Study: Volkswagen cheated on emissions standards — and made thousands of kids sick

A new study analyzes the effects of the “clean diesel” fraud. They’re not good.

Since 2009, Volkswagen sold 480,000 “clean diesel” cars in the US that were actually heavy polluters in disguise, and other cheating companies sold an additional 120,000. Those “cheating cars” were not evenly distributed around the United States; some areas had lots of the cheating cars, while others had only a few. That uneven distribution allowed the researchers to look at different measures of air quality and health, and to find correlations with the presence of polluting cars. read more »

Driverless Cars Are Taking Longer Than We Expected. Here’s Why.

Automatic braking and lane-departure warnings are on the road, but a lot of work remains before self-driving cars become a reality.

Autonomous vehicle technology has gotten better in the last decade, but the hype has gotten bigger. How close are we really to a time when a robot chauffeur will be able to drive us safely anywhere cars can legally go?

The fact is, no one can be certain about the safety potential of self-driving automobiles until they advance from the experimental stage and become ingrained in daily life. Machines are rarely, if ever, perfect. Humans never are, and their unpredictability is likely always to play a role. That was demonstrated last year with the first recorded pedestrian death at the hands of an autonomous vehicle. A woman in Tempe, Ariz., Elaine Herzberg, walked her bike across a street late at night, only to be killed by an Uber-operated car going slightly under the speed limit at about 40 miles per hour. read more »

US senators call for investigation of Ford Focus, Fiesta transmission decisions

Two U.S. senators have called for an immediate federal investigation of Ford Motor Co.'s decision to knowingly launch and continue for years to sell Fiesta and Focus vehicles with defective transmissions despite thousands of complaints and a deluge of repairs.

Separately, the chairman of the U.S. House committee with oversight of the agency charged with traffic safety said he was troubled by the National Highway Traffic Administration's "wait-and-see approach towards an avalanche of consumer complaints" and must hold Ford accountable. read more »