Waymo is not thinking small as it prepares to make on-demand robot rides available to the general public, with plans to add as many as 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans to its fast-growing fleet of self-driving vehicles. It's also in talks to make that technology available to individual vehicle buyers. The Alphabet Inc. unit created to commercialize Google Self-Driving Car R&D said it's fleshing out a January 2018 announcement about adding "thousands" of the Chrysler vehicles, which at the time didn't specify a number. The deal could be worth about $2.5 billion for automaker FCA if Waymo buys the maximum number of vans, which have a $39,995 base price. It follows a March deal with Jaguar to buy up to 20,000 electric i-Pace crossovers over the next few years.

Many are doing brisk business as companies around Eastern Europe accelerate an automation drive. At Rittal, a maker of switch gears and control cabinets for industrial robots, orders rose 15 percent last year and have jumped 25 percent since January. "Companies aren't able to produce more, so their competitiveness is falling," said Jaromir Zeleny, Rittal's managing director. "They don't want to be so dependent on people." Eastern Europe became a manufacturing powerhouse by luring multinationals with low wages. That advantage is ebbing, though.

New rules of the road for robot cars coming out of Washington this week could lead to the eventual extinction of one of the defining archetypes of the past century: the human driver. While banning people from driving may seem like something from a Kurt Vonnegut short story, it's the logical endgame of a technology that could dramatically reduce -- or even eliminate -- the 1.25 million road deaths a year globally. Human error is the cause of 94 percent of roadway fatalities, U.S. safety regulators say, and robot drivers never get drunk, sleepy or distracted. Autonomous cars already have "superhuman intelligence" that allows them to see around corners and avoid crashes, said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia Corp., a maker of high-speed processors for self-driving cars. "Long term, these vehicles will drive better than any human possibly can," Shapiro said.