Uber has announced it will scale back operations in Russia, creating a new transport company with local search giant Yandex. Yandex.Taxi and Uber driver-side apps will be merged into one service, but both apps will remain available to customers in Russia. The new company will also take over operations in Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. See… 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 »
Germany’s large automotive industry will soon be able to test self-driving cars in their home-country. The upper house of parliament approved a law on Friday that enables manufacturers to test vehicles on public roads for the first time. The legislation requires a human driver to remain in the vehicle at all times and a black… Read more »
Japan could have a fleet of self-driving shuttles on the road within three years, if SB Drive, a new entity created by tech conglomerate SoftBank, reaches its target date for commercialization. SB Drive wants to have a range of autonomous vehicles serving the public in the next five years, and has already completed trial runs… Read more »
Though the big American metropolises often hog the smart city headlines, a new study found that U.S. mid-sized cities are the true technology leaders. A new study into U.S. smart city activity demonstrated that mid-sized cities were filling the pipeline with the most urban technology projects. The survey of 54 American cities was produced by… Read more »
An organization representing professional drivers has called on New York state legislators to ban self-driving vehicles for 50 years, citing the potential eradication of thousands of transport jobs. The Upstate Transportation Association, which advocates for professional drivers, said it expects Uber and Lyft, the two major ridesharing services in New York City, to convert to… Read more »
Google’s self-driving division, Waymo, has revealed that its cars receive limited internet access to minimize the window for hackers to penetrate the system. “Our cars communicate with the outside world only when they need to, so there isn’t a continuous line that’s able to be hacked, going into the car,” said Waymo CEO John Krafcik… Read more »
Mercedes-Benz wants to have its first autonomous vehicle on the roads by 2020, but expects there will be roadblocks for the first few years as regulators and infrastructure remain in the age of human-controlled cars. Speaking to CarAdvice at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017, Mercedes head of R&D Ola Kallenius said that it plans… Read more »
When you think of car hacking, it’s easy to simply think of it as a nefarious activity when in reality it’s just as likely to be the work of a researcher or DIY enthusiast wanting to extend a vehicle’s capabilities and understand its weaknesses. Last year we saw Chinese security researchers take remote control of… Read more »
Studies of traffic congestion regularly point much blame at cars circling for parking. To tackle this perennial problem, Get My Parking is joining a smart city initiative to launch a smart parking pilot in India. As reported in Firstpost, the Delhi-based startup’s technology is being tested in government smart city initiatives. “We are getting a… Read more »
