A Tesla Takedown alum has launched a campaign for stricter regulation of autonomous vehicles in the US. Tesla's self-driving robotaxis use only cameras and software to navigate. Critics say this approach is less safe than designs that use additional sensors like lidar. A new advocacy group is pushing state lawmakers to pass more stringent autonomous vehicle regulations. The group, Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere in the United States (SAVE-US), says its goal is to ensure that new self-driving technology will save lives instead of doing harm.

After two years without a full-fledged, in-person CES, automotive suppliers and vehicle technology providers – and their customers – are eager for CES 2023, which is just a few months away. Even before a trend of diminishing support for some of the major auto shows around the globe, longtime auto journalist and analyst John McElroy called CES the world's best auto show. And it appears the 2023 version, slated for Jan. 3-8, 2023, in Las Vegas, may maintain that status. Gary Shapiro, president and CEO at Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which hosts the event, recently said that excitement is building, as CTA is expecting attendance to surpass 100,000 people. Of even greater interest to automotive and mobility supplier PR professionals, the automotive technology section of the show's floor is sold out, and in the first week of media registration, more than 1,000 journalists have already signed up.

Ford and VW-backed'Argo AI', the autonomous vehicle technology company, is shutting down. The company, which was once hailed as the leader of autonomous driving systems, failed to attract other investors and will now have a part of its resources absorbed by two of its primary investors. In 2017, Ford invested $1 billion in Argo AI eyeing autonomous vehicle technology to be available for commercial use by 2021. But, with heavy cash burn and technology still a "long way off", the company's priorities seemed to have changed. Motor Company also said that there is "potential for attracting revenue streams tied to L3" and that the company will use its resources in deploying the L3 BlueCruise System. Another report pointed out that Ford's investment in Argo AI came at a time when there was a huge hype around autonomous vehicle technology which was still at a nascent stage.

WASHINGTON, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Automakers and tech companies face a bumpy road to clearing regulatory roadblocks to deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) without human controls on public roads, industry officials and lawmakers said. On Wednesday, Ford Motor Co (F.N) and Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) said they would shutter self-driving startup Argo AI, saying the technology was a long way off. The same is true when it comes to rules around the technology as well. Legislation in Congress has been stalled for more than five years over how to amend regulations to encompass self-driving cars, including the scope of consumer and legal protections. And U.S. regulators have given no indication when they might act on petitions to initially approve a few thousand self-driving cars on U.S. roads without steering wheels or brake pedals.

This paper presents a neural network recommender system algorithm for assigning vehicles to routes based on energy and cost criteria. In this work, we applied this new approach to efficiently identify the most cost-effective medium and heavy duty truck (MDHDT) powertrain technology, from a total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective, for given trips. We employ a machine learning based approach to efficiently estimate the energy consumption of various candidate vehicles over given routes, defined as sequences of links (road segments), with little information known about internal dynamics, i.e using high level macroscopic route information. A complete recommendation logic is then developed to allow for real-time optimum assignment for each route, subject to the operational constraints of the fleet. We show how this framework can be used to (1) efficiently provide a single trip recommendation with a top-$k$ vehicles star ranking system, and (2) engage in more general assignment problems where $n$ vehicles need to be deployed over $m \leq n$ trips. This new assignment system has been deployed and integrated into the POLARIS Transportation System Simulation Tool for use in research conducted by the Department of Energy's Systems and Modeling for Accelerated Research in Transportation (SMART) Mobility Consortium

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Yellowstone National Park announced Wednesday that it is testing its first autonomous electric shuttle. T.E.D.D.Y., or The Electric Driverless Demonstration in Yellowstone, is a small vehicle with a big job. Annual visitation to the park has increased by almost 40% since 2008 – by 1 million people in the last decade, causing issues like parking lot overflow, traffic jams, unsanitary conditions, roadside soil erosion and vegetation trampling.

We were told there'd be fully-autonomous vehicles dominating roadways across the globe by 2018. When that didn't happen, we were told they'd be here by the end of 2020. And when that didn't happen, we were told they were just around the corner. It seems like now the experts are taking a more pragmatic approach. According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, many computer science experts believe we could be at least a decade away from fully-driverless cars, and some believe they may never arrive. Driverless vehicle technology is a difficult challenge to solve.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is calling on its sister agency to implement stricter regulation related to automated vehicle technology. In a letter it sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) at the start of February (via CNBC), the NTSB says the regulator "must act" to "develop a strong safety foundation." What's notable about the document is that NTSB chair Robert Sumwalt frequently cites Tesla in a negative light to support his department's suggestions. The automaker is referenced 16 times across the letter's 15 pages. For instance, in one section, Sumwalt writes of NHTSA's "continued failure" to implement regulations that would prevent driver-assist systems like Autopilot from operating beyond their intended use.

"LIDAR is a fool's errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it's ridiculous, you'll see." Tesla's approach to driverless vehicle technology has been controversial at best.

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup founded by two former Google engineers, has raised $500 million, suggesting that investors still have an appetite for long-term pursuits such as robotics and automated vehicle technology. Nuro now has a post-money valuation of $5 billion. The Series C round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., with participation from new investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company and Baillie Gifford. The round also includes existing investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and Greylock. Nuro was founded in June 2016 by former Google engineers Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu.