Trade News

Self-driving truck startup Gatik has reached a milestone.

Two of the company's autonomous box trucks are conducting driverless operations along a seven-mile route in Bentonville, Ark., as part of its commercial partnership with retail giant Walmart Inc.

Gatik removed its human safety drivers from behind the wheel — though not the vehicle itself — starting in August. The company disclosed the developments Monday morning.

It is believed to be the first time a self-driving truck company has launched ongoing driverless commercial service beyond infrequent demonstrations. The trucks are running every day, and generating revenue on their route, which connects a Walmart dark store with a neighborhood market.

Gatik CEO Gautam Narang hailed the service as both a historic moment and validation of the company's strategy to deploy trucks on specific, repeatable routes that are chosen for their operational simplicity -- a business model that's different than …

Waymo is getting a taste of the Big Apple

Far from the car-friendly confines of its metro Phoenix operating hub, self-driving tech company Waymo is starting operations in the most densely populated city in the U.S.

The company said that it would begin mapping the streets of New York City last week. Starting with five of its Chrysler Pacifica minivans, Waymo's vehicles will learn Manhattan's roads, primarily south of Central Park.

At least for the foreseeable future, the driving will happen strictly in manual mode. New York has restrictive permitting and rules that govern self-driving operations, and a state law requires drivers to keep a hand on the steering wheel.

Those factors have dismayed self-driving companies such as Mobileye and Cruise, which both conducted temporary operations in the city in recent years before departing.

Might New York become more welcoming? Waymo said it had already met with Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who sa…

It's a relatable experience. Your eyelids droop, and your head starts to nod. Yawning becomes almost constant, and your vision seems blurry. You blink hard, focus your eyes and suddenly realize that you've drifted toward the shoulder or across the center line, just for a second, and quickly straighten the wheel. It was a moment. You were lucky.

Nov. 7-14 is the National Sleep Foundation's Drowsy Driving Prevention Week. It's a time to reflect on how dangerously common — but preventable — drowsy driving truly is.

This danger of impairment is very real. We should consider drowsy driving on the same list as drunken, drugged and distracted driving — and perhaps more widespread. In a foundation survey of adult drivers, 60 percent reported driving while drowsy in the past year, and the percentage of drivers 18 and older who said they had fallen asleep while driving in the past 30 days translated to more than 10.3 million people. That's a wake-up cal…

The pandemic accelerated dealerships' use of technology to interact with customers, sell vehicles — and interview employees.

What started by circumstance to avoid in-person meetings at the height of the pandemic last year has evolved into a preference for some dealership hiring managers, who want to evaluate job candidates' ability to navigate the increasingly digital demands of the position they're seeking.

To recruit the best applicants, dealerships need to show that they're as tech-savvy as the candidates they want to interview, Anil Harjani, senior vice president of product and growth for dealership technology recruitment company Hireology, told me. That, he says, has become even more important now that dealerships are competing with companies outside of auto retail for the pool of available workers.

Some dealership managers told me they look for how quickly candidates respond to messages during the hiring process as a proxy for how fast they might …

Apple Inc., bolstering its car-development efforts, hired a former engineer from Tesla Inc. who drew controversy this year for remarks about that company’s Autopilot feature.

The iPhone maker tapped Christopher “CJ” Moore for its team working on a self-driving car, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Moore is working on the effort’s software, reporting to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla executive who joined Apple at the end of last year. Bowers had led Tesla’s Autopilot team before departing in mid-2019.

The move suggests Apple is plowing ahead with attempts to develop self-driving technology, a high-stakes race with automakers such as Tesla. Moore is joining a division known for its secrecy -- Apple has never publicly laid out its car plans -- and frequent turnover. The head of Apple’s car project, codenamed Titan, departed the company earlier this year to lead technology efforts at Ford Motor Co.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., d…

Elon Musk proposed selling 10 percent of his Tesla Inc. stock on Twitter Saturday, and took a poll of people on the social network to see if they supported it.

Musk said he would “abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”

The amount of stock in play is valued at about $21 billion, based on his holdings of 170.5 million Tesla shares. The stock, which surged 74 percent this year to a record on Thursday, closed 0.6 percent lower at $1,222.09 on Friday.

The number of shares Musk could be set to offload based on the Twitter poll is equivalent to 80 percent of the average daily trading volume for Tesla in the past three months.

As of Saturday night, more than 55 percent of the 2 million users who had voted supported Musk selling his shares. The poll will end around 3 p.m. on Sunday.

Musk, the world’s richest person known for his tongue-in-cheek tweets, cited recent discussion of the wealthy hoarding unrealized gains to avoid pay…

Bose, chief technology officer of U.K. startup Humanising Autonomy, describes how AI helps AVs understand the intentions of pedestrians, how pedestrian behavior differs among cultures and how that intelligence can lead to safer streets.

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Penske Automotive Group Inc. has been largely quiet in this year's dealership acquisition spree by U.S. public auto retailers, but it does see a sizable opportunity to grow — in Japan, where it just bought the remaining stake in a group of luxury stores.

The Bloomfield Hills, Mich., auto retailer took full ownership of the Nicole Group in October, nearly six years after investing in the Tokyo-area stores.

"We said we would go in with 49 percent, help build it, which we did, and then we'd have the opportunity to buy the balance after a certain period of time," Penske CEO Roger Penske told Automotive News. "We certainly exercised that at very reasonable pricing here in the last few weeks."

Penske didn't disclose what he paid for the 51 percent stake, but his description contrasts with the high dealership prices he said he's seeing in the U.S., where dealership buy-sells and consolidation have accelerated. Many of Penske's auto retail competitors have anno…

MOAB, Utah — Designers working on the fifth-generation Jeep Grand Cherokee didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

They chose to refine it and build upon its legacy, said Mark Allen, Jeep brand's head of exterior design.

But there was a new challenge because they had to craft designs for a traditional two-row model, which arrives at dealerships by year end, as well as the nameplate's first three-row variant, which is already on sale.

Allen, 58, spoke with Staff Reporter Vince Bond Jr. at a media event here for the redesigned two-row Grand Cherokee. He discussed juggling the two-row and three-row designs and the approach to the Grand Cherokee 4xe, a plug-in hybrid due in early 2022. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: With the new platform, were you tempted to do something totally different with the design?

A: No. Grand Cherokee, to me, has to be a refinement of the car. Grand Cherokee means so much to us. It doesn't need to be blown up. It's not brok…

The House late Friday passed the biggest U.S. infrastructure package in decades, marking a victory for President Joe Biden and unleashing $550 billion of fresh spending, including $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $65 billion for upgrades to the nation's electric grid.

The vote was 228-206 and sends the legislation to Biden for his signature. Thirteen Republicans supported the bill and six Democrats voted against it, a sign of the intraparty strains that nearly derailed the legislation. It would not have passed without GOP votes.

Passage capped a day in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to deal with a last-minute standoff between party progressives and moderates that took hours of intense negotiations and the president's intervention to resolve.

The president, in a statement early Saturday, called the bill's passage "a monumental step forward as a nation."

Pelosi and Biden, however, were unable to land a House vote at th…

Cruise LLC, the self-driving car startup that is majority owned by General Motors, filed an application with the State of California for a permit to charge fares for driverless rides.

Cruise needs permission from the California Public Utility Commission to ferry people around in its driverless vehicles without a test driver and charge for the service. The company has already been given permission by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to give rides without a safety driver.

The company’s business is a big part of GM’s push to double its revenue to $280 billion by 2030. Cruise’s autonomous ride-hailing business should grow to $50 billion in revenue in about six years, its CEO Dan Ammann said at the automaker’s investor presentation last month.

“Cruise has hit another important milestone today as the first company to apply for the final state permit required to launch an autonomous ride-hail service in California,” said Prashanthi Raman, head of glob…