Uber Technologies Inc unveiled its newest Volvo self-driving car in Washington on Wednesday as it works to eventually deploy vehicles without drivers under some limited conditions.Uber said the new production XC90 will be assembled by Volvo Cars in Sweden and have human controls like steering wheels and brake pedals, but also with factory-installed steering and braking systems designed for computer rather than human control.

Uber Advanced Technologies Group chief scientist Raquel Urtasun showed off the company’s artificial intelligence technology that allows it to drive autonomously for long distances on highways without maps and “on the fly” to plot its course and navigate construction zones.“Our goal is get each one of you to where you want to go much better, much safer, cheaper,” Urtasun said.As the race to push out autonomous cars across the globe heats up, other companies are also working to deploy self-driving vehicles in limited areas.Ford Motor Co’s majority-owned autonomous vehicle unit, Argo AI, launched its new fleet of self-driving test vehicles - Ford Fusion Hybrid - in Detroit on Wednesday, expanding to five US cities.The No. 2 US automaker also opened a research centre in Tel Aviv, joining a growing number of major automakers and suppliers setting up shop in Israel’s tech hub.General Motors Co in January 2018 sought permission from US regulators to deploy a ride-sharing fleet of driverless cars without steering wheels or other human controls before the end of 2019 but is still struggling to win regulatory approval.

Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit is operating a robotaxi service in Arizona and said last month it is partnering with Lyft Inc to serve more riders.South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co and Kia Motors Corp both said they would invest in the self-driving car software startup Aurora and speed up the development of their respective autonomous vehicle technologies.Carmakers have struggled to maintain profit margins faced with the rising costs of making electric, connected and autonomous cars. As a result, they are setting up alliances and lining up outside investors to combat spiralling development costs.Previously, Uber had purchased about 250 Volvo XC90 SUVs and retrofitted them for self-driving use.The new vehicles - known by the internal code number 519G and under development for several years - are safer, more reliable and will replace the older vehicles in Uber’s fleet “soon,” according to Eric Meyhofer, the head of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group.“This is about going to production.”  

Meyhofer said in an interview at an Uber conference in Washington on Tuesday.The new vehicle also has several backup systems for both steering and braking functions as well as backup battery power and new cybersecurity systems.HUMAN CONTROLSUber is not ready to deploy vehicles without human controls, Meyhofer said.“We’re still in a real hybrid state,” he said. “We have to get there and we’re not going to get to thousands of cars in a city overnight. It’s going to be a slower introduction.”The new XC90 vehicles have an interior fish-eye camera to scan for lost items, Uber said. They also do not have sunroofs since the self-driving vehicles have large sensors on the roof and are equipped with auto-close doors to prevent an unsafe departure.Uber, which has taken delivery of about a dozen prototypes of the new vehicle, but has not yet deployed them on public roads, said the car’s “self-driving system will one day allow for safe, reliable autonomous ridesharing without the need” for a safety driver.

Asked if Uber will deploy self-driving cars without safety drivers in limited areas in the next few years, Meyhofer said: “Yes - way before that.”But he added that Uber wants to be in “the good graces of public trust and regulatory trust” before making the business decision to deploy.In December, Uber resumed limited self-driving car testing on public roads in Pittsburgh, nine months after it suspended the program following a deadly accident in Arizona.In March 2018, authorities in Arizona suspended Uber’s ability to test its self-driving cars after one of its XC90 cars hit and killed a woman crossing the street at night in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, then Uber’s largest testing hub. The crash was the first death attributed to a self-driving vehicle.

In March 2019, prosecutors in Arizona said the company was not criminally liable in the crash and would not pursue charges. Uber has since ended testing in Arizona, but plans to eventually resume testing in Toronto and San Francisco, Meyhofer said.The death prompted significant safety concerns about the nascent self-driving car industry, which is racing to get vehicles into commercial use.

Volvo Cars Chief Executive Hakan Samuelsson said in a statement that “by the middle of the next decade, we expect one-third of all cars we sell Hot selling Modified sine wave 3000W to be fully autonomous.”Volvo Cars, which is owned by China’s Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd, will use a similar autonomous base vehicle concept for the introduction of its first commercially available autonomous drive technology in the early 2020s.Volvo and Uber said in 2017 that the rideshare company planned to buy up to 24,000 self-driving cars from Volvo from 2019 to 2021 using the self-driving system developed by Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group.An Uber spokeswoman said Tuesday that the company plans “to work with Volvo on tens of thousands of vehicles in the future.”

A file photo of Chinese Internet company LeEco Holdings Ltd unveiling its Internet electric battery driverless concept car, “LeSEE”, during a launch event in Beijing. Chinese manufacturers and Internet giants are in hot pursuit of their US counterparts in the race to design driverless cars, but the route to market is still littered with potholes.While Google has been working on autonomous vehicles for at least six years, with the likes of BMW, Volvo and Toyota in its wake, more recently Chinese businesses have entered the race, from Internet search giant Baidu to manufacturer Changan.Last week, ahead of the Beijing Auto Show opening on Monday, two self-driving Changan cars made a mountainous 2,000 kilometre journey from Chongqing in the southwest to the capital in the country’s first long-distance autonomous vehicle test. Another Chinese Internet giant, LeECO, is also venturing into autonomous technologies, unveiling Wednesday in Beijing an electric car that can park itself and be summoned to its owner’s location via smartphone.And late last year Baidu tested China’s first locally designed driverless vehicle, a modified BMW, with a 30 kilometre ride through the streets of Beijing.Despite China’s relatively late entry to the field, analysts believe the country could become a key market for driverless vehicles thanks to a more favourable regulatory and consumer environment.The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) forecasts that global sales of driverless cars will reach 12 million by 2035, with more than a quarter sold in China.Vehicles which automatically adjust their routes in response to real-time traffic information could solve chronic gridlock in China’s major cities, BCG’s Xavier Mosquet said.“If they believe this would ease traffic, Chinese authorities will do all they can to promote the development of this technology and then its use,” he said.

Robot taxisPublic concerns over the safety of driverless cars are far lower than elsewhere, according to a survey by Roland Berger consultants in 2015, which found 96 per cent of Chinese would consider an autonomous vehicle for almost all everyday driving, compared with 58 per cent of Americans and Germans.In a country notorious for accidents, the promise of better safety through autonomous technologies could also be appealing.The ultimate prize, say analysts, will be when mass transport firms such as taxi-hailing giant Uber, or its Chinese rival Didi, can deploy huge fleets of robot taxis.“The real payoff for truly driverless technology will come when cars on the road are no longer owned by people, but are owned by fleet management services,” said Bill Russo, managing director of the consultancy firm Gao Feng.“That’s where you want to think about taking the driver out of the equation. Mobility on demand is hugely popular here.”In the Roland Berger survey, 51 per cent of Chinese car owners said they would prefer to use robot taxis rather than buy a new vehicle themselves, compared with 26 per cent of Americans.With a ready market, China may soon become the top location for companies to refine driverless technology.Swedish manufacturer Volvo, owned by China’s Geely since 2010, this month announced plans to test Sale Modified sine wave 5000W drive up to 100 of its vehicles on Chinese roads this year.Changan, a partner of Ford, is set to roll out commercial autonomous vehicles for motorways from 2018, while mass production of driverless city cars is projected to begin in 2025.Does the car chooseBaidu, meanwhile, says it will launch self-driving buses by 2018, which will operate on fixed routes in select cities in China.Like Google, the Internet giant already owns detailed roadmaps and has experience in electronic security, and a company spokeswoman said it had “very positive feedback” from the government.But analysts are more cautious, predicting slow-moving autonomous vehicles will not appear in towns until at least 2020.

Production costs were still too high to make a robot taxi fleet viable, BCG’s Mosquet said.“There are still many questions to be resolved” before fully autonomous vehicles can be put into public use, said Jeremy Carlson, a senior analyst for IHS.He pointed to “chaotic traffic situations” on roads shared with cyclists and pedestrians, and less-than-adequate infrastructure.Technology will be the first to see solutions, he said, but that still left regulation and issues around liability and insurance to be addressed.For some, there are moral dilemmas as well.“If you have someone jumping out in front of an autonomous car, does the car have to choose between killing that person, or swerving and crashing and killing the passenger ” asked Robin Zhu, senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.“If your car could choose to kill you, would you get in it ”.

Virovacz said BMW’s new capacity could help partly offset an expected slowdown in economic growth in 2019 and 2020 as European Union funds run out, and will bring foreign investment to a less developed eastern region of the Central European country.BMW did not specify which models would be manufactured in Hungary but said the new factory will help to expand its manufacturing footprint in Europe, a market where it sells 45 per cent of its cars.BMW declined to say whether the decision to build the new Hungarian plant, its first new factory in Europe since 2005, was taken in response to increasing trade tensions.However, he said the project will also boost Hungary’s dependence on the car industry and thus its exposure to any cyclical slump in car sales if there is a global economic downturn.

Outside of Europe, BMW is expanding production in China and is due to open a new factory in Mexico next year..Hungary, along with other Central European economies, has been struggling with a serious shortage of workers, partly due to a mass emigration to the west for higher wages.BMW has already beefed up production capacity in continental Europe by expanding its business with contract manufacturers VDL Nedcar in the Netherlands and Magna in Austria at a time when Britain is preparing to leave the European Union.BMW joins Daimler and Audi, both of which already have car plants in Hungary. it is already very hard to find 1,000 employees, let alone in 2 years from now,” he said.

Car manufacturing accounts for around one-third of Hungary’s exports, and with BMW this could rise to 40 per cent or even more, said Peter Virovacz, an analyst at ING in Budapest.“Our new plant in Hungary will also be able to manufacture both combustion and electrified BMW models – all on a single production line,” Oliver Zipse, BMW AG Board Member for Production said in a statement.As part of a strategic push to “build where you sell”, BMW this year stopped exporting its X3 offroader to Asia from a plant in South Carolina because it can avoid tariffs by making the vehicle at a plant in China instead.BMW will invest 1 billion euros ($1..The Munich-based carmaker said the plant will be built near the city of Debrecen about 230 kilometres east of Budapest and will have a production capacity of 150,000 cars.

Audi recently announced investments to launch serial production of electric engines in the country.(Source).“The biggest question mark regarding this investment will be the Hungarian labour market .A trade dispute between China and the United States has already hurt exports between the two nations, forcing global carmakers including Daimler, GM and FiatChrysler to cut their Wholesale power inverter Suppliers profit outlooks.17 bln) to build a new plant in Hungary at a time when a rise in protectionism is forcing carmakers to curb inter-continental exports and to refocus production networks to serve regional trading blocs.