At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, South Korean automaker Hyundai shows off its self-driving car. Crowds gather to see a BMW concept vehicle at the BMW Group news conference Wednesday at CES in Las Vegas. LAS VEGAS -- Not that long ago, checking in on the state of self-driving car technology meant asking Google's engineers how they were doing. The search company was virtually alone on the autonomous car highway. But in the last four years, that road has gotten crowded.

A USA TODAY motion graphic showing what a city of the future may look like. Cities of the future could be a haven of largely driverless efficiency and tranquility, but there are many potential potholes on the road to this vision. SAN FRANCISCO – The city of the future has had countless fantasy blueprints, from The Jetsons' pleasant hive of automated efficiency to Blade Runner's dystopian tangle of urban chaos. But the reality is the city of future is closer than you think, as tech companies and automakers floor the pedal on projects ranging from cars that drive themselves to apps that aggregate transportation options. Conversations with mobility experts here and abroad paint a picture of an urban revolution that is already underway in a patchwork of cities from Seattle to Stockholm.

Jennifer Jolly reviews the first vacuum shoe designed by the automotive company Denso. A lot of gadgets are announced at CES, but many of them are too impractical or expensive for most consumers. Here are four new products we found that we'd actually consider purchasing. Columnist Jennifer Jolly tries out Alexa on the Ford, peers at TVs held to walls by magnets, and tests a'smart bike'. Products that have chips that allow connectivity to the internet and that learn user's habits grab attention at CES in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS -- Nissan is joining other auto makers in stepping up its self-driving car technology. But there's a catch: These autonomous cars still need humans to navigate, its CEO said. Company chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn, delivering the company's first Consumer Electronics Show keynote address here Thursday, offered more insights to the Yokohama, Japan-headquartered company's strategy. "Many people don't want to give up driving completely," he said. "But what they want is to decide when to drive and when to let the car take over."

The robot can gather a piece of fruit and sort by size automatically. Last month as our Mixing Bowl colleagues Michael Rose and An Wang were interviewing Sonny Ranaswamy of the USDA's NIFA to better understand current US food and agriculture labor issues, we were representing The Mixing Bowl in discussions on potential solutions to food production labor issues through automation and robotics. At this year's RoboUniverse event in San Diego there was a full-day track on December 14th dedicated to the application of robotics to agriculture. The industry track, pulled together in great part by Nathan Dorn, CEO of Food Origins and an Advisor to The Mixing Bowl, featured a knowledgeable group of automation/robotics experts and food producers who drew on their experience to define the opportunities and sharpen focus on the challenges. Nathan authored a detailed summary of the day in a post on Agfunder.

Faraday Future's FF 91 electric car is unveiled at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 3. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg) Faraday Future said it received 64,124 customer reservations shortly after unveiling its first car, the FF 91, this week at CES in Las Vegas. The initial strong response is welcome news as the Los Angeles-based automotive startup is in need of funds to get the battery-powered crossover into production. The spike in reservations came within 36 hours of Faraday Future's elaborate debut of the car on Tuesday, the company said in a statement. While "priority" reservations for the 1,050-horsepower FF 91 require a refundable $5,000 deposit, the company declined to specify how many of its prospective buyers were paying that amount. If all goes well, cars start shipping sometime in 2018.

The North American International Auto Show begins its media previews on Sunday in Detroit. The show opens to the public on Jan. 14. Along with the gleaming displays of new vehicles, the show will be a gathering place for innovators from many backgrounds, focusing on the future of mobility. Chris Thomas has worked in the auto industry, served in Iraq and is now the co-founder and partner of Fontinalis Partners, a venture capital firm. He'll also be a speaker and panelist at the auto show.

Much mirth ensued recently when Jeremy Corbyn's crack publicity team issued a photograph of the dear leader with a compressed quote from his speech: "We now face the task of creating a New Britain from the fourth industrial revolution – powered by the internet of things and big data to develop cyber physical systems and smart factories." One may be forgiven for suspecting that Corbyn had not a clue what he was uttering, but the "fourth industrial revolution" is an actual thing, at least according to some analysts. The first was steam-powered; the second electrical; the third the birth of the computer age; and the fourth – which some argue is just a continuation of the third – is the era of wearable gadgets, 3D printing, gene editing, machine intelligence and networked devices such as street lights full of electronic sensors, or smart fridges that order eggs when you've run out. The dream of networking ordinary objects with cheap processors and wireless communication comes under the rubric of "the internet of things", which is (or ought to be) short for "the internet of things that should not be connected to the internet". Inevitably, some bored teen will hack your smart fridge to flood your kitchen while you're away; the more urban infrastructure is computerised, the more vulnerable it will be to cyber-attack.

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger users are being tricked into sending out a message by a scam. The hoax claims that people need to send out a message otherwise theyl'l be forced to pay for each one they send to their friends in future. If they don't copy and paste the post then the apps will presume that they are not an "avid user" and so will move towards charging them, the post claims. But it's entirely untrue and neither Facebook or WhatsApp is moving to charging for messages. Both are expected to remain entirely free – which they need to do, since Facebook's business model is capturing information on its users and then using that to charge advertisers for marketing.

BMW AG will dispatch a fleet of autonomous vehicles to U.S. and European cities in this year's second half, the next step in its partnership with Mobileye NV and Intel Corp. to introduce fully self-driving vehicles by 2021. The German automaker will put 40 of its 7 Series sedans on the road and train them to drive in urban areas, Klaus Froehlich, BMW's head of development, said in an interview. The goal is to apply the gathered data toward producing the iNext, which will supplant the 7 Series as the BMW brand's flagship model and be capable of full autonomy four years from now. Automakers and technology companies are rushing to form partnerships to compete against the likes of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, which has clocked 2 million self-driving miles on public roads, and Tesla Motors Inc., with 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles. BMW is appealing to other carmakers to adopt its approach to help shoulder research costs, speed development by sharing data and ensure they don't become also-rans.