Hasta La Gadget!

Tesla’s growing at home and abroad, as customer demand continues for it’s Model S sedan — even while the EV’s gotten some negative publicity due to a few cars catching fire after being wrecked. So, to ensure that there is no “false perception about the safety of electric cars,” Elon Musk has requested that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigate these fires. This is the same governmental testing body that performs crash tests on all cars driven on US roads, that previously found that the Model S is the safest car it’s ever evaluated. Should anything turn up from the NHTSA looking into the recent fires, Tesla will, quite naturally, make the necessary fix to new models and retrofit the old ones for free. Furthermore, the company’s also updated its warranty to cover Model S fire damage, even if it’s the driver’s fault. The one limitation on that very generous offer? You can’t be actively trying to destroy the car. Makes sense to us.

Filed under: Transportation

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Via: Autoblog

Source: Tesla blog

The key to road safety may lie in self-driving cars. That’s the general conclusion of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s recently released policy report which urges states to draw up legislation that encourages testing of automated autos. Currently, only three states (i.e., California, Nevada and Florida) have enacted laws that permit companies like Google to operate these vehicles on public roadways. But the NHTSA hopes that with more state-backed adoption, advances in vehicle-to-vehicle communication and automatic braking can more quickly be refined, thus paving the way for industry standards and eventual commercial deployment.

The agency, an arm of the US Department of Transportation, is also conducting its own research into V2V systems and driver guidelines for self-driving cars; the first phase of which is set to play out over a four-year period. For now, though, it still has a few additional hurdles to overcome, namely consumer perception (the NHTSA estimates self-driving cars could reduce crashes by 80 percent) and possible WiFi interference from the whitespace spectrum freed up by the FCC. Though the NHTSA’s sights are clearly set on an automated vehicle future, it’s yet to determine whether or not inclusion and use of that tech will be mandated.

Filed under: Transportation, Google

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Via: Bloomberg

Source: NHTSA

El Goog has been experimenting with autonomous vehicles for a while, and now it’s hiring a government man to help handle the red tape and get them on the roads. Ron Medford will be leaving his job as second in command (Deputy Administrator) at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and joining the search giant in January as the Director of Safety for Self-Driving Cars. Google’s prototype robot chauffeurs have navigated over 300,000 miles of US road, but to graduate from the testing stage will require just as much regulatory expertise as it will tech smarts. That’s where Medford comes in, who will be paying close attention to the NHTSA’s multi-year project to define standards for self-driving cars, which started only recently. Now, hopefully, we won’t have to wait as long for those stressful journeys as pilot to become relaxing jaunts as fleshy cargo.

[Image Credit: Getty Images / Brendan Hoffman]

Filed under: Robots, Transportation, Google

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Via: Wired

Source: The Detroit News