self-driving cars

Autonomous vehicles have become a hot talking point in recent years, as major firms like Google continue high-profile development of the technology. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] has also expressed an interest in recent years, and now tells Nikkei that the firm could introduce...

It's almost inconceivable, the idea of a world without personally-owned automobiles. But that's the startling vision proposed by noted researcher Tom Turrentine and colleagues, in a recent paper published online in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, entitled "California: Beyond cars?" (PDF)...

Seven years ago, dozens of professional stunt drivers in identical Ford Tauruses drove for hours through a ghostly and abandoned suburban California subdivision of one-story stucco homes, curving roads, and cul-de-sacs. On the roads with them were 11 self-driving vehicles, from a battered...

This is probably not the car you'll be whisked around cities in, in the future. Which is either a good or bad thing, depending on how much you like cars that look like koala bears on a substance recently legalized in Colorado. But it is Google's latest, dedicated test vehicle for its autonomous car...

It's long been expected that sooner or later, the Tesla Model S electric sport sedan will be offered with all-wheel drive. Now, two different Tesla fans have captured photos and video of what appears to be a prototype test vehicle with external instrumentation driving around the San Francisco Bay...

Cruise control is an American driving staple. We use it on long road trips to reduce fatigue. And with the advent of adaptive cruise control systems, we're even using it on parts of our commutes, and during traffic-jammed holiday weekend slogs. For the most part, cruise control can save a lot of...

Tesla Motors new high-profile hire is Doug Field, a former Apple vice president and Ford engineer.

Tesla says it will have a self-driving car on the road before anyone else, and that it will develop all of the necessary technology in-house.

Speculating on what will happen to Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] can be endlessly entertaining, and the discussions have taken up terabytes of server space already. But last week, a Forbes contributor suggested an intriguing notion: Should search giant Google buy Tesla? The conventional wisdom has been...

Nissan announced Tuesday that it will build an autonomous car by 2020. It is not the first carmaker to make that promise, but Nissan is hoping that a car that doesn't rely on connectivity could be what makes autonomous driving a reality.

A race track isn't necessarily the place you'd expect to find the latest in zero-emissions transit, but that's exactly what you'll find at Circuit of the Americas in Texas. Called Navia and built by French firm Induct, the small electric shuttle bus carries visitors around the circuit, with no need...

Love or hate Tesla Motors (NSDQ:TSLA) and its CEO Elon Musk, it's hard to deny that he's ahead of the curve when it comes to developing new cars. So when Musk says self-driving or autonomous technology is the next logical step in the evolution of the car, you take notice. According to Bloomberg...

It's early days for both electric vehicles and autonomous cars, but the technology for the two seems to go hand-in-hand. After all, what better way to be whizzed home after a hard day at work than in a smooth, quiet, green, and entirely autonomous electric car? It'd be like living in the future...

Making cars more efficient is only one step in improving personal mobility in the future. The other, some will tell you, is making the roads themselves a more efficient place to travel. If the roads were empty, picking the greenest route and keeping an ideal pace wouldn't be a problem, but other...

Steve Mahan got into a Toyota Prius hybrid, drove to the dry cleaner's, picked up some clothes he'd left to be cleaned, and drove home. The trip was about a mile and a half. Steve Mahan is legally blind. He's lost 95 percent of his vision. He did it, though, with a little help from Google. The car...

It's been a big morning for General Motors, with news coming left and right from its big media event in Detroit to celebrate Chevrolet's 100th birthday. In addition to confirming the 2013 Chevy Spark minicar and its all-electric Spark EV model, GM has announced a new Trailblazer sport-utility...

Put a group of urban planners, architects, and sociologists on a panel to discuss transportation in the cities of the future, and you may find they don’t spend much time talking about cars. Instead, you get statements like, “The megacity of the future desires to be a generous knowledge...

We've always been intrigued by the EN-V autonomous pod cars proposed by General Motors. Maybe they harken back to the happy futurism of the Fifties, or maybe it's just that they're the first total reinvention of wheeled personal transit in quite a while that makes inherent sense. Prototyped more...

The select global fleet of self-driving cars has a new Chinese addition, and the developers claim the intellectual property behind it was created entirely at a Chinese university. After gaining early publicity five years ago, the robot-driven vehicle made the trip between the interior Chinese...

Driving is often a pain, particularly in dense, congested urban cores. Start and stop, brake suddenly, stay carefully in your lane, drive defensively, then park in tight spaces. What if the car could do all that for you? Last week, BMW showed off its new BMW i3 Concept, which points the way toward...