BMW and Daimler are strengthening their already-announced autonomous vehicle partnership as the two companies look to launch their next-generation self-driving tech in passenger cars by 2024.
Domino’s Pizza will use robotics company Nuro’s autonomous R2 delivery vehicle to deliver pizzas in Houston starting this year as part of a pilot program.
USPS mail is being hauled across the Southwest in self-driving trucks over the next few weeks as part of a new pilot program.
Einride’s T-Pod, an all-electric driverless truck, has started making deliveries on a stretch of public road in Sweden. Einride and customer DB Schenker are calling the deliveries the first of their kind in the world.
Anthony Levandowski is aware of his reputation.
One of the most controversial figures in autonomous driving, his background has been well-covered, from building the Ghostrider motorcycle that competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005, to his work on Google’s self-driving car.
It continues with his founding of Otto, a self-driving trucking startup acquired by Uber, to his role at the center of the Waymo vs. Uber case. Levandowski was accused of stealing Waymo’s self-driving secrets and bringing them along to Uber, which fired him. Waymo eventually accepted a settlement of $245 million.
There’s more of course, including the founding of a AI-focused religious organization, Way of the Future. It seems with Anthony Levandowski, there’s always more…
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This morning Uber Technologies Inc. announced that they have agreed to purchase 24,000 Volvo XC90 plug-in hybrids from the Swedish company to for a fleet of driverless cars. Let that sink in for a moment, 24 thousand self-driving sports utility vehicles. That is 10,000 more than the number of yellow cabs in New York City.
In this week’s top stories: Model 3 sightings, next-gen Tesla Roadster rumors, Fisker‘s all-electric claims, Model X becomes the highest safety rated SUV ever, Autopilot 2.0 and Autopark, and much more.
Earlier this week, a Tesla Model S hit a barrier on the highway near Dallas, Texas. The driver, who fortunately wasn’t injured, first blamed Tesla’s Autopilot for the crash.
We now have footage of the accident and it actually shows a situation that the Autopilot probably shouldn’t be expected to be able to handle, at least not yet. Ultimately, it serves as a reminder not to trust the system without paying attention.
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Intel has announced it will acquire 15% of mapping company HERE in an effort that will see the two companies collaborate on autonomous vehicle tech, machine learning, and more.
A press release from Intel notes the partnership will focus on development of autonomous vehicle technology it describes as “a highly scalable proof-of-concept architecture that supports real-time updates of high-definition (HD) maps for highly and fully automated driving.” It also said the two companies will collaborate on opportunities in IoT and machine learning related technology.
This month we reported on an EV enthusiast who transformed their Bayliner into an all-electric boat using Tesla battery modules. Now we take a look at a team of individuals who have their autonomous, solar-powered boat, dubbed the Seacharger, traversing the Pacific ocean towards New Zealand.
Earlier this year, we revealed that electric car startup Faraday Future (FF) hired Bosch engineering director and leading automated driving expert, Jan Becker, to lead its own self-driving effort. The company has been building an impressive team of automated driving experts under Becker, including experts from Ford and more recently, the startup hired computer vision expert, Sangmin Oh, from Nvidia.
Now we learn that just months after starting the project, Faraday Future is about to start testing self-driving car prototypes in Michigan.
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In a not so surprising but disappointing report for EV enthusiasts today, we learn that BMW is putting its electric vehicle programs on the “back burner” in order to focus its ‘i’ brand, under which the German automaker has been releasing its electric vehicles, on self-driving cars instead.
The company reportedly will not release a new all-electric vehicle until 2021.
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A report from AutoExtremist (later corroborated by The Wall Street Journal) says today that Alphabet/Google is in the late stages of discussing an “advanced technical partnership” with London-based Fiat Chrysler, citing sources with direct knowledge of the discussions…
Tesla CEO Elon was in Norway today where he gave a keynote address at a government sponsored conference on ‘Future transport solutions’. Musk gave a quick presentation and then sat down for a public talk with Minister of Transport and Communications, Ketil Solvik-Olsen (picture above).
His presentation was titled:”How to reduce global warming through renewable energy production and consumption“. He shared his views about the necessities to accelerate the transition to a post fossil fuel economy in a similar way as he did during his Paris talk last year.
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Last year, famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tesla investor Steve Juvertson recalled a conversation he had with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:
Travis recently told me that in 2020, if Telsas are autonomous, he’d want to buy all of them. He said all 500,000 of estimated 2020 production, I’d want them all, but he couldn’t get a return call from Elon.
Well apparently Kalanick couldn’t wait any longer and reportedly already placed an order for 100,000 autonomous Mercedes S-Class sedans, according to sources inside Daimler and Uber talking to German magazine Manager Magazin.
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A Tesla Model S test vehicle with a new suite of sensors has been spotted in the San Francisco Bay Area last night, as reported by a Redditor on the Tesla forum.
The vehicle appears to be equipped with LiDAR sensors on the side mirrors, a new front-facing camera, and additional sensors around the car. Although it’s definitely a Tesla Model S, it doesn’t necessarily means the car is owned by Tesla or that the automaker is testing this particular hardware suite.
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According to a report over the weekend from Crain’s Detroit Business, Google/Alphabet is seeking an R&D site for its self-driving cars near Ann Arbor, Michigan. This report comes as FCC documents last month revealed that the Mountain View company was planning to bring the cars to four new cities. Kirkland, Washington officially became one of those locations two weeks ago, and as we noted, a location near Ann Arbor makes perfect sense to be one of the next bunch…
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference last week about the release of the latest version of the company’s software for the Model S and X. The update added new and improved autonomous features to the automaker’s fleet.
During the press call, Musk reiterated that the current sensor suite the company is using to implement new autonomous features will not support full autonomous driving, but the CEO was extremely vague about the timing of the roll out for the new hardware suite that could enable fully self-driving cars.
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GM announced a $500 million investment in car-sharing company Lyft to create an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the U.S.
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Google’s self-driving car initiative has been gaining momentum over the past year, but now it looks like the company has at least one more big piece of news up its sleeve. According to a report from Yahoo Autos, Google and Ford are planning to announce a joint venture to build self-driving cars.
Tesla is currently using a hardware suite of sensors from Mobileye to get the input needed for its Autopilot system to control the Model S on highways and under some specific road conditions. But as it is often the case with Tesla (like for its seats), the company is looking to discontinue Mobileye’s system in favor of bringing it in-house, according to an email exchange between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and George Hotz, a software engineer mainly known for being the first person to jailbreak the iPhone.
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Google publishes a report for its self-driving car project once a month, and today — appropriately — the company published the report for November. Today’s report is notably unexciting, but it does mean the end of a two-month streak of the cars being accident-free. That said, the accident that Google details in this report is barely an accident…
Once again, Google wasn’t at fault in yet another fender-bender:
A vehicle approaching from behind came to a stop and then rolled forward and collided with the rear bumper of the Google AV. The approximate speed of the other vehicle at the time of impact was 4 MPH. The speed of the Google AV at the time of impact was below 1 MPH.
Other than this minor accident, which bumps the total number of accidents the cars have been involved in to 17, there’s not much new here. The cars have now driven a total of 1,320,755 autonomous miles, and 955,771 manual miles. The total number of Lexus cars on the road is the same, but there are now 30 prototypes out and about.
You can read the full report for yourself at Google’s website.
