Apple killed its'Apple Car' last month after years of broken promises and while the world has never seen an actual photo, but new details reveal what it could've been. The features were shared by a reliable industry expert who suggested the vehicle would've been a futuristic-looking microbus with a'private jet' interior. Mark Gurman, an Apple tipster, mentioned the van-like car would boast an all-white exterior, self-driving capabilities and a giant screen inside for FaceTime calls, watching videos and scrolling through apps - much like the iPhone. Experts had predicted the world could see the Apple Car by 2028, but then scrapped after an internal memo was circulated to around 2,000 company employees in February. Apple had never officially confirmed when consumers could expect the vehicle to be released, but it announced that it was abandoning the highly anticipated project after a decade in the works.

Gary Marcus has criticised a prediction by Elon Musk that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be achieved by 2029 and challenged him to a $100,000 bet. Marcus founded RobustAI and Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber), is the Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, and authored Rebooting.AI. His views on AGI are worth listening to. AGI is the kind of artificial intelligence depicted in movies like Space Odyssey ('HAL') and Iron Man ('J.A.R.V.I.S'). Unlike current AIs that are trained for a specific task, AGIs are more like the human brain and can learn how to do tasks.

Although the world is still battling the coronavirus, one Italian designer is looking toward a post-pandemic world to help commuters travel safely and securely to their destination. Andrea Ponti released a gallery of concept designs for a private jet-like drone that carries up to four passengers while they sit in single seats with soft fabric and leather cushions. Called'Kite,' the craft would use a propulsion system of four double-helix rotors and features a pair of LED headlights to help with landing and low-altitude flying. Ponti chose the name as a reference to the black kite, a well-known bird in Hong Kong, as he aims to use the air taxis in China's Greater Bay Area. This area consists of nine cities and two special administrative regions – locations that are suffering economically due to travel restrictions amid the coronavirus.

It's a short holiday week, which means we've got to mix it up. This week, we're thankful for you, dear readers, who follow us through the strange vicissitudes of the car business. You are curious; you are tolerant; you are mostly kind, at least on Twitter. So please be gentle with me as I introduce the theme of this car roundup, which is holiday plane travel. For this greatest of travel weeks, we're reviewing all the juicy, fun here-to-there stories we wrote in the last year or so, about building the most audacious flying machine ever, about staying healthy on your next flight, and about surprisingly safe airport Wi-Fi.

Yesterday at CES, Quanergy, an automotive startup based in Sunnyvale, Calif., held a press conference to announce the S3, a solid-state LIDAR system designed primarily to bring versatile, comprehensive, and affordable sensing to autonomous cars. The S3 is small, has no moving parts, and in production volume will be US 250 or less. According to Quanergy, the S3 is better than traditional LIDAR systems in every single way, and will make it easier and cheaper for robots of all kinds to sense what's going on in the world around them. LIDAR systems work by firing laser pulses out into the world and then watching to see if the light reflects off of something. By starting a timer when the pulse goes out and then stopping the timer when the sensor sees a reflection, the LIDAR can do some math to figure out how far away the source of the reflection is. And by keeping careful track of where it's pointing the laser, the LIDAR gets all of the data that it needs to place the point in 3D space.