Ride-sharing platform Lyft is already competing with Uber in cities around the world to provide on-demand mobility. But this week, the San Francisco company took concrete steps toward competing in the driverless taxi space, too. In July 2017, Lyft announced the creation of its own autonomous transport division, Level 5. Fifteen months and 300 engineers and researchers later – many of whom were picked up from Waymo, Apple, Tesla, and Ford – the company has unveiled its first self-driving vehicle: an adapted Ford Fusion Hybrid. In an official blog post,…

Read More

Volkswagen has enlisted the help of Microsoft to allow its customers to utilise digital services in its connected cars. The joint solution – called the Volkswagen Automotive Cloud – operates on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, allowing customers to access key services and seamlessly switch between in-car and home services. The German car manufacturer enlisted the help of Microsoft’s Azure platform to offer extra-value services, such as the ability to continue streaming music from their home when getting into their car, or accessing a conference call while on their way to work.…

Read More

SoftBank’s British chip-making giant Arm has launched what it describes as the “world’s first autonomous-class” processor for driverless vehicles. The Arm Cortex-A76AE has been designed exclusively for automotive applications. The processor is the first in Arm’s new Automotive Enhanced (AE) line and includes specific features for in-vehicle processing. The move opens the door to the design of safety-hardened chips that combine both the processing performance required for autonomous applications and high-integrity safety features. Arm counts Nvidia, NXP, Renesas, Samsung’s Harman business, and the Siemens Mentor unit among its driverless-car industry…

Read More

Japanese semiconductor solutions provider Renesas has agreed to buy California-based Integrated Device Technology (IDT) for $6.7 billion. The move will leave the company well placed to provide a wide range of products that will be essential to self-driving vehicles. Renesas is a leading provider of embedded processors, while IDT specialises in sensors, connectivity, and wireless power. Together, the companies’ products are poised to improve performance and efficiency in high-computing electronic systems. The initiative will see Renesas expand its analog solutions line-up and strengthen its kit solution offerings, which combine its…

Read More