Research

It envisions a universal signal to communicate what an AV is doing.

Google compiles its first Automotive Trends Report, based on search data from three global markets. Americans' first loves are dogs and cameras.

88 percent of car buyers go online to sites like Autoblog to research and compare cars they're interested in.

Navigant Research looked at 18 companies working on self-driving technology.

The lives of the many outweigh the cost to your wallet.

Developing cars for different markets is very costly, and finding a way to unify regulations could dramatically reduce those costs.

Columbus, Ohio has earned $140 million to be a living laboratory for the future of transport. Don't act so surprised.

A short tour of the research posters at the EVS29 conference in Montreal.

The students performing research with Stanford University's Audi TTS test rig "Shelley" (not to be confused with Audi's own self-driving race cars) are getting a kick out of the numbers generated by the machine.

Toyota is dedicating itself to research into artificial intelligence, announcing a partnership with MIT and Stanford University.

General Motors is undertaking a multimillion-dollar project to renovate the old Durant-Dort carriage factory in Flint into an archive and research facility.

Virginia Tech researchers find a way to make hydrogen from corn waste.

What do we need to have happen first? Have more people buy electric vehicles, or provide charging stations for EV drivers to plug into? Two researchers believe the government could stimulate the electric-car market by building more chargers. It might be even more worthwhile than offering tax credits.

Ford is getting serious about developing more sophisticated technology for its models, and to make things even better, the automaker is opening the new Research and Innovation Center Palo Alto in Silicon Valley. With a former Apple engineer as the center's technical head, the lab is focusing on five areas: connectivity, mobility, autonomous vehicles, customer experience and big data.

Next up on the hot-button list of things that can kill you behind the wheel: "highway hypnosis." That's the zombie-like, autopilot phase you get into on a long highway drive when there isn't much to distract you, like curves or traffic. Digging further into what it is and how to combat it, Hyundai-Kia engineers and the University of Michigan are commencing a study that will measure brainwave activity in o

Don't tell Ray LaHood, but a study from Carnegie Mellon University and the London School of Economics has said "Hold the Phone!" to the argument that talking on a mobile phone while driving raises the risk of a crash. Said one of the study's two authors, "Using a cell phone while driving may be distracting, but it does not lead to higher crash risk in the setting we examined."

Who would have ever guessed that an insect could drive a car? Well, sort of.

Turns out, the good folks at Audi aren't nihilists. The German automaker has joined up with Columbia University researchers to make predictions about city life in 2050, when 7 billion people will be urban dwellers. The result is five potential future scenarios, and none of them involve world destruction. Or even replicants.

So much for all those systems that allow you to convert your voice to text messages. Reuters reports that a new study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M has found the technology to be no safer to use while driving than employing a traditional handheld device. The study found that drivers took around twice as long to react to situations on the road as they did while they weren't texting and that eye contact with the