HoloRadar helps give the vehicles a more complete picture of their surroundings. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In late January, an Alphabet-owned Waymo self-driving car was cruising near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, when a young child suddenly darted into the street . Waymo's LiDAR sensors detected the student, who had just emerged from behind a parked SUV, but it was too late. Despite slamming on the brakes and slowing from 17 to six mph, the driverless car struck the child, knocking them to the pavement.

Is texting behind the wheel of a self-driving Tesla crazy? As self-driving cars get closer to reality, Tesla is striving to remain a big player. But is it sacrificing safety to stay in the game? For the past few weeks, Geoff Perlman, a 61-year-old technology executive from Texas, has been testing a free trial of Tesla's latest self-driving software as he travels around Austin. He's impressed: it can handle confusing lane adjustments and park itself in busy lots better, he thinks, than the average human.

Chinese robotaxis could be set to hit UK roads in 2026 as ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft announce partnerships with Baidu to trial the tech. The two companies are hoping to obtain approval from regulators to test the autonomous vehicles in London. Baidu's Apollo Go driverless taxi service already operates in dozens of cities, mostly in China, and has accrued millions of rides without a human behind the wheel. Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said the news was another vote of confidence in our plans for self-driving vehicles - but many remain sceptical about their safety. We're planning for self-driving cars to carry passengers for the first time from spring, under our pilot scheme - harnessing this technology safely and responsibly to transform travel, Ms Alexander said in a post on X .

The sidewalk outside Majed Zeidan's grocery store in San Francisco's Mission District has stayed filled with flowers, candles, memorials and pictures since his cat was crushed under a Waymo in late October. A month later, a Waymo reportedly crushed a dog. Amid the pictures of the cat, a visitor had placed a poster that said, "save the cat, kill the car". That's when Zeidan knew Kit Kat, his bodega cat, had become the face of the simmering discontent over San Francisco's growing number of self-driving cars. Residents became increasingly comfortable riding one, costumed Halloween parade goers clambered on its rooftops and danced, and pedestrians occasionally banged its bonnet to get it to give way to them.

Humans display significant uncertainty when confronted with moral dilemmas, yet the extent of such uncertainty in machines and AI agents remains underexplored. Recent studies have confirmed the overly confident tendencies of machine-generated responses, particularly in large language models (LLMs). As these systems are increasingly embedded in ethical decision-making scenarios, it is important to understand their moral reasoning and the inherent uncertainties in building reliable AI systems. This work examines how uncertainty influences moral decisions in the classical trolley problem, analyzing responses from 32 open-source models and 9 distinct moral dimensions. We first find that variance in model confidence is greater across models than within moral dimensions, suggesting that moral uncertainty is predominantly shaped by model architecture and training method. To quantify uncertainty, we measure binary entropy as a linear combination of total entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information. To examine its effects, we introduce stochasticity into models via "dropout" at inference time. Our findings show that our mechanism increases total entropy, mainly through a rise in mutual information, while conditional entropy remains largely unchanged. Moreover, this mechanism significantly improves human-LLM moral alignment, with correlations in mutual information and alignment score shifts. Our results highlight the potential to better align model-generated decisions and human preferences by deliberately modulating uncertainty and reducing LLMs' confidence in morally complex scenarios.

The race begins to make the world's best self-driving cars Tue 11 Nov 2025 09.27 ESTLast modified on Tue 11 Nov 2025 09.29 EST I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham. Who will dominate the autonomous vehicles market? We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come. The company has invested billions of dollars in Waymo in the past 15 years.

Tesla is being investigated by the US government after reports the firm's self-driving cars had broken traffic laws, including driving on the wrong side of the road and not stopping for red lights. It said it was aware of 58 reports where the electric cars had committed such violations, according to a filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). An estimated 2.9 million cars equipped with full self-driving tech will fall under the investigation. Tesla, whose boss Elon Musk recently became the world's first half-trillionaire, has been approached for comment. The NHTSA's preliminary evaluation will assess the scope, frequency, and potential safety consequences of the Full Self-Driving (Supervised) mode.

Police officers in San Bruno observed a Waymo car making an illegal U-turn. The incident highlights a gray area in law enforcement’s ability to cite robot cars when they violate traffic laws.

Eyeing the future of self-driving cars, Musk's Tesla settles accident case Billionaire tycoon Elon Musk's Tesla has said its future will be centred around Robotaxis, robots and self-driving cars. Musk's own fortunes, including the promise of a $1 trillion pay package, will depend on the carmaker hitting those milestones over the next decade. One key feature to achieve some of those goals revolves around Tesla's ability to offer a fully self-driving service - the company is required to sell up to 10 million subscriptions for self-driving cars as one of the conditions in the proposed trillion-dollar pay package. That is not a spotlight that Tesla wants, and the company recently settled with the family of a 15-year-old boy in San Francisco who died in 2019 after a Tesla self-driving car hit the car his father was driving, court filings on Monday showed. The family of Jovani Maldonado had alleged that the self-driving car was at fault for the accident. The settlement came weeks after a Florida jury ordered the company to pay $243m in damages to the family of a female pedestrian who had died in a crash involving a Tesla self-driving car.

'The ludicrous valuations of AI startups are predicated on the idea that this technology has the power to eliminate the very need for human labor.' 'The ludicrous valuations of AI startups are predicated on the idea that this technology has the power to eliminate the very need for human labor.' AI will make the rich unfathomably richer. Is this really what we want? The'knowledge economy' promised cultural and social growth. Instead, we got worsening inequality and division. R ecently, Palantir - a tech corporation that boasts no fewer than five billionaire executives - announced its Q2 earnings: over a billion dollars generated in a single quarter.