Category: Car News

It’s just a ruin in a field now, but in 15th-century England, Boxley Abbey was a hotspot for the faithful. Pilgrims would travel from across the land to see a statue of Christ on the cross that was housed in the monastery and known as the Rood of Grace. On holy days, the Christ would come alive, with a contemporary account describing how the figure hypnotized crowds with its ability to: “shake and stirre the hands and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps,…

Read More

An early wave of modern human ancestors interbred with Neanderthals between 470,000 and 220,000 years ago, a new DNA discovery from an ancient Neanderthal thigh bone suggests. That’s much earlier than experts had thought, and it could help explain why human DNA seems to be appearing in Neanderthal genomes much earlier than it should. It’s not entirely clear when humans and Neanderthals split — and there are conflicting answers in ancient DNA. The 124,000-year-old leg bone offers scientists a peek at the DNA animals get primarily from their mothers, tucked…

Read More

Automotive startup Pearl is shutting down just one year after coming out of stealth mode, a source has confirmed to The Verge. The small company’s first (and now only) product was a $500 wireless backup camera that fit around your car’s rear license plate. The news was first reported by Axios. Pearl built its early reputation on the fact that most of its employees used to work at Apple. At the time of Pearl’s launch last year, around 50 of its 70 employees boasted a resume with time spent working…

Read More

Avis Budget Group, the parent company of car rental services like Avis, Budget, and Zipcar, has struck a non-exclusive deal with Waymo to manage its growing fleet of self-driving minivans. Avis will clean and tend to Waymo’s vehicles, providing services like regular oil changes, but it won’t tinker with any of the self-driving hardware. The partnership, which will begin later this year, only covers the self-driving vans Waymo has deployed in Phoenix. (Waymo also tests vehicles in Mountain View, California.) But CEO John Krafcik told Bloomberg that the company is…

Read More

Uber is adding the ability to book rides for other people. Going forward, any time you set a pickup location that is away from where you actually are, the app will ask if you or someone else is taking the ride. From there, you can pick from a list of contacts (mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, etc.) and set a destination. Uber will then send that person a text message with the information about the ride, including the driver’s name, phone number, license plate number, who is paying, and a link…

Read More

A company called Token is launching its first product today: the Token Ring. It’s a fingerprint-sensing ring that’s designed to unlock and authenticate everything, including your car, house, and computer. The ring is NFC- and Bluetooth-compatible so it can work as a payment device or as a ticket for various transit systems. Most of that functionality is still to come, and in certain cases, requires additional hardware. The ring itself is available in six sizes and includes a battery that could last up to six weeks. It charges through inductive…

Read More

The haze of yesterday’s massive ransomware attack is clearing, and Ukraine has already emerged as the epicenter of the damage. Kaspersky Labs reports that as many as 60 percent of the systems infected by the Petya ransomware were located within Ukraine, far more than anywhere else. The hack’s reach touched some of the country’s most crucial infrastructure including its central bank, airport, metro transport, and even the Chernobyl power plant, which was forced to move radiation-sensing systems to manual. The ostensible purpose of all that damage was to make money…

Read More

I like to play a game on the subway where I look around and try to find someone not on their phone. I like seeing a person reading a book, or, in an ultimate win, someone staring into space without headphones. It’s a rare find. These check-ins remind me that we, as a society, rely on our phones to distract and entertain us. Yet still, even as a hyper-aware person, I can’t even force myself to get off my own iPhone while riding the train. I try, but always think…

Read More

I don’t think anyone would argue that Faraday Future’s all-electric car, the FF91, doesn’t look fast. They might argue over the strange, “bulky crossover” design. They might argue that the videos Faraday has published about the car, both before and after it was announced, were heavily edited, which made it hard to make a real judgement about whether the car was as fast as the company said it is. But judging from the rides Faraday gave people in the car when it was announced at CES — including our own…

Read More

Toyota recently completed its first in-home trial of its new Human Support Robot. The Japanese auto giant built the HSR to help people with disabilities perform everyday tasks around the home, like open doors and fetch water bottles. In this case, the robot was delivered to the home of a US Army vet who is paraplegic, and, as you can imagine, the results were quite heartwarming. The HSR, with its articulated torso and arm and video calling functionality, has mainly been in use in hospitals in Japan, helping with that…

Read More