Autopilot, ProPilot, CoPilot: Automakers have many names for new systems that allow for hands-free driving, but no safety or performance standards to follow as they roll out the most significant changes to vehicle technology in a generation. Spurred by Tesla's success and eager to start profiting from billions spent on autonomous driving research, automakers are accelerating plans to automate routine driving tasks such as cruising on a highway and make them widely available within five years, industry executives said. Most traditional automakers until recently had resisted allowing drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel for extended periods, concerned about product liability claims. Now, hands-free driving systems offer a new and sorely needed source of profit for automakers and suppliers such as Aptiv, especially when this technology is packaged with other extra-cost options. "Consumers are willing to pay extra - sometimes a lot of money - for advanced technology and features that are convenience-oriented rather than strictly focused on safety," IHS principal analyst Jeremy Carlson said.

Automakers have many names for new systems that allow for hands-free driving, but no safety or performance standards to follow as they roll out the most significant changes to vehicle technology in a generation. Spurred by Tesla's success and eager to start profiting from billions spent on autonomous driving research, automakers are accelerating plans to automate routine driving tasks such as cruising on a highway and make them widely available within five years, industry executives said. Most traditional automakers until recently had resisted allowing drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel for extended periods, concerned about product liability claims. Now, hands-free driving systems offer a new and sorely needed source of profit for automakers and suppliers such as Aptiv, especially when this technology is packaged with other extra-cost options. "Consumers are willing to pay extra -- sometimes a lot of money -- for advanced technology and features that are convenience-oriented rather than strictly focused on safety," IHS principal analyst Jeremy Carlson said.

To me, the San Francisco streets seemed deserted. To my self-driving car, they were full of hazards. In mid-March, just as the coronavirus outbreak started to change the world as we knew it, I took a ride in an autonomous vehicle through the narrow and winding, topsy-turvy streets of downtown San Francisco -- from the hairpin turns of Lombard Street to the steep hills surrounding Coit Tower and the famed Embarcadero waterfront. Even with tens of thousands of workers staying put as the first work-from-home orders hit, in the back of a Toyota Highlander piloted by autonomous vehicle start-up Zoox, I started to become hyper-aware of the circus of hazards robocars encounter on a daily basis. There was a cyclist or skateboarder in the blind spot.

How society will adjust, or what we can do to mitigate cultural upheavals, is just beginning to be discussed. Today, there are few answers. Autonomous vehicles are classified by six levels, from zero to five. Fully autonomous, Level 5, vehicles will not be available for 10 years or longer, Mr. Rosekind believes, and only after they've been tested for billions, not the current millions, of miles. But a Level 4 autonomous car that can completely drive itself under certain circumstances will come to market in five years or less, experts say.

Here's the deal, says Mark Rosekind. Around him, some 400 workers clack away on computers, or roll out yoga mats in the central "town hall" space, or tend to the startup's fleet of self-driving, golf-cart-on-steroids prototypes. The deal is that in spite of all this kind of work--work that has put autonomous vehicles on the streets of cities around the world--regulators don't know how to ensure the potentially life-saving technology won't instead make roads more dangerous. "A company might think it's OK because it checks some box," says Rosekind, whose job is to help Zoox solve this puzzle. Maybe its robo-car has amassed 50 million of miles of data, or has executed a perfect three-point turn, or reliably pulls over when a wailing police car appears behind it.

The top U.S. auto safety regulator said on Thursday the agency is seeking additional details of a recent crash of an Alphabet Google self-driving car in California. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) chief Mark Rosekind told Reuters on the sidelines of an event on highway safety that the agency is collecting more information to get a'more detailed exploration of what exactly happened.' A Google self-driving car struck a municipal bus in Mountain View in a minor crash on Feb. 14, and the search engine firm said it bears'some responsibility' for the incident in what may be the first crash that was the fault of the self-driving vehicle. Footage recorded by cameras on the bus shows the Lexus SUV, which Google has outfitted with sensors and cameras that let it drive itself, edging into the path of the bus that was rolling by at about 15 mph. Here, it can be seen on the right of the image, next to the kerb. Neither the Google employee in the driver's seat -- who must be there under California law to take the wheel in an emergency -- nor the 16 people on the bus were injured.

Federal highway safety regulators are gently rebuking a California plan that would compel automakers to show how they are addressing privacy, safety and a host of other questions about their self-driving cars -- a novel technology that could transform the U.S. transportation system. The plan from California's Department of Motor Vehicles would make it mandatory for manufacturers to complete a 15-point report on safety and other issues before testing automated vehicles or allowing them on public roads. It has been criticized by the automotive industry as being overly burdensome and a threat to innovation. The idea for the report came from a set of guidelines from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that was released in September. But the suggestions were never meant to be mandatory or prescriptive, NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind told members of Congress in a committee hearing Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Federal regulators, faced with a growing number of self-driving car tests on roads across the U.S., plan to issue a flurry of new guidelines Tuesday aimed at automakers and tech companies. The U.S. Department of Transportation will require any new tech to meet a 15-point safety assessment, consider new powers to allow administrators to limit the deployment of experimental vehicles, and will issue a model for state self-driving car policies aimed at developing a cohesive set of national regulations. Officials will solicit public comments on the topic of self-driving car regulations for the next 60 days on the Transportation Department website and plan to update self-driving car policies annually. "We're laying it out there, what we care about, and inviting the industry to show us how they meet those standards," Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters during a briefing late Monday. "Some companies haven't dealt with us, but they'll learn quickly we can go really deep on these topics. We want the public to be safe."

In 2011, Bentley's new CEO decided to get into the luxury SUV market. Wolfgang Durheimer, the incoming boss, had migrated across parent company Volkswagen Group from the Porsche division. He saw what the popular Cayenne crossover had done for Porsche's bottom line. Durheimer gave the Bentley engineers a simple mandate: Make the most powerful, most luxurious and most exclusive SUV on the planet. With the 2017 Bentley Bentayga, the company's first crossover, he appears to have succeeded.

Today everybody expects a regulation comes out and that's what it is forever. That will not work,