Author: Megan Geuss

Hollywood as an industry may be excited about drones but the Southern California city of West Hollywood is not. Three months ago, an errant drone in West Hollywood crashed into some electrical wires, cutting one to the ground. The collision caused almost 700 residents to lose power for three hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Tuesday evening at West Hollywood’s city council meeting, city officials passed an ordinance (PDF) requiring every drone operator flying in the city to get a permit for their drone from city officials. (That’s in addition to the registration drone operators are now required to get from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).) The city said it would give each registered drone a sticker with an identification number which must be clearly visible on the drone from the ground.

In addition to this, the ordinance requires that drone operators comply with FAA regulations by avoiding piloted aircraft, maintaining a line-of-sight view of the drone, and flying the drone no higher than 400 feet above the ground. In addition, drone pilots can’t fly their drones at night without explicit permission from the FAA, nor can they fly the drone within 25 feet of another person (excluding takeoff and landing).

On Thursday, General Motors launched a new “personal mobility brand” called Maven, through which the company will try to infiltrate the many ride-on-demand companies that have sprung forth from Silicon Valley. The initial business plan involves a car-sharing service, also called Maven, which will allow people to rent GM vehicles à la Zipcar or City CarShare.

The announcement came shortly after GM announced a $500 million investment in Lyft, which it told the public would be used for developing autonomous vehicles as well as to solidify a partnership between the two companies (Lyft will now also allow its drivers to rent GM vehicles if they prefer not to use their own). Then, just two days ago, GM unexpectedly purchased Sidecar, an Uber rival that shut down in December amid intense competition.

“GM is at the forefront of redefining the future of personal mobility,” GM President Dan Ammann said in a statement. Amman went on to say that the automaker’s strategic relationship with Lyft and its decades of work developing GM’s OnStar system would allow Maven "to provide the high level of personalized mobility services our customers expect today and in the future.”

Four states and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) are seeking up to $24 billion in fines from Dish Network after a judge ruled that the company and its contractors made more than 55 million illegal telemarketing calls using recorded messages and phoning people on do-not-call lists. The trial to decide whether Dish was aware that it was breaking the law and whether the company is responsible for calls made by its subcontractors began yesterday.

A spokesperson for Dish, which is based outside of Denver, Colorado, noted in an e-mail to Ars that "Most of the Dish calls complained about took place almost ten years ago and Dish has continued to improve its already compliant procedures.” The spokesperson added that in 2008, the satellite TV and Internet provider hired Possible Now, a company that specializes in marketing and regulatory compliance, to make sure that Dish’s marketing practices were legal. According to Dish, Possible Now gave the company a passing grade on compliance with federal regulatory rules.

However, the DOJ as well as Ohio, Illinois, California, and North Carolina say that Dish disregarded federal laws on call etiquette. US lawyers are asking for $900 million in civil penalties, and the four states are asking for $23.5 billion in fines, according to the Denver Post. "Laws against phoning people on do-not-call lists and using recorded messages allow penalties of up to $16,000 per violation,” the Post added.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) assembled a panel of experts in auto manufacturing and marketing to talk about whether or not automakers should be allowed to sell cars directly to customers.

Representatives from Tesla Motors, as well as Elio Motors, a company that has plans to manufacture cheap, three-seater vehicles, argued that new car companies shouldn’t have to comply with a dealership model of car distribution—something that been a contentious issue for Tesla in previous years. Tesla has been barred from selling directly to consumers in numerous states including New Jersey, West Virginia, and Texas. The FTC, however, has sided with Tesla, calling for legislation to revisit regulations on how cars are sold. (FTC officials stressed at today’s panel that the commission was not going to assert its opinion, but instead leave the stage to the speakers it had assembled.)

On the opposing side, auto industry analyst Maryann Keller and dealership attorney Paul Norman argued that the dealership model is good for consumers because it promotes “intrabrand competition”—or the idea that competition doesn’t just happen between, say, Ford and Volkswagen, but between Ford dealers within the same city.

On Saturday, regulators in California decided to hold off on a plan to capture and burn the natural gas that is leaking from a broken storage well just north of Los Angeles, citing the risk of a “catastrophic explosion,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The well at the Aliso Canyon storage facility has been leaking since October 23, belching massive amounts of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, into the air. Methane is not only bad for climate change, it’s also extremely flammable.

At first, California regulators wanted to take advantage of that property of methane by capturing and burning off the gas coming from the well. That would have reduced the methane’s impact on the environment somewhat while Southern California Gas, the company that owns the Aliso Canyon facility, finished drilling the relief well to plug the underground reservoir feeding the leak. As National Geographic noted in an article last week, "Flaring gas has a much lower impact on the climate than a vent directly into the atmosphere—the flame converts gas into an amount of carbon dioxide that will have 30 times less warming potential in the near term.”

This week, Amazon China registered to become an “ocean freight forwarder” with the United States Federal Maritime Commission. That means Amazon, one of the largest online retailers in the world, would be able to subcontract companies to ship goods from China to the US.

Because this registration allows Amazon to sell shipment services, Reuters suggests that Amazon might be looking into providing logistics services for third-party companies.

A blog post by freight forwarding company Flexport notes it’s likely that Amazon China filed for this freight contracting registration because Chinese sellers are more enthusiastic about finding American buyers than American sellers are about finding Chinese buyers right now. In addition, American companies shipping to China wouldn’t want to share shipping data and wholesale prices with Amazon, since the company is viewed as a fierce competitor. But for Chinese companies, Amazon is less of a threat, and a freight service provided by Amazon might help them minimize costs when shipping abroad.

The BBC has posted an 18-minute interview with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has offered some interesting insights into his vision of the future and his goals for his companies.

Journalist Rory Cellan-Jones asked Musk about what Telsa hopes to accomplish on a grander scale with Tesla, and the CEO suggested that he’s looking to build an ecosystem for sustainable transportation. “If we can have sustainable energy production and combine that with electric cars, we have a long term sustainable future,” Musk said, adding that he believes eventually “all transport with the exception of rockets will go fully electric.”

Indeed, Musk is on the board of SolarCity, a solar panel company, and last year he announced a new line of stationary batteries, called the Tesla Powerwall, which will be sold to people who want to store energy on their premises. “The whole point of Tesla is to accelerate the presence of sustainable transport,” Musk said.

If you want to build a self-driving car and test it on public roads in California, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles says that every year you have to submit a disengagement report—basically a list of every time the human driver had to take over for the car. This year, Bosch, Delphi, Google, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group were required to submit disengagement reports, and the results are largely what you’d expect from a novel and complicated technology.

Google, as the company that's driven the most miles on public roads in California, said it experienced 341 significant disengagement events over 424,000 miles of driving (PDF). Similarly, Nissan reported that it drove 1,485 miles on public roads in California and it experienced 106 disengagements. Delphi’s two autonomous vehicles drove 16,662 miles and the company reported 405 disengagements. Tesla, for its part, reported no disengagements (PDF) from fully-autonomous mode from the time it was issued a permit to test self-driving cars in California.

While it’s tempting to use those numbers as a comparison point as to how good a company’s autonomous vehicles are, there are many variables that could obscure an otherwise accurate comparison. The numbers only reflect miles driven on California roads and disengagements that happen in that state. If a company primarily tests its public road driving in another state, those numbers won’t be reflected in these reports.

On Tuesday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) rejected Volkswagen Group’s proposed fixes for 2.0L diesel engines that were caught with software to cheat the cars’ emissions control systems.

CARB’s decision (PDF) only applies to 75,688 California cars, but this afternoon the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is also demanding that Volkswagen put forth proposals to fix the diesel vehicles caught with so-called defeat devices, agreed with CARB's decision. In a statement, the EPA said that to-date, the Germany automaker "has not submitted an approvable recall plan to bring the vehicles into compliance and reduce pollution.”

Volkswagen has been scrambling to avoid regulatory blowback, lawsuits, and consumer outrage since the EPA issued a notice of violation (NOV) in September, accusing the automaker of installing defeat devices on diesel vehicles made after 2009. Volkswagen was eventually forced to admit that some 11 million vehicles worldwide could have the defeat device software on them. The software increases emissions by up to 40 times the limit allowed by US regulators when the car is being driven under normal conditions.

According to a survey from market research group Phoenix Marketing International, 38 percent of all Apple Pay transaction volume comes from in-app purchases, with only 62 percent of purchases made in-store. The survey doesn’t offer a reason as to why in-app purchases seem to be so robustly represented, but in a press release from Phoenix, Greg Weed, director of card research at the company, suggested that "the number of acceptance locations [for Apple Pay] is relatively small (but growing) and the incidence of reported friction at the point-of-sale is high.”

That is, in-app purchases may look like a large part of Apple Pay's transaction volume because in-store purchases are still working to get off the ground.

Phoenix has been surveying Apple Pay users for over a year now. In April the group reported that “47 percent of all Apple Pay users shopping in a participating store were not able to use Apple Pay to complete a transaction at least once,” either because the terminal didn’t work, the cashier couldn’t help the customer, or for some other reason.