So now, without any further ado let's dive into the how the self-driving car industry looked like 15–20 years ago! Unless you are living under a rock, you probably know that the self-driving car industry has become one of the hottest industries in the last 5–10 years. Some of the world's biggest companies like Google, Tesla, GM are working on self-driving cars. These companies have spent more than 120 billion dollars on self-driving car R&D just in 2020 alone! The CEOs of these companies are saying that they are on the verge of creating the driverless cars that we all imagine when we think about our future cities(the ones where you can just fall asleep in to get the extra hour of sleep).

The popularity of self-driving cars or autonomous cars or driverless cars is increasing day by day. Just imagine a city with such cars dropping and picking people, there would be no hustle looking for parking spaces, getting traffic tickets, or no need for multiple cars per household too. And so the self-driving car trends in 2022 are even more exciting! When we look at the automakers and the tech companies they are developing complex technology that will allow cars to drive themselves. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) predicts that driverless cars will take over up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the end of 2040.

The automotive industry has undergone a massive evolution in the past two centuries. In just 200 years, traveling has moved from bullock carts to autonomous cars. If we compare this time frame and the pace of change with other sectors, it will surely leave us in awe. Moving ahead, humankind is expecting a big turnaround in the self-driving car industry. A forecast suggests that by 2025, there will be approximately 8 million autonomous vehicles or semi-autonomous cars on the road.

It is not the best of times for self-driving car startups. The past year has seen large tech companies acquire startups that were running out of cash and ride-hailing companies shutter costly self-driving car projects with no prospect of becoming production-ready anytime soon. Yet, in the midst of this downturn, Waabi, a Toronto-based self-driving car startup, has just come out of stealth with an insane amount of $83.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Uber, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures, BDC, and Aurora Innovation. The company's financial backers also include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Peter Abbeel, and Sanja Fidler, artificial intelligence scientists with great influence in the academia and applied AI community. What makes Waabi qualified for such support?

It is not the best of times for self-driving car startups. The past year has seen large tech companies acquire startups that were running out of cash and ride-hailing companies shutter costly self-driving car projects with no prospect of becoming production-ready anytime soon. Yet, in the midst of this downturn, Waabi, a Toronto-based self-driving car startup, has just come out of stealth with an insane amount of $83.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with additional participation from Uber, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures, BDC, and Aurora Innovation. The company's financial backers also include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Peter Abbeel, and Sanja Fidler, artificial intelligence scientists with great influence in the academia and applied AI community. What makes Waabi qualified for such support?

News broke this week that Woven Planet, a Toyota subsidiary, will acquire Level 5, Lyft's self-driving unit, for $550 million. The transaction, which is expected to close in Q3 2021, includes $200 million paid upfront and $350 million over a five-year period. Toyota will gain full control of Lyft's technology and its team of 300. Lyft will remain in the game as a partner to Toyota's self-driving efforts, providing its ride-hailing service as a platform to commercialize the technology when it comes to fruition. The Toyota-Lyft deal is significant because it comes on the back of a year of major shifts in the self-driving car industry.

Self-driving car startup Cruise has received more than $2 billion in a new round of investment from Microsoft, General Motors, Honda, and institutional investors, according to a joint statement by Cruise, its owner GM, and Microsoft on Tuesday. The investment will bring the valuation of Cruise to $30 billion and make Microsoft an official partner. Per Tuesday's announcement: "To unlock the potential of cloud computing for self-driving vehicles, Cruise will leverage Azure, Microsoft's cloud and edge computing platform, to commercialize its unique autonomous vehicle solutions at scale. Microsoft, as Cruise's preferred cloud provider, will also tap into Cruise's deep industry expertise [emphasis mine] to enhance its customer-driven product innovation and serve transportation companies across the globe [emphasis mine] through continued investment in Azure." So, Cruise will get the much-needed funds to conduct research and (possibly discounted) access to Microsoft's cloud computing resources and move closer toward its goal of launching a purpose-built self-driving car.

With that crispness in the air a sure sign summer is coming to an end, Robert Laganière is already looking forward to the sub-zero chill of January. While snowbanks, blizzards and icy roads are a veritable nightmare for most Ottawa residents, for the University of Ottawa computer scientist and entrepreneur they represent the ideal proving ground for his company's cutting-edge tech. Laganière is the founder and CEO of Sensor Cortek, a startup launched early last year out of an incubator run by uOttawa's Faculty of Engineering. He leads a team of researchers developing technology for self-driving vehicles that uses artificial intelligence to help detect pedestrians, cars and other surrounding objects. The seven-person company's state-of-the-art sensors combine tools such as radar and Lidar with deep neural computer networks that mimic the functions of the human brain.

New concept driverless car sparks autonomy debate. Quick, how many senses do humans have? Most of us would rattle off the five senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, touch, and the sense of being able to smell. So, your answer presumably is five. There are some though that claim we have a sixth sense, perhaps consisting of intuition or an ability to have premonitions.

A few decades back Artificial Intelligence was tasked as the technology of the future. Fast forward to today, it is quickly transitioning from the much-hyped future technology to surrounding us and affecting our daily lives. Right from predicting the next word to type in a text message to taking Instagram perfect pictures, Artificial Intelligence is being fused into products and services that we use on a daily basis. In the Manufacturing sector, AI has been at the forefront in driving transformation. In particular, this technology has disrupted the car manufacturing industry spawning the era of self-driving cars.