Author: Jonathan M. Gitlin

We take a BMW 7 Series for a short drive to play with its gesture control. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Yesterday, we showed you Dragon Drive, the voice-activation system that's now included in BMW's 7 Series. That's not the only advanced user interface that the Munich-based car maker has included in its technology-laden sedan—it also features gesture control.

BMW's UI designers evidently believe gestures are the future. The i Vision Future Interaction concept we showed you Monday is built around gesture control, as is a remote parking system that BMW is developing for the i3. (Take that, Tesla Model S!) But neither of those are production-ready, unlike the system in the 7 Series.

Matt Jones shows Ars the CES concept that Jaguar Land Rover and Intel put together, and discusses the company's tech incubator in Portland, Oregon. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch (video link)

LAS VEGAS—If you're a car nerd, you may know that Jaguar is based in Coventry, England. If you're a super-duper car nerd like me, you might also know that its main technology center is on a former RAF base in Gaydon, next door to Aston Martin. But did you know that it also has a tech center in Portland, Oregon? At CES we spoke to Matt Jones, director of future technology for Jaguar Land Rover, to find out more.

Brian Ratliff from Nuance gives us a demo of Dragon Drive, the voice activation system in the new BMW 7 Series. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Distracted driving is a real problem. Even though most of us intrinsically know that playing with our phones isn't compatible with piloting a vehicle surrounded by other vehicles and pedestrians, it's a common enough problem that more than a quarter of all crashes involve cell phone use. Not using a phone at all in the car is obviously the ideal solution, but like teenagers and sex, hoping for abstinence is a high-minded but ultimately ineffective approach. If people are going to text and drive—which they are—then systems that make that a safer activity are probably a good thing. At CES last week, Nuance (the company behind Dragon Dictation) gave us a demo of its solution to the problem.

BMW's Holger Hampf explains the thinking behind the i Vision Future Interaction concept car at CES. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—As auto engineers are hard at work on the technology behind self-driving cars, their colleagues in the design studios are also tackling the problem. One thing is becoming increasingly clear—the idea of a pod where the seat swivels 180 degrees when the car is in autonomous mode just isn't realistic in the near- or even mid-term future. What's also becoming clear is that each car company has different ideas for autonomous vehicles—they're all going to be quite different, reflecting each marque's values and DNA. At CES last week we got a chance to talk to Holger Hampf, head of user experience at BMW, about his company's i Vision Future Interaction concept.

Wayne Williams from Ford shows us one of the company's fully autonomous Fusion research vehicles. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—As we've noted elsewhere, CES has now evolved to be part car show. But not just any car show—the focus is on how technology is transforming the car, and nowhere is that more evident than in autonomous driving. The goal is to get to "level four"—the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's highest level of self-driving vehicle, capable of getting from point A to point B without any human driver intervention. We're not there yet—no one in the industry Ars has spoken to recently thinks the tech challenges are quite solved yet—but research vehicles from companies like Google, Delphi, Audi, and Ford are testing out the hardware and software necessary to get us to that point. With that in mind, we spoke to Wayne Williams, who gave us a quick tour of one of Ford's fully autonomous hybrid Fusions.

Harman's Yoram Berholtz explains how Harman is helping the car industry stay current with over-the-air software updates. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—A constant bugbear in automotive tech is how inconvenient it is to have to take one's car to the dealership to get a software update—something Tesla owners often gloat about since their cars don't suffer that problem. Well, have faith, non-Tesla owners, because it looks like the auto industry is moving in the right direction. To find out more, we spoke to Harman's Yoram Berholtz at CES.

We walk through CES so you don't have to. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Is CES the world's largest trade show? To this author, it certainly felt like it. In my past life as a scientist, I used to attend massive scientific and medical conferences like the American Heart Association's annual meeting, and in recent years, I've been going to the major auto shows. But the monster that takes over Sin City for the first week in January each year dwarfs all of those by at least an order of magnitude (attendance was apparently capped at 176,000). We put together this short video to give you just a tiny flavor of the event.

CES is spread out over the Las Vegas Convention Center and several of the larger hotels, and its purview runs the gamut from laptops and computer bits to TVs, home appliances, drones, toys, and in recent years, cars (which explains my presence at the show). The consequence of all that is that you'd better be prepared to fight your way through a gigantic scrum of humanity in to get where you need to go, and about 80 percent of the show could well be completely irrelevant to your interests.

A rather effusive Jonathan gets a demo of Hyundai's augmented reality owner's manual. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

LAS VEGAS—If you kept a look out for it, you could find a few examples of augmented reality on display at CES this year. There were concept cars with AR heads-up displays (JVC Kenwood and McLaren Automotive had a modified 675LT with such a system), but little of it was production-ready. That's not the case with Hyundai's new virtual owner's manual.

It's been a big week for electric vehicles, thanks to CES. Faraday Future made waves, Chevrolet debuted the Bolt, Volkswagen gave us the Budd-e electric camper van, and Arcimoto's SRK turned out to be our surprise of the show. Tesla doesn't do auto shows or CES, but it evidently didn't want to be left out; it's just begun rolling out its latest firmware, version 7.1. The update includes improvements to the Model S' various driver assists and adds a new beta feature that allows the car to drive into or out of one's garage remotely.

According to the firmware release notes posted over at the Tesla Motors Club forums, the improvements to Tesla's adaptive cruise control systems include better traffic awareness, and the Autosteer function has been refined so that it won't exceed the speed limit by more than 5mph (8km/h) on residential streets or roads without a central divider.

The new beta feature is called Summon. This lets a Model S drive or reverse into or out of of a parking space, up to 39 feet (12m). We should caution that Summon can only be used on private property at this point; outside of special permits granted by states for manufacturers to test self-driving vehicles, there are no currently-approved vehicles that the general public can use on the roads to be driven autonomously.

Meet the Arcimoto SRK, the most surprisingly fun EV we've driven in ages. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Electric vehicles were a big thing at CES this year. Even before the show officially kicked off, Faraday Future introduced the world to its FF Zero 1 concept car, and Chevrolet let journalists (including us) get behind the wheel of its new Bolt EV. But the single most fun EV we encountered was also the cheapest and most pared back (by quite some margin)—the Arcimoto SRK.