Waymo starts selling its LiDAR sensors to power robots, security systems, and more

The small mound on the back of Waymo’s self-driving cars is for sale. 
The Alphabet-owned autonomous car company is making its “homemade” LiDAR sensor, the Laser Bear Honeycomb, available to other companies. 
In a blog post Wednesday, the c…

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Waymo to start selling standalone LiDAR sensors

Waymo, the Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, will start selling its custom LiDAR sensors — the technology that was at the heart of a trade secrets lawsuit last year against Uber . The company announced Wednesday in a blog post that it will sell is light detection and […]

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Anthony Levandowski will be speaking at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI April 18 at UC Berkeley

Late last week, we announced the schedule for April 18’s TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at U.C. Berkeley, including some heavy hitters like Marc Raibert, Melonee Wise and Ken Goldberg. At the time, we noted that still had some big names left to reveal — and we weren’t joking. Today we’re excited to announce […]

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Transportation Weekly: Polestar CEO speaks, Tesla terminology, and a tribute

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fourth edition of our newsletter, a weekly jaunt into the wonderful world of transportation and how we (and our packages) move. This week we chat with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, dig into Lyft’s S-1, take note […]

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Transportation Weekly: Amazon’s secret acquisition and all the AV feels

Welcome to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. I cover all the ways people and goods move from Point A to Point B — today and in the future — whether it’s by bike, bus, scooter, car, train, truck, robotaxi or rocket. Sure, let’s include hyperloop and eVTOLs, or […]

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Waymo CTO on the company’s past, present and what comes next

A decade ago, about a dozen or so engineers gathered at Google’s main Mountain View campus on Charleston Road to work on Project Chauffeur, a secret endeavor housed under the tech giant’s moonshot factory X. Project Chauffeur — popularly know as the “Google self-driving car project” — kicked off in January 2009. It would eventually […]

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Waymo chooses snowy location for its factory devoted to self-driving cars

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“Dashing through the snow in a Level 4 self-driving car…”

That’s what Google autonomous car spinoff Waymo is humming today (probably) after announcing plans for a self-driving car factory in southeast Michigan. 

The company said it’s building the “world’s first factory 100%-dedicated to the mass production” of Level 4 autonomous vehicles, which technically don’t require a driver in the front seat. (So far, Waymo has decided to keep a safety operator up front anyway.)

The first order of business is finding a facility in Michigan and then hiring engineers, operations staff, and fleet coordinators to build and eventually test the self-driving cars. Waymo has a Michigan presence already with a development center in Novi that opened in 2016. The space served as a testing spot for the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, which was used in a self-driving taxi service launched last year in the Phoenix area.  Read more…

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Waymo plans to open a self-driving car factory in Michigan

Waymo and Magna plan to build thousands of self-driving cars at a factory in southeast Michigan, including autonomous versions of the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan. Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, announced Tuesday that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation voted to approve […]

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Report: Self-driving car startup Aurora is raising capital at a $2B valuation

Early last year, LinkedIn co-founder and prolific venture capital investor Reid Hoffman called Chris Urmson “the Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles (AV).” The vote of confidence and big check from Hoffman, coupled with a team of deeply knowledgable AV entrepreneurs, has catapulted his company, Aurora Innovation, squarely into “unicorn” territory. Aurora, the developer of a full-stack […]

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Walmart taps startup Udelv to test autonomous grocery deliveries in Arizona

More autonomous vehicles are poised to descend on Arizona. This time, Walmart has signed a deal with startup Udelv to test the use of autonomous vans to deliver online grocery orders to customers. Under the agreement, Udelv will provide its second-generation autonomous delivery van, called the Newton, to Walmart to deliver groceries in Surprise, Arizona. […]

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Audi, Mobileye, Waymo, other top automakers unite to spread the self-driving gospel

The self-driving vehicle evangelists are uniting. A number of major automakers, technology companies and organizations with a stake in autonomous vehicles, including Audi, Aurora, Cruise, GM, Mobileye, Nvidia, Toyota, Waymo and Zoox has formed a coalition to spread the word about advanced vehicle technologies and self-driving vehicles. Their message: this tech can transform transportation and […]

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Levandowski’s Pronto.ai plans to ship automated driving systems for trucks in 2019

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has taken his newest autonomous vehicle technology company out of stealth mode with a product aimed at the commercial trucking industry. Technically, Levandowski’s involvement in a self-driving trucking company was first revealed by […]

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