The self-driving era is here, just not the one that was promised. Instead of sleek pods without steering wheels ready to chauffeur buyers off the lot, there are mostly driverless Chevy compacts, Chrysler minivans, and Ford box trucks with bolted-on hardware trundling around bits of the U.S. southwest and, as of August, a short loop of roads in Ontario. But while the current reality has fallen far short of automaker predictions, it's worth stopping to acknowledge that there are trucks driving around public Canadian roads making deliveries, without a soul inside. The technological achievement of the feat has huge implications for business, and society, but the latest industry outlook, humbled by past failures, points to a more gradual rollout. "People think there will be a magic day where suddenly everything will be autonomous, but that's not how this is going to work," said Raquel Urtasun, a leading artificial intelligence researcher and chief executive of Toronto-based autonomous outfit Waabi Innovation Inc. "You will have certain areas where this technology is going to deploy, and then those areas will expand under more and more difficult situations."

Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate Sony Group Corp says it has the technology to make humanoid robots quickly once it has identified how they could be effectively used. "In terms of technology, several companies in the world including this one have enough technology accumulated to make them swiftly once it becomes clear which usage is promising," Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano told Reuters in an interview. "The key is the development of application." Sony launched a robot dog called Aibo more than two decades ago. It sold about 150,000 units of Aibo from 1999 until 2006 and launched an advanced version in 2018, selling about 20,000 units in the first six months.

TOKYO, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate Sony Group Corp (6758.T) said on Tuesday it has the technology to make humanoid robots quickly once it has identified how they could be effectively used. "In terms of technology, several companies in the world including this one have enough technology accumulated to make them swiftly once it becomes clear which usage is promising," Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano told Reuters in an interview. "The key is the development of application," Kitano said. Sony launched a robot dog called Aibo more than two decades ago. It sold about 150,000 units of Aibo from 1999 until 2006 and launched an advanced version in 2018, selling about 20,000 units in the first six months.

General Motors Co.'s driverless-car unit has requested approval from California regulators to begin public testing of a shuttle that has no steering wheel or manual controls, showing the auto maker's determination to make progress on autonomous vehicles as rivals step back. GM's Cruise LLC division in August submitted an application to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, requesting permission to test its Origin driverless vehicle on San Francisco streets, according to a copy of the document obtained through a public records request. The California DMV began reviewing the application in late October, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal as part of the request. In its application, Cruise said it would begin test runs of the electric Origin in a confined area of San Francisco during limited hours and gradually expand over time. While GM and Cruise push ahead on plans to commercialize robotaxis, other players have pulled back, expressing doubts about whether the technology can support a viable business any time soon.

HAGA, Japan--Honda Motor Co. said it would focus for now on partially autonomous driving technology to improve safety, adding itself to the list of auto makers that say fully self-driving cars aren't ready for prime time. The Japanese auto maker, an investor in General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving unit, this week showed off a prototype system that allows a car to automatically overtake slow-moving vehicles on a highway. It plans to roll out the technology globally starting in 2024, and it says it has found ways to use less-expensive radar and sensor technologies to make the system affordable for mass-market cars. An alert human driver still needs to be at the wheel. Honda's executive chief engineer, Mahito Shikama, said the company intends to focus on technologies such as the automatic passing system and other crash-prevention measures that fall short of full autonomy.

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.

TOKYO--Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Group Corp., together with six other Japanese companies, are creating a new business to design and make next-generation semiconductors by the late 2020s. The venture, called Rapidus, Latin for "rapid," comes amid rising competition among major economies for advanced chips to support applications such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Toyota, Sony and chip companies Kioxia Holdings Corp. and Tokyo Electron Ltd., as well as SoftBank Group Corp., have each contributed about one billion yen, around $7 million, to create the venture, the Japanese government said Friday. A research center for the new business will be set up this year, the government said. "As the struggle for control of technology between the U.S. and China intensifies, the importance of semiconductors is increasing from the perspective of economic security," Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said.

DETROIT (Reuters) - The road map to fully self-driving vehicles is being rewritten once again, this time by Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG. When the two automakers joined forces in July 2019 to share control of self-driving startup Argo AI, it shook up the landscape among other key players. Wednesday's announcement that Pittsburgh-based Argo is being shuttered and some of its employees moving to Ford and VW underscores the growing realization that automated vehicles may be even further away from mass deployment than industry executives predicted back in 2019. "It's become very clear that profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are still a long way off," Ford CFO John Lawler said on Wednesday. As Ford, General Motors Co and other companies began to realize they would need to step up investment over a longer period of time, "it was never clear what the financial returns were going to be" on automated vehicles, Evangelos Simoudis, an investor, author and corporate adviser, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Uber Technologies Inc. inked a deal with Motional Inc. to offer driverless deliveries and rides, rekindling its vision of a self-driving taxi fleet nearly two years after it sold its autonomous vehicle division. The San Francisco-based company is partnering with Motional, which is an autonomous driving joint venture between Hyundai Motor Co. and Aptiv Plc. The 10-year deal will pair Motional's all-electric IONIQ 5 robotaxis with Uber's ride-hailing and delivery platform, the companies said in a statement Oct. 6. They did not disclose financial terms. "This agreement will be instrumental to the wide scale adoption of robotaxis," Motional Chief Executive Officer Karl Iagnemma said in a statement.

Tesla's CEO Elon Musk is set to unveil its prototype humanoid robots at an event on Sept. 30, hoping to expand beyond self-driving cars that have not yet become reality despite his repeated promises. While robots are widely used for specialist tasks at factories, other companies have struggled to create commercially viable human-like robots, despite decades-long development efforts. "This market is very, very challenging market because you buy this big expensive robot, but it actually cannot do much," Heni Ben Amor, a robotics professor at Arizona State University, said. Tesla's humanoid robots, Optimus, will be initially used in manufacturing and logistics for boring and repetitive work, thus addressing a labor shortage. For the longer term, Musk said the robot could be used in homes, even becoming a "buddy" or a "catgirl" sex partner.