BMW issues stop-sale for i3 electric car

BMW has told its dealers to hold all sales of its 2018 i3 electric car due to a compliance issue detected by the NHTSA. The German automaker will also recall about 30,000 examples of the BMW i3.

The government agency found during routine testing that the i3 does not provide adequate protection in simulations of a very specific head-on collision. read more »

Do Self-Driving Cars Dream Of Safe Streets?

One of the key questions pondered by automakers is how many deaths per year in self-driving cars will be acceptable.

Earlier this year at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Bill Ford said out loud what a lot of people in the auto industry were thinking–or, more precisely, worrying about more than they care to admit. The Ford CEO was talking about the advent of driverless vehicles, a topic that’s getting a lot of ink these days as every automaker and some of the biggest players in Silicon Valley pour billions of dollars into the development of “naked” robotic cars (so-called Tier 5 autonomous vehicles, or AVs, without steering wheels or pedals).

Engineering the autos will be the easy part, Ford said, because the technology is ramping up quickly. More daunting, though, will be deciding how to program autonomous cars to make life-and-death decisions. read more »