Walmart is expanding its drone delivery program from one pocket of the Dallas-Fort Worth area to millions of people in 30 municipalities in the area, Chief Executive Doug McMillon announced Tuesday at CES 2024. The retailer will use drone delivery systems operated by startup Zipline and by Alphabet subsidiary Wing, companies that have made hundreds of thousands of deliveries in recent years. They each recently obtained FAA clearance to fly their drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) -- in other words, out of the eyesight of a human operator -- which makes large-scale drone delivery operations more practical and economical. Delivery drones offer fast service, with Walmart packages arriving between 10 and 30 minutes after an order is placed from stores up to 10 miles away. Walmart touts the technology for people who need missing cooking ingredients, last-minute birthday gifts, over-the-counter medications or movie night snacks.

Autonomous vehicles in San Francisco are exempt from traffic tickets if there is nobody in the driver's seat, according to the San Francisco police department (SFPD), underscoring ongoing legal and safety concerns surrounding the expanding technology. California law has not caught up to the cars, even though they are already on the road, say public safety agencies and experts. SFPD policy states that officers can make a traffic stop of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for violations, but can only issue a citation if there is a safety driver in the vehicle overseeing its operations. Since June 2022, autonomous vehicles have been permitted to operate without safety drivers as long as they are inside the city limits. Officers can issue citations to the registered owner of an unoccupied vehicle in absentia for non-moving violations such as parking or registration offenses but not violations like speeding, running a red light, driving in the wrong lane or making an illegal turn.

Tesla is recalling more than two million cars in the United States, nearly all of its vehicles sold there, after a federal regulator said defects with the autopilot system pose a safety hazard. In a recall filing on Wednesday, the carmaker said autopilot software system controls "may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse". "Automated technology holds great promise for improving safety but only when it is deployed responsibly," said a spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has been investigating the autopilot function for more than two years. "Today's action is an example of improving automated systems by prioritizing safety." The decision marks the largest-ever recall for Tesla, as autonomous vehicle development in the US hits a series of snags over safety concerns.

Seven years after Tesla released the automated driving feature it calls Full Self-Driving, and two-and-a-half years after opening an investigation into it, the California Department of Motor Vehicles is alleging false advertising, which could carry serious implications for the electric car maker. Tesla is defending itself by saying, in effect, that the DMV let the company slide for so many years, the case no longer has legal standing. Plus, the company, run by Chief Executive Elon Musk, says the DMV is violating its free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment. The DMV "has been aware that Tesla has been using the brand names Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability since Tesla started using those names in 2014 and 2016 respectively," the company said in a response filed in a state administrative court Friday. The company "relied upon [the DMV's] implicit approval of these brand names" and "the DMV chose not to take any action against Tesla or otherwise communicate to Tesla that its advertising or use of these brand names was or might be problematic," the response notice states.

A judge has found "reasonable evidence" that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company's self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida. Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he'd found evidence that Tesla "engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous" and that Musk's public statements about the technology "had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products". The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way for a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla's roof and killing Banner. The lawsuit, brought by Banner's wife, accuses the company of intentional misconduct and gross negligence, which could expose Tesla to punitive damages. The ruling comes after Tesla won two product liability lawsuits in California earlier this year focused on alleged defects in its Autopilot system.

His experience was a sign of how self-driving taxis are increasingly starting to take a toll on city services. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous vehicles, the cars have slowed down emergency response times, caused accidents, increased congestion and added to the workloads of local officials, said police officers, firefighters and other city employees. In San Francisco, more than 600 self-driving vehicle incidents were documented from June 2022 to June 2023, according to the city's Municipal Transportation Agency. After one episode where a driverless car from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, California regulators ordered the company to suspend its service last month. Kyle Vogt, Cruise's chief executive, resigned on Sunday.

The founder of General Motors-owned Cruise has stepped down less than a month after the driverless car company paused operations after an accident and the loss of permission to operate in California. Kyle Vogt did not give a reason for his departure from the company that he started in 2013 before it was bought by the US automotive manufacturer General Motors in 2016. San Francisco-based Cruise is seen as one of the most advanced autonomous driving companies in the world, and it had started charging passengers for journeys in some US cities. However, it paused all of its driverless cars on 26 October after California regulators revoked its licence to transport passengers without a driver after an accident on 2 October. The company recalled nearly 1,000 vehicles to update their software after the incident.

Automotive bosses could face up to two years in prison for overstating the ability of autonomous cars under new legislation proposed by the UK government last week. The Automated Vehicles Bill (AVB) is intended to provide a foundation for the regulation and enforcement of autonomous car safety in England, Scotland and Wales. Some small parts of the law would also apply to Northern Ireland.

In August 2016, WIRED visited the San Francisco offices of a young startup recently snapped up by a surprising buyer. General Motors acquired three-year-old Cruise for a reported $1 billion in hopes the straitlaced Detroit automaker could coopt the self-driving technology tipped to disrupt the auto industry. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt--a scrappy Twitch cofounder who competed as a teen in BattleBots--said he intended to stick around, but to keep running the driverless-car tech developer like a startup. He'd be out of a job, he predicted, if he couldn't hack the self-driving thing in 10 to 15 years. GM's financial reports show it losing $8.2 billion on Cruise since the start of 2017, and it has sunk at least $1.9 billion into the company this year.

Earlier this month, a woman in San Francisco was hit by a car while crossing the street. Had the story ended there, it would have been just another one of the small tragedies that occur on America's roads, where roughly 100 people die every day. She was hit again, this time by a robotaxi from the start-up Cruise. The car braked, coming to a stop with her pinned underneath. Then it started driving again, dragging the woman along with it for an agonizing 20 more feet.