Articles by Keith Naughton

U.S. Wants Safety ‘Two Times Better’ for Autonomous Cars

Self-driving cars must increase safety at least twofold to make a real dent in the 38,000 lives lost on American roads last year, the U.S. auto-safety chief said as the federal government prepares to release rules for autonomous vehicles next …

Driverless Car Supporters Urge National Laws to Override State, Local

A patchwork of state laws governing the operation of self-driving cars threatens to stall their development, supporters told lawmakers as U.S. senators began consideration of a national standard for robotic vehicles. “It’s absolutely critical that we have uniform rules across …

Michigan Says Potholes Make State a Great Place to Test Robot Cars

Michigan and California, vying for control of our driverless future, are each proposing crumbling World War II military sites as ideal locations to test robot cars. Michigan’s secret weapon? Better potholes. The Great Lakes state plans to make a test …

Driverless Cars Give Lawyers Bottomless List of Defendants

Imagine a robot car with no one behind the wheel hitting another driverless car. Who’s at fault? The answer: No one knows. But plaintiff’s lawyers are salivating at the prospects for big paydays from such accidents. If computers routinely crash, …

Driverless Car Accidents Pile Up As They Obey Laws, Humans Don’t So Much

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. The glitch? They …

Professor Steers Driverless Car Programmers Toward Ethical Questions

It’s nothing more than a dune buggy on a cordoned-off street but it’s headed for trouble. A jumble of sawhorses and traffic’ cones simulates a road crew working over a manhole and the driverless car has to make a decision …

U.S. Missing Life-Saving Opportunity of Driver Assistance Technologies

New auto safety technologies such as automatic braking and sensors that keep a car in its lane could prevent almost 10,000 U.S. road deaths a year and save $251 billion if they were more widely available, according to a Boston …

Shopping, Banking from Car Dashboards Opens Door to Identity Theft

Hackers can already take control of a car. And as vehicles become rolling shopping malls, cybercriminals will have an opportunity to snatch your identity, too. Eager for a cut of drivers’ purchases of fast food, gas and more, automakers have …

M City: Where All Cars Are Driverless

A simulated city opened Monday on the north campus of the University of Michigan to test how self-driving cars will travel in the future without mowing down pedestrians or causing colossal crashes. “We had the faculty here at the university …

Driverless, Shared Cars to Cut Vehicle Ownership by Half: Barclays

U.S. auto sales may drop about 40 percent in the next 25 years because of shared driverless cars, forcing mass-market producers such as General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. to slash output, a Barclays Plc analyst said. Vehicle ownership …