Driverless vehicles are the talk of the automotive industry after busy CES and Detroit motor shows, but testing them in a safe environment, that can accurately replicate the challenges of road navigation, has been a challenge until now.

US education establishment, the University of Michigan, has released more information surrounding M-City, its ambitious project to create a detailed urban test area for driverless...

As the doors closed at the Las Vegas Convention Centre and its countless exhibitors tidied away their wares, it is clear that the connected car is at the forefront of the most compelling developments in the technology industry.

Technology firms have earmarked automotive as a sizable growth area and are investing heavily in developing products for car manufacturers to implement in one or all of their models.

Nuance, a company best known for its voice-transcribing software for desktop PCs, is a prime example of this strategy...

Picture credit: Denis Bocquet

The number of people living in cities is expected to double by 2050, meaning congestion and pollution will increasingly be a problem for city dwellers. As a result the cities of the future will demand smarter traffic management solutions and more intelligent vehicles.

Experts say that the car industry will develop more in the next decade than it has in the last fifty years due to the rise in connectivity and mobile technology. The industry is gearing itself up for the age of the...

Graphics chipset designer Nvidia has launched the Drive PX and Drive CX products, its first foray into the world of production road vehicles.

Based on architecture that can also be found in modern supercomputers, each of Nvidia’s new products houses all the hardware that a vehicle manufacturer might need to get its in-car software running.

While there are many companies already developing hardware for cars, Nvidia is trying to stand out from the crowd by drawing on its background in personal computing...

Google has unveiled a new version of its self-driving vehicle prototype, six months after its original mockup materialised.

The car is still in its early stages of development as Google continues to run tests on its private track. However, the search firm does plan to trial the vehicle on the streets of Northern California in the new year.

Safety drivers currently oversee the vehicle, using manual controls to ensure all the car’s features are given Google’s stamp of approval before it considers...

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Cyclists’ helmets may soon be able to communicate with cars if Volvo’s collaboration with sports gear manufacturer POC and Ericsson goes on general sale.

Working with the two companies, Volvo has developed a helmet prototype that is capable of communicating with a connected car to provide proximity alerts to driver and cyclists in a bid to prevent accidents from occurring.

Collisions between cars and cyclists is a global concern. In Europe, 50% of all cyclists...

Picture credit: BMW

Smartwatches have only started hitting the mainstream consumer market this year, but German car manufacturer BMW is already coupling the technology with its vehicles.

BMW is dreaming of a world where people can get out of their car on the ground floor of a multi-story car park, tap their smartwatch and let the car drive through the levels to an available space on its own.

This technology currently only exists in the company’s BMW i3 research vehicle, equipped with the fully automated...

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Starting 1 January, driverless cars will become a common sight in four English cities as government quango Innovate UK announces £9 million of extra funding for the technology’s development.

The news came as part of the government’s autumn financial statement, with Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne green lighting the funding himself.

Formal trials are expected to occur in Greenwich, Milton Keynes, Coventry and Bristol for the duration of 18 to 35 months....

Telecommunications company Huawei has announced that it will be investing heavily in future infrastructure technologies as it prepares for the era of autonomous cars. Fifth generation mobile internet (5G) has been discussed as a solution to the substantial bandwidth requirements that vehicles are likely to require when communicating with other road-based objects. In a recent article on the Financial Times, Huawei CEO Eric Xu, revealed that talks with car manufacturers were already on the agenda. However, the discussions must still be at an early stage as Xu failed to disclose any specifics. Bandwidth capacity There is a worry that even...

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Global automotive supplier Visteon has lifted the lid on its own interpretation of where the connected car industry is headed over the next few years.

With eyes as far ahead as 2018, Visteon has announced details of its Fusion connected platform that it says will launch in four years time. The infotainment platform bundles together driver information, infotainment and Cloud connectivity into a human machine interaction (HMI) experience.

Visteon’s Tim Yerdon, global leader,...