California regulators are threatening to suspend Tesla's licence to sell its electric cars in the state early next year unless the car maker tones down its marketing tactics for its self-driving features after a judge concluded that the Elon Musk-led company has been misleading consumers about the technology's capabilities. The potential 30-day blackout of Tesla's sales in California in the United States is the primary punishment being recommended to the state's Department of Motor Vehicles in a decision released late on Tuesday. After presiding over five days of hearings held in Oakland, California, in July, Cox also recommended suspending Tesla's licence to manufacture cars at its plant in Fremont, California. But California regulators will not impose that part of the judge's proposed penalty. Tesla will have a 90-day window to make changes that more clearly convey the limits of its self-driving technology to avoid having its California sales licence suspended.

Uber will invest 300m in electric vehicle maker Lucid in a robotaxi deal that aims to start with one major US city late next year. The two companies announced the new partnership on Thursday. Over six years starting in 2026, Uber will acquire and deploy over 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs that will be equipped with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology from startup Nuro, the three companies said in a statement. The agreement illustrates the renewed plans and push for financing for self-driving cabs, years after a first wave of autonomous driving investment produced only a limited number of vehicles. Tesla has recently launched a robotaxi trial in Austin, and Alphabet's driverless taxi unit, Waymo, is speeding up its expansion.

Electric carmaker Tesla has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of an Apple engineer who was killed when his Model X swerved off a California highway while on autopilot. Tesla settled with the family of Wei Lun Huang in the wrongful death suit they filed over the crash in Mountain View, California in 2018, court filings showed on Monday. The settlement means that Tesla will avoid a jury trial that would have focused scrutiny on its self-driving technology months ahead of the scheduled launch of its self-driving Robotaxi in August. The amount Tesla paid to settle the case was not disclosed in court documents after the company asked that it remain under seal. Huang's family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 accusing Tesla of liability due to exaggerated claims about the firm's self-driving technology.

Kyle Vogt, CEO of self-driving car developer Cruise and who founded the company before its acquisition by General Motors in 2016, resigned this evening. His announcement comes amidst upheaval at the company which last month had its permit to operate its groundbreaking robotaxi service in San Francisco suspended by state regulators. "The status quo on our roads sucks, but together we've proven there is something far better around the corner," Vogt wrote in a message to Cruise workers posted on X. He did not refer to the company's recent troubles. Cruise's crisis began on the night of October 2 in San Francisco when a human driver struck a pedestrian and threw her into the path of one of the company's driverless robotaxis.

Traffic deaths have been tumbling across the rich world, with Japan and Norway among the countries recently reaching postwar lows. The notable outlier is the United States. American crash fatalities hit a 16-year high in 2021 before barely budging last year. An American is now two to five times more likely to die in a collision than citizens of peer nations. Those expressing concern about this trend include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who has called it "a national crisis"), roadway safety advocates, and newspaper editorial pages.

Self-driving cars, also known as autonomous vehicles, have been a topic of interest for many decades. The idea of a car that can drive itself has been a futuristic dream for many people, but it wasn't until recently that the technology to make it a reality began to develop. In the early 2000s, self-driving cars were still in the experimental stages, with most of the focus being on developing sensors and software that could accurately detect and respond to road conditions. One of the first notable examples of self-driving technology came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States, which held a series of competitions in which teams of engineers and computer scientists would create autonomous vehicles that could navigate a set course. By the mid-2010s, self-driving technology had advanced significantly, with companies like Google, Tesla, and Uber investing heavily in the development of autonomous vehicles.

Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. Founded in 2017 by experts in the self-driving industry, Aurora is revolutionizing transportation – making it safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. Its flagship product, the Aurora Driver, is a platform that brings together software, hardware, and data services, to autonomously operate passenger vehicles, light commercial vehicles, and heavy-duty trucks. Aurora is partnered with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem including Toyota, Volvo, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, FedEx, and U.S. Xpress. Aurora tests its vehicles in the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, and Texas and has offices in those areas as well as in Bozeman, MT; Seattle, WA; Louisville, CO; and Detroit, MI.

A California billionaire has ramped up attacks on Tesla by running a Super Bowl ad questioning the safety of the car maker's self-driving technology. The 30-second commercial shows the electric cars crashing into child-sized mannequins, driving past a stopped school bus and hitting strollers in a parking lot while a narrator proclaims that "Tesla's full self-driving is endangering the public." The ad is the latest in what has been a yearlong campaign by tech executive Dan O'Dowd to have Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology, or FSD, barred from the roads and push lawmakers to increase scrutiny of the technology's safety. Dowd founded a campaign dubbed the Dawn Project to speak out against Tesla, and bugs and security defects in other computer systems. The organization has run a full-page ad in the New York Times and posted similar videos online, but the newest video ran during one of the nation's most watched sporting events, in which a 30-second commercial was reported to cost $6 million to $7 million.

Since ChatGPT took the world by storm last fall, people have been in a frenzy debating the impact artificial intelligence and other new automated technology will have on America's job market. The "robots are taking our jobs" narrative was further boosted by viral videos showing new, "fully automated" McDonald's and Taco Bell restaurants. The knee-jerk reaction to these videos is to say that robots are coming for our jobs, but while AI and other kinds of automation have progressed, that doesn't mean they're necessarily eliminating jobs. Instead, the new tech is simply changing how we work and what kinds of jobs exist. Automation technology has ushered in a fleet of secret workers behind screens, machines, and smiling robot faces.

Autonomous driving vehicles may be more ubiquitous much sooner than we originally expected. The commercialization of self-driving technology is expected to gain momentum in China in the next few years, thanks to continuous technological innovation and considerable policy support, industry experts said. China has taken the lead in the research and development as well as application of autonomous driving technology around the world and it is the first country to allow fully driverless paid robotaxi operations, as the market potential of this technology continues to grow in the nation, they added. The self-driving industry is set to witness robust growth in the coming years. The market size of China's self-driving taxi services is expected to surpass 1.3 trillion yuan ($188.6 billion) by 2030, accounting for 60 percent of the country's ride-hailing market by then, said a report by global consultancy IHS Markit.