self-driving car

A former engineer in Google’s self-driving division who became the focus of a criminal investigation that rocked Silicon Valley has pleaded guilty to a count of trade secrets theft, NBC News reports.

A driver of a self-driving car was caught sleeping behind the wheel on the 5 freeway in Santa Clarita. This is not the first documented instance of sleeping while driving, with nappers caught mid-snooze on the 405 and on the way to Anaheim.

In 2012, Steve Mahan, who is blind, climbed into the driver’s seat of a self-driving car and rolled up to the drive-thru of a Taco Bell in a video that’s been viewed more than 8 million times online. The piece, produced by Google, captured the potential of autonomous-car technology to change the lives of the visually impaired. “It was my...

Warning: the contents of this video may be disturbing to viewers, viewer discretion is advised. The Tempe, Arizona, police department on Wednesday released footage of the Sunday crash in which an Uber self-driving vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian. Uber has suspended testing of self-driving vehicles on public U.S. roads.

Google’s parent company is throwing its financial support behind ride-hailing service Lyft, deepening its rift with market leader Uber. Alphabet Inc., which gets most of its money from Google’s digital ad network, is leading a $1 billion investment in Lyft that values the privately held company at $11 billion. The investment announced Thursday is being made through Alphabet’s CapitalG venture...

A new study inspired by Boston’s early experiments with self-driving cars finds that the technology could ease congestion, but might also lead to more cars on the road and further encourage urban sprawl. The report, released Tuesday by the Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum, is a mostly optimistic take on how autonomous vehicles could change cities. Three...

In the race to the self-driving future, Lyft has agreed to work with Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google’s parent company, to bring autonomous vehicles to the masses, both companies told NBC News on Sunday night....
The announcement comes as Waymo has accused Lyft’s biggest competitor, Uber, of stealing trade secrets from the company to advance its own self-driving...

Uber on Wednesday brought a small number of self-driving cars to its ride-hailing service in San Francisco, but California regulators pushed back, ordering the company to halt the service until it gets a state permit.

Google wants Congress to create new federal powers that would let the tech giant receive special, expedited permission to bring to market a self-driving car that has no steering wheel or pedals.

Newly released video shows the first time a Google self-driving car being tested in public caused an accident.

Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads.

An autonomous car’s recent 3,400-mile U.S. road trip proves there’s at least one thing computers do better than humans: Follow the speed limit.