Articles about Car Tech

Self-driving cars, until recently, were a phenomenon saved solely for sci-fi films. Yet over the past couple of years, car manufacturing companies have begun focusing their sights on the vehicles of the future.

With studies predicting up to 15 percent of new cars sold in 2030 will be fully autonomous, it’s unsurprising to hear that traditional industry leaders and disruptive innovators such as Google and Apple are currently working on making this trend a reality.

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It seems every product hitting the market these days is touted to be smart, with the catch-phrase Internet of Things being thrown around everywhere. While there have been security issues in this new product line, there are also some really cool things available, and it captures the imagination.

Alexa, the persona behind Amazon Echo, is one way to enter the market, though you need to add devices to pair with it. Lights, door locks, thermostats, there's no shortage of items to choose from and it's growing all the time.

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Google has been testing driverless cars for a little while now, and the next stage in autonomous vehicles is driver-free lorries. Freed from the constraints of human drivers who have an irritating need to sleep, driverless lorries would be able to deliver goods over long distances faster than ever.

Driverless convoys of lorries are due to be trialled in the UK later this year as part of an attempt to not only speed up deliveries, but also reduce congestion on the roads. The Department for Transport wants the UK to lead the way in the use of "HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) platoons". The trials will take place on public roads.

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We forget the old days when we went everywhere on our own -- it now seems that we can't leave the house without a phone and GPS, frequently the same device. Both phones and mapping technology seem to be moving forward at an ever-increasing rate, and now TomTom is making the next big leap with its maps.

The new edition of NavKit adds real-time maps that will update incrementally. Also rolling out is additional geographies.

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Ford has announced today that it will unveil the new Ford Kuga SUV during the Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week.

If you were wondering what the hell is a car doing on a fair for mobile things, keep on reading.

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I love cars, but hate shopping for them. My vehicle is a meager Ford Focus, but it took me a year to buy it. Why? Some car salespeople can be very high-pressure, but worst of all, negotiating a price is an exercise in frustration -- it took me a long time to find the right car at the right price.

Why is it that buying a car can't be more straightforward? Well, Fiat Chrysler may have part of the solution to that problem. By leveraging Project Tango, Google's Android-powered augmented reality solution, consumers will soon be able to experience the vehicle of their desires without entering a showroom.

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Andy Rubin, best known as the founder of Android, became the head of the division after Google purchased the mobile operating system. He left the company in 2014 after briefly heading the robotics division, and founded Playground Global.

Since then his tech incubator has provided funding and help to many startups with Google being one of the sponsors of this venture.

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Another big show is looming on the horizon, though it seems the last big electronics expo just recently wrapped up. Mobile World Congress, which runs February 22-25 in Barcelona, Spain, is thought of as strictly a show for handsets. In fairness, that's what it mostly is, but other things tend to premier there also.

This year, for instance, Ford plans to be there again with CEO Mark Fields giving a keynote address featuring the unveiling of new in-car technology, something the company has become known for.

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Jaguar Land Rover wants to make autonomous vehicles behave more like humans, and less like robots.

The company is looking into how humans behave in specific situations, like slow-moving traffic, roadworks and busy junctions.

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You perhaps have not heard of the tiny island nestled between England and Ireland, but the Isle of Man has a long and rich history, including its now dying language of Manx. Its most prominent export these days is cyclist Mark Cavendish, a multi-stage winning sprinter in the Tour de France.

Now you just may be hearing much more about it as the island lobbies to be the test bed for driverless cars, a product that Google has made famous, but that many more manufacturers are attempting to produce as the future seems to dictate it.

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Last week, I came across an interesting piece by Jan Dawson about self-driving cars. In it, he argued that Tesla's (and possibly Apple's) approach of incremental improvements in automation was vastly superior to Google's goal of achieving full automation. His primary argument is that consumers need to purchase and experience semi-autonomous vehicles before they can trust the technology enough to purchase fully autonomous vehicles (especially given the likely cost of purchase). While this does appear to make some sense, there is a key flaw in this argument. The goals and business models of companies following these two approaches are dramatically different.

What do Tesla (and potentially Apple) want out of autonomous car technology? At least, in the short term, their goal is to sell more cars to consumers. What approach fits best with that goal? Incrementalism -- in other words, making sustaining improvements to their existing product to grow sales volumes and average selling prices. And as Jan rightly pointed out, consumers are unlikely to trust the technology behind fully autonomous cars right off the bat. Therefore, striving for incremental improvements in autonomy makes perfect sense for business models dependent on hardware sales.

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Here's the deal, folks -- I love cars and technology. Heck, I am sure many of you dear BetaNews readers do too. Unfortunately, it just isn't feasible to buy a brand-new car every time the latest technology comes out. While I love my Ford Focus, it doesn't even have Bluetooth. My iPhone gets connected to the stereo by way of an analog cable. I would absolutely love a car with Apple CarPlay.

While I am a Ford fan, I am also a fan of value and quality regardless of make. Hyundai is a company that overcame much to become one of the best-bang-for-your-buck vehicle brands, and its Elantra is one of the smartest buys for those on a budget. Today, Hyundai announces that the 2017 model of the aforementioned car will be getting both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

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When it comes to predictions it is often easiest just to take some really popular new technology and point out the obvious time it will take to be actually adopted. You could say I’m doing that here with drone deliveries and driverless cars, but I like to think my value-added is explaining why these will take so much longer than some people expect.

Amazon.com has been making a lot of noise about using small helicopter drones to deliver packages. I’m not here to say this is an impossible task or that drones won’t at some point be used for this purpose, but what I am saying is that it won’t happen this year, won’t happen next year, and in any true volume won’t happen even five or 10 years from now.

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At CES 2016, NVIDIA has announced the release of its Drive PX2 which is the company’s latest offering in the autonomous vehicle hardware market. NVIDIA hopes that the Drive PX2 will provide the ability to train, optimize and develop the neural networks which will be the foundation of self-driving cars in the future.

Several earlier NVIDIA components combine to form the Drive PX2 such as DIGITS and DriveWorks. However, Drive PX 2 hardware is also the successor to the Tegra-powered Drive PX released last year with the new Drive PX 2 representing  a major computational power jump with 12 CPU cores and two discrete "Pascal"-based GPUs.

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Google and Ford have decided to join forces to build self-driving vehicles by forming a joint venture. Google’s technology will enable the cars to drive autonomously, while Ford will design and manufacture the vehicles being used.

The partnership between Google and Ford will be announced by Ford at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in January. This joint venture will take the pressure of designing its own vehicles off of Google while helping Ford gain valuable knowledge and insight into self-driving software development.

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