self-driving car
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that lidar sensors are a “crutch” for autonomous vehicles. But his company has bought so many from Luminar that Tesla is now the lidar…
Wayve raises $1B to take its Tesla-like technology for self-driving to many carmakers
Wayve, a U.K.-born startup developing a self-learning rather than rule-based system for autonomous driving, has closed $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the U.K.’s…
Police are starting to turn to robotaxis — specifically all of that footage captured by cameras — for video evidence to help solve crimes. While it might not be a…
Tesla fights US Senate campaign ad showing its EVs hitting child-sized mannequins
Dan O’Dowd, the California U.S. Senate candidate behind a controversial anti-Tesla ad, has pledged to continue airing the campaign despite receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the automaker. O’Dowd’s call for…
Ex-Apple engineer admits stealing automotive trade secrets
A case concerning Apple’s driving trade secrets which started in 2018 has come to a close. Xiaolang Zhang, a former Apple employee, pleaded guilty on Monday to stealing confidential information…
Toyota-backed robotaxi unicorn Pony.ai sues ex-employees over trade secrets
Pony.ai, a Chinese autonomous vehicle company valued at $8.5 billion as of late, has sued two former employees over alleged trade secret infringement. The lawsuit is arriving months after Frank…
Daily Crunch: Cartona will use $12M Series A to expand its Egypt-based, B2B e-commerce platform
Happy new week! Christine went on a well-deserved break, so you’ll have to deal with a double dose of my awful puns and worse headline shenanigans for a bit.
Real driverless cars are now legal in Shenzhen, China’s tech hub
There are plenty of autonomous driving vehicles testing on the roads of Shenzhen today: Pony.ai, Baidu, DeepRoute, AutoX, you name it. But these vehicles are not really the unmanned vehicles…
Baidu reveals the next-gen robotaxi that will be deployed throughout China
Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant that has plowed money into AI and autonomous vehicle technology, unveiled Wednesday a new all-electric robotaxi that it plans to deploy at scale across…
Cruise can finally charge for driverless robotaxi rides in San Francisco
Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors, has finally been given the green light to start charging fares for its driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco. The California Public…
Luminar, the U.S. lidar company, is the latest to poach executives from Apple, Nvidia and Tesla in the continuing talent war in automated driving and autonomous vehicle technology. Christopher “CJ”…
Zoox reveals close-up of its autonomous robotaxi
Zoox shared a close-up of its commercial electric robotaxi at the TechCrunch Mobility 2022 conference in San Mateo, California, on Wednesday. The Amazon subsidiary’s four-passenger, fully autonomous vehicle features a cubelike…
Autonomous Cruise car encounter with police raises policy questions
No technology is perfect. Even self-driving cars trained to obey traffic laws are bound to run into issues that cause them to commit a citable offense. Such was the case…
Daily Crunch: Identity-as-a-service platform Okta says it ‘contained’ network breach in January
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Volkswagen in talks to buy Huawei’s autonomous driving unit: report
The autonomous driving space might be seeing the marriage of two titans. Volkswagen is in talks with Huawei to acquire the latter’s nascent autonomous driving unit for billions of euros,…
Exploring the many faces of sidewalk delivery robots with Cartken’s Anjali Jindal Naik
“Sidewalks, to us, seem like the best way to get to an origin and an end destination. So that’s kind of where we’ve landed.”
Annotell raises $24M for tech that tests autonomous vehicle perception systems to improve how they work
As the automotive industry inches slowly ahead on the road to self-driving vehicles, we’re seeing the emergence of startups aiming to fill in some of the technical gaps in autonomous…
Humans should drive our transit future, not autonomous vehicles
Congress and the Biden administration have a chance to ensure that workers and the public interest, not profit motives of tech companies and large corporations, drive the future of AV…
Once an industry with long development cycles, the automotive space is being upended by China’s tech giants. One can hardly keep up with all the new electric vehicle brands that…
Toyota Ventures backs seed extension into Agtonomy, turning tractors into autonomous vehicles
Using a mobile phone app, a farmer can assign a job to one of the tractors, like mowing the field.
Autonomous driving startup DeepRoute.ai prices L4 solution at $10,000
DeepRoute.ai, an autonomous vehicle startup with offices in Shenzhen and Fremont, California, unveiled an ambitious self-driving solution on Wednesday. The package, named DeepRoute-Driver 2.0, is a production-ready Level 4 system…
Like Nio, Chinese electric car maker XPeng has kickstarted its international expansion. But unlike its rival, which put on a series of splashy campaigns in Norway, XPeng launched quietly in…
Combining driver monitoring systems with advanced driver-assistance systems creates a truly robust vehicle safety system.
Wayve, the lidar-free self-driving startup, raises $13.6M from Ocado
Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving startup that is notable for its use of deep learning and cameras rather than more-costly lidar and other sensors to guide vehicles, is gearing up for…
We don’t just need an AV revolution — we need a design evolution
Building an autonomous vehicle without any changes in design is like building a cell phone with a rotary dial.
Featured Article
Why regulators love Nuro’s self-driving delivery vehicles
Nuro’s autonomous vehicles (AVs) don’t have a human driver on board. There’s no room in the narrow chassis for a driver’s seat, no need for a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals.
Featured Article
How Nuro became the robotic face of Domino’s
Pandemic pizza was definitely a thing. U.S. consumers forked out a record-breaking $14bn to have pizza delivered to their doors in 2020, and nearly half of that was spent with one brand: Domino’s.
Widespread AV adoption starts with driver assistance systems consumers can trust
Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To start building this critical trust today, automakers should aim to accelerate the adoption of advanced driver assistance systems.
Scale AI CEO Alex Wang weighs in on software bugs and what will make AV tech good enough
Scale CEO Alex Wang joined us at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss his company’s role in the autonomous driving industry and how it’s changed in the five years since…
Congress has an opportunity to help build public trust in the safety of driverless technology by requiring existing innovations that will be the building blocks of driverless vehicles.
