CES

We curate the week's events with a focus on Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell strategy. Plus other news and notes from the automotive world.

Audi brings its Prologue concept to CES with a fresh coat of paint, a refreshed interior, autonomous driving technology and hybrid assist for the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 to drive itself and its output up to 605 hp and 701 lb-ft of torque.

Episode #412 of the Autoblog Podcast is here, and this week, Dan Roth, Steven Ewing, and Brandon Turkus discuss the automotive news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show and talk about the cars we're most looking forward to driving in 2015.

California celebrates groundbreaking for high-speed rail system, Elon Musk talks more about SpaceX than Tesla in his Reddit AMA and Ford announces 25 global mobility experiments at CES.

As automakers jockey to showcase their latest infotainment technologies at CES, studies show that customers don't just want more tech in their cars - they're willing to pay for it, too.

Volkswagen is going all out at CES 2015 to show off the future of automotive technology. The company thinks in the future that electric cars might be able to find charging stations by themselves and that gesture controls might be the next step in operating a vehicle. Besides the Golf R Touch concept, VW is debuting its next-gen MIB II infotainment system that supports MirrorLink, Apple CarPlay and Google Android Auto.

The industry is pointing towards a driverless future, and Mercedes-Benz is showing its vision for it with the F 015 Luxury in Motion concept this week at CES in Las Vegas.

Toyota makes a splash at CES by saying its hydrogen fuel cell patents will be open for licensing, for free, until around 2020. The move follows Tesla opening its patents up last summer.

Here's your first official look at the 2016 Chevy Volt, ahead of its debut at the Detroit Auto Show. Chevy gave us a sneak peek of its new gasoline-electric sedan in Las Vegas as part of its CES festivities.

CES 2015 might as well be called the 2015 Automotive Tech Show, as OEMs and tech companies flock to show off their cutting-edge wares in Las Vegas.

This silhouette foretells of a potentially self-driving prototype which Mercedes evidently plans on presenting at the CES next week.

Volvo will demonstrate a new safety innovation at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas next month that enables vehicle-to-cyclist communication to warn both a driver and a bicycle rider about an impending collision. It was developed in partnership with POC, a maker of safety gear for gravity sports athletes, and Ericsson, and works through a smartphone app and the Volvo cloud.

Hyundai has announced that it's bringing a new, smartphone-enabled infotainment system to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show. Set to arrive on the brand's lower-end 2016 models, it will eventually be offered across the entry level range, and is compatible with both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Automatic parking systems are something of a novelty, in their present form. Sure, modern parallel parking systems work well enough. And they're great if you lack the special awareness required to complete such a task. But frankly, how often is the average owner of such a system in a position to use it? Perpendicular parking systems, meanwhile, are basically an admission that you don't really deserve a driver's license.

We head back to CES in Las Vegas to check on the progress of autonomous vehicles in 2014. We go hands-free on the highway with Audi, narrowly avoid a collision with Ford and hear all about BMW's drifting driverless car. But first we take a ride on Induct's self-driving Navia shuttle.

Without a doubt, the most impressive thing that BMW showed at CES this year was a driverless M235i drifting flawlessly around a wet track at Las Vegas Speedway. However, that bit of robotic helmsmanship wasn't the only trick the German company had up its sleeve. Or, more to the point, on its wrist.

Ford marketing head honcho Jim Farley made waves at CES this week by telling show attendees, "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it," according to a report by Business Insider. Farley continued by saying, "We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone."

In an age when luxury was all about sheltering the fortunate from the world around them, companies like Mercedes-Benz were satisfied simply to coddle their drivers and passengers in cocoons of leather and wood. But as luxury car buyers increasingly expect their vehicles to connect them with the world around them, Mercedes is increasingly investing in information and entertainment systems that make navigating the world that much easier. It is those technologies which Mercedes had to showcase this

Before taking a ride in Audi's impressive Piloted Driving A7, we took a short spin up and down the Las Vegas strip to check out a smaller, but intriguing piece of Audi driver assistance technology called Traffic Light Assist that promises to help drivers make every green light.

Not content to pummel CES show goers with laser lights and self-piloting vehicles, Audi has also pulled the wraps (well, some of the wraps) off the interior of its upcoming next-gen TT. While the car itself wasn't on hand for us to check out, Audi did mock up the cockpit, complete with its all-new Virtual Cockpit central display and the latest iteration of the company's Multi Media Interface (MMI).

Come September, the world's first electric racing series will kick off with the inaugural FIA Formula E Championship. But while the organizers have shown the Spark-Renault SRT_01E in static form around the world and even taken it to the track for testing, the first time the public has been able to see the car in action didn't come until yesterday.