Autonomous

Japanese carmaker Toyota has invested big into an autonomous driving startup company with hopes of keeping up with rivals in the autonomous vehicle field, as reported by Reuters. Autonomous driving startup Pony.ai has announced $701 million raised in funds for development, with $607 million of the sum coming from Toyota. Pony.ai is Silicon Valley-based with origins in China, marking the investment as the biggest Toyota has ever made into a Chinese-background autonomous driving company.

Chung Eui-sun, executive vice president of Hyundai, who has assumed day-to-day running of the company from his father, sounded a cautious note after announcing a joint venture for developing autonomous vehicle technology. The new development firm will be owned 50/50 by Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, with the South Korean firm contributing US$1.6 billion ($2.4 billion) in cash and US$400 million ($590 million) in engineering and research services, as well as intellectual property.

Australia needs to make privacy a priority when it comes to autonomous vehicles, according to the latest National Transport Committee (NTC) latest report into self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are reliant on huge swathes of data to operate, constantly communicating with other vehicles, road infrastructure, and the 'cloud' to navigate their way through the world.

This story was first published in 2015. As we move closer to a future where autonomous driving technology is expected to feature more and more in new cars, we felt a revisit of the basics is in order. Click here for our most recent stories on autonomous driving. If I’m involved in an accident while riding in an autonomous vehicle that I wasn't actively driving, who is at fault? Was I meant to have my hands on the wheel?

Lagonda will reveal its second concept car at the 2019 Geneva motor show, designed to offer a glimpse of how its fully-electric off-roader will look. The new All-Terrain Concept will be the first production Lagonda. It appears to be a raised version of the autonomous concept unveiled last year in Geneva. Billed as an "entirely new approach to luxury", the Lagonda Vision Concept (below) was fully electric, and didn't require any driver inputs. Steering yourself is so 2016, you see.