Google's autonomous taxi subsidiary will hit the UK's capital next year, regulations permitting--but its first international service could be Waymo's biggest challenge yet. Waymo is expanding to London, the self-driving vehicle developer announced on Wednesday. The Google sister company aims to start service next year, when the UK government plans to allow autonomous vehicles to begin operating on its roads in limited pilot programs. Waymo says it's working with the government to receive the necessary permissions for its launch. This is only Waymo's second venture outside the United States--though could be its first international robotaxi service.

Tesla has publicly staked its future on its robotaxis. Now the company is planning to launch a public car service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tesla is calling it a "robotaxi" service, but legally, this one will have to use cars with human drivers. The plan appears to put the electric carmaker in murky legal waters in a US state with the country's most tightly regulated autonomous vehicle industry--and where Tesla is already being sued for misleading language around its driver assistance tech. On Friday, a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates ride-hailing and taxi services in the state, said that Tesla informed the agency Thursday that it planned to expand an employee-only taxi service to friends and family of employees and "select" members of the public.

When it comes to autonomous vehicles on city roads, that's been the approach in most of the world's countries. But on Tuesday, the UK announced it would put a cautious foot on the pedal, when the Department of Transport said it would accelerate plans to allow companies to operate self-driving cars on public roads in limited pilot programs starting spring of next year. The British government had initially planned to open up its roads for self-driving vehicles more than a year later, in the second half of 2027. "We can see what a massive economic opportunity this technology presents," Transport secretary Heidi Alexander tells WIRED in an interview. The department estimates the autonomous vehicle industry will create 38,000 jobs and generate 42 billion pounds ( 57 million US) for the country by 2035.

Tesla has been granted a permit to operate a taxi service in California, a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, a state regulator, said Tuesday. It marks the first step towards Tesla's and CEO Elon Musk's vision of operating a driverless taxi service in the state. One day, Musk has said, Tesla owners should be able to rent out their cars as sort of self-driving Ubers while they're not using them. He has said current owners should be able to operate their Models 3 and Y autonomously in the state later this year--a plan that faces both technological and regulatory hurdles. But despite the permit, Tesla's driverless taxi future still seems far off in California, which has the perfect climate for self-driving cars but some of the strictest regulatory requirements in the US for testing and operating them.

Waymo is launching its driverless taxi service in Los Angeles tomorrow after a stream of crashes. Angelenos will be able to sign up for Waymo's waitlist to be the first to ride in the fully autonomous vehicles after years of testing. 'Once an unimaginable future, autonomous driving is now a real-world way of getting around for tens of thousands of people each week,' said Waymo co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana. 'After achieving key milestones in each city, we're so excited to bring the safety, comfort and delight of our Waymo One service to more people in Los Angeles and Austin this year.' Although Waymo is rolling out its taxi service in LA, it is still conducting fully autonomous testing in Austin, Texas and is expected to become available to public riders later this year.

Paid autonomous vehicle service is coming to Los Angeles, thanks to a decision by California regulators today to allow Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to operate in the city. Under the new ruling, Waymo is also permitted to launch service in a large section of the San Francisco Peninsula. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission will likely prove controversial. It comes over the protest of local governments and agencies, including the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, the city of South San Francisco, and the County of San Mateo. All argued that local government and citizens should have more input and oversight over the expanded autonomous taxi service.

In recent years many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services and activities in a collaborative manner. The key idea behind such systems is to take advantage of idle or underused capacities of existing resources, in order to provide improved services that assist people in their daily tasks, with additional functionality, enhanced efficiency, and/or reduced cost. Particularly in the domain of urban transportation, many researchers have put forward novel ideas, which are then implemented and evaluated through prototypes that usually draw upon AI methods and tools. However, such proposals also bring up multiple non-technical issues that need to be identified and addressed adequately if such systems are ever meant to be applied to the real world. While, in practice, legal and ethical aspects related to such AI-based systems are seldomly considered in the beginning of the research and development process, we argue that they not only restrict design decisions, but can also help guiding them. In this manuscript, we set out from a prototype of a taxi coordination service that mediates between individual (and autonomous) taxis and potential customers. After representing key aspects of its operation in a semi-structured manner, we analyse its viability from the viewpoint of current legal restrictions and constraints, so as to identify additional non-functional requirements as well as options to address them. Then, we go one step ahead, and actually modify the existing prototype to incorporate the previously identified recommendations. Performing experiments with this improved system helps us identify the most adequate option among several legally admissible alternatives.

A week before Halloween last year, city of Austin employee Rachel Castignoli sent a polite but firm email to a government relations staffer at self-driving vehicle developer Cruise. "We would like you to not operate between 5 pm and 9 pm on Halloween," she wrote in bold text highlighted in yellow, documents obtained by WIRED through a public records request show. More children are killed by vehicles on Halloween than on any other night of the year, she wrote, and the city wanted to limit traffic--regardless of whether software or a human was behind the wheel. "Please acknowledge receipt of this email," Castignoli concluded, also in bold, adding "Thanks!" Castignoli's email is an example of the strange position of officials in some US cities chosen by Cruise and rivals such as Alphabet's Waymo as testing grounds for self-driving taxi services. Castignoli works for Austin's Transportation and Public Works Department, which like local agencies around the country, is responsible for what happens on city streets, setting speed limits and traffic restrictions.

Late last year, Waymo secured a Driverless Pilot permit from the state of California, bringing the alphabet-owned brand one step closer to launching its autonomous taxi service in the state. Now, Waymo is already expanding its service area, announcing plans to begin testing driverless cars in Los Angeles. The company tells Engadget that the test will mark the first time that fully autonomous cars will roam the streets of LA, and that thanks to successful tests in San Francisco, its been able to roll out autonomous drivers in new cities with "little-to-no on-board engineering work." That doesn't mean the company is ready to launch its Waymo One taxi service in California, however. The LA test will likely follow the same course as Waymo's fleet in San Francisco: a limited number of vehicles only available to riders in the Waymo Research Trusted Tester program.

Financial technology services are increasingly large and diverse, not only representing a change for users, but also for banks that have had to adapt as new developments allow greater knowledge of the market and customers. Faced with this situation, they have launched in Colombia a platform that will use advanced artificial intelligence functions to generate a credit score for each person and allow financial institutions to identify potential clients. The new system is developed by the fintech Yabx which specializes in enabling credit for unbanked sectors, so thanks to an alliance it will base its data on Telecom's Telecommunications system in association with Claro, therefore It will allow the identification of new clients not recognized by the criteria of traditional banking. The platform will use machine-learning algorithms (artificial intelligence machine learning) to provide a credit score and other products that can be offered to banks or other fintech companies that want to improve their abilities to acquire and qualify customers whose applications to banks traditional are rejected. Thanks to the association with Claro, one of the largest telecommunications networks in the country, the new system will be able to cover around 67% of Colombian adults, in addition, it will allow credit institutions to reduce their rejection rates by up to 40% by take into account factors that are not normally observed.