Google’s parent company Alphabet has a division called Waymo that’s working on self-driving cars. It has an entire fleet of autonomous cars that are being tested on public roads. The company eventually wants to launch a ride-hailing service that uses these self-driving cars. Waymo hasn’t said what the fares for its self-driving taxi service will be but it has reportedly started testing trip fares with early riders.
We imagine that the thought of getting into a self-driving car can be a bit scary. After all this is a computer that controls the speed and direction of the car which can be a bit disconcerting at first. However Apple could have come up with an idea on how to better handle such situations, which is by detecting the stress levels of the passenger.
Uber grounded its entire fleet of self-driving cars after the fatal accident earlier this year in Arizona. It halted testing of its self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles after the accident. Uber today announced that it’s putting these cars back on public roads in Pittsburgh but they will not be driven in autonomous mode. These cars will only be operated in manual mode.
Uber’s self-driving car operations have been under scrutiny ever since the fatal accident involving one of its autonomous cars in Arizona back in March. The company has since ended its self-driving car program in Arizona. The company also suspended driverless car testing in all other markets which include Toronto, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. It now appears to be trimming the staff attached to the overall project as well. According to […]
Chinese tech giant Baidu has been working on its own self-driving technology and the company is now reportedly gearing up to launch its self-driving buses in Japan next year. Baidu’s Apolong fully self-driving bus has been developed in collaboration with Chinese manufacturer King Long and it will be first rolled out in a handful of Chinese cities before it lands in Japan.
Tesla is no stranger to choosing interesting names for the various performance driving modes in its cars. Its Model S and Model X feature modes named “Insane” and “Ludicrous.” The company CEO Elon Musk has revealed that the upcoming Tesla Semi truck is going to have an equally interesting name for a mode, it’s going to feature a “Mad Max” mode.
Like other companies that are testing their self-driving cars on public roads, Uber also has a human safety driver behind the wheel at all times. One of the company’s autonomous cars in Tempe, Arizona was involved in a crash this March which led to the death of a pedestrian. A new report released by the police mentions that Rafaela Vasquez, the safety driver, was watching Hulu on her phone just […]
For a while we’ve known about Apple’s interest in self-driving cars and the technology behind it. We’re not sure what the company plans to do about it, but whatever the company is planning for the technology is certainly progressing thanks to a recent hire in the form of Jaime Waydo, a senior engineer who previously worked with Waymo and was also at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Tesla has long warned its drivers and has insisted that its Autopilot feature is not a self-driving feature, and government officials have in the past warned Tesla about the way they market it. However it seems that the company could finally be transitioning into offering full self-driving features in an upcoming update.
The Japanese government announced after a strategic review today that a self-driving car service could be launched in Tokyo in time for the 2020 Olympics. The country sees this as a method of driving new investment into the technology of the future to fuel economic growth. The government will then try to commercialize this self-driving car service by 2022.
The state of California already allows driverless cars to be tested on public roads (assuming the company has applied for and been given a permit to do so). This is why it doesn’t come as a surprise that they are now allowing driverless cars to pick up passengers, according to a recent report from The San Francisco Examiner.
Uber and Waymo had long been involved in a costly legal battle covering self-driving technology. Waymo, a startup owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, claimed that Uber stole its trade secrets and demanded $1.8 billion. The matter was eventually settled by the two companies with Waymo getting around $245 million worth of Uber equity and a guarantee that the company won’t use Waymo’s confidential research in its autonomous cars. With […]
A couple of years ago, Uber announced that they would headed over to Arizona to conduct their self-driving car tests. It seemed to be going well until a couple of months ago where Uber was involved in a fatal accident with one of its self-driving cars. Naturally the program was halted and it was unclear if Uber would get it back up and running again.