The cars that debuted at the Beijing Auto Show demonstrate that the Chinese market is now at the forefront of electrification and intelligence. These are the 19 most intriguing models we saw. The newest concept car from Lynk & Co was revealed at the 2026 Beijing Auto Show. While major motor shows in Europe and the United States are being forced to downsize or change their format, those in China continue to expand. With 1,451 vehicles on display, including 181 world premieres, the 2026 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition 2026 (also known as Auto China 2026) has become the largest auto show in history--and that's in terms of both exhibition space and the number of vehicles on display. This fact itself reflects a shift in the center of gravity of the automotive industry, but that's not all. A much larger structural transformation is actually taking place in China today. Previously, the focus was on low-priced electric vehicle models, but now price is no longer the primary point of competition.

Losing traction while driving at high speed is generally very bad news. Scientists from the Toyota Research Institute and Stanford University have developed a pair of self-driving cars that use artificial intelligence to do it in a controlled fashion--a trick better known as "drifting"--to push the limits of autonomous driving. The two autonomous vehicles performed the daredevil stunt of drifting tandem around the Thunderhill Raceway Park in Willows, California, in May. In a promotional video, the two cars roar around the track a few feet from one another after human drivers relinquish control. Chris Gerdes, a professor at Stanford University who led its involvement with the project, tells WIRED that the techniques developed for the feat could eventually help future driver-assistance systems.

The following footage obtained by The Washington Post shows Colorado authorities responding to a car crash on May 16, 2022, in Evergreen, Colo. This story is best experienced with sound. Hans von Ohain and Erik Rossiter were on their way to play golf one afternoon in 2022 when von Ohain's Tesla suddenly swerved off Upper Bear Creek Road. The car's driver-assistance software, Full Self-Driving, was struggling to navigate the mountain curves, forcing von Ohain repeatedly to yank it back on course. "The first time it happened, I was like, 'Is that normal?'" recalled Rossiter, who described the five-mile drive on the outskirts of Denver as "uncomfortable." "And he was like, 'Yeah, that happens every now and then.'"

This week, a US Department of Transportation report detailed the crashes that advanced driver-assistance systems have been involved in over the past year or so. Tesla's advanced features, including Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, accounted for 70 percent of the nearly 400 incidents--many more than previously known. But the report may raise more questions about this safety tech than it answers, researchers say, because of blind spots in the data. The report examined systems that promise to take some of the tedious or dangerous bits out of driving by automatically changing lanes, staying within lane lines, braking before collisions, slowing down before big curves in the road, and, in some cases, operating on highways without driver intervention. The systems include Autopilot, Ford's BlueCruise, General Motors' Super Cruise, and Nissan's ProPilot Assist. While it does show that these systems aren't perfect, there's still plenty to learn about how a new breed of safety features actually work on the road.

Derrick Monet and his wife, Jenna, were driving on an Indiana interstate in 2019 when their Tesla Model 3 sedan operating on Autopilot crashed into a parked fire truck. Derrick, then 25, sustained spine, neck, shoulder, rib and leg fractures. Jenna, 23, died at the hospital. The incident was one of a dozen in the last four years in which Teslas using this driver-assistance system collided with first-responder vehicles, raising questions about the safety of technology the world's most valuable car company considers one of its crown jewels. Now, U.S. regulators are applying greater scrutiny to Autopilot than ever before.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk often touts the arrival of completely autonomous vehicles as imminent, but exactly how close that future is for the electric automaker remains murky. Meanwhile, the company is launching new features in a US regulatory environment that has often taken a laissez-faire approach to emerging technologies, while using terms like Full Self Driving (FSD) that critics view as misleading. Videos posted online by Tesla owners show an erratic performance in "FSD Beta," the latest update on Tesla's driver-assistance system. Cars can be seen turning awkwardly, knocking down safety cones and lurching unexpectedly. Earlier this month, Tesla initiated a recall of some 54,000 vehicles equipped with FSD Beta to disable a feature that had allowed the cars to go through a stop sign without fully halting in certain situations. The episode highlights a downside to Musk's envelope-pushing approach, which has also been credited with making electric vehicles a mainstream option in the United States and other markets.

Federal authorities will investigate a fiery car crash which killed two people in a Tesla in Florida last week. The National Transportation Safety Board announced on Twitter it would send three investigators to look into the operation of a Tesla Model 3 which left the road in Coral Gables and collided with a tree, and the fire that followed. "We always look especially closely at newer technology," said Peter Knudson, an NTSB spokesman. The crash occurred near a residential intersection. It was not immediately known if speed was a factor or if the car's automated driving system was activated.

U.S. auto safety regulators are investigating Tesla Inc.'s advanced driver-assistance system known as Autopilot after a series of crashes involving emergency vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a document made public Monday that it had identified 11 crashes since early 2018 in which a Tesla vehicle using the company's driver-assistance system struck one or more vehicles involved in an emergency-response situation. NHTSA has been looking more closely at advanced driver-assistance systems such as Autopilot as they have become more ubiquitous and safety concerns have grown. The agency recently began requiring companies to regularly report crashes involving advanced driver-assistance or automated driving systems to the agency.

The next time Waymo talks about its fully autonomous driving technology, you won't see the Alphabet subsidiary use the term "self-driving." That's because the company wants to differentiate the tech it's working on from the semi-autonomous driver-assistance systems that frequently and incorrectly get grouped under the label. "It may seem like a small change, but it's an important one, because precision in language matters and could save lives," the company said. "Unfortunately, we see that some automakers use the term'self-driving' in an inaccurate way, giving consumers and the general public a false impression of the capabilities of driver assist (not fully autonomous) technology… Coalescing around standard terminology will not just prevent misunderstanding and confusion, it will also save lives." In practical terms, one of the first expressions you'll see come out of this change is Waymo's rebranded public education campaign, which is now known as Let's Talk Autonomous Driving.

Safety concerns over automated driver-assistance systems like Tesla's usually focus on what the car can't see, like the white side of a truck that one Tesla confused with a bright sky in 2016, leading to the death of a driver. But one group of researchers has been focused on what autonomous driving systems might see that a human driver doesn't--including "phantom" objects and signs that aren't really there, which could wreak havoc on the road. Researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev have spent the last two years experimenting with those "phantom" images to trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla's driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians. In new research, they've found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard's video. And they warn that if hackers hijacked an internet-connected billboard to carry out the trick, it could be used to cause traffic jams or even road accidents while leaving little evidence behind.