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A California woman is being treated for 'multiple traumatic injuries' after being hit by a driver at a San Francisco intersection before becoming trapped underneath a Cruise driverless vehicle for 30 minutes. The woman, who has not yet been named, was strolling through downtown San Francisco when she was hit by a sedan near the corner of Fifth and Market streets around 9:30pm on Monday night. Footage taken by the Cruise vehicle and viewed by NBC, revealed how the car hit the woman in the left lane, throwing her into the path of the Cruise taxi which then ran her...

Not off to a good start. A brand-new, self-driving shuttle bus suddenly crashed into another carrier in Orlando, Fla. — just two days after the shuttle service officially hit the streets. The SWAN shuttle — short for Shuttling with Autonomous Navigation — collided with a full-size bus in the city’s downtown area Tuesday, cops said. The crash was caught on camera by a passenger testing out the city’s hyped new service.

Driverless vehicles promise a future with less congestion and pollution, fewer accidents resulting from human error and better mobility for people with disabilities, supporters say. But every now and then, one of the cars runs into trouble in a way that casts a bit of doubt on that bold vision. So it was on Tuesday in San Francisco, where a driverless car somehow drove into a city paving project and got stuck in wet concrete. Paul Harvey, 74, a retired contractor who lives in the city’s Western Addition neighborhood, took a photo of the car with roof-mounted sensors, tipped...

A group of about ten self-driving taxis became stuck in the San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach on Friday evening, causing a traffic jam just one day after regulators voted to allow driverless taxi companies virtual free rein in the city.

DRIVERLESS taxi service Cruise has expanded its San Francisco operational times to daytime hours. This 24-hour availability will be offered to the organization’s employees before expanding to the public. Public San Francisco Cruise customers can currently order Cruise’s transport service from 10:00pm to 5:00am. There are now around 70 active Cruise vehicles in San Francisco, TechCrunch reports. Cruise San Francisco fares require a $5 base fee and $0.90 per mile, plus $0.40 per minute rates. Cruise began charging its passengers fares in June and expanded into most of the San Francisco are

A truck driver has lost control of his vehicle in Bavaria. The truck drove driverlessly in a serpentine way through a construction site, against crash barriers and over warning barges. The police tried to draw the driver’s attention with flashing lights. Without checking his tractor-trailer and in critical health, a truck driver left a more than 30-kilometer-long path of destruction on Autobahn 3. The 48-year-old had lost control of the truck late on Saturday evening “apparently due to a medical cause,” the police said. During the entire journey through Lower Franconia, the vehicle collided with the guardrail several times and...

Waymo’s fully driverless vehicles are doing passenger trips in the suburbs outside Phoenix, Arizona. We got to experience it first hand, and our ride included a close brush with a construction site, a wrong turn, and a flock of pigeons. But more importantly, it got us thinking about what it means when Waymo says the future is driverless, and what we lose when we eliminate human driving. Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EoOvVkEMo Link to article: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driverless-car-self-driving-ride-hail-service-phoenix-arizona

German motorhome manufacturer Hymer introduced a concept named Galileo that argues autonomous technology will make motels obsolete in a distant future. The boxy, glass-walled design study drives itself so its occupants can enjoy the view without needing to keep an eye on the road ahead, and get a full night's sleep without stopping when they're ready to call it a day. From the outside, Hymer's Galileo looks a lot like the dozens of box-shaped concept shuttles we've seen at major auto and tech shows in recent years. It has the proportions of a toaster oven, sliding side doors, and wheels...

When will automotive industry investors learn the lesson from this weekend's reported drone attack on a Saudi oil facility? We saw one version of this kind of scenario in the 1977 movie "Telefon" with Charles Bronson: Brainwashed sleeper cells were sent out in trucks to smash into various critical facilities, causing huge explosions. The attack on the Saudi oil facility explains why it's illegal to operate a drone near an airport or a city center anywhere in America today. The risk of terrorist sabotage is simply too high. But what is a driverless car, if not a 5,000-pound, land-based drone?...

United Parcel Service Inc. has asked for exemptions from 2020 entry-level driver training regulations that would hurt the company’s ability to hire new drivers, according to a report from FreightWaves. The new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rules would require behind-the-wheel and theory driver training instructors to have two years experience and to have held a commercial driver’s license for two years. “If it has to comply with the instructor qualification requirements, UPS would not be able to use a minimum of 25% of its current certified driver instructors,” UPS said, according to the logistics news site. Looking forward two...

Starsky Robotics is now testing autonomous trucks that have no driver inside, the San Francisco Bay Area startup announced on Wednesday. As of June 16, Starsky began operating truly driverless semi-trucks on the Florida turnpike. It's a first in the industry. To be sure, there are plenty of autonomous trucks on the road. TuSimple has a fleet of more than 50 trucks making three to five revenue-generating routes per day in Arizona. Waymo resumed testing its self-driving trucks in Phoenix, after ending the tests two years ago. Embark's trucks drove more than 124,000 automated miles last year. And Tesla has...

Waymo on Wednesday launched a commercial robot ride-hailing service in Arizona called Waymo One. Like Uber or Lyft, customers will summon a ride with a smartphone app. But in this case, the car will be driving itself. Only “a few hundred customers” will have access to the app and participate in the early stages. Although the cars will drive themselves, a Waymo engineer will sit behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong. Waymo did not say when the cars will start arriving without a human minder or when the program will be expanded. Waymo’s cars, Chrysler Pacifica minivans bristling...

Could there be anything less American than driverless cars?  I suppose sexbots might quality but certainly driverless cars are right up there.Why would you NOT want to drive this?Seriously, driverless cars have no place in the land that practically invented the open road, hit-the-road-Jack-never-come-back motif. And Michael Walsh agrees: …these vehicles are emasculating, imprisoning, anti-American, and inhuman. And now, in the wake of the first fatal accident involving an “autonomous vehicle,” they’re deadly as well. Whence comes this rush to robot cars? Did the public demand it? Or have our betters in the tech industry and in the bowels of...

A self-driving car is not a self-driving car is not a self-driving car. That is the message Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, tried to send on Monday, when it invited a group of reporters to visit Castle, a facility in California’s Central Valley that it has been using as a training course for its self-driving vehicles. Castle, which is built on a decommissioned Air Force base roughly 120 miles from San Francisco, resembles a miniature city, with many of the realistic elements a self-driving car might encounter on the road — like cul-de-sacs, traffic signals...

Sixty years ago, a 1957 Chevy moved slowly down U.S. 77 near the Nebraska 2 intersection guided by wire coils buried in the highway. It was the first real highway demonstration of a system its inventor and promoters believed would allow cars to be guided by signals from electronic wiring buried in the highway, rather than by human drivers. Promoters hoped the Nebraska experiment would usher in an era of “electronic chauffeurs,” which would eliminate accidents caused by driver drowsiness or carelessness. The experiment took place because of the persistence of one man, a state traffic engineer, Leland Hancock.

The vehicles were introduced as part of the Baltic state's presidency of the EU Two shuttles costing around £90,000 (€100,000) each are being testedThey are capable of maximum speeds of around 30 to 40 mph (50 to 60 kmph)They will not exceed 12 mph (20 kmph) during the current testing phase They have had a number of close calls, including ignoring a speeding police car's emergency lights Driverless buses in Estonia have had a number of close calls, including ignoring a speeding police car's emergency lights. The vehicles were introduced in the capital Tallinn in recent weeks as part of the Baltic state's...

Dubai: Months after Dubai unveiled the first flying taxis in the world, Dubai Police on Tuesday unveiled another believed world’s first — autonomous, self-driving miniature police cars that are expected to hit the streets by year-end. The robotic vehicles will be equipped with biometric software to scan for wanted criminals and undesirables who are suspected or are breaking laws, police said.

Eliminating the Problem How difficult is it to test autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads? Uber can probably tell you all about it. Much of the difficulty in obtaining the permits necessary for such tests comes from fear. Because self-driving technology is new, because the systems have been involved in incidents in the past, and so on, people aren’t quite ready to trust the tech. The governor of Washington state, however, has a different perspective. Governor Jay Inslee signed an order on Wednesday that would allow for autonomous vehicle tests without a human driver behind the wheel. According to the...

I've been testing a new car, but I never actually drove it. That's because it drives itself. It's the shape of things to come: autonomous vehicles rolling along without human drivers. Hyundai is the latest automaker to take the wraps off of its self-driving technology. For Hyundai, this comes in the form of research versions of the company's new Ioniq. I rode along with an engineer from Hyundai, recording the journey as we traversed the streets of Las Vegas. The test vehicles, with large "Autonomous" decals emblazoned on the sides, were two Ioniq compact cars, an EV (or electric vehicle)...

Prematurely accelerating the implementation of fully autonomous trucking (no driver in the cab) seems like an idea that could be fraught with risk. While driverless long-haul trucks have the potential to increase economic productivity by enabling more cost-effective transport of goods, the technology is not yet ready for prime time. There is growing pressure, however, to make it a reality sooner rather than later – particularly as long-distance trucking faces a worsening driver shortage. At the same time, highway infrastructure in many parts of the country is clearly inadequate even for today’s traffic, let alone a mixed bag of driven...