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.

Driverless lorries are to be trialled in the UK, Chancellor George Osborne is expected to confirm in his Budget speech this month. Trials later this year on the M6 in Cumbria will see the vehicles travel in convoy, with a driver in the leading lorry, the Times reported. The tests will take place on a quiet stretch of the motorway, it added. The Department for Transport confirmed it was planning trials of driverless "HGV platoons".

The federal government is operating in high gear trying to get out ahead of the self-driving car movement, which is probably good considering the existing laws and regulations are totally unprepared for what the future may bring, according to a draft report commissioned by the US Department of Transportation. The report, released today, analyzed the current federal rulebook to determine how automated vehicles...

The World Economic Forum, the Detroit Auto Show and CES all occurred recently, and each has driven a great deal of discussion around self-driving cars.

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...

Battery-powered pizzabot has 20-mile range; customers access pizza with a code.

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.

Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. "It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!" Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars...

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...

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...

About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent. The trucks set off from their bases in three European countries and completed their journeys in Rotterdam in the Netherlands today (Apr. 6). One set of trucks, made by the Volkswagen subsidiary Scania, traveled more than 2,000 km and crossed four borders to get there.

Swedish carmaker Volvo has said it plans to launch a self-driving experiment in China involving up to 100 cars. Local drivers will test cars on public roads in "everyday conditions", according to a company press release. The move was announced at an event in Beijing on 7 April, though details of a start date were not provided. One analyst said he thought China was at the forefront of the development of autonomous cars.

Toyota's taking a different approach to creating the self-driving cars of our future. Unlike other automakers and tech giants that have already begun investing time and resources into the space, the Japanese company's developing a partially autonomous system to occasionally take the wheel. According to MIT Technology Review, the "guardian angel" feature, which is under development at Toyota Research Institute, would only temporarily take control from the driver during...

Motor Trend magazine managed to capture the automotive world’s attention on Wednesday with a cover story that it billed as an “exclusive” look.

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,"...

hongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ford Motor Co.’s partner in China, said it completed a 1,200-mile road trip to test a self-driving car as part of its ambitions to produce highly automated vehicles by 2020. The car set off from the company’s headquarters in Chongqing and reached Beijing after six days, the automaker said in a statement to the Shenzhen stock exchange. The driverless car employed cameras and radar to test automatic cruising, lane-keeping and changing...

From Here to Autonomy: Google’s leading role in the new industry of driverless cars stems not just from tech expertise. Its killer app is aggressive lobbying. By Paul Ingrassia, Alexandria Sage and David Shepardson.