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Ever been stuck on the road far from home with a breakdown? Not fun. So imagine getting an email or text warning weeks or months before a starter quits, a battery dies or a fuel pump fails. Some of General Motors' connected-car owners are already getting alerts for the service bay.

Thanks to an engineering discipline called prognostics, carmakers are working on giving customers a digital warning before a check-engine light comes on. Prognostics tap sensors to monitor starting, charging and running systems, and telemetry hardware sends vehicle health messages to the automaker's centralized processing operation.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence weigh the results and determine the remaining service life of critical components — and whether to trigger a warning.

"The most obvious benefit is peace of mind," says Jim Kelly, GM program engineering manager for vehicle health. "These issues are very rare, but our customers can sleep…

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk famously served as the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.'s depiction of billionaire genius Tony Stark in Marvel's "Iron Man" movies.

Now he's trying to avoid a real-life Ultron moment.

In the fictional Marvel universe, Stark originally designed Ultron, an artificial intelligence program, to protect Earth. But when it gained sentience, it turned on its creators and attempted to destroy humanity.

Musk doesn't think it's the stuff of fiction. Although his Tesla vehicles come with boundary-pushing driver-assist features, he has called AI humankind's "biggest existential threat," tweeted that it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes" and referred to dabbling with AI as "summoning the demon."

He's taken a more fatalist approach in recent years, lamenting that his warnings have gone unheeded.

"I tried to convince people to slow down AI, to regulate AI; this was futile ... nobody liste…

Cars learn a lot from their owners. They know about their location. Where they're parked at night. What routes they usually take to work. What doctor's offices they visit. What churches they attend.

They know about their driving habits: how often they brake hard; how loud they set the volume; when and where they drive faster than the speed limit.

As they've added new connections to cars, automakers have increasingly harvested and stored such information to establish new revenue streams, using it for advertising purposes or selling it to third parties.

But a stringent new California law that went into effect at the start of this year presents new challenges. The California Consumer Privacy Act grants consumers greater access to their personal data that companies keep tabs on and perhaps, in some cases, more control over how that data is collected and shared.

Exactly what complications the CCPA introduces for carmakers and dealer…

Most of what consumers know about artificial intelligence comes from the movies or other pop culture.

Think The Matrix, A.I. Artificial Intelligence or WarGames. These are all films that depict AI as an almost-human force — often hidden behind a computer screen — that has a mind of its own. But for people in a variety of industries using AI, it's important to put aside these mischaracterizations and get down to the facts.

Definitions vary widely, but fundamentally, AI is technology that allows machines or computer systems to perform tasks in ways that mimic human intelligence. It's an umbrella term for systems that can adapt based on the data they receive.

"We have to teach these systems first, and then they can do what they've been taught better than a human, but they can't go beyond that scope," said Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at chip supplier Nvidia.

Artificial intelligence seems to have morphed…

Kevin Schlosser has made it his mission to make driving safer by advocating for autonomous vehicles.

Schlosser's first experience with the dangers of the roadways came when his mother was involved in a car crash when he was 12 years old. Schlosser's mother survived the accident, though another person involved was killed. Then, in 2017, Schlosser lost his girlfriend in a vehicle crash.

"I needed to do something," Schlosser, now 30, told Automotive News. "I needed to help find a safer means of transportation."

In a lecture Schlosser attended a few months later, Richard Bishop — longtime automotive consultant and former program manager for vehicle-highway automation at the Federal Highway Administration — spoke on autonomous vehicles. It was Schlosser's introduction to the possibilities of new modes of transportation.

The two connected a few months later and began working together on researching autonomous vehicles.

Billions of dollars have been spent in a global race to develop artificial intelligence in recent years and position AI as a powerful technology capable of redefining multiple industries.

Might some of those efforts be unraveled by a small piece of black tape?

A recent experiment underscored the fragility of nascent artificial intelligence systems. Researchers at McAfee tricked a Tesla equipped with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control into misreading a speed-limit sign and then accelerating to match the erroneous reading.

They altered a 35 mph speed-limit sign by elongating the middle part of the "3" with a patch of black tape. The tweak baited Tesla's computer-vision algorithms into misclassifying the "3' as an "8."

For now, this may be of mild concern. The spoofed system is part of a driver-assist feature. Humans still oversee — and retain all responsibility for — vehicle operations. But it's not a far leap to a future wh…

Lyft Inc. has bought U.S.-based startup Halo Cars, which allows drivers to make money through digital advertisements displayed on top of their vehicles.

The deal, first reported by Axios, was confirmed by the ride-hailing company on Friday. Lyft did not comment on the financing of the deal.

Halo Cars was founded in 2018 and has operations in U.S. markets such as New York and Chicago.

Lyft and larger rival Uber Technologies Inc., both based in San Francisco, are pursuing different roads in search of profitability, with Uber pouring money into side businesses which have so far lost money and Lyft focusing solely on moving people around.

With operations only in the United States and some Canadian cities, Lyft said earlier this month its active rider customer base in the fourth quarter grew to 22.9 million from 22.3 million the previous quarter.

That compares with Uber's global 111 million active platform users in the same period.