Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google said on Monday it bears "some responsibility" after one of its self-driving cars struck a municipal bus in a minor crash earlier this month. The crash may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hitting another vehicle and the fault of the self-driving car. The Mountain View, California-based Internet search leader said it made changes to its software after the crash to avoid future incidents.

Automakers and tech companies are working hard to offer the first true self-driving car, but 75% of drivers say they wouldn’t feel safe in such a vehicle.

The robot car revolution hit a speed bump on Tuesday as senators and tech experts sounded stern warnings about the potentially fatal risks of self-driving cars. “There is no question that someone is going to die in this technology,” said Duke University roboticist Missy Cummings in testimony before the US Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation. “The question is when and what can we do to minimize that.” Automotive executives and lawmakers sniped at each other over whether...

Some 20 carmakers have committed to making automatic emergency braking systems a standard feature on virtually all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2022, according to a new plan from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Automatic brakes are designed to stop a vehicle before it collides with a car or another object. Experts say that making them standard could prevent...

Quick recap: ride-sharing behemoth Uber is famous for connecting passengers with people who have their own cars. (Well, among other things.) Uber doesn't own a fleet of cars for would-be drivers to use, which makes the fact that the company seems to have purchased least 100,000 Mercedes Benz S-Classes from Daimler all the more fascinating. What gives? Germany's Manager Magazin, which broke the story earlier today...

Project director Chris Urmson now says a fully-featured Google self-driving car might be 30 years away. If you're one of the millions of people pining to own a Google self-driving car, you better make yourself comfortable, because you may be in for a much longer wait than you ever expected. Not only that: There's a distinct chance that once you get behind the wheel of the first commercial version of the Google car, it may not take you where you need to go.

As you know if you've driven anywhere ever, traffic lights are part of a vast conspiracy designed to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible for you to get where you want to go. Lights change from green to red because someone might be coming from another direction, which isn't a very efficient way to run things, since you spend so much of your travel time either slowing down, speeding up, or stopped uselessly.

Volvo has made quite a few ambitious safety pledges in the past year. In addition to accepting full liability in the case of accidents that involve autonomous vehicles, Volvo has also set a goal to have no deaths in the company’s vehicles by 2020. As Volvo’s CEO of North America Lex Kerssemakers would have it, autonomous technology will be a major factor in achieving that goal.

George "Geohot" Hotz's attempt to put cheap, self-driving tech into any existing car raised eyebrows (and Tesla's ire) when it was revealed late last year. Now, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital funds is throwing its wallet behind Hotz's grand idea. Andreessen Horowitz has written a check for $3.1 million to help Hotz hire engineers and turn his jury-rigged system into a working product. He's joining some illustrious company, since the fund has previously...

IN 2011, DON FOSS, perhaps the richest used-car salesman in the history of the world, commissioned a half-hour film about himself and posted it to YouTube. The Don Foss Story opens with one of his TV ads from the 1970s, ads for which Foss hired an actor to portray him. (The real Foss, who is portly and balding, says he might have played himself "if I looked like Robert Redford.") At the ad's conclusion, we meet the film's narrator: "Today I'm going to guide...

When self-driving cars get here, they’ll make our commutes more efficient and allow us to get the kids to soccer practice without disrupting mom and dad’s work days. They’ll conserve resources, boost mobility for seniors and others who can’t, and make deadly traffic accidents all but disappear. It’s all great stuff. But the impact of self-driving cars will go deeper than even that, according to researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology, who’ve begun to study the potential...

The car is the star. That’s been true for well over a century—unrivaled staying power for an industrial-age, pistons-and-brute-force machine in an era so dominated by silicon and software. Cars conquered the daily culture of American life back when top hats and child labor were in vogue, and well ahead of such other innovations as radio, plastic, refrigerators, the electrical grid, and women’s suffrage. A big part of why they’ve stuck around is that...

Futurists have suggested that one day, self-driving cars might augment or even replace public transport, but for the town elders of Beverly Hills, this future is nearer than you'd think. Earlier this month, the city's council voted unanimously to create a program to "develop autonomous vehicles as public transportation." The council's vision is for self-driving vehicles to provide "on-demand, point-to-point transportation,"...

In 2014, in the USA alone, cars traveled an estimated 2,926 billion miles (4,740 billion kilometers) - not always safely. During that year, 32,675 people lost their lives in traffic accidents, and a much larger number were injured. This meant around $200 billion (175 billion euros) in insurance claims and another $670 billion of uncompensated losses in pain and suffering, lost work-time, damaged gear, emergency services costs...

As you might imagine, we at Ars get bombarded with PR pitches about connected cars. Devices that plug into your car's OBDII port. Smartwatch integration with new models direct from the factory. Cars that alert you if you've left your keys behind. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and more ideas like them are coming from both the tech and auto industries. LTE modems are becoming widespread in new models and not just in luxury cars—try buying a Chevrolet without...

In the animated TV show Rick and Morty, there is a car-security system that keeps passengers safe by inflicting psychological warfare on, and then destroying, anyone who so much as approaches the vehicle. That fictional system, as anyone who’s ever woken up to a car alarm blasting at 3 a.m. knows, is only slightly more irritating than the real ones.

The overwhelming majority of Americans don't want to own a fully self-driving car in the future, according to a new survey by the University of Michigan (U-M). The online survey involving 618 respondents showed that 37.2% were "very concerned" about riding in a completely self-driving vehicle, while 66.6% were "very or moderately concerned." Only 9.7% of respondents said they were not at all concerned about riding in a completely self-driving vehicle.

All cars registered before 1997 will be banned in Paris as of July 1st, under a new law aimed at curbing the city's chronic smog and traffic problems. As Le Monde reports, the older cars will be banned from the city center during weekdays, as will all motorcycles registered before 1999. The ban was announced last year as part of an anti-pollution measure that will become progressively stricter in coming years. By 2020, the ban will extend to cover cars that were registered prior to 2010. Those who violate the rule can face a fine of up to €35 ($39), or €78 as of January 1st, 2017.

Norway’s four main political parties have been discussing a possible ban on new gasoline-powered car sales (diesel or petrol) for quite some time, but they were not able to come to an understanding until now, according to a new report from Dagens Næringsliv (Paywall), an important newspaper in Norway. The four main political parties, both from the right and the left, have agreed on a new energy policy that will include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales as soon as 2025 – making it one of the most aggressive timeline of its kind for such a policy.

Preston Tucker launched a car company shortly after World War II. Those who saw "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," starring Jeff Bridges know the general outline of the man who raised millions in a stock offering only to be dragged into federal court and tried for fraud. Tucker was acquitted but his business was ruined. Someone who should study the Tucker story is Elon Musk: His actions with Tesla mirror some of the things for which Tucker got in trouble. Musk and Tesla have done nothing wrong, mind you. But remember that Tucker was ruined by the government and he had done nothing wrong either.