Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm Grab is aiming to start the new year with a bang and an awful load of bucks. The company, which acquired Uber’s local business earlier this year, is planning to raise as much as $5 billion from its ongoing Series H round, up from an original target of $3 billion, a source with… Continue reading Grab raises fundraising target to $5B as Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing war heats up
Tag: Uber
Peugeot Returns to U.S. to Help People Get Around, but Not With Its Cars – The New York Times
PARIS — Nearly three decades ago, Peugeot abandoned the United States market, stung by years of dwindling sales that were punctuated by a dispiriting 4,291 cars sold in 1990. Two years ago, Peugeot’s parent, the big European carmaker PSA Group, announced its return to the cutthroat North American market. The move stunned some industry observers… Continue reading Peugeot Returns to U.S. to Help People Get Around, but Not With Its Cars – The New York Times
Local EV makers drive ecosystem for green mobility in Telangana
As the infrastructure slowly gathers pace, there are about 200 EVs plying on the roads in the Telangana. Hyderabad: Even as the Telangana government hunts for that one big name in the electric vehicle (EV) space that can help fire up the EV ecosystem in the state, many local players are revving up their game… Continue reading Local EV makers drive ecosystem for green mobility in Telangana
Ex-Google engineer says he just finished first cross-country self-driving car trip
Angela Merendino | AFP | Getty Images
Anthony Levandowski, Otto Co-founder and VP of Engineering at Uber.
Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of a now-settled lawsuit between Alphabet self-driving car company Waymo and Uber, claims he has completed a trip across the country in a self-driving car.
Levandowski is launching a new autonomous driving start-up, Pronto.ai, according to The Guardian, and is touting the impressive feat as the company's first success.
“We are not building technology that tells vehicles how to drive. Instead, our team of engineers is building tech that can learn how to drive the way people do,” Levandowski said in a Medium post. “Our new approach has already enabled us to make great progress. We drove a vehicle coast-to-coast without any human intervention.”
Levandowski told the Guardian he didn't touch the steering wheel or pedals — except for periodic rest stops — for the full 3,099 miles. He posted a video that shows a portion of the drive, though it's hard to fact-check the full journey.
It would be quite the milestone for autonomous driving, and a potential comeback for the engineer, who was one of the pioneers of Google's self-driving car efforts (before they were rebranded as Waymo), and later defected to Uber. The companies got into a legal battle over confidential documents that Levandowski allegedly took with him, and he was briefly barred from the autonomous driving industry during the trial. The companies settled the case early this year.
The technology isn't “perfectly autonomous,” Levandowski said. And, he added, “The age of autonomous vehicles crisscrossing the country by themselves is still quite a ways off.”
Pronto is rolling out it first product next year.
Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.
Uber’s self-driving cars are back on the road, nine months after a fatal accident
Source: Uber
Uber Volvo SUV
Uber's self-driving cars are back on the road Thursday, nine months after a fatal accident in Arizona stalled development and pushed the company into lengthy reviews.
The company says it conducted a “top-to-bottom” audit of its safety policies. It previously vowed to improve operations before returning self-driving vehicles to the road. Uber pulled all testing in March, after one of the company's autonomous vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian.
A self-driving Uber SUV recognized a pedestrian crossing the street but failed to slow down for the designated back-up driver to manually brake in time. The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the accident and found gaps in Uber's systems.
“Over the past nine months, we've made safety core to everything we do,” Eric Meyhofer, head of Uber Advanced Technologies, said in a statement. “We implemented recommendations from our review processes, spanning technical, operational and organizational improvements. This required a lot of introspection and took some time. Now we are ready to move forward.”
The company is resuming road tests in Pittsburgh, with approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The company is also resuming manual testing, with a human driver directing the vehicle, in San Francisco and Toronto.
“We've reviewed and improved our testing program to ensure that our vehicles are considerate and defensive drivers,” Meyhofer said. “Before any vehicles are on public roads, they must pass a series of more than 70 scenarios without safety-related failures on our test track. We are confident we've met that bar as we reintroduce self-driving vehicles to Pittsburgh roadways today.”
Start-up Zoox is working on making the roads safer with self-driving cars
8:00 AM ET Wed, 24 Oct 2018 | 06:11
Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.
The electric scooter wars of 2018
This was was undoubtedly the year of the electric scooter. Between massive fundraising rounds, lofty valuations and both Uber and Lyft’s entrance into the space, it’s clear these scooters are here for the long haul. But just because investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies in the past year, the electric scooter… Continue reading The electric scooter wars of 2018
California issues its first approval for an autonomous ride service
Zoox Which company did you think would be most likely to offer an autonomous ride service in California? A heavyweight like Waymo or Uber? No — it’s an up-and-comer. The state’s Public Utilities Commission has revealed that self-driving car startup Zoox will be the first to transport the public. It’s joining a pilot program where… Continue reading California issues its first approval for an autonomous ride service
Uber reaches tentative settlement with drivers arbitrating over employment status and expense reimbursement
Uber is reportedly on track to go public in the first quarter next year, and in the lead up to that, it’s sewing up some loose ends. TechCrunch has learned that Uber has offered a tentative settlement to pay out 11 cents for every mile driven for Uber (including adjacent services like Uber Eats) to… Continue reading Uber reaches tentative settlement with drivers arbitrating over employment status and expense reimbursement
DriveItAway Buys Management Firm Whip, Cuts Ties with HyreCar
DriveItAway’s new platform, created exclusively for car dealers, focuses on the “low hanging fruit” of current shared mobility offerings Screnshot via DriveItAway. The car rental app for ride-hailing drivers, DriveItAway, purchased the technology and assets of Whip Inc. and ended its partnership with HyreCar. The purchase of Whip included its operations and technology team lead by… Continue reading DriveItAway Buys Management Firm Whip, Cuts Ties with HyreCar
Future Tesla Autopilot chips may come from Samsung self-driving push
2017 Tesla Model S testing at Consumer Reports
The race to build self-driving cars is heating up, with Google (Waymo), Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Ford, GM (Cruise), and others all vying to build the first reliable self-driving system.
Now add Korean electronics giant Samsung to that list—with a twist. Its first client could be one of the major competitors in the business, Tesla.
Tesla once had a partner in developing self-driving software, Israel's Mobileye, when it first launched its Autopilot system to great fanfare in 2014.
DON'T MISS: Teslas to get new self-driving, Autopilot chip in spring 2019
After a widely reported fatal accident in Florida tied to the company's original Version 1 Autopilot system, which used the Mobileye hardware, Tesla has been on its own to develop the next-generation Autopilot 2 hardware.
In October, the company introduced new software that enabled full on-ramp to off-ramp self-driving in the system it calls Navigate on Autopilot, on existing Autopilot chips. CEO Elon Musk has since tweeted that with the upcoming faster chips, the system will be able to handle commuting from home to work without human intervention.
Industry sources told the Investors Business Times that Samsung has been on a hiring spree for electronics engineers with automotive experience.
CHECK OUT: Consumer Reports tests Tesla's Navigate on Autopilot
Musk announced in October that the company would roll out new, faster chips in the spring that will enable the company's long-promised Full Self-Driving Mode features, which many customers have pre-paid for. He tweeted that the new chip will be 50 to 200 times faster than the current hardware.
IBT sources say that Samsung has already begun assembling the chips expected to be rolled out to the Model 3 in March.
Central to Musk's plan to have Navigate on Autopilot work in more situations and on surface streets is having more drivers use the system and feed driving data back to Tesla's artificial intelligence servers. If a new chip is also on horizon, however, more data may not be enough.
READ MORE: Tesla drivers log 1 billion miles on Autopilot
Samsung has denied the rumors that it is forming a new self-driving car division.
The insiders noted that Samsung's practice is to line up a leading customer before launching new business lines.
With the Consumer Electronics Show on the horizon in Las Vegas early next month, it wouldn't be surprising to see the electronics giant introduce such a system there.
Green Car Reports reached out to Tesla for comment on this story, but had not heard back before publication.