Driverless

​​​​It’s hard to believe we’re approaching year eight of Apple’s work on a self-driving car. For all the fits and starts, 2022 could prove to be the project’s most pivotal.

The automaker got the green light to sell its Drive Pilot package for use on stretches of the country’s Autobahn network at a speed of up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour, Mercedes said Thursday.

Apple Inc. venturing into cars might shake up the electric vehicles market in the same way the iPhone revolutionized the mobile communications industry in 2007. So says Morgan Stanley.

UPS, which tested autonomous delivery vans with Waymo in the Phoenix area beginning last year, will expand that partnership to include big rigs, Waymo said in a statement. The courier first began testing autonomous technology on 18 wheelers with TuSimple in Arizona after taking an equity stake in the startup in 2019. The Waymo tests will be done for UPS’s North American Air Freight unit for delivery routes between Dallas and Houston.

The move suggests Apple is plowing ahead with attempts to develop self-driving technology, a high-stakes race with automakers such as Tesla. Moore is joining a division known for its secrecy -- Apple has never publicly laid out its car plans -- and frequent turnover. The head of Apple’s car project, codenamed Titan, departed the company earlier this year to lead technology efforts at Ford Motor Co.

The agency launched a probe of Tesla’s Autopilot program in August after almost a dozen collisions at crash scenes involving first-responder vehicles.

In other news: Allstate closes $400M sale of New York life, annuity business; USAA partners with Blink by Chubb; Zurich North America implements Chisel AI.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has said that on Friday, the electric-car maker will roll out an updated version of its Full Self-Driving beta software, which until now has only been available to roughly 2,000 people.

Drivers under 25 years old file collision and property damage liability claims less and it's likely because of crash avoidance technology, according to three separate studies from the Highway Loss Data Institute.

Autopilot will now operate largely using camera vision, and some features will be temporarily disabled due to the transition.

Cruise will be able to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform to manage its self-driving vehicle network.

West is the second former Delta executive hired by GM and its related companies in recent months.

Velodyne creates radar-like systems that use lasers to generate three-dimensional images of a surrounding environment, used by carmakers including Mercedes-Benz AG and Ford Motor Co.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is unveiling a voluntary initiative Monday in an attempt to bring together state and local governments along with vehicle makers.

VW’s investment includes a $1 billion cash infusion and the folding of its $1.6 billion Autonomous Intelligent Driving unit into Argo.

Potential deal could speed autonomous delivery, cutting the giant's costs.

(Bloomberg) -- Nearly half of Americans say they would not get in a self-driving taxi, according to a poll commissioned by the advocacy group Partners for Automated Vehicle Education. The poll, conducted online in February and March by SurveyUSA, found widespread skepticism and confusion about autonomous vehicles. Of the 1,200 adults surveyed, 48% said they would “never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously,” while 21% said they were unsure about it. A fifth of respondents said that AVs would never be safe, and another fifth stated incorrectly that it is possible “to own a completely driverless vehicle today.”

The uniform and uninspiring looks of these autonomous vehicles are coming under criticism for being as much of a turn-off as the no-frills approach automakers took to designing EVs that ended up being slower sellers than expected.

Tesla was heavily criticized for not doing enough to keep drivers from using its driver-assist function inappropriately.

The NTSB reports include hundreds of pages of data about the accidents, but no conclusions about what caused them