For decades, anyone who wanted to know whether a new car was safe to drive could simply put it through its paces, using tests established through trial and error. Such tests might investigate whether the car can take a sharp turn while keeping all four wheels on the road, brake to a stop over a short distance, or survive a collision with a wall while protecting its occupants. But as cars take an ever greater part in driving themselves, such straightforward testing will no longer suffice. We will need to know whether the vehicle has enough intelligence to handle the same kind of driving conditions that humans have always had to manage. To do that, automotive safety-assurance testing has to become less like an obstacle course and more like an IQ test.

In another step towards autonomous driving, Skoda Auto has partnered with VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, to develop new technologies for driving assistance systems. The collaboration between the two parties involve a'Follow the Vehicle' project that aims to have autonomous cars follow a manned lead vehicle. The technology, currently being tested on two correspondingly configured Skoda Superb iVs, has potential for car-sharing service providers, car rental companies or fleet operators. The'Follow the Vehicle' project follows the principle of'two cars, one driver' where the lead vehicle is driven by a human, determining route, speed, lane and other parameters. The autonomous car follows the lead vehicle at a distance of up to ten metres.

Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo kept its lead in driverless cars in California, but General Motors Co.'s Cruise and startups, such as Zoox Inc., are closing the gap. California's DMV this week released 2018 data on its autonomous-car permit holders and the miles they have driven, saying AVs with a "safety driver," or those ready to intervene as needed in a test driverless vehicle, drove 2.05 million miles on the state's public roads, four times more than 2017's 507,000 miles driven. California requires every company conducting driverless-car tests on its public roads to report every January their prior-year monthly miles driven and "disengagements," or instances where human drivers had to take control of the driverless cars to avoid incidents or to test a feature. See also: GM investors are undervaluing company's restructuring savings, Deutsche Bank says Alphabet's GOOG, 0.13% GOOGL, 0.05% Waymo continued to lead the pack, driving about 1.3 million miles, compared with 353,000 miles in 2017. GM GM, -0.28% Cruise's test cars drove 448,000 miles.

Toyota today revealed some of the inner workings of an automation package meant to help drivers rather than replace them. The company also said that if that package had been in operation, it could have prevented or mitigated a recent three-car accident in California. The announcement came at CES 2019, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. Toyota has often spoken of its two-stage research project for self-driving cars. In the long run, it plans to offer a truly driverless technology called Chauffeur.

In the race to the autonomous revolution, developers have realized there aren't enough hours in a day to clock the real-world miles needed to teach cars how to drive themselves. Which is why Grand Theft Auto V is in the mix. The blockbuster video game is one of the simulation platforms researchers and engineers increasingly rely on to test and train the machines being primed to take control of the family sedan. Companies from Ford Motor Co. to Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo may boast about putting no-hands models on the market in three years, but there's a lot still to learn about drilling algorithms in how to respond when, say, a mattress falls off a truck on the freeway. If automakers and tech enterprises want to make their deadline, they have to hurry up.

In the race to the autonomous revolution, developers have realized there aren't enough hours in a day to clock the real-world miles needed to teach cars how to drive themselves. Which is why Grand Theft Auto V is in the mix. The blockbuster video game is one of the simulation platforms researchers and engineers increasingly rely on to test and train the machines being primed to take control of the family sedan. Companies from Ford Motor Co. to Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo may boast about putting no-hands models on the market in three years, but there's a lot still to learn about drilling algorithms in how to respond when, say, a mattress falls off a truck on the freeway. If automakers and tech enterprises want to make their deadline, they have to hurry up.

Self-driving cars operate using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms have become commoditized, even open source. Data, not algorithms, is what confers competitive advantage. Currently, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) has access to vastly more driving data than any other company. The Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Waymo, once widely recognized as the leader in self driving, had a cumulative 2 million miles of driving data in October 2016. Tesla's cars with "full self-driving hardware" (HW2) are currently driving over 1 million miles per day.

Google plans to begin testing its new prototype of a self-driving car -- which, unlike earlier models, the company hopes to operate without a backup driver -- at NASA's Ames Research Center on the grounds of Moffett Field, just a few miles from the tech company's headquarters, space agency officials said this week. Because Moffett is federal property, Google cars can drive the network of streets that crisscross the sprawling, 2,000-acre research facility without worrying about California regulations that say a human operator must be able to take control of self-driving vehicles during testing on public roads. Testing of cars without drivers could begin at Moffett early next year, according to a statement from Ames Associate Director Deborah Feng. NASA is working with Google on the project and hopes to gain useful information for its own efforts to develop unmanned drones and air traffic management systems. The Google cars are one of several projects run by the company's secretive X division, overseen by co-founder Sergey Brin. He and Google CEO Larry Page have said computer-driven cars may someday eliminate countless traffic injuries and deaths caused by human error, while also saving time, money and land devoted to parking, since they could drop off passengers and return later to pick them up.

The lidar grid is visible using night vision during the test of the Ford Fusion Hybrid autonomous car. Ford researchers took a Fusion Hybrid autonomous test vehicle to its proving grounds in Arizona to put its lidar sensors through their paces – in pitch black darkness. It was so dark the researchers who were monitoring the test wore night vision goggles. The test was important not just for the cool factor of driving without lights in the darkness like a sci-fi spy. Many autonomous car systems use several types of sensors, including cameras and radar in addition to lidar.