Weekly Connected and Autonomous Vehicle News

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles:

💰 Applied Intuition Lands $6B Valuation for AI-Powered Autonomous Vehicle Software. “The eye-popping funding round is the latest example of investor fervor for AI.”

🚘 NHTSA in Talks With GM Over Fleet of Self-Driving Cars With No Steering Wheels. “Acting NHTSA Administrator James Owens said his agency aims to make a decision soon on GM‘s January 2018 petition as well as a request by Softbank Corp.-backed driverless delivery startup Nuro to deploy a limited number of low-speed, highly automated delivery vehicles without human occupants.”

👌 5GAA, Partner Associations Issue Statement on US Department of Commerce’s Inquiry into Connected Vehicles.

🤨 Things Just Went From Bad to Worse for General Motors and Self-Driving Start-Up Cruise. Here’s Why I Think Tesla Is the Big Winner. “Despite Cruise‘s $1.3 billion of cash on the balance sheet, its current burn rate doesn’t bode much confidence. Frankly, I see General Motors GM -2.45%↓ needing to inject far more capital into Cruise sooner rather than later.”

😒 China Has The U.S. Beat On Autonomous Driving. “The reasons, it seems, boil down to a single feature that American passenger cars have yet to implement: Lidar.”

🚌 Space-Enabled Connectivity Steers Self-Driving Cars. In one of the longest-running trials of a self-driving vehicle, collecting data over 13 000 km of autonomous travel, Darwin Innovation Group has been testing a novel driverless shuttle bus at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, in Oxford, UK, which is home to ESA’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT).