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In a famous episode of UK sitcom Only Fools and Horses, the protagonists chase an ambulance through London after a deal goes awry – and then lose it as it goes straight through a red traffic light. “How could you possibly lose an ambulance?” exhorts Del Boy. “It’s a ruddy great big white thing with a flashing blue light on the top! And in case your peepers ain’t too clever, it makes a sound like an air...

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Local Motors has announced the development of its self-driving bus, dubbed ‘Olli’, powered by the advanced cognitive computing of IBM Watson. The electric vehicle, which can carry up to 12 people, facilitates natural interaction between the passenger and the vehicle. From today onwards, Olli will be used on public roads locally in DC, and late in 2016 in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas.

Olli makes use of the...

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Highways England, the arbiter for road network infrastructure in England, has unveiled a wide-ranging plan including opportunities for driverless cars and Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

Among the initial projects to be funded, according to the report, includes motorway to motorway traffic management schemes, as well as a ‘collaborative traffic management’ programme on the M25, as part of wider plans to make the road network and vehicles safer.

“We will pursue a...

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Hyundai has become the latest automotive manufacturer to launch its connected car blueprint, collaborating with major networking and IT firms to develop a ‘hyper-connected and intelligent car’ concept.

The roadmap will see Hyundai focus its efforts on the 'Car to Life' initiative, aimed at taking forward the connected car era. The initiative will offer a knowledge hub to users and also enable them to analyse and use that information to improve owners'...

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Location and navigation technology provider HERE has convened a forum aimed to foster greater industry collaboration in vehicle sensor data transmission, with the contingent arguing a universal standard needs to be agreed upon.

The forum, involving 16 companies ranging from automotive manufacturers to system vendors, examined a variety of issues from security to data content.

HERE, a Nokia subsidiary, argues the need for an industry standard where vehicle sensor data is ‘ingested by a location...

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Earlier this week we had the views of US drivers on whether they would be happy with being ferried around in autonomous vehicles, and the response was less than unanimous. Now, survey data from UK insurance provider Bobatoo shows only a quarter of UK respondents would describe themselves as ‘excited’ about driverless cars.

This survey differs from the study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), which focused exclusively on respondents...

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The days when drivers act as individual entities on the road could be over in a matter of years thanks to the integration of swarm intelligence technology within car design. The idea behind it is to allow vehicles to work together and share data with others (i.e. act as a collective swarm) for the benefit of all and the wider transport infrastructure – ‘the cloud’.

The clear impact of this is far reaching - the travelling of more efficient and optimum routes, reduced...

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...