When California police officers approached a Tesla stopped in the centre of a five-lane highway outside San Francisco last week, they found a man asleep at the wheel. The driver, who was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, told them his car was in “autopilot”, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system. In a separate incident this week, firefighters in Culver City reported that a Tesla rear-ended their parked fire truck as it attended an accident on the freeway. Again, the driver said the vehicle was in autopilot.

Elon Musk has promised the world that a completely automated Tesla will be available by the end of 2018. Although other companies revise their estimates for self-driving vehicles in the consumer market - Waymo has pushed its date back to 2020, for instance - Musk is being coy. He'll have it ready even sooner.

Toyota Research Institute, the Silicon Valley-based arm of the biggest carmaker in the world, just unveiled the latest version of its autonomous test vehicle. The vehicle — a Lexus LS 600hL test vehicle equipped with LIDAR, radar, and camera arrays — is an iterative improvement on the vehicle Toyota showed off twice last year. (The institute is calling this one Platform 3.0.) The car will be on display at CES in Las Vegas next week.

The MIT Camera Culture group present a new approach to time-of-flight imaging that increases its depth resolution 1,000-fold. That’s the type of resolution that could make self-driving cars practical. The new approach could also enable accurate distance measurements through fog, which has proven to be a major obstacle to the development of self-driving cars.

Autonomous trucks are moving towards commercial reality on Canadian highways as companies look to boost productivity amid a driver shortage and governments seek to reduce deadly crashes.

Owning a car won't always be the mark of economic advantage. In a long profile of automaker Ford Motor Co.’s efforts to remake itself in a new era of mobility, Kevin Roose says that “driving isn’t just a mechanical task -- it’s a social act.” Driving has always been that way, from time spent chatting with fellow travelers to the hand signals used at intersections, from the rules by which drivers self-regulate themselves to stopping at red lights.

A self-driving shuttle bus in Las Vegas was involved in a crash on its first day of service. The vehicle - carrying “several” passengers - was hit by a lorry driving at slow speed. Nobody was injured in the incident which city officials say was the fault of the human driver of the lorry. The man was subsequently given a ticket by police.

The death of a Tesla Model S rider in May 2016, which occurred while the car was operating on autopilot, was a jarring resurrection of the debate behind the safety of autonomous vehicles. The death represented the only fatality in the history of the world from an autonomous vehicle—for comparison’s sake, there were 40,200 car-related fatalities in 2016 in the U.S alone. Nevertheless, the public and policymakers alike have made it clear that they demand an extremely high threshold of tested safety before self-driving cars can be let loose en masse.

It’s not every day a titan of industry predicts the demise of his own. But Bob Lutz, the former vice chairman of General Motors, believes the auto industry is not long for this world. “It saddens me to say it, but we are approaching the end of the automotive era,” he writes this month for Automotive News. Our daily travel, he predicts, will migrate to standardized passenger modules as the demolition of the traditional auto industry accelerates.

Silicon Valley graphics chipmaker NVIDIA unveiled on Tuesday the first computer chips for developing fully autonomous vehicles and said it had more than 25 customers working to build a new class of driverless cars, robotaxis and long-haul trucks. Deutsche Post DHL Group, the world’s largest mail and logistics company, and ZF [ZFF.UL], a top automotive parts supplier, plan to deploy a fleet of autonomous delivery trucks based on the new chips, starting in 2019, NVIDIA said.

U.S. Sen. Gary Peters' bill would allow as many as 80,000 self-driving cars exempt from safety standards to be sold in three years' time.

Picture this: Your car is driving you to work. What do you do? Pull out your phone and start checking emails? Get a novel and start reading? Do you bother to turn on the radio and listen to Morning Edition? When you tell your grandkids one day that back in the day, in the twenty-oughts, you used to listen to the radio on the work, will it seem as archaic to them as the idea of a family gathering around a radio to listen at night does now? Why would you listen to a radio in the car if you could have a screen instead?

A Ford van zooming around the Washington D.C. area last month, seemingly without a human in the driver’s seat, wasn’t self-driving after all: it was a man in a ‘seat suit.’ A fake driverless car might seem like a weird experiment, especially considering the fact that there’s an entire fake town for testing self-driving vehicles at Ford’s disposal.

Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi, working together as Alliance 2022, have announced a six year project that includes becoming an industry leader in the field of self-driving ride sharing vehicles. The plan is very light on actual details of how it plans on achieving this; it says that it plans to release 12 electric cars, and 40 vehicles capable of autonomous driving by 2022 but doesn’t go into much detail. Still, it’s interesting to see such major manufacturers taking steps towards an autonomous future for the taxi industry.

A Norwegian container ship called the Yara Birkeland will be the world’s first electric, autonomous, zero-emissions ship. With a capacity of up to 150 shipping containers, the battery-powered ship will be small compared to modern standards (the biggest container ship in the world holds 19,000 containers, and an average-size ship holds 3,500), but its launch will mark the beginning of a transformation of the global shipping industry. This transformation could heavily impact global trade as well as the environment.

With the entire automotive industry looking toward a future of driverless mobility, commercially owned self-driving taxis seem poised to be on the frontline of tomorrow. However, nobody seemed to realize that these vehicles will eventually become little more than mobile toilets.

As a Director here at Pythian, and the host of the Datascape podcast, technology and business are two topics that are always on my mind. Currently, in the business world, there’s a lot of talk about self-driving transport trucks and how they will disrupt the transportation industry and potentially remove a lot of middle class jobs. As I started thinking about these things, I thought...

MIT researchers argue that for now, robot copilots make more sense than autonomous taxis.

When is it ethical to hand our decisions over to machines? And when is external automation a step too far?

Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber, its competitor in the automated vehicle business, is going to trial. Judge William Alsup ruled that Uber could not force the lawsuit over theft of trade secrets into private arbitration. Instead, the trial will play out publicly, with evidence being presented mostly in the open. This is not the scenario that Uber wanted.