The Trump administration is replacing some of the nation's top tech officials with Silicon Valley talent tied to Elon Musk and companies associated with Peter Thiel. This could make it easier for Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engineers to gain access to sensitive government systems, sources and experts say. Over the last few weeks, several Musk-aligned tech leaders have been installed as the chief information officers, or CIOs, of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Department of Energy (DOE). CIOs manage an agency's information technology and oversee access to sensitive databases and systems, including classified ones. "Federal agency CIOs have authority over all agency asset management, which includes software used to monitor civil servant laptops and phones," a former Biden official with firsthand knowledge of a CIO's capabilities tells WIRED.

A judge has found "reasonable evidence" that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company's self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida. Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he'd found evidence that Tesla "engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous" and that Musk's public statements about the technology "had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products". The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way for a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla's roof and killing Banner. The lawsuit, brought by Banner's wife, accuses the company of intentional misconduct and gross negligence, which could expose Tesla to punitive damages. The ruling comes after Tesla won two product liability lawsuits in California earlier this year focused on alleged defects in its Autopilot system.

With self-driving vehicles possibly arriving on UK roads later this year, the government is starting to put rules in place to accommodate them, the BBC has reported. As part of that, it will allow drivers in autonomous vehicles to watch TV from an infotainment screen in self-driving mode, as long as they're ready to take back control. That's a modification of a law that has been on the books since 1986 that prohibits drivers from viewing a "television-receiving apparatus" when behind the wheel. It will still not allow the use of mobile phones, which were officially banned in the UK last year. That's because automakers can implement technology to stop a car's built-in screen from displaying content when the driver needs to take back control, but can't do the same on a smartphone.

Now, it's also the latest company to seek an edge in artificial intelligence by making its own silicon chips. At a promotional event last month, Tesla revealed details of a custom AI chip called D1 for training the machine-learning algorithm behind its Autopilot self-driving system. The event focused on Tesla's AI work and featured a dancing human posing as a humanoid robot the company intends to build. Tesla is the latest nontraditional chipmaker to design its own silicon. As AI becomes more important and costly to deploy, other companies that are heavily invested in the technology--including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft--also now design their own chips.

We were promised self-driving cars before the end of the last decade, and those predictions are turning out to be wildly, hilariously wrong. But things may be catching up -- and the loser of the pack, according to Sam Abuelsamid of Guidehouse Insights, is Tesla, which may surprise droves of Elon-stans. The market research firm performed an analysis of the entire emerging autonomous driving industry, and the company wasn't just last in the just-released annual scorecard -- it was last by miles and miles. "Of course there is also the elephant in the room that is Tesla," Abuelsamid tells Inverse. "To be honest, I'm not sure they really belong in this group at all, but the company and CEO have been so insistent that they are developing'full self-driving' ... and they get most of the attention from media and financial markets that I felt they should be here just to demonstrate where they actually stand."

Such freedom is granted under the Honda Sensing Elite's Traffic Jam Pilot function, which gives the car control over its own brakes, steering and throttle in that eponymous scenario. This lets the car maintain its following distance, speed and lane position. It does all this with zero input from the driver, who Honda says can "watch television/DVD on the navigation screen or operate the navigation system to search for a destination address." Outside of traffic jams, Honda Sensing Elite functions like the best ADAS technology currently offered from its electric vehicle partner GM, Cadillac's newly updated Super Cruise. With Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Keeping Assist and Low-Speed Follow active on the highway as well as "certain conditions" fulfilled, a Honda Sensing Elite-equipped car can drive behind another vehicle at a preset speed and a safe distance while staying centered in its lane. If the system notices the car ahead is lagging below the set speed, "the system notifies the driver and then assists [with] passing and returning to the original lane."

Volkswagen at one time said its electric ID.Buzz van would reach dealerships by 2022 (that announcement has been removed but you can view it in the Internet Archive), but news from its commercial division confirms that at least an unveiling is still on deck for next year. Beyond that, VW autonomous driving exec Christian Senger said "This year, for the first time, we are conducting field trials in Germany, in which the self-driving system by Argo AI will be used in a version of the future ID. Argo AI is the autonomous driving technology that Ford and VW have partnered to invest in and develop. The commercial vehicles team is developing vans to use the self-driving tech in that are based on the ID.Buzz to power a ride-hailing and pooling concept with autonomous vans that can operate in urban areas. With the announcement VW also released this concept sketch (above) of the self-driving test vehicle that Germans may see on roads any moment now.

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk made headlines recently by saying that his electric vehicle company is "very close" to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology. "I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year," Musk said in a video message, as reported by Reuters. But many industry insiders and self-driving engineers are dubious of Musk's claims. After all, level 5 autonomy means a truly self-driving car, that can drive anywhere, at any time, under any condition, without ever needing any human assistance. Gill Pratt, the CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, said "none of us in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true level 5 autonomy."

The self-driving car race seems like it's been going on forever, but also at times seems like it has no ending -- since it's so hard to get truly self-driving cars (from point to point) on the market. A lot of hope is being put on Tesla because it is collecting enormous amount of data (oodles more than anyone else) and feeding it into neural nets managed by potentially the best autonomous driving professionals on the planet. But there is no guarantee they are going along the best route, and there are many other players in the field. Perhaps the two most notable players in this field other than Tesla, from my perspective, are Zoox (because it was just bought by Amazon, which has potential to develop its tech at an enormous scale) and Argo.AI (company site here). It mostly (but not entirely) comes down to its potential to quickly collect data at a massive scale.

A remote Phantom Auto operator monitors a Postmates delivery robot. The 2020s may yet be the decade of self-driving cars, but early predictions from automakers and tech developers including Tesla, Nissan, Nvidia and Ford that autonomous vehicles would be ready as soon as this year or next don't seem to be panning out. This week auto supply giant Magna ended a tech alliance with Lyft on self-driving robo-taxis owing to a slower-than-anticipated timetable. But the billions of dollars that have been poured into R&D and development of advanced sensors and computing the past few years are being leveraged for near-term applications, including delivery robots and self-driving trucks, as well as autonomous warehouse, cleaning and security bots. And as those vehicles proliferate, there's an increasing need to keep track of them, monitor their operations, provide remote guidance in some cases or even, in very limited circumstances, drive them remotely.