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Humanless big rig completes first US freight run

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG . Fox News AI Newsletter: The AI model that's too dangerous to go public Are insurance apps watching you?


California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

BBC News

Driverless cars are becoming more common in some California cities, but when the autonomous vehicles violate traffic laws, police haven't been able to ticket them - until now. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a notice of AV noncompliance directly to the car's manufacturer. The new rules, which will go into effect 1 July, are part of a larger 2024 law that imposed deeper regulation on the technology. There have been a number of reports of the cars breaking traffic laws, including during a San Francisco blackout last year. The California DMV is calling the new rules the most comprehensive AV regulations in the nation.


'Temu Range Rover': what the bestselling Jaecoo 7 says about China's electric car ascendancy

The Guardian

Chery sold 10,064 of its Jaecoo 7 crossover SUVs in March. Chery sold 10,064 of its Jaecoo 7 crossover SUVs in March. 'Temu Range Rover': what the bestselling Jaecoo 7 says about China's electric car ascendancy T he UK is no stranger to foreign cars. The bestseller lists in recent years have been dominated by the US's Ford Puma, Japan's Nissan Qashqai, Korea's Kia Sportage and occasionally even Tesla's Model Y. But in March the top 10 provided a shock: a Chinese car leapt into the lead.


Nervous humans are GM's secret weapon for self-driving cars

Popular Science

Technology AI Nervous humans are GM's secret weapon for self-driving cars Put on your sensor suit and get ready to stress out. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Cadillac's EV series is put through its paces in the lab and on the road. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Blue skies and fluffy clouds surround me.


Emergency First Responders Say Waymos Are Getting Worse

WIRED

"I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn't really ready," one police official told federal regulators last month. Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets--that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them "a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims." WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting. Officials from San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo has been ferrying passengers without drivers for more than a year, said the vehicles' performance is getting worse.


In 1934, Chrysler bet big on teardrop-shaped cars

Popular Science

The streamline shape is still more aerodynamic than most cars today. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. In 1930, English engineer Sir Dennis Burney told Popular Science that his teardrop-shaped car would cut fuel consumption in half. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. From the start, cars were built wrong. At least, that's what Chrysler's head of automotive research, Carl Breer, thought in 1930. Automobiles had never been built to be aerodynamic, he posited, and he was right.


China car giant BYD says it can thrive without US

BBC News

The recent surge in fuel prices due to the war in Iran has spurred demand for electric vehicles around the world, and Chinese car makers are making the most of the opportunity. China is the world's top producer of EVs, and while its manufacturers remain largely shut out of the major car market of the United States, they are benefiting from an uptick in interest and orders via dealerships across Asia and elsewhere. BYD, which overtook Tesla as the world's largest seller of electric vehicles last year and is expanding aggressively overseas, is at the centre of this shift in focus. We survive and are successful without the US market today, BYD executive vice president Stella Li told the BBC at the Beijing Auto Show. Instead of aiming for US customers, the company says its challenge is meeting increased demand in other regions, including Brazil, the UK and Europe.


'Look, no hands': China chases the driverless dream at Beijing car show

The Guardian

A t the world's biggest car fair, which opened in Beijing on Friday, there were hundreds of manufacturers, more than 1,000 vehicles, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts - and hardly anyone behind a wheel. China's car companies have cornered the domestic electric vehicle market, and are increasingly visible on the global stage . Now they are turning their attention to what they are betting is the future of mobility: autonomous driving. At the Beijing Auto Fair, a huge industry event that covers 380,000 square metres on the outskirts of the capital, the country's carmakers showed off a range of intelligent driving technologies. In China's cut-throat domestic market, nearly every big carmaker is investing heavily in the software and computing power needed to make "hands-free" driving a reality as they compete to offer additional perks and find new ways to generate revenue.


Revealing Geography-Driven Signals in Zone-Level Claim Frequency Models: An Empirical Study using Environmental and Visual Predictors

Alfonso-Sánchez, Sherly, Bravo, Cristián, Stankova, Kristina G.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Geographic context is often consider relevant to motor insurance risk, yet public actuarial datasets provide limited location identifiers, constraining how this information can be incorporated and evaluated in claim-frequency models. This study examines how geographic information from alternative data sources can be incorporated into actuarial models for Motor Third Party Liability (MTPL) claim prediction under such constraints. Using the BeMTPL97 dataset, we adopt a zone-level modeling framework and evaluate predictive performance on unseen postcodes. Geographic information is introduced through two channels: environmental indicators from OpenStreetMap and CORINE Land Cover, and orthoimagery released by the Belgian National Geographic Institute for academic use. We evaluate the predictive contribution of coordinates, environmental features, and image embeddings across three baseline models: generalized linear models (GLMs), regularized GLMs, and gradient-boosted trees, while raw imagery is modeled using convolutional neural networks. Our results show that augmenting actuarial variables with constructed geographic information improves accuracy. Across experiments, both linear and tree-based models benefit most from combining coordinates with environmental features extracted at 5 km scale, while smaller neighborhoods also improve baseline specifications. Generally, image embeddings do not improve performance when environmental features are available; however, when such features are absent, pretrained vision-transformer embeddings enhance accuracy and stability for regularized GLMs. Our results show that the predictive value of geographic information in zone-level MTPL frequency models depends less on model complexity than on how geography is represented, and illustrate that geographic context can be incorporated despite limited individual-level spatial information.


Tesla is rolling out its Robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston

Engadget

The initial rollout will be limited to a couple of neighborhoods in the two cities. Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi footprint across Texas by introducing availability in both Dallas and Houston. As announced in a post on X, the EV maker is rolling out its Robotaxis to small sections of the Texas cities, as detailed by two maps of its new service areas. The first Robotaxi rides started in Austin, Texas where Tesla is headquartered, but the service's launch was paired with a Tesla Safety Monitor, or a supervising human in the passenger seat. Earlier this year, Tesla began to transition away from including safety monitors, leaving its Robotaxis to operate unsupervised and fully autonomous.