Amazon-owned Zoox today announced that it received a driverless testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). With it, Zoox becomes the fourth company to hit that milestone after Waymo, Nuro, and AutoX. The new permit will enable Zoox to test "at least two" autonomous vehicles on streets without a driver behind the wheel within a designated part of Foster City. The vehicles are approved to operate in fair weather conditions, including light rain and fog, on streets with a speed limit of no more than 45 miles per hour. Zoox was founded in 2014 by Australian artist-designer Tim Kentley Klay and Jesse Levinson, son of Apple chair Arthur D. Levinson, who was developing self-driving technology at Stanford.

Texas A&M is playing a leading role in expanding the capabilities of automated vehicles and investigating how they can be safely used on rural roads. The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) was recently awarded $7 million in federal grant funding from the Department of Transportation (DOT). In partnership with researchers from George Washington University and the University of California-Davis, A&M professors will be studying the specifics of how automated vehicles work on rural roadways -- something Alireza Talebpour, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said not much is currently known about. "Autonomous vehicle testing has pretty much only been done in urban centers," Talebpour said. "The technology is useless if it only works in big cities – the majority of roads in the United States are rural. We want to enable autonomous driving for people who don't live in big cities."

Apple has laid off over 200 employees from its secretive self driving car division, it has been claimed. CNBC says the division, known as Project Titan, has seen employees moved to different parts of Apple. The major restructuring of project comes after the iPhpne maker last year hired Tesla engineering vice president and Apple veteran, Doug Field, to lead the team alongside Apple's veteran hardware guru Bob Mansfield. An Apple spokesperson confirmed the layoffs to CNBC, but said the firm is not abandoning the project. "We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple,' it said. 'As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple. 'We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever."

NAGOYA – Toyota Motor Corp. is considering trials using autonomous vehicles to transport residents and deliver food in central Japan by the late 2020s as it focuses on new mobility services using self-driving technology, company sources said Friday. Toyota will likely carry out the trial on the approximately 260,000-square meter premises of a plant in Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, that its subsidiary Toyota Motor East Japan Inc. will close by the end of 2020, they said. In the envisioned urban development on the lot, the auto giant, which also has a housing arm, is weighing collaboration with information technology companies to offer homes with electrical appliances that can be controlled through its internet-connected vehicle, they said. Toyota said it has not made a final decision about how the plant premises will be used but that it is "considering ways to grow and develop with the local community through the implementation of our mobility business." Toyota has been stepping up efforts to develop autonomous cars that can offer various services such as ride-hailing and package delivery, as the auto industry faces a dramatic shift in demand from owning cars to sharing them.

Tesla's former head of engineering Doug Field is back working with Apple after he took a sudden leave of absence from the Elon Musk firm back in May. In July, it was confirmed the senior engineer would not be returning to Tesla and is instead back with Apple - the company he left five years ago. He will be working on Apple's secretive'Project Titan' autonomous vehicle team, which been running since mid-2016. The two companies have fought over Silicon Valley talent for years with Tesla's CEO Elon Musk once describing Apple's car project as a'Tesla graveyard'. Tesla's former head of engineering Doug Field is back with Apple after first taking a sudden leave of absence back in May.

Apple is still extremely secretive about its self driving car plans - but new figures from the DMV have revealed just how advanced they are. The new figures, obtained by MacReports, show Apple has 55 vehicles and 83 drivers under its permit to test autonomous vehicles. This makes is the second highest permit holder, with more cars on the road that Waymo and Tesla, with only GM having more with 104. The new figures, obtained by MacReports, show Apple has 55 vehicles and 83 drivers under its permit to test autonomous vehicles. This makes is the second highest permit holder, with more cars on the road that Waymo and Tesla, with only GM having more with 104.

Uber does not plan to continue testing autonomous cars in California as it faces fallout from one of its self-driving vehicles killing a pedestrian in Arizona. While Uber announced shortly after the accident that it would suspend its autonomous vehicle testing nationwide, a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) relayed the raid-hailing giant's plans to discontinue testing in California for the foreseeable future. "Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California", says a letter from deputy DMV director Brian Soublet to Uber. The company's authority to drive autonomous cars on public roads in California, first granted last March, expires at the end of this month. If it wants to secure a new permit after that, Mr Soublet wrote, the company "will need to address any follow-up analysis to investigations" from the Arizona crash.

Apple products are already in our homes, pockets and ears, but now you'll start seeing them on the roads a lot more. The tech giant has quietly expanded its fleet of self-driving cars in California to 27 vehicles total, according to Bloomberg. That's a significant jump from when it was known to have three test vehicles driving around Bay Area streets last April. Apple has registered 24 more Lexus SUVs under the California Department of Motor Vehicles program for testing autonomous cars. The company has been gradually ramping up its focus on autonomous vehicles, albeit at a noticeably slower pace compared to rivals like Waymo, Lyft, Tesla and Ford.

Apple is working with a Chinese firm on research and development of car batteries, despite claiming it was only developing the software for vehicles. China's Yicai Global claims the Cupertino tech giant has been working with Contemporary Amperex Technology to develop car batteries. CATL was previously a part of Amperex Technology Ltd, which supplies batteries for other Apple products, but has since been spun off into a separate entity. Apple's chief executive Tim Cook has confirmed that the company are working on self-driving car technology for the first time. Apple officially secured a permit to test autonomous vehicles in California on April 14.

Apple's chief executive Tim Cook has confirmed that the company is working on software for self-driving cars for the first time. The company has long been rumoured to be working on driverless technology, and recently autonomous vehicles have been spotted around its California headquarters. But Apple, which has already invested heavily in machine learning and automation in computing, had refused to reveal its plans on cars until now. In a recent interview, Mr Cook finally confirmed Apple's intentions, describing self-driving technology as'the mother of all AI [artificial intelligence] projects'. Apple's chief executive Tim Cook (pictured in 2014) has confirmed that the company are working on self-driving car technology for the first time.