Author: Megan Geuss

(credit: Ford Motor Company)

On Friday, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Mark Rosekind told an audience in Detroit, Michigan that car makers “cannot wait for perfect” when it comes to developing and deploying self-driving car technology. The Wall Street Journal reported that Rosekind said automation would “save people’s lives” in a time when auto fatalities have been up 8 percent since 2014.

Rosekind’s comments come after a man using Tesla’s autopilot system fatally crashed into a left-turning truck in Florida. The incident is believed to be one of the first involving a car in autonomous mode. Tesla has said that the car’s sensors didn’t register the image of the left-turning truck in the glare of the bright Florida sun. Although Rosekind didn't address the Tesla crash explicitly, he noted that the NHTSA's mandate is to reduce fatalities. Taking human error out of the process of driving could theoretically reduce fatal crashes.

Despite Tesla's most recent crash, regulators seem enthusiastic about getting more autonomous vehicles on the road in the near future. Earlier this week, Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told an audience in San Francisco that “autonomous doesn't mean perfect,” but that “we need industry to take the safety aspects of this very seriously.”

(credit: André-Pierre du Plessis)

On Thursday, Visa and PayPal announced a new partnership designed to push Visa cardholders to link their credit and debit cards to their PayPal and Venmo accounts, eschewing the bank-owned Automated Clearing House (ACH) network that PayPal has long preferred to work with.

PayPal makes more money off ACH-based transactions because it doesn’t have to pay a cut of any transaction fees to a card network like Visa. But two months ago, Visa CEO Charlie Scharf expressed his displeasure with getting cut out of the payments process and vowed to “go full steam and compete with [PayPal] in ways that people have never seen before” if the digital payment platform didn’t start playing nice.

In today's partnership announcement, the two companies said that when a customer goes to sign up with PayPal or make a payment through the platform, Visa-network cards will be presented as “a clear and equal payment option” with ACH. In addition, PayPal said it promises not to “encourage Visa cardholders to link to a bank account via ACH,” and the company vowed to help Visa identify customers that could potentially change their current PayPal setup to route payments over Visa’s network.

On Wednesday evening, Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk released his “Master Plan 2,” detailing the ways in which he hopes to have Tesla contribute to making the energy economy sustainable. The plan would see consumers handle their own energy via a solar/battery combination, and provide electric vehicles for every market segment.

The radical part of the plan, however, would see improved self-driving capabilities allowing people to turn their Tesla into a taxi while they're not using it, potentially offsetting the entire cost of ownership.

The blog post introduces the plan as being all about energy:

The site Hyperloop One is using to test its sled. (credit: Hyperloop One)

In a new lawsuit filed Tuesday, the remaining executives at startup Hyperloop One accused four former employees, including former co-founder and CTO Brogan BamBrogan, of a slew of breaches of duty to the company. The suit comes just a week after those four former employees sued Hyperloop One, accusing the remaining executives—including co-founder Shervin Pishevar—of mismanaging the company, mistreating the engineers, and even placing a “hangman’s noose” on BamBrogan’s desk.

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One had enjoyed some real success in prior months. The startup is trying to build a Hyperloop—a train-like method of transportation imagined by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that would use a low-pressure tube and magnetism to propel pods of cargo or humans at 700mph. In May, the company successfully tested the propeller mechanism for its test track in North Las Vegas.

But rifts within the company were apparently already growing. The cross-complaint from Hyperloop One is just as incendiary and intrigue-filled as the original complaint, with accusations of screaming, sexist comments, and poor performance. Hyperloop One is demanding $250 million in damages from the four former employees.

Law enforcement officers working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) arrested Eric Wamser (PDF), a 57-year-old Placer County man, last Friday for flying his drone too close to a wildfire burning north of Sacramento, California.

Wamser’s arrest is the first of its kind in the state.

The incident occurred on the evening of June 28, when the Trailhead Fire broke out. A drone was spotted above the fire, so authorities temporarily grounded firefighting aircraft for about 30 minutes.

Matthias Müller became VW Group's CEO when Martin Winterkorn left, but both men are implicated in the most recent lawsuits from US states. (credit: By Volkswagen AG )

On Tuesday, the attorneys general of Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland launched fresh lawsuits at Volkswagen Group and its affiliates Audi and Porsche, naming more than two dozen engineers and managers in an apparent scheme to install illegal software on diesel VWs, Audis, and Porsches that were sold in the US.

The civil lawsuits allege that prior to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) public announcement in September that it had discovered defeat devices to circumvent emissions control systems in VW Group’s diesel cars, the German automaker engaged in a year and a half of cover ups and deception with the knowledge of VW Group’s former CEO, Martin Winterkorn. The company “only confessed to the defeat devices when they knew the regulators had them pinned to the facts,” according to the New York attorney general’s press release.

The lawsuits also allege that VW Group has not cooperated with investigators. “When the investigation was getting under way in late 2015, numerous employees, tipped off by a senior in-house lawyer in Germany, allegedly destroyed incriminating documents,” the press release added.

Although Yahoo reported decent earnings in its Q2 2016 financial call yesterday, the embattled company reported yet another write down on its $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition. Yahoo is in the process of soliciting bids for its core businesses as well as downsizing significantly, but the company still didn’t have anything to share about a potential buyer on its call, with the third and final round for bids due on Monday.

Yahoo said it had lowered its projections for Tumblr’s performance, writing down $482 million in “impairment charges.” Last quarter, Yahoo similarly took a $230 million write down on the social media platform. CNN Money notes that Yahoo has now written down about half the value of its original investment in Tumblr, “rendering [CEO Marissa] Mayer's biggest acquisition to date effectively worthless.”

When Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013, the company put out a press release to placate angry and worried Tumblr users, promising “not to screw it up.”

(credit: Netflix)

It’s been a little over a year since HBO launched its streaming-only online platform HBO Now, and the network is declaring that investment, along with HBO Go and HBO On Demand, a success. On Monday, HBO sent around a press release saying that the digital platforms had been drivers of “record viewership,” especially with season six of Game of Thrones.

Netflix, on the other hand, was not so lucky. That staid bastion of cord-cutter viewership saw its “weakest subscriber expansion in two years,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Still, Netflix was able to keep content costs down enough to beat earnings expectations, the paper noted.

Both companies have threatened traditional pay-TV models in the past. Netflix was earliest on the scene, and HBO cut deals with its pay-TV partners to make a standalone HBO package a possibility.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in Utah voted to approve a bill that would make it legal for firefighters or law enforcement to shoot down, spoof, or otherwise disable drones found flying over airspace that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) puts under temporary restriction due to wildfire.

The bill was passed after a small drone flying over a fire 300 miles south of Salt Lake City forced firefighters to ground aircraft. Utah’s governor, Gary Herbert, has said that the fire expanded and became more expensive to control after the drone incident. Herbert is expected to sign the bill in the coming days.

Evan Vickers, the Utah senator that co-sponsored the bill, said that firefighters and police would be allowed to shoot a drone down, but he added that they’d probably use technology to jam signals sent to a drone and bring it down that way. (You can see a video of that kind of solution here.) "The redneck in me [says] to shoot the damn thing," the Republican senator said to the Salt Lake Tribune. “But there are much more humane ways to do that,” he added.

Late Wednesday evening, the California Air Resources Board rejected Volkswagen Group’s plan to fix 3.0L diesel Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches that were discovered last year to be illegally circumventing the cars’ emissions control systems. In two letters (one addressing Volkswagen and Audi cars (PDF), and the other addressing Porsches (PDF)), CARB called the company’s recall plan “substantially deficient” and said VW Group submitted documents that “fall far short” of meeting standards that would bring the cars up to code.

It has been estimated that a total of 85,000 3.0L diesel Porsche, Audi, and Volkswagen cars are still on the road without a recall or a buyback plan. In June, VW Group proposed a massive settlement in which it would buy back almost 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles and compensate owners and lessees with a cash award.

In CARB’s Wednesday letters to VW Group, the air regulator claimed that subsidiaries Audi and Porsche “failed to disclose and provide a complete description of all defeat devices” on the cars, even after CARB rejected an earlier plan in February and reminded the automakers of what they needed to submit to get CARB to approve a recall plan. CARB also said that VW Group didn’t describe in enough detail how the fix would work, or how it would impact the car’s emissions after the fix.