Author: Megan Geuss

According to reports from the New York Times and Reuters, the Volkswagen Group is refusing to turn over e-mails and correspondence from its top executives to US Attorneys General (AG), citing German privacy laws.

AGs from Connecticut and New York told the two news outlets that they were outraged with Volkswagen’s reluctance to comply fully with their investigations. The two AGs are part of a larger group of 48 top state lawyers, which has launched a probe into Volkswagen’s defeat device scandal. (The two AGs who are not participating in the civil investigation represent California and Texas and are “conducting their own inquiries,” according to the New York Times.)

The scandal broke open in September when the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation accusing Volkswagen of selling 580,000 diesel vehicles with illegal software installed on them to goose results on federally mandated emissions tests.

On Wednesday evening, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County in connection with a massive natural gas leak that’s ongoing at a Southern California Gas Company storage facility. The leak, which began on October 23, has been spewing methane into the air at a rate of tens of thousands of kilograms (PDF) per hour.

Governor Brown’s declaration of a state of emergency requires that SoCal Gas and other gas storage facility operators throughout California start conducting daily inspections of well heads and implement infrared imaging technology to detect leaks. Facility operators will have to monitor the wells for mechanical integrity, gas pressure, and safety on an ongoing basis.

The emergency declaration doesn’t earmark any state funds to help fund a cleanup, but it orders the California Public Utilities Commission to "ensure that Southern California Gas Company covers costs related to the natural gas leak and its response, while protecting ratepayers.”

On Thursday a German newspaper reported that Volkswagen Group "assumes it will have to buy back about 115,000 cars in the United States," according to Reuters.

Volkswagen officials have been working with US regulators to come to an agreement about how best to fix the nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US that were discovered to illegally include software—generically called a defeat device—that thwarts the emissions control system. Defeat devices helped some of Volkswagen Group’s cars pass emissions tests in a lab, but allowed the cars to pollute more heavily when driving under normal conditions. In the 2.0-liter engine diesel cars especially, models were found to give off 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as is permitted by federal law.

The scandal eventually extended to Europe and then to global Volkswagen markets, with the company admitting that 11 million diesel passenger cars could have defeat devices on them. In Europe, at least, fixing the cheat was relatively easy for Volkswagen Group, with the approved fix taking under half an hour in most Volkswagen and Audi models.

Auto designer Henrik Fisker filed a lawsuit against British automaker Aston Martin this week, accusing the company of civil extortion (PDF). Fisker says Aston Martin threatened to sue the designer if he showed off his new Force 1 luxury sports car at the Detroit Auto Show in mid-January.

Fisker is well-known in the auto design world. He served as the president of BMW’s DesignWorks before he was brought on at Aston Martin. According to Fisker’s complaint, Aston Martin sold only 400 vehicles per year in the mid-ninties, but by the time the two cars Fisker developed for Aston Martin were in production, global sales had grown to more than 7,000 cars sold worldwide.

Fisker later went on to do entrepreneurial work. Fisker Automotive, which was supposed to deliver a plug-in electric hybrid car, went bankrupt and was purchased by China’s Wanxiang Group Corp. in 2014. Today, Fisker is set to release a new car he designed, called the Force 1, which will go into production later this spring. The Wall Street Journal notes that it is still unclear which company will manufacture the 745 horsepower, $300,000 vehicle that Fisker has designed.

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, telepresence company Double Robotics announced that it would be making some long-awaited upgrades to its original hardware. After 18 months of development, the Double 2 will now have improved lateral stability control to get the robot over challenging office terrain (like stray cords), a function called Power Drive to speed the Double down long hallways faster, and an optional Camera Kit accessory, which increases the Double’s field of view by 70 percent.

Double Robotics is just one of a handful of companies that started making telepresence robots a few years back. Beam, Anybot, and VGo are all competitors of Double Robotics. All of the companies make apparatuses that allow people who can’t be physically present at a gathering to call in from a Web or mobile interface and move around the space where the gathering is being held and interact with the people around them. Double Robotics’ devices are arguably sleeker and have a more minimalist design than its competitors, but the Doubles tend to be expensive (the base price of the new Double 2 is $2,500 and it doesn’t come with the iPad you’re supposed to affix to the top to allow two-way communication).

Ars played with one of the original Doubles two years ago in the MongoHQ headquarters, and we really enjoyed it. The Web interface allows you to see and hear everything going on in an office, and you can adjust the height so you can easily talk to people who are sitting or standing. It also lets you toggle between a view of the room and a view of the floor so you can navigate cluttered offices and stray paraphernalia lying around.

According to a report put together by Thompson Reuters’ Intellectual Property and Science Division, Toyota spent the last couple of years filing hundreds of patents related to autonomous driving. The report said that Toyota’s 1,400 patents outstripped any other automaker or tech company by a factor of two.

The report also noted that automakers in general have more patents related to autonomous vehicles than Silicon Valley companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google do. While that might be surprising considering Google has appeared to lead the charge on self-driving cars, nearly all the major automakers in the US have some sort of autonomous vehicle division or lab at this point, whether they’re working on making fully self-driving cars or just moving to implement automatic braking in newer vehicles. Alphabet, Reuters says, ranks just 26^th on the list of companies with the most patents related to self-driving vehicles.

Still, the number of patents a company has does not necessarily mean that that company will have success in the autonomous driving market. "Non-US companies tend to be more aggressive in filing patent applications than American companies,” Reuters wrote. "The quality of patents is also important, since not all are created equal.”

According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered.

The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and "to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes." VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the '80s.

The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991.

The US Department of Justice has sued Volkswagen Group (PDF) in a Michigan District Court on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alleging that the automaker installed illegal defeat devices on almost 600,000 diesel passenger vehicles.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in the fallout since the EPA published a notice of violation in September accusing Volkswagen of installing software on many of its diesel vehicles that would stop the car’s emissions control system from working properly during normal driving, but engage the emissions control system while the car was being tested in a lab, effectively helping Volkswagen cheat air quality regulators in the US.

A press release from the EPA said that approximately 499,000 diesel cars with 2.0 liter engines were found to have defeat devices, and some 85,000 cars with 3.0 liter engines were similarly implicated. The complaint filed by the Department of Justice suggests that the software to defeat the emissions control system in 2.0 and 3.0 liter cars was slightly different, however.

On Monday, General Motors and ride-sharing company Lyft announced a new partnership to develop a network of driverless taxis. GM has invested $500 million in Lyft as part of a $1 billion funding round. The partnership includes a seat for GM on Lyft’s board of directors.

Neither Lyft nor GM mentioned how soon they expected to realize their driverless taxi dream. In a press release, GM said it would work with Lyft to "leverage GM’s deep knowledge of autonomous technology.” Lyft, for its part, promised "to build a network of on demand autonomous vehicles that will make getting around more affordable, accessible and enjoyable."

GM’s labs have been testing the waters with autonomous concept cars, even hinting in October that the company’s strategy in 2016 would be “aggressive” and would include a fleet of self driving Chevrolet Volts. Lyft declined to comment publicly on how a fleet of driverless taxis would impact current Lyft drivers.

On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement.

"The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to 'look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF).

Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk's hero, Garth of Izar. Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans.