Amazon acquired a company called Zoox to "help bring their vision of autonomous ride-hailing to reality." It's important right this minute to be extra clear, here, that Amazon did NOT just acquire the video conferencing brand Zoom - that's a different company altogether. Amazon acquired Zoox, a California-based company "working to design autonomous ride-hailing vehicles from the ground up."
Mercedes-Benz will use NVIDIA's DRIVE platform for its driver-assistance and autonomy in future vehicles, the automaker has announced today, including powering cars that can drive themselves from address to address on regular routes. The deal will see the first new Mercedes using NVIDIA DRIVE from 2024, as the German automaker revamps its fleet.
BMW and Mercedes-Benz have put their autonomous driving collaboration on hold, blaming the expense of building a shared system for the decision. The two German automakers announced their self-driving alliance in early 2019, focusing on developing a Level 4 autonomous system that would allow their cars to navigate independently without any human involvement, within certain conditions.
Ford's Mustang Mach-E electric crossover will join a very exclusive club of vehicles with hands-free driver assistance, still far from full autonomy but nonetheless promising a more relaxed driving experience - if the conditions are right. Though the 2021 Mustang Mach-E is on track to begin deliveries later this year, the newly-announced Ford Active Drive Assist system won't actually be available until late 2021. However confusion around the system is already cropping up now.
Computational photography trailblazer Light has quietly given up its smartphone camera ambitions, despite inking deals with Nokia, Sony, and others to use complex multi-sensor tech for better images. The company's approach eschewed the "one big sensor" angle that was most prevalent in smartphones, replacing it with a cluster of multiple sensors the data of which would be combined to produce a final frame.
The primary objective for self-driving cars, at least the ones pushed by proponents of the technology, isn't the convenience of the driver or passenger. That is just one of the goals or even a by-product of what these autonomous vehicles bring to the table. After all, one can only sit back and relax and take one's hands off the wheel and eyes of the road when you're 200% sure the self-driving car can safely drive itself through any road condition or obstacle. It turns out, however, that our current autonomous driving technologies can only avoid 34% of crashes that human drivers caused.
Volkswagen and autonomous vehicle company Argo AI have completed their $2.6 billion investment deal, paving the way for future VW Group models to gain new driverless tech. Argo AI broke cover in 2017 with a billion dollars of Ford's money to play with; now, it's expanding to a new facility in Europe.
Researchers all around the world are working hard on self-driving cars to help people unable to drive themselves to get around and take the roads around the nation and the world safer. Yandex has announced its fourth-generation of self-driving cars that originally developed with Hyundai Mobis. The new self-driving platform operates on the 2020 Hyundai Sonata and joins an existing fleet of over 100 self-driving Toyota Priuses that Yandex operates.
Self-driving vehicles always look cool on TV and films but getting them right in real life no easy task. Considering the human lives involved, autopilot systems are often put under intense scrutiny to ensure nothing goes terribly wrong. Unfortunately, things do go wrong to different degrees, and, fortunately for one driver in Taiwan, the story didn't have a tragic ending, even if his Tesla met a different fate after crashing into the roof of a truck.
Audi has set up a new high-tech car division, Artemis, focused on developing "a pioneering model" that will bypass the traditional process. The team will be based in Ingolstadt and get to tap into all of the Volkswagen Group hardware, software, and engineering and design talent. However it'll be wielding those in a way to fast-track a new electric car to market.
The coronavirus pandemic around the world has forced many people to reconsider the way they acquire the things they need for their daily lives. During the pandemic, simple trips to the grocery store or pharmacy could be hazardous to your health. For Americans who require prescription medications, trips to the pharmacy aren't an option no matter what's going on in the outside world.
Intel's autonomous car division, Mobileye, has released a new video showing one of its self-driving cars in action, an unedited 40 minute stretch of the vehicle navigating a challenging urban environment. In the process, Mobileye - which was acquired by Intel in early 2017, in a deal worth over $15 billion - raises questions about the path to autonomous driving taken by most other projects, Tesla and Waymo included.