Self-driving vehicles are still a bit of a novelty still, but several companies are beginning to escalate their offerings. Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, has begun to offer rides in Arizona. The rides are part of an early access program.
Author and columnist Ed...Read more...
Perhaps someday in the future autonomous vehicles will be the norm, not the exception. There are plenty of hurdles standing in way of that ultimate goal, with safety being the obvious main concern. Doing its part, Waymo has decided to share its rich collection of self-driving car data with researchers at no...Read more...
Alphabet owns both DeepMind and Waymo, and the two subsidiaries are working together to train AIs that operate Waymo self-driving cars. The way the duo are training the AI is using the technique that DeepMind calls population-based training (PBT) that was developed and used previously by DeepMind for training the...Read more...
After over 10 million miles of miles of testing with its ever-growing fleet of self-driving vehicles, Google's Waymo is now ready for a commercial launch of its ride-hailing service. The paid service is called Waymo One, is available 24-7, and is accessible with an app (just like Uber and Lyft).
Right now, the...Read more...
Waymo's autonomous vehicle fleet has been piling on the miles ever since the program was first initiated by Google back in 2009. According to the company, its cumulative total for miles driven has swollen to 8 million to date.
To put that figure in perspective, it took six years from the time the Google's first...Read more...
Fiat Chrysler has announced that it has expanded its partnership with Waymo. The new deal will see Waymo acquiring an additional 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans for its autonomous fleet. Chrysler was mum on just how many of the vans Waymo was getting when the last deal was announced at the beginning of the...Read more...
Something went terribly wrong on a Tempe, Arizona road last week, when a pedestrian crossing the street was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber Volvo XC90. The vehicle's sensors didn't detect the pedestrian, meaning that the brakes weren't automatically applied to prevent the crash (or at least lessen its...Read more...
While Uber's autonomous driving trials are understandably on hold for the moment, computers Waymo is moving right ahead with new partnership to advance the field. Today, Waymo announced that it has signed an agreement with Jaguar to deliver up to 20,000 self-driving I-PACE electric crossovers over the next few...Read more...
We were all stunned last week when it was revealed that an Uber self-driving Volvo X90 crossover struck a pedestrian crossing the street at night, killing her. While there was a human driver behind the wheel at the time of the crash, the Volvo was operating in fully autonomous mode when the accident...Read more...
Now that Waymo is free of its long-running legal battle with Uber, it is focusing its attention on more important endeavors; namely spreading its self-driving technology to more platforms. In this case, Waymo is launching a pilot program that will see autonomous semi-trucks navigating through the Atlanta, Georgia...Read more...
To the uninitiated, riding shotgun in a self-driving car might seem like a scary proposition. Part of the reason is because we are simply not used to seeing a vehicle navigate itself without a human driver behind the wheel, so the image of a potentially deadly hunk of metal motoring down a busy street is inherently...Read more...
Alphabet's Waymo and Uber have agreed to bury the hatchet and settle a lawsuit revolving the latter's self-driving vehicle aspirations. As a result, Uber will pay Alphabet a hefty sum (in the eyes of mere mortals): $244 million. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still a relatively small figure for Uber, which...Read more...
Just two months ago, Waymo announced plans to test a self-driving car service in Phoenix, Arizona, in which commuters could summon a free ride from one of around 600 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans. Now the company is putting the pedal to the metal with "thousands more" of the same hybrid vehicle, each one motoring...Read more...
Uber has been in hot water over the last few months for some very unsavory allegations. Among them was that Uber was hacked resulting in the data of 57 million customers being stolen. The company allegedly paid the hacker $100,000 to delete the data. The latest issue stems from a 37-page letter that Ric Jacobs, a...Read more...
Waymo, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, continues to accelerate its self-driving car efforts by racking up millions of miles on public roads. The official tally now stands at 4 million miles, of which 1 million of those were accumulated in the past six months alone. In the early going, it took a full 18...Read more...
Waymo's legal battle with Uber over autonomous driving technology just got a little bit trickier to navigate for the Alphabet-owned company. Adding to a growing list of unfavorable rulings for Waymo, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out key testimony from the company's damages expert, Michael Wagner, making it...Read more...
Self-driving cars are inevitable when it comes to the future of transportation in the United States and abroad. Many auto manufactures from Ford to Mercedes-Benz to Tesla are racing to make fully autonomous driving technology ready for primetime on public roads by the turn of the decade (or shortly...Read more...
Automotive manufacturers and technology firms all around the world are working hard towards an autonomous future for a number of reasons. One of the biggest is that an autonomous car with an infrastructure to allow it to communicate with other cars is safer; which means fewer accidents, less traffic, and a faster...Read more...
The lead lawyer for Uber has threatened to fire Anthony Levandowski, one of the company's top self-driving car engineers, if he refuses to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into accusations that he stole trade secrets from Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Google's parent company Alphabet. Levandowski...Read more...
Waymo and Lyft are joining forces to help bring self-driving vehicles to the masses. The collaboration comes on the heels of a ruling in the case of Anthony Levandowski, a former Google employee, founder of Otto and current Uber employee.
Waymo and Lyft were not forthcoming about the details of the new...Read more...
The world is changing, folks. That has always been the case, of course, but every so often comes along a game changing technology that underscores the changing landscape. Around 20 years ago it was the Internet, which had begun going mainstream. And today? Self-driving cars point to a different future than the one we...Read more...
Anthony Levandowski, the former boss of Google's self-driving car program, invoked his Fifth Amendment right in a lawsuit alleging he stole thousands of files and IP from the firm's spin-off business Waymo, which focuses on self-driving car technology. Levandowski is currently the VP of engineering at Uber where he...Read more...