Tesla autonomous vehicles

A Maryland attorney is suing Tesla for over $1 million, saying the car he bought from the electric vehicle company in 2017 went haywire and began swerving at nonexistent objects. Attorney Scott Breza sued Tesla on Dec. 4, saying the company did not fix numerous sensor issues with his $105,600 Model X 75D. He said the vehicle’s autopilot feature often caused the car to veer off the road. The lawsuit brought up other instances of Tesla’s vehicles’ malfunctioning as well.“I have had multiple occurrences with the enhanced autopilot malfunctioning whereby the vehicle suddenly veered off the road,” Breza wrote in a 2018 letter to Tesla that was included in the lawsuit. “I have had issues with the proximity sensors repeatedly warning me of a potential collision when there is nothing in proximity to the vehicle.” (RELATED: Report Shows Tesla In Autopilot Mode Accelerated Seconds Before Deadly Wreck) Tesla has not responded to the Daily Caller News … [Read more...] about Maryland Attorney Sues Tesla As The Electric Vehicle Maker’s Technology Comes Under Fire

The family of a man who was killed when his Tesla Model X plowed into a highway barrier is suing the electric vehicle maker for allegedly using drivers as guinea pigs to test the company’s artificial intelligence instruments. Tesla is “beta testing its Autopilot software on live drivers,” Mark Fong, an attorney representing Walter Huang’s family, said in a statement. Huang, a Silicon Valley resident, died when his vehicle slammed into a barrier on U.S. 101 in California in 2018. His vehicle’s semi-automated feature misread the lines on the road and failed to account for the concrete median, according to the April 26 lawsuit.Fong added: “The Huang family wants to help prevent this tragedy from happening to other drivers using Tesla vehicles or any semi-autonomous vehicles.” Fong, while preparing the lawsuit, said the family’s lawyers have access to Huang’s vehicle but not to the data collected by Tesla. “We had access to the … [Read more...] about Family Of Man Killed In Tesla Crash Sues Musk For Treating Drivers Like Lab Rats

Tesla has acquired the machine learning startup DeepScale, CNBC, Techcrunch, and other news outlets have reported. The company's CEO, Forrest Iandola, announced Monday that he had joined Tesla's Autopilot team. Iandola explained his company's mission to Ars during a phone call last year, just after the company raised $15 million from venture capitalists in April 2018. DeepScale was building image recognition software based on convolutional neural networks. Further ReadingHow computers got shockingly good at recognizing images A key step for any self-driving software system is perception: identifying cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and other objects around the car. Identifying objects accurately is crucial because it allows software to make informed predictions about where they might move in the future. Most companies working on the problem use a technique called "convolutional neural networks" (CNNs) to tackle this problem. You can check out our deep dive on CNNs for full details on how … [Read more...] about Tesla just bought an AI startup to improve Autopilot—here’s what it does

A partnership between Volkswagen and self-driving vehicle startup Aurora has ended, according to a report by the Financial Times, citing three people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson from VW confirmed the news, telling TechCrunch that “activities under our partnership have been concluded.” VW did not provide any further details. Aurora didn’t provide any details either, accept to say “VW Group has been a wonderful partner” since its early days of development of its self-driving vehicle stack dubbed the Aurora Driver. Aurora, a nearly three-year-old startup that has raised $530 million, develops and supplies the “full-stack solution” for self-driving vehicles. It has existing partnerships with Hyundai, Byton and, more recently, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, as well as several other unnamed companies, which it alluded to in its statement. “As the Driver matures and our platform grows in strength, we continue to work with a growing … [Read more...] about VW’s partnership with self-driving car startup Aurora has ended

In the manicured grounds of a public library in Chandler, Arizona, Liisa Walimaa is waiting for a robot to take her to Macy’s. For a year Walimaa has been a participant in a closely guarded experiment being run by Waymo, a division of Alphabet (née Google), in this suburb of Phoenix that could change the face of global transportation on a scale unseen since we ditched horses for cars. Automated vehicles offer the promise of fewer road fatalities, cheaper rides and greater mobility for the blind and otherwise disabled. They could also cost millions of jobs, threaten public transport spending and upend insurance. Technology companies may love to talk about “disruption”, but what is happening in Chandler is genuinely worthy of the word. There have been setbacks (there will be more) and progress has been slower than first promised, but Walimaa thinks that in five or 10 years, autonomous vehicles will be as viable an option as taking a bike, calling a regular taxi or … [Read more...] about ‘I’m so done with driving’: is the robot car revolution finally near?

Five years ago Aileen Lee, founder of Silicon Valley investor Cowboy Ventures, coined the term “unicorn” for a private company valued at more than $1bn. Back then unicorns were almost as rare as their mythical namesakes – just 39 existed, according to Lee. Now there are 334 around the world, worth more than $1tn. And this week some of the very biggest beasts started stampeding towards the public markets. On Friday Lyft, the ridesharing company, went public on the US stock markets, soaring 21% before ending the day up a more modest 8.7%. The company is now valued at $22bn, creating many new millionaires among the Lyft staff and generating big profits for investors who have backed the business as it has developed. Soon it is expected to be joined soon by Airbnb, Palantir, Pinterest, Slack, Uber, WeWork and more than 200 other companies, largely in tech, that could raise over $1oobn between them – more money than was raised by the dotcom bubble at the turn of the … [Read more...] about Stampede of the unicorns: will a new breed of tech giants burst the bubble?