Technology

Eighteen months ago, Uber’s self-driving car unit, Uber Advanced Technologies Group, was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Now, it’s up for sale and a competing autonomous vehicle technology startup is in talks with Uber to buy it, according to three sources familiar with the deal. Aurora Innovation, the startup founded by three veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry who led programs at Google, Tesla and Uber, is in

Japan's Honda Motor Co said on Wednesday it will be the world's first automaker to mass produce sensor-packed level 3 autonomous cars that will allow drivers to let their vehicles navigate congested expressway traffic. "Honda is planning to launch sales of a Honda Legend (luxury sedan) equipped with the newly approved automated driving equipment" before the end of March 2021, Honda said in a press release. The race to build self-driving cars is a key technology battleground for automa

Companies describe the contest as a matter of ensuring flexibility for a new generation of workers who want to choose when and how they work. Opponents see an effort to exploit workers and avoid employee-related costs that could amount to more than $392 million each for Uber Technologies Inc, Lyft Inc, a Reuters calculation showed.

A group of business leaders and public policy experts is launching a new body to grapple with thorny questions surrounding the future of transportation including self-driving and electric vehicles. The Commission on the Future of Mobility, reported earlier by Reuters, was formally unveiled on Friday. The group plans to propose a new regulatory framework to address a global transportation sector "on the cusp of a worldwide transition driven by shared, connected, autonomous, and electric technol

As Tesla touts the cutting-edge nature of its new Full Self Driving software, rival Mercedes-Benz says it has developed a similar system but stops short of allowing members of the public to take it on urban roads. The Germans, pioneers in developing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), are taking a step-by-step approach to releasing new technology, waiting for their own engineers, rather than the general public, to validate their system. Advanced driver assistance systems can pr

Self-driving tech company Waymo, which this month opened its driverless taxi service in the Phoenix suburbs to the public, on Friday said its autonomous vehicles there had been involved in 18 minor incidents since 2019 during tests and actual rides. Waymo, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc , said it was releasing the data https://waymo.com/safety to improve transparency and open a public dialogue. Waymo also said it hopes its safety data will help companies and regulators devise in

General Motors Co's Super Cruise once again edged Tesla's Autopilot in an evaluation of 17 vehicles equipped with active driving assistance systems (ADAS) by Consumer Reports, the testing organization said on Wednesday. A Tesla Model Y fitted with Autopilot finished "a distant second," the group said, to a Cadillac CT6 equipped with Super Cruise, which GM is rolling out to more than 20 vehicles - including its new Hummer electric pickup truck - over the next three years.

Tesla on Tuesday night released a beta, or test version, of what it calls a "Full Self Driving" software upgrade to an undisclosed number of "expert, careful" drivers. During a Tesla earnings call on Wednesday, Chief Executive Elon Musk said the latest upgrade was planned to be widely released by the end of this year, with the system becoming more robust as it collected more data.

Then it was another woman's turn in the exercise to prepare drivers for Uganda's new all-female ride-hailing service, Diva Taxi. The taxi service, dreamed up by a local woman who lost her logistics job at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, was launched in June and has recruited over 70 drivers. It's uncommon to find women taxi drivers in Uganda, a socially conservative East African country where most women labor on farms or pursue work in the informal sector.

The race for driverless autonomous vehicles is heating up and on Thursday Cruise became the first to receive a permit to test cars without anyone in them on the streets of San Francisco from California's Department of Motor Vehicles. Cruise, which is majority owned by General Motors Co and counts Honda Motor Co Ltd and SoftBank Group as investors, has been testing 180 self-driving cars in San Francisco with a safety driver behind the wheel, and the permit allows five o

Tesla has boosted the range of existing Model Y crossovers through a software update.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced Italian tyremaker Pirelli to temporarily shut its factories in March, R&D chief Pierangelo Misani needed a rapid rethink. With a new range of products due to be launched by early next year at the latest, Misani scrambled technicians and IT teams to get more research and development shifted online so locked down engineers could test materials and tyres virtually. The pandemic has disrupted production and sales for tyremakers worldwide - Pirelli's r

In recent years, Nidec's founder Shigenobu Nagamori has turned his attention to autos, and a technology which turns electricity stored in the battery into propulsion power. This technology, called an e-axle or e-drive, is emerging as a new competitive front as the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles. By 2030, Nagamori says he wants a 35% slice of a global e-axle market that is forecast to be worth $20-30 billion a year by then, up from an estimated $2.8-$3 billion now.