Xiaolang Zhang, the former Apple employee who pleaded guilty to stealing information about the development of the company's self-driving vehicle, has been sentenced to 120 days in prison followed by a three-year supervised release. Zhang was arrested back in 2018 at San Jose International Airport just as he was about to board a flight to China. He initially pleaded not guilty until he changed his tune in 2022 and admitted to stealing trade secrets. In addition to serving time behind bars, he also has to pay restitution amounting to 146,984, according to the court document of his sentencing first seen by 9to5Mac. Zhang originally faced up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 250,000.

For many years, rumors have been flying around that Apple has been working on a self-driving car, or at least an electric vehicle with some autonomous functionality. Now, a third former employee has been accused of stealing some of that technology for a Chinese self-driving car company. A federal court in the Northern District of California has unsealed charges against Weibao Wang, a former Apple software engineer. Wang started working at the company in 2016 as part of a team that developed hardware and software for autonomous systems -- technology that could conceivably wind up in self-driving cars. According to the indictment, in November 2017, Wang accepted a job with a US subsidiary of a Chinese company that was developing self-driving cars but waited more than four months to tell Apple that he was quitting.

The history of self-driving cars goes back much further than most people think. As early as the mid-1900s, the first proposals for driverless transportation were developed, but given the state of technology at the time, the only realistic way to achieve it were to heavily constrain the problem. Specially built tracks, magnets installed under roads to guide vehicles, and other custom infrastructure were required, even in theory. But as time went on and technology improved, constraints could be relaxed: by the 1990s, rudimentary computer vision algorithms allowed self-driving cars to perform reasonably well on the highway. But these more modern techniques required that the automated vehicle be filled with server racks, and weren't adaptable enough for city driving.

Tesla is determined to win the autonomous race without lidar. Tesla has big plans in store, if we're to follow CEO Elon Musk's timeframe laid out during the Autonomy Investor Day. In an effort to achieve these goals, the electric-car maker may have made a solid purchase. CNBC reported Tuesday that Tesla has fully acquired a tech startup company called DeepScale. The startup focuses on computer vision and not on lidar, which many other companies and automakers bank out to give their self-driving car prototypes the gift of sight.

Apple is grappling with another employee accused of stealing autonomous vehicle trade secrets. NBC News has learned that the FBI arrested Jizhong Chen for allegedly trying to swipe self-driving car tech and pass it along to a Chinese competitor. After an employee saw him taking photos in a sensitive work area, the company conducted an investigation that discovered thousands of sensitive documents on his personal computer, including roughly a hundred photos from inside an Apple building. They also found that he'd recently applied to work at that competitor. Agents arrested Chen a mere day before he was supposed to fly to China, according to a criminal complaint.

You'd barely even know it, but CES just happened this week. In the last couple years the big technology trade show was very much a car show, where automakers and startups alike showed off the latest in hopeful self-driving systems always billed as just "a few years away." Barely a peep from anyone, and that may be because last year was the year everyone got real about autonomous cars. After a year that saw the first death of a human at the hands of a self-driving Uber prototype, and then an admission by Google's own self-driving technology chief that such cars won't ever be fully able to drive in all conditions, those in the automotive and mobility spaces seem to be taking a much more measured approach to things from here on out. Development of autonomous cars continues, to be sure, as does the advancement of semi-autonomous driving aids like those found on many modern cars. But we seem to be past the days where every car company, startup and government official swears we'll have a fleet of robo-taxis or delivery vehicles by 2020.

Lidar, the laser-bouncing tech used in self-driving cars, is pretty versatile. When it's not making autonomous vehicles smarter, it can be used for uncovering lost cities, finding bodies in unmarked graves, helping protect areas from wildfires, and … judging athletic contests? That's the application that Fujitsu has in mind with a new lidar-based system it thinks could help human judges assess gymnastics judging -- or potentially even replace the need for flesh-and-blood judges altogether. The idea behind the project is that gymnastics judges have to evaluate routines involving highly precise maneuvers. Due to human errors of judgment, however, scoring can vary, leading to accusations of bias or favoritism.

A high-profile legal fight took place in a San Francisco courthouse between Uber and Google spinoff Waymo, which accused the ride-hailing company of stealing its self-driving car technology. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A high-profile legal fight took place in a San Francisco courthouse between Uber and Google spinoff Waymo, which accused the ride-hailing company of stealing its self-driving car technology.

A high-profile legal fight is underway in a San Francisco courthouse between Uber and Google-spin-off Waymo, which accuses the ride-hailing company of stealing its self-driving car technology.

Byton, the new China-based company that unveiled a tech-centric all-electric SUV concept at the big tech trade show CES in January, is now tapping some outside experts to bring self-driving car technology into their future vehicles. Byton announced Monday that it has partnered with self-driving vehicle technology startup Aurora. The buzzy startup, led some of the best minds in self-driving cars, will work on bringing Level 4 autonomous vehicle capabilities into Byton vehicles. The two companies will conduct a pilot deployment of Aurora's L4 autonomous driving systems on Byton vehicles in the "next two years." The pilot will be in California, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said.