Good morning from Quick Shift, your top news source on tomorrow's transportation. Check out the weekend's headlines below. — Shiraz Ahmed
Uber's self-driving problems come to light: After an Uber autonomous car hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona last week, the company's self-driving car program has come under intense scrutiny. The New York Times obtained internal documents from the company showing that driver takeovers of autonomous vehicles had exceeded targets in the month before the crash. And experts say tasking drivers to monitor autonomous cars for hours at a time is known to lead to failure.
This incident highlights the many challenges autonomous technology faces before being road-ready for mass deployment.
But states are still bullish on self-driving cars: Despite these challenges and calls to end testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, legislators in Texas and Florida are moving forward with allowing it.
Meanwhile, the daughter of Elaine Herzberg, the pedestrian killed in the Uber crash, has retained a lawyer.
Quick hits:
- The federal spending bill President Donald Trump signed into law Friday contains $100 million earmarked for autonomous vehicle research.
- Waymo CEO John Krafcik threw shade at Uber, saying his company's self-driving cars likely would have seen the pedestrian and stopped.
- One of Toyota Motor Corp.'s newest board member is an international basketball champion and advocate for mobility services.
- Uber is selling its Southeast Asian ride-hailing operations to regional rival Grab, retaining a minority stake in the service.
- Auto dealers are worried that increased safety and entertainment technology in cars is pushing the sticker price of new vehicles higher and higher.
- China will adopt Germany's autonomous vehicle regulatory regime to encourage testing.
- Congestion pricing sounds nice until you start figuring out the, uh, pricing part of the plan.
- Lyft is experimenting with pickup and drop-off locations in San Francisco.
