The firms who will beat Google to get us into self-driving cars..
Google is going tvfygo Google is going to be beaten to the punch. For years consumers have eagerly awaited the public launch of the firm’s self-driving cars: autonomous pods that will leave us free to read, watch TV or work on tasks other than driving. Now it seems as if traditional car manufacturers are about to take the lead. General Motors said that it would spend $500 million with car-hailing service Lyft to build “an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the US”. Toyota is building a new research institute to work on autonomy, while Audi, BMW, Ford and others also announced progress in their efforts to develop driverless cars. Mercedes has developed a self-driving research vehicle (pictured above) and taxi app Uber has already announced billions of dollars in autonomous car investment. On the map At the moment, Google doesn’t have much of this extra data and neither does anyone else. But now, car manufacturers are banding together to make their own ma...