Automakers like Nissan and Mercedes-Benz, as well as Lyft, have been bundling their autonomous car experiments into electric vehicles. But Ford will keep one foot in fossil fuels, at least for now. An executive from the company told Automotive News that the self-driving car Ford intends to release in 2021 will be a completely new hybrid. While Ford is making a conservative choice to stick with gas-powered autonomous cars, it's hoping to eke out an edge with longer ranges than competitors' electric vehicles. After all, it's a lot quicker to fill up a gas tank than fully recharge an EV.

Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the stories you need to know for your next dinner party. For a couple years, the Morning Shift story at the beginning of every month was "Another month of record sales!" As the country recovered from the recession--or seemed to, anyway--all that pent-up demand resulted in booming new car sales for months on end. General Motors and Ford Motor Co., behind another weak month for cars, posted declines in U.S. sales for April in what is projected to be the fourth consecutive monthly decline for the industry and the longest losing streak since the market bottomed out in 2009.

Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know. We know autonomous cars are coming, and in several ways are here already. But BMW CEO Harald Krueger is thinking beyond just autonomy to the effects of full-on artificial intelligence in cars. Citing the win of Google's AlphaGo AI over a Chinese player and the development humanoid robots that react to how you feel, here's what Krueger is thinking about these days, according to Automotive News: "The companion in the Vision Next 100 car is just that: a real companion that gets to know you as a person and responds to you as an individual," Krueger said.