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 »
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 »
Bosch, the world’s largest supplier of automotive parts, has announced plans to build a €1 billion ($1.1 billion) semiconductor plant, focused on self-driving cars, smart homes, and smart city infrastructure. The factory will be located in Dresden, Germany and should be ready by 2021, according to Bloomberg. See Also: Industry split on when first commercial… Read more »
A Republican proposal could see U.S. states effectively banned from regulating self-driving cars and make the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) the lead agency for all autonomous vehicles. States are currently allowed to create their own rules and regulations for self-driving cars. That has led to several states legalizing parts of self-driving, in… Read more »
Uber rival Lyft and self-driving startup nuTonomy have announced on Tuesday a R&D partnership focused on the “end-to-end experience” of riders in autonomous vehicles. nuTonomy will work on the performance of the self-driving system and how it interacts with the rider, while Lyft will focus on the routing and booking of rides. In a press… Read more »
The introduction of self-driving vehicles will not automatically solve all congestion problems and some studies say traffic levels could rise as young teens, elderly, and disabled swap public transport for their own autonomous vehicle. Anthony Barrs and Baiyu Chen, two research students from the University of California, Berkeley, have published a system that could reduce… Read more »
Waymo, the self-driving division of Google, has confirmed that alongside an expansion to its autonomous car efforts, it is looking to develop self-driving trucks. “We’re taking our eight years of experience in building self-driving hardware and software and conducting a technical exploration into how our technology can integrate into a truck,” a Waymo spokesperson said… Read more »
