After years of ambitious targets and bold promises, investors are growing impatient with the pace of driverless-car development, applying pressure on an industry that had become accustomed to latitude and piles of cash from investors. Auto makers in recent weeks scaled back plans for the technology amid new pressure to curb expenses during an economic slowdown. An influential hedge fund also has questioned Google-parent Alphabet Inc.'s yearslong effort to advance self-driving technology, an endeavor that has proven thornier than many experts predicted just a few years ago. Activist investor TCI Fund Management this month sent a letter to Alphabet questioning the company's continued spending on its self-driving unit, Waymo. "Waymo has not justified its excessive investments, and its losses should be reduced dramatically," Christopher Hohn, TCI managing director, wrote in the letter.

You approach the car with arms full of groceries and call out, "Open the tailgate!" On the road, as snow builds, the vehicle asks if you'd like to engage four-wheel drive, which you do by saying "yes." Wondering what that digital warning symbol is on your dashboard? The car can explain as you drive. The technology behind these scenarios is expected to make its way into cars in the next year or two, as auto makers expand voice capabilities and allow users to control more of the car through spoken word.

Sony first displayed an EV sedan at CES two years ago, but it said at the time it didn't necessarily plan to sell a Sony car. The initial prototype served to show off Sony's image sensors, which can be a key part of autonomous driving systems. The new Las Vegas announcement suggested Sony does plan to sell vehicles under its own brand rather than merely supplying its technology to other car makers. The company said it would establish a company called Sony Mobility Inc. in the spring. The EV market is getting increasingly crowded with Tesla Inc. leading the pack of EV-only companies competing against traditional car makers, almost all of which have announced ambitious plans to expand their EV offerings.

Tesla owners who want to tap into a self-driving feature when traveling local streets got a boost this weekend, when the electric car maker began releasing a much anticipated software update, reports say. The updates to the Full Self-Driving beta version 9 became available Saturday according to tech publication The Verge, and Electrek, a news site dedicated to reports about Tesla and other electric vehicles. The update expands assisted driving capabilities for a small pool of Tesla owners who get to try out features early, according to Electrek. Tesla's assisted driving programs have come under scrutiny in the wake of several accidents involving Teslas, including some that were in Autopilot mode. In the wake of those incidents, federal transportation officials have said Tesla has done an inadequate job of monitoring drivers to make sure they are engaged and also has permitted the Autopilot feature to be used on roads where it's not suitable.

The transaction provided Luminar with the infusion of capital it needed to begin producing lidar sensors that use lasers to measure distances and classify objects for self-driving vehicles at a commercial scale, according to Chief Financial Officer Tom Fennimore. As a public company, however, Luminar must be mindful of how it spends the cash, he added. Luminar has positioned itself in recent years to benefit from the expected rise of autonomous vehicles. It has announced partnerships with car makers including Volvo Cars, which is owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Daimler AG's trucks business and SAIC Motor Corp. Ltd. to incorporate its sensor technology into self-driving vehicle designs. The Morning Ledger provides daily news and insights on corporate finance from the CFO Journal team.

The road to the autonomous driving future is certainly not going to be easy. Some car makers are even starting to doubt we'll ever get completely self-driving cars. Level 5 autonomous driving models will basically no longer need a steering wheel. They will be capable of taking us everywhere without any kind of help from the human occupants. But until we get there, Level 4 cars might be more plausible.

HONG KONG/BEIJING – Autonomous driving firm Pony.ai said on Wednesday it has raised $462 million in its latest funding round, led by an investment by Japan's largest automaker Toyota Motor Corp. Toyota invested around $400 million (¥44.2 billion) in the round, Pony.ai said in a statement, marking its biggest investment in an autonomous driving company with a Chinese background. The latest fund raising values the three-year-old firm, already backed by Sequoia Capital China and Beijing Kunlun Tech Co, at slightly more than $3 billion. The investment by Toyota comes at a time when global car makers, technology firms, start-ups and investors -- including Tesla, Alphabet Inc's Waymo and Uber -- are pouring capital into developing self-driving vehicles. Over the past two years, 323 deals related to autonomous cars raised a total of $14.6 billion worldwide, according to data provider PitchBook, even amid concerns about the technology given its high cost and complexity. The Silicon Valley-based startup Pony.ai -- co-founded by CEO James Peng, a former executive at China's Baidu, and chief technology officer Lou Tiancheng, a former Google and Baidu engineer -- is already testing autonomous vehicles in California, Beijing and Guangzhou.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp unveiled an emergency safety system on Monday that uses big data to ignore the accelerator if it determines the driver steps on the pedal unintentionally. Japan's biggest car maker will roll out what it calls an "accelerator suppression function" in new cars from this summer, beginning in Japan. The system is a response to an increasingly common cause of traffic accident in ageing Japan where the driver, often elderly, mistakes the accelerator for the brake. Some 15% of fatal accidents on Japanese roads in 2018 were caused by drivers who were 75 years or older, showed a report from the government, which actively encourages elderly drivers to give up their licenses. Toyota's announcement comes as automakers globally invest heavily in so-called active safety features as they work to develop fully autonomous cars.

Shot at the New York Auto Show, the new Cadillac Super Cruise includes a driver facing camera. In 2018, drivers asked for hi-tech, onboard cameras and now they're getting them. The New York International Auto Show, open to the public through April 28, is ground zero for next-generation car technology and also home to several vehicles that offer in-car and exterior monitoring systems. From upgraded blind spot cams to facial recognition software installed in the dash, cars on display are equipped with several sets of digital eyes that can improve vehicle security, safety and convenience. Some of the cameras can help propel cars closer toward an autonomous future by enabling the vehicle to see what's around it.

SABRA LANE: Much of the traditional car making industry around the world could go bust during the next decade, as the cost of electric cars plunge and become affordable for average motorists. That's the prediction of a top researcher and investor who thinks a world of self-driving electric cars, including autonomous taxis, is only a few years away. Brett Winton, the director of research at the US based Ark Invest, believes a disruptive day of reckoning is coming for complacent car making giants, who've failed to adapt their manufacturing models to confront new challengers like Tesla. Mr Winton is visiting Australia and he spoke about a not too distant "new world" of artificial intelligence with Senior Business Correspondent, Peter Ryan. You can look at some of the advances in artificial intelligence and see that computers are going to have the capability to solve the game of driving the car, and likely a lot safer than humans.