Business

Transportation

A Twitter exchange over the past 36 hours between two automotive CEOs — Jim Farley of Ford and Elon Musk of Telsa — has been both entertaining and scary.

The San Diego-based developer of robotic truck technology is the first self-driving tech company to go public in the U.S. The IPO also turned its cofounders into billionaires.

VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle company, is exploring an IPO at a $60 billion valuation, as reported in Reuters. That's larger than the valuation of VinFast's parent company, the Vingroup conglomerate.

Self-driving cars will be capturing video of everything they encounter, raising privacy qualms, of which using blurring might be a helpful remedy.

The challenge for Tekion, a five-year-old startup based in San Carlos, Calif., is that dealers have long-term relationships with the well established competitors. These are companies such as CDK Global, Reynold & Reynolds or Cox Automotive’s Dealertrack that provide dealer management systems.

The self-driving startup backed by General Motors said Walmart and other companies joined a previously announced funding round, adding an additional $750 million.

While widespread EV adoption remains a top priority, EVs are still considered expensive and out of reach for the average consumer. An emerging used EV market could provide a solution to this problem by making EVs more accessible for personal vehicle use.

The EV industry may receive a significant boost from Biden’s infrastructure plan. However, would it come at the expense of mass transit? Rudy Salo explores EV adoption, shifting housing trends, and the future of public transportation.

Earlier this month, the CDC recommended Americans delay traveling until they are fully vaccinated.

A new CarGurus study finds consideration for battery electric vehicles spiking, but consumers will only buy under certain conditions. Plus, Tesla's EV dominance may be short lived.

Nikola, IVECO and natural gas distributor OGE are partnering to create a hydrogen pipeline and fuel station system to power fuel cell big rigs in Europe.

Groq founder Jonathan Ross, who helped invent Google's tensor processing unit, has plans to double the AI chip startup's staff and expand its customers beyond existing ones in data centers and autonomous vehicles.

This trend is driven by the evolution of automated driving features that could lead to fully self-driving cars. That could drive down insurance premiums if autonomous cars eliminate human error, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports cause 94% of crashes.

Apex.OS is a fork of the ROS robot operating system that has been reworked to make it ISO 26262 certified and it will be used in Toyota's Arene automated driving development platform

Bizarro World has just come to life in automotive: insurance agents are the only superheroes ready to protect the public when it comes to functional safety in an autonomous world.

Ford has decided to brand it's hands-free driver assistance system as BlueCruise when it becomes available as an over-the-air software update on compatible F-150s and Mustang Mach-Es in Q3 2021

Self-driving cars are readily routed and could be programmed to avoid the bad parts of town, but this raises concerns from a societal viewpoint.