Altran's parent, Capgemini, is combining the engineering skills of Altran with its data infrastructure and has launched a service for end to end support for validation and verification of driverless car systems. Altran also includes Cambridge Consultants in the UK which has been developing AI and sensor technologies for autonomous systems. The validation technology is being used by the maker of Citroen, Peugeot and Opel-Vauxhall cars to manage thousands of petabytes of data from testing the next generation of driverless cars. "We wanted to work with Capgemini and Altran because of their strong skills in data oriented and cloud- based projects. Participating in a European innovation project for the automotive industry in the field of the connected and autonomous car is very challenging. This collaboration enables us to complete our data collection and processing on schedule, and helps us to deploy innovative solutions for data analysis methods on a hybrid-cloud based solution," said Jean-Louis Sauvaget, Research & Development Division, Expert car data acquisition and post processing for customer usage in Groupe PSA.

WASHINGTON (WISH) - Ohio lawmakers want to boost automated vehicle testing in the state. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is asking the U.S. Transportation secretary to reverse an Obama-era policy that keeps the Transportation Research Center in Ohio from getting federal money to test self-driving cars. Ohio lawmakers say the center is the perfect place to test self-driving cars. They say it's the largest and most sophisticated independent vehicle testing ground in North America. U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers, a Republican from Ohio, said, "They can test in different road conditions, different weather conditions, wind conditions. They can simulate almost anything."

Automakers can now start testing fully driverless cars on California's roads. According to the state DMV's new regulations that became effective on April 2nd, it can now issue three types of autonomous vehicle testing permits. The first kind is the original one it approved years ago, which needs a driver behind the wheel, while the other two could pave the way for the release of Level 4 to 5 autonomous vehicles. See, the second type of permit it can dole out will allow automakers to test fully driverless vehicles, and the third will give the companies permission to deploy them. While it may seem like California introduced its new permits at a bad time -- Uber and Tesla were recently involved in fatal accidents while their self-driving technologies were engaged -- the state approved the new regulations way back in February.

Driverless cars will be tested on California roads for the first time without a human being behind a steering wheel, under new rules that put the pedal to the metal for the fast-developing technology.