Nissan has revealed some of the self-driving features coming to the next generation Leaf EV, due to start shipping before the end of the year. The ProPilot driver assist is not anywhere near the fully autonomous future we keep hearing about, but it will control steering, acceleration, and braking in a single freeway lane. See… Read more »
The wearables market, outside of smartwatches, is still in its infancy stage. Research firm IDC expects to see its sales double in four years, with smart clothing and hearables expected to be the two new trends. Smartwatches will remain the dominant driver of wearable sales, going from 71.4 million sales currently to 161 million in… Read more »
Google’s self-driving division Waymo has hired Satish Jeyachandran, the former director of hardware engineering at Tesla, a close competitor in the self-driving race. Jeyachandran will lead the hardware division, according to Bloomberg, focused on building Lidar, radar, cameras, sensors, and silicon for the company’s self-driving cars. See Also: Waymo working on competitor to Uber’s self-driving… Read more »
Google is launching a new video standard for YouTube creators that want to shoot VR content. The new standard, VR180, records 180-degree videos, reducing the amount of specialized software and hardware needed to shoot in virtual reality. Not all VR content needs to have 360-degree viewing, especially if the content is designed to be viewed… Read more »
Nokia has rebranded all Withings products and will be retiring the brand, a year after acquiring the French health-tech company for $191 million. The three wearables, Go, Steel, and Steel HR, will remain part of Nokia’s portfolio. Go is a simple E-Ink activity and sleep tracker with one year charge, available for $50. Steel does… Read more »
The University of Michigan is trialling its own self-driving shuttle service, taking students on a two-mile trip from the North Campus Research Complex to the Lurie Engineering Center. The Navya Arma shuttle will take 15 passengers at a time, and students ride for free. To start, the university is running two shuttles on the route,… Read more »
Tesla has hired Andrej Karpathy to be the new Director of AI and Autopilot Vision, following the departure of Autopilot software leader Chris Lattner. Karpathy will split his duties on Autopilot with Jim Keller, the head of Autopilot hardware. See Also: Who is responsible for autonomous car regulation? Lattner has only been around for six… Read more »
They say maintaining your identity in a relationship is hard, but Cruise Automation, the $1 billion self-driving startup acquired by General Motors last year, has kept a significant amount of autonomy from the Detroit-based automotive giant. General Motors works on the development of self-driving vehicles and the installation of hardware, while Cruise installs, tests, and… Read more »
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced last December that its self-driving project would have its own division inside the corporation. That division became Waymo, which analysts at Morgan Stanley believe could be worth $70 billion if it is ever spun-out to a standalone company. The analysis works off the assumption that Waymo cars and… Read more »
Texas, like Finland, never had a law blocking self-driving cars from public roads, until Thursday when Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that set out the rules of the road. The re-legalization makes a few things clear for automakers and tech companies testing their autonomous vehicles in The Lone Star State. First, self-driving cars without… Read more »
