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Imagine it's the near future, and you've bought a new car with a self-driving mode. But hard times hit and you fall behind on loan payments – then, one day you find your car has driven itself away to the repossession lot. That's the vision of a new Ford patent published last month that describes a variety of futuristic ways that Ford vehicle systems could be controlled by a financial institution in order to aid in the repossession of a car. The company told NPR that the company has no intention of implementing the ideas in the patent, which is...

A self-driving car went rogue in Arizona, stalling, then speeding off before assistance could arrive. A YouTuber caught the nearly 20-minute episode on video from the backseat of the car.... ...About 12 minutes into the ride, the car attempted to turn into a lane that had been blocked off with construction cones. Mid-turn it stopped and the rider called an online tech for help...before roadside assistance could get there the car sped off only to stop in the middle of the road, forcing the cars behind it to go into oncoming traffic in order to pass the vehicle. The situation...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is holding talks with General Motors Co (GM.N) on the automaker’s petition to deploy a limited number of self-driving vehicles on American roads without steering wheels or other human controls, the head of the agency said on Friday.

In the highly competitive race to get self-driving cars to the market, most companies hold their secrets close. But when it comes to helping those cars figure out where they are on the road, some experts are ready to open up. Argo AI, based in the Strip District, and Aptiv, based in O’Hara, publicly released some of their own data sets earlier this year in an effort to further advancement in the field. The companies shared parts of their own maps of cities where they are testing self-driving cars, including Pittsburgh. That may seem strange considering the abundance of applications...

Volkswagen will invest $2.6 billion into a Pittsburgh autonomous vehicle company that’s mostly owned by Ford as the automakers who were once rivals deepen their partnership to develop driverless and electric vehicles in an ultra-competitive landscape. The two automakers will become equal owners of Argo AI, and they plan to put autonomous vehicles on the roads in the U.S. and Europe as early as 2021, the companies said Friday. The deal also includes a plan for Ford to use VW’s electric vehicle platform to build zero-emissions cars for the European market starting in 2023. Auto companies have been teaming up...

AUBURNDALE — Florida has one of the world’s most famous asphalt ovals in the Daytona International Speedway. A slightly smaller track recently completed in Auburndale won’t draw massive crowds for races, but it’s part of a project that could hasten the day when self-driving vehicles take over the roads. Crews finished laying asphalt for the 2¼-mile oval — phase one of SunTrax — in early May, and construction will begin in the coming months on infield elements designed for the development and testing of connected and autonomous vehicles. The second phase of SunTrax, a project overseen by Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise...

It's the not-so-far-away future in San Francisco. One-Wheels and e-scooters litter the road. Your self-driving car has just deposited you at Union Square, and you've instructed it to return in an hour, after you've purchased the latest it-smartphone, the iPhone Z. Your autonomous vehicle, intelligent as it is, knows finding a parking spot downtown is nearly impossible at this hour, plus parking lots are known to charge flat rates of $15 and up. Instead of parking, your car decides to cruise...

The “safety” driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber that hit and killed a pedestrian was streaming the television show The Voice on her phone at the time of the crash, police have said. The collision that killed Elaine Herzberg, 49, who was crossing the road at night in Tempe, Arizona, was “entirely avoidable”, a police report said, if Rafaela Vasquez had been paying attention. Instead, she repeatedly looked down at her phone, glancing up just half a second before the car hit Herzberg. Police said she could faces charges of vehicular manslaughter, but it would be for prosecutors...

Self-driving vehicles have been proposed as a solution for the rapidly increasing number of fatal traffic accidents, which now claim a staggering 1.3 million casualties each year. While we have made strides in advancing self-driving technology, we have yet to explore at length how autonomous vehicles will be programmed to deal with situations that endanger human life, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. To understand how self-driving cars might make these judgments, the researchers looked at how humans deal with similar driving dilemmas. When faced with driving dilemmas, people show a high willingness to sacrifice...

Uber is temporarily halting self-driving car tests in all locations after a deadly accident. Programs in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Phoenix and Toronto will be paused after a woman was hit and killed overnight by an Uber self-driving car when walking across the street in Tempe, Arizona. It is likely the first pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car.

I thought I had it all figured out: self-driving cars are being developed to enable the entire population to be stoned and still arrive at their jobs, assuming they have a job, safely. Honey, I’m home!In the interim, a fierce PR campaign has been conducted via the media echo chamber to ensure everyone that legal pot is having absolutely no negative effect on vehicular accidents in order to continue our progressive march towards the Brave New World. “Public safety doesn’t decrease with increased access to marijuana, rather it improves,” Benjamin Hansen, one of the authors of the previous study, said...

The Senate has agreed to pass legislation lifting regulations on manufacturers of self-driving cars. Full details will be announced the first week of October, but it's expected the bill will cover safety and manufacturing regulations as well as driver protection. Paving the Way United States roadways are one step closer to being traversed by driverless cars: on September 30, the Senate announced that it had reached an agreement to lift some of the regulations on manufacturers that made it harder to get self-driving cars on the road. “While this Senate self-driving vehicle legislation still has room for further changes,...

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls and bar states from blocking autonomous vehicles, congressional aides said. The bill, which was passed unanimously by a House panel in July, would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year, a cap that would rise to 100,000 vehicles annually over three years. Automakers and technology companies including General Motors Co and Alphabet Inc’s’ self-driving unit Waymo have been pushing for new federal rules making...

It was an unusual sight: Democrats and Republicans gently ribbing each other, giggling, and vowing to work closely together on legislation that is said to be vital to the health and safety of Americans. Of all the things that could bring both parties together in this era of rank partisanship, who would have thought it would be self-driving cars? The convivial atmosphere in today’s hearing by the House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection, which was to mark-up a package of bills related to autonomous vehicles, was by design. After all, it was carefully cultivated by the big automakers...

One of the biggest gold rushes of our time looks to be the anticipated market for autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. Worldwide there are companies and investors throwing billions at the market and what was predicted to happen in 10 years now looks like 2 at most. The ways autonomous vehicles will impact our daily lives are just now being contemplated but one impact is clear, they have the ability to completely change how we view public transportation, all for the better. We need to rid ourselves of a bus and rail-based paradigm for public transportation. A complete stop should be placed...

As the nation speeds toward development of fully self-driving vehicles, here’s a speed bump to consider: Not only is hacking a “real threat,” but “autonomous vehicles provide an avenue for terrorism as well,” Congress was told on Tuesday. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) asked RAND Senior Information Scientist Nidhi Kalra, “How real is the threat of vehicle hacking” when it comes to autonomous vehicles. […] … “[A]utonomous vehicles provide an avenue for terrorism as well because there’s a way to use these vehicles to — you know — the threat is no longer sort of suicide bombers and — that blow...

TOLEDO (13abc Action News) - Self-driving cars are getting closer to becoming a reality in America. Testing is underway in a few places around the country and if you travel the Ohio Turnpike, you'll soon be sharing the road with them. We spoke with drivers and the head of the Ohio Turnpike Commission about the testing. The autonomous vehicles could be on the turnpike by the end of the year. The Ohio Turnpike will be turned into a test track of sorts for the emerging technology. Randy Cole is the Executive Director of the Turnpike Commission, "It's 241 miles of...

A Canadian car safety expert has introduced the world to a surprising moral panic, warning that if people no longer have to drive their cars, they'll have sex in them instead. The idea that an autonomous vehicle might become a “shaggin' wagon”* comes from Barrie Kirk, Executive Director of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Center of Excellence, who told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “I am predicting that, once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars”. Kirk's fear is that if the computer asks the human to take over at a crucial moment, their attention...

Google's self-driving cars have got into quite a few accidents, but they've been caused by human-driven cars crashing into them, not the other way around. "Our self-driving cars are being hit surprisingly often by other drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the road," head of Google's driverless car program Chris Urmson wrote in a blog post Thursday. He describes an incident in which a human-driven car (can you imagine: In a few years we may have to indicate that a car is human-driven more often than not) slammed into the back of Google's self-driving Lexus. Google's car,...

The problem is clear: Traffic congestion will become significantly worse and more widespread without big changes in how people and products get around. Build more roads. Build more public transit. Rely on new technology. The possible solutions are many, but none is easy or cheap. A few ways to ease the nation's gridlock: ——— PUBLIC TRANSIT RENAISSANCE Ridership on public buses, trains and subways has reached its highest level nationally since the 1950s, and transit boosters cite this as evidence that expanded service and routes is a good investment. The nation's driving capital, Los Angeles, is making a multibillion-dollar investment...