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On Thursday, a video dropped on YouTube that laid out Elon Musk’s statements about Full Self Driving over the last 5 years, compared to what the company has actually been able to achieve and deliver. The 12 minute video laid out a blatantly obvious case for Full Self Driving to be, as one FinTwit user described it, “one of the biggest bait and switch scams in history”. Noted Tesla short seller Montana Skeptic called the video “a truly superb 12-minute YouTube presentation on [Tesla’s] full self-driving promises,” noting that “almost every word spoken or written is by [Elon Musk], his...

The backup safety driver that was behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber vehicle that crashed in 2018, killing a pedestrian, has been charged. Officials said on Tuesday that driver Rafaela Vasquez was charged with negligent homicide on August 27 over the crash in Tempe that killed 49-year-old Elain Herzberg, the Associated Press reports. It was the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving vehicle. The charge comes in light of allegations that Vasquez was distracted moments before the self-driving Uber she was monitoring struck Herzberg who was crossing the road. Vasquez told investigators that she didn’t use her phone before...

While it hasn’t been in the news as much lately, work is still being done on improving and deploying the technology required for self-driving vehicles to share the streets with us. Uber has been working on it for a while now with an eye toward eventually eliminating their drivers entirely. Similarly, manufacturers and distributors have expressed interest in self-driving trucks to cut down on supply chain costs, though Congress has thus far been protecting the truck drivers who would lose their jobs as a result.But how do regular commuters feel about the technology? Are people really ready to jump...

When a driverless car kills someone, who’s to blame? That’s no longer a hypothetical question. A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a woman on a street in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday night, likely marking a grim milestone for the nascent technology: the first pedestrian killed by such a car on public roads. Police say the 49-year-old woman was walking a bike across the street, outside the crosswalk, at around 10 p.m. The Uber was traveling at 40 miles per hour in autonomous mode, with an operator in the driver’s seat, when she was hit. Police have not...

Waymo recently hosted a number of journalists at its private Castle testing compound, and treated us to rides with no safety driver behind the wheel – now, the former Google self-driving car company is going farther still, however, launching public road tests of its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans with no safety driver on board. The tests aren’t limited to one or two routes, either; the test area where the truly driverless trials are being conducted is in Chandler, Arizona (part of the greater Phoenix metro area), and the cars are able to go anywhere within this defined space. It’s hard...

Joshua D. Brown, of Canton, Ohio, died in the accident May 7 in Williston, Florida, when his car’s cameras failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes, according to government records obtained Thursday. Frank Baressi, 62, the driver of the truck and owner of Okemah Express LLC, said the Tesla driver was “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.” “It was still playing when he...

No driver? No ticket. That, at least, was the result when a police officer pulled over one of Google's self-driving cars Thursday in Mountain View, California. The car wasn't speeding. On the contrary, it was driving too slowly -- 24 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone, according to the Mountain View Police Department -- with traffic apparently backing up behind it. pic.twitter.com/3tKhtuxxr8 -- David E. Weekly (@dweekly) November 12, 2015 "As the officer approached the slow moving car he realized it was a Google Autonomous Vehicle," a police department post said. Which is to say that no one...

Since we last published an in-depth report into Apple's Project Titan autonomous car project seven months ago, the company's bank balance has grown by £15bn ($23bn) – enough to fund the entire development process of a completely new car several times over. Now, after a small misfire in the rumour mills, talk of an Apple car is back on the front pages. But let us rewind briefly to that small misfire and look at where we are at today. Rumours of Apple producing its own car began at the start of 2015; they escalated quickly as talk of a secret...

A newly published report in the Guardian suggests that not only is Apple planning a self-driving car, but that the so-called Project Titan prototype is ready for testing. Documents revealed by British newspaper The Guardian strongly indicate the long-rumored self-driving car program by Apple, codenamed Project Titan, is indeed a reality. The correspondence reveals Apple's interest in GoMentum Station, a 5,000-acre, former navy weapons station in California that features 20 miles of paved roadway, which other companies have used for the testing, validation, and commercialization of connected vehicle (CV) applications and autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies. "We would ... like to...

Google’s self-driving cars will hit the roads by summer 2015 On May 21, 2015, Nvidia (NVDA) started shipping Drive PX, its hardware and software development kit, to leading luxury car manufacturers including Bentley, Aston Martin, Tesla (TSLA), and Rolls-Royce. Google (GOOG), which has been in this space for the last six years, will be putting its self-driving cars on public roads by as early as summer 2015. Tech giants report that Google, with a fleet of almost 20 self-driving cars, now averages ~10,000 self-driving miles per week. Google claims that its cars have 75 years of US adult driving experience...

Google's self-driving car has fascinated our minds with its technological promise since being introduced in 2010. But yesterday, the self-driving car touched our hearts. Google posted a video of the self-driving car taking a legally blind man for a spin, showing one of the possibilities and benefits that could come from the technology. "Where this would change my life is to give me the independence and the flexibility to go to the places I both want to go and need to go when I need to do those things," Steve Mahan says in the video. The self-driving car takes Mahan...

It has proved one of the most endearing of cinematic legends - a loveable car with a mind of its own that can drive itself. And for 40 years Herbie - or the 'Love Bug' - as the Volkswagen Beetle was dubbed in its first movie outing - has enthralled millions of families in a series of Hollywood sequels. But now German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself - and at speeds of up to 150mph. It can weave with tyres screeching around tricky bends and chicanes,...