The non-profit Mozilla Foundation deemed cars the "worst product category" ever reviewed for data privacy, according to research released Wednesday. Its Privacy Not Included Research division reviews everything from smart home devices to health and wellness apps. But of the 25 car brands the research team studied, not a single one passed the reviews, with top brands like Tesla, Nissan and Hyundai landing at the top of the worst-of-the-worst list. Tesla earned a mark against it for untrustworthy use of AI, making it the second product reviewed by Mozilla to fail every privacy test conducted. That's because its AI-powered autopilot feature caused several deaths and hundreds of crashes. Meanwhile, companies like Nissan and Kia say they can collect information about your sexual activity and sex life, and Hyundai promises to comply with "lawful requests, whether formal or informal" to share your information with government and law enforcement.

Yansong Chen, senior vice president of strategy and technology at Ricardo--an environmental, engineering, and strategic consulting company--says advanced technologies are changing the way the industry looks at its value proposition, at a fundamental level. "They're also changing the way that the industry perceives its role in interacting with the customer." The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) clearly shows how change has swept across the auto industry over the past decade. Global sales of passenger EVs in 2022 exceeded 10 million for the first time ever. One in every sevenpassenger cars bought globally in 2022 was an EV, compared with just one in every 70 cars sold in 2017.

Renault Group is the latest carmaker to announce significant digitalisation plans, confirming a move into the industrial metaverse. The technology will combine augmented and virtual realities across many platforms, enabling different digital interactions. The industrial metaverse could offer several benefits, including a fresh marketing opportunity in front of a new audience. According to Renault, the system will be based on four dimensions spanning mass data collection, digital twins, supply chains, and advanced technologies. Renault states the integration of the metaverse can offer a'better visibility of the work environment allowing actors to gain agility and autonomy in decision making.'

Ensemble and auxiliary tasks are both well known to improve the performance of machine learning models when data is limited. However, the interaction between these two methods is not well studied, particularly in the context of deep reinforcement learning. In this paper, we study the effects of ensemble and auxiliary tasks when combined with the deep Q-learning algorithm. We perform a case study on ATARI games under limited data constraint. Moreover, we derive a refined bias-variance-covariance decomposition to analyze the different ways of learning ensembles and using auxiliary tasks, and use the analysis to help provide some understanding of the case study. Our code is open source and available at https://github.com/NUS-LID/RENAULT.

Google today announced the launch of Visual Inspection AI, a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) solution designed to help manufacturers, consumer packaged goods companies, and other businesses reduce defects during the manufacturing and inspection process. Google says it's the first dedicated GCP service for manufacturers, representing a doubling down on the vertical. It's estimated that defects cost manufacturers billions of dollars every year -- in fact, quality-related costs can consume 15% to 20% of sales revenue. Twenty-three percent of all unplanned downtime in manufacturing is the result of human error compared with rates as low as 9 percent in other sectors, according to a Vanson Bourne study. The $327.6 million Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was destroyed because of a failure to properly convert between units of measurement, and one pharma company reported a misunderstanding that resulted in an alert ticket being overridden, which cost four days on the production line at £200,000 ($253,946) per day.

It's a tall order, but one that Zapf says artificial intelligence (AI) technology can support by capturing the right data and guiding engineers through product design and development. No wonder a November 2020 McKinsey survey reveals that more than half of organizations have adopted AI in at least one function, and 22% of respondents report at least 5% of their companywide earnings are attributable to AI. And in manufacturing, 71% of respondents have seen a 5% or more increase in revenue with AI adoption. Once "rarely used in product development," AI has experienced an evolution over the past few years, Zapf says. Today, tech giants known for their innovations in AI, such as Google, IBM, and Amazon, "have set new standards for the use of AI in other processes," such as engineering.

In spite of all the hype about autonomous vehicles, the prospect of level 5 self-driving vehicles coming soon to a city near you remains some way off. By 2030, it's possible that we will see autonomous cars allowed to operate on some open roads, but for the time being, the evolution of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) in Europe is characterised by caution. However, there are certain aspects of autonomy that are already being deployed on the roads of Europe – while others will become commonplace and even mandatory over the next couple of years. Self-parking cars first appeared on European roads almost a decade ago, when Volkswagen Group unveiled new technology that could scan for a parking space before taking control of the steering wheel and manoeuvring the vehicle into the space. Since then, many of the major OEMs have incorporated similar technology as an optional extra or – on more expensive models – as standard equipment.

Alibaba has enabled the AliGenie virtual assistant in Audi, BMW, Honda, Renault, and Volvo vehicles. This article in The Motley Fool identifies a range of services that AliGenie enables as the conversational commerce portal to Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall marketplaces as well as to Alipay: It also acts as a hub for a wide range of smart home devices. Last year, Alibaba introduced Tmall Genie Auto, a version for connected cars. BMW and Volvo initially agreed to install Alibaba's speakers in their cars, and the company recently added Volkswagen's Audi, Renault, and Honda to its customer list. However, China's smartphone shipments fell 14% last year, according to Canalys, due to the saturation of the market.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A budding deal to combine Jeep maker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker Renault could make that possibility a reality in the coming years. After years of searching for a partner, Fiat Chrysler may have finally found the one. Less than a year after the death of consolidation promoter and Fiat Chrysler savior Sergio Marchionne, a merger of Fiat Chrysler and Renault is on the verge of happening. Fiat Chrysler on Monday unveiled its proposal to combine the two companies in a 50-50 deal that would carry seismic consequences for the global automotive business. Here's how it could affect American car shoppers: Fiat Chrysler is badly lacking electric vehicles in America.

SHANGHAI - Global automakers are positioning themselves for a brave new world of on-demand transport that will require a car of the future -- hyper-connected, autonomous and shared -- and China may become the concept's laboratory. With ride-hailing services booming and car-sharing not far behind, the need for vehicles tailored to these and other evolving mobility solutions is one of the hottest topics among global automakers gathered for this week's Shanghai Auto Show. Nearly all agree that there is no better proving ground than China: Its gigantic cities are desperate for answers to gridlock and its population is noted for its ready embrace of new high-tech services. To take advantage of this, manufacturers are competing not only to sell conventional and electric vehicles in the world's biggest auto market, but also to develop new technologies and even specific interiors designed for the on-demand world. "We cannot just develop electric cars. They will have to be smart, interconnected and of course shared," Zhao Guoqing, vice president of Chinese auto giant Great Wall Motors, said on the auto show's sidelines.