Driverless and Semiautonomous Vehicles
Self-Driving and Driver-Assist Technology Linked to Hundreds of Car Crashes
Over the course of 10 months, nearly 400 car crashes in the United States involved advanced driver-assistance technologies, the federal government’s top auto-safety regulator disclosed Wednesday, in its first-ever release of large-scale data about these burgeoning systems. In 392 incidents cataloged by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from July 1 of last year through […]
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Auto Safety Agency Expands Tesla Investigation
The federal government’s top auto-safety agency is significantly expanding an investigation into Tesla and its Autopilot driver-assistance system to determine if the technology poses a safety risk. The agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Thursday that it was upgrading its preliminary evaluation of Autopilot to an engineering analysis, a more intensive level of […]
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How Safe Are Systems Like Tesla’s Autopilot? No One Knows.
Every three months, Tesla publishes a safety report that provides the number of miles between crashes when drivers use the company’s driver-assistance system, Autopilot, and the number of miles between crashes when they do not. These figures always show that accidents are less frequent with Autopilot, a collection of technologies that can steer, brake and […]
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Google’s I/O Conference Offers Modest Vision of the Future
SAN FRANCISCO — There was a time when Google offered a wondrous vision of the future, with driverless cars, augmented-reality eyewear, unlimited storage of emails and photos, and predictive texts to complete sentences in progress. A more modest Google was on display on Wednesday as the company kicked off its annual developer’s conference. The Google […]
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How Elon Musk Winged It With Twitter, and Everything Else
Kimbal Musk and Mr. Gracias, who left Tesla’s board last year and serves as a SpaceX director, declined to comment for this article. Today, Mr. Musk oversees or is associated with at least a dozen companies, including public ones, private ones and holding companies such as Wyoming Steel, which he uses to manage real estate. […]
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Can A.I. All but End Car Crashes? The Potential Is There.
In Barcelona, Spain, a recent trial used computer vision technology on city buses to map places along the route where there were conflicts with vehicles, pedestrians and others, to identify where accident risks were highest. “When you collect that kind of data for an entire year with thousands of buses and thousands of streets, you […]
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Tesla Recalls Cars With Full Self-Driving to Prevent Rolling Stops
Tesla is recalling 54,000 cars equipped with its Full Self-Driving software to disable a feature that in certain conditions lets the vehicles roll slowly through intersections without stopping. The move comes after the automaker was criticized on social media for enabling “rolling stops” in violation of traffic regulations. “Failing to stop at a stop sign […]
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Why Is Silicon Valley Still Waiting for the Next Big Thing?
In the fall of 2019, Google told the world it had reached “quantum supremacy.” It was a significant scientific milestone that some compared to the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, Google had built a computer that needed only three minutes and 20 seconds to perform a calculation that […]
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What We Got Wrong About Tech
Tech cannot fix problems caused by car dependence: For a long time, I was excited about technologies related to transportation, including apps that made it easier for people to take an Uber to a train station or a scooter ride the last mile to work from a bus stop. I thought that they would help […]
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