company and ride services company, it seems, is developing or partnering with developers of self-driving technology, from Google parent Alphabet Inc […]
Autonomous vehicles use sensing and communication technologies to navigate safely and efficiently with little or no input from the driver. These driverless technologies will create an unprecedented revolution in how people move, and policymakers will need appropriate tools to plan for and analyze the large impacts of novel navigation systems. In this paper we derive […]
Auto accidents kill more than 33,000 Americans each year, more than homicide or prescription drug overdoses. Companies working on self-driving cars, such as Alphabet and Ford, say their technology can slash that number by removing human liabilities such as texting, drunkenness, and fatigue. But Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, says his agency’s […]
Autonomy isn’t just for cars; Mercedes-Benz has created a self-driving city bus, too. Mercedes-Benz revealed its latest creation on Monday morning. Called the Future Bus, it’s the first city bus that can drive autonomously. Mercedes did more than just unveil the futuristic vehicle. It also sent it on a 12-mile route through the streets of […]
As the co-founder and chief executive of Tesla Motors, the technology billionaire Elon Musk has consistently portrayed his company’s electric cars as cleaner, safer and more innovative than models made by other automakers. His confidence in Tesla’s technology has seemed boundless, particularly when the company announced last year that it would equip its flagship Model […]
A fatal accident in which the driver of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car operating in Autopilot mode was killed in a collision with a truck has prompted an investigation by federal highway safety regulators, the U.S. government and Tesla disclosed on Thursday. The investigation of the first known fatality in involve a Model […]
Yesterday, six platoons of self-driving trucks converged in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, part of the 2016 European Truck Platooning Challenge and marking the first time that trucks equipped with the technology had crossed international borders. Platooning is when a group of automated or semi-automated trucks (a.k.a. a road train) is connected via wi-fi on the road. The […]
How do you reduce the number of highway accidents? Just tell all the cars to look out for each other. As far out as that may sound, that’s exactly what the National Transportation Safety Board recommended this week, following a fatal bus crash, and it’s part of a fundamental shift in the automotive world. Cars are […]
In philosophy, there’s an ethical question called the trolley problem. If you had to push one large person in front of a moving trolley to save a group of people on the tracks, would you? This abstract idea has taken hold in programming self-driving cars: what happens if it’s impossible to avoid everyone? Researchers from […]