Nature's editorial board urged governments on Tuesday to reverse decades of rail disinvestment as railways mark their 200th anniversary September 27, citing transport sector emissions that grew 1.7% annually from 1990-2022 and now generate one-quarter of global CO2. Rail produces one-fifth the emissions of cars per passenger kilometer yet carries just 8.4% of EU passenger traffic versus 73% for automobiles.

The journal called for broader investment criteria beyond narrow profitability metrics and noted only one-third of countries have incorporated transport into their Paris Agreement commitments. Global rail freight fell from 38% to 24% between 1980-2017 while US networks shrank from 400,000 to 200,000 kilometers since 1914. Africa operates 87,000 rail kilometers continent-wide compared to India's 65,000 kilometers in one-tenth the area. Transport emissions must decline 3% yearly to meet net-zero targets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: In roughly six weeks, three California Democrats, a labor head and two ride-hailing leaders managed to pull off what would have been unthinkable just one year prior: striking a deal between labor unions and their longtime foes, tech giants Uber and Lyft. California lawmakers announced the agreement in late August, paving a path for ride-hailing drivers to unionize as labor wanted, in exchange for the state drastically reducing expensive insurance coverage mandates protested by the companies. It earned rare public support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and received final approval from state lawmakers this week.

The swift speed of the negotiating underscores what was at risk: the prospect of yet another nine-figure ballot measure campaign or lengthy court battle between two deeply entrenched sides, according to interviews with five people involved in the talks. Their accounts shed new light on how the deal came together: how the talks started, who was in the room, and the lengths they went to in order to turn around such a quick proposal -- from taking video meetings while recovering from surgery to the unexpected aid of one lawmaker's newborn baby.

"This was really quite fast," said Ramona Prieto, Uber's chief policy expert in Sacramento. "It wasn't like this was months of negotiating." The landmark proposal is only the second time a state has reached such a framework for Uber and Lyft drivers, after Massachusetts did so in 2024. And unlike Massachusetts, it came together without reverting to a ballot fight. California already saw its most expensive ballot measure effort to date in 2020, when Uber and Lyft spent more than $200 million backing an initiative to bar app-based workers from being classified as traditional employees, known as Proposition 22. Its passage sparked a legal challenge from labor leaders that wasn't resolved until July 2024, when California's Supreme Court affirmed the ballot measure's constitutionality. [...]

But the compromise still faces hurdles ahead. A recent lawsuit has raised fresh scrutiny of how the deal came together and what truly motivated it. Further criticism from those left out of the negotiating room is putting dealmakers on the defense as they try to sell it more widely. Plus, the final deal isn't what some labor leaders hoped when they first set out to strengthen drivers' rights in 2019. [...] And while the deal allows gig workers to unionize, that doesn't guarantee the necessary 10 percent of the state's 800,000 ride-hailing drivers actually will. Many who drive for Uber and Lyft do so part-time, and labor leaders acknowledge the challenge of organizing a disparate population that doesn't have a space to meet one another.

Toxic fumes from jet engines are leaking into aircraft cabins at an accelerating rate, reaching 108 incidents per million departures in 2024 compared to 12 in 2014, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. The fumes contain neurotoxins and carbon monoxide that have caused brain injuries in crew members. JetBlue flight attendant Florence Chesson suffered permanent neurological damage after inhaling engine oil vapors in 2018, diagnosed by neurologists as equivalent to an NFL linebacker's concussion.

The surge is driven by Airbus A320 aircraft, particularly the A320neo model introduced in 2016. WSJ reports Airbus loosened maintenance requirements under airline pressure despite knowing the changes would increase incidents. The FAA received over 700 fume event reports from major U.S. airlines in 2024. Most commercial jets except Boeing's 787 use a "bleed air" system that pulls cabin air through engines.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: The world's largest airplane, when it's built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that's sprouted wings — aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale.

Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it'll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it's transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn't be moved over land, since they wouldn't fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.

So the WindRunner's developer, Radia of Boulder, Colorado, has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there... Radia's plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious — an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia's supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job — the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger. Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble...?

Having fewer total turbines means a wind farm could space them farther apart, avoiding airflow interference. The turbines would be nearly twice as tall, so they'll reach a higher, gustier part of the atmosphere. And big turbines don't need to spin as quickly, so they would make economic sense in places with average wind speeds around 5 meters per second compared with the roughly 7 m/s needed to sustain smaller units. "The result...is more than a doubling of the acres in the world where wind is viable," says Mark Lundstrom [Radia's founder and CEO].
The executive director at America's National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation points out that one day blades could just be 3D-printed on-site — negating the need for the airplane altogether. But 3D printing for turbines is still in its earliest stages.

Last year Amazon's robotaxi service Zoox held a training session for 20 Las Vegas firefighters, police officers, and other first responders, reports the Washington Post, calling it "a new ritual for emergency workers across the country, as autonomous vehicles begin to spread beyond the handful of cities that served as initial testing grounds..." Questions that came up included: What can first responders do if the nearly 6,000-pound vehicle is blocking a roadway? (Better to pull, not push.) What happens if the vehicle loses its connectivity? (It's designed to pull over.) And can first responders manually shut off the vehicle? (Not yet, but Zoox is working on it....) The vehicles' operators claim they drive more safely than humans, but anything can happen on public roads, and first responders need to know how to intervene if a robotaxi is caught in a collision that traps passengers, catches fire or gets caught doing something that demands a traffic stop...

Alphabet's Waymo, which has more than 2,000 vehicles completing hundreds of thousands of paid trips each week across San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, has trained more than 20,000 first responders in how to interact with its vehicles, the company said. Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment on how many first responders the company has trained, but a representative from the Austin Police Department confirmed that fire, police and transit workers were trained on the company's Robotaxi before the company launched commercial service in June. Tesla, Waymo and Zoox say their vehicles can detect the lights and sirens of emergency vehicles and automatically attempt to pull over. Waymo says its vehicles can interpret first responders' hand signals....

The first responders appeared excited about the potential of the company's artificial intelligence technology to ferry visitors up and down the Vegas Strip without concern that a driver might be inebriated. They were also wary of problems that might unfold: Autonomous vehicles are electric, and when electric vehicles catch fire, they're difficult to extinguish, the firefighters said. The first responders also worried that a secondary air bag deployment could injure an emergency responder, a common concern with conventional vehicles. And if a police officer wanted to view the footage a Zoox vehicle captured on the road, would the company be willing to share it?

Turning over footage would require a subpoena, a Zoox official responded.
But "those who've been through the trainings and have seen large-scale commercial rollouts say it's difficult to anticipate all the potential issues in a specific market," the article points out.

• Darius Luttropp, former deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco Fire Department, told the Post last year that Waymo vehicles had blocked city firefighters from leaving and entering firehouses, and also crashed into their equipment.

• Lt. William White of the Austin Police Department told the Post that more than once Waymo vehicles failed to recognize an officer on a motorcycle with their police lights activated.

Surgeons in London report a surge in severe e-bike-related injuries, putting major strain on NHS trauma units. The BBC mentions a couple e-bike accidents overheard at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. "A 32-year-old, fit and well student... a couple of days ago he fell off an e-bike sustaining a closed left tibial plateau fracture." Another case involved a little girl named Frida: "Six-year-old girl, she was hit by an electric bike, she has a closed tib/fib fracture." From the report: Surgeon Jaison Patel is seeing more and more cases like this. "It's a massive burden on our department and I'm sure it's the same across the whole of London," he tells us. "If we can reduce the number of patients coming in with these sorts of injuries it would be great for the patients obviously, but also takes massive pressure off us in the NHS."

Jaison deals with lower limb injuries. Just along the corridor his colleague Nick Aresti does the upper limbs. Nick explains that he is a cyclist himself, and it's something he encourages people to do for the benefit of their health. But, he has real concerns about e-bikes, and says: "What we've noticed with e-bikes is that the speed in which people are coming off is much higher and as a result, the injuries are much worse." He shows us X-rays of someone who has broken their collarbone. He explains that with e-bikes, the injuries they're seeing are much more severe, and as such, people are "struggling to get back to normality."

Nick and Jaison both agree it's something they're seeing increasingly more of as time goes by, and they think the industry needs better regulation. "We should do something about it, I don't think we can let this carry on," Jaison says. Over recent days of course, thousands of Londoners have taken to e-bikes to help beat the strikes. For many it has been an essential way to get about. Currently, anyone aged 14 or over can legally ride an e-bike. The power output of an e-bike's motor should be capped at 250 watts, and the motor should not be capable of propelling the bike any faster than 15.5mph (25kph), according to government rules.

London's Walking and Cycling Commissioner Will Norman says the rules need changing and says better regulation of the rentable electric bikes could be on the way. "We need to ensure that the vehicles are safe, that there's parking, they're not scattered all over the place, and that the batteries are safe," he says. "I'm really delighted that the government has now indicated in its English Devolution Bill that London and other cities across the UK will be getting more powers so again we can start regulating that, to ensure that they're safe for people to use and operate while they get around". The bill is currently going through parliament, and as yet there is no date for when it will be passed. Duncan Dollimore, head of campaigns at Cycling UK, who are members of the Electric Bike Alliance, argues against the regulation of e-bike usage. "The cost of inactivity-related health issues to the NHS each year is 7.4 billion pounds, and people cycling saves them 1 billion pounds. We have seen a slight rise in the number of incidents involving hired e-bikes in London, but the health benefits of people cycling outweigh the risks by around 20 to one."

US EV sales hit a record 146,332 in August, grabbing nearly 10% of all new car sales, according to Kelley Blue Book. That's the highest yet and up from 9.1% in July. Electrek reports: With the federal EV tax credit set to expire on September 30, analysts say Q3 2025 is shaping up to be the strongest quarter for EV sales in US history. The current record holder is Q4 2024, when 365,824 EVs were sold.

Prices ticked higher, too. The average transaction price (ATP) for an EV in August was $57,245, 3.1% more than July's revised lower ATP of $55,562. Year-over-year, though, EV prices were basically flat, down just 0.1%. The wave of EV sales also helped push up the overall market's ATP.

Incentives, while not as high as July's record, remained hefty. EV buyers received discounts averaging over $9,000 in August, equal to 16% of ATP. That's more than double the incentive rate in the overall auto market and up from 13.6% a year ago. A separate report from Rho Motion found that global EV sales surged 25% in 2025, led by strong growth in Europe and China. "That amounts to 12.5 million EVs, although the data combines both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs for the total," reports Ars Technica.

As for North America? "EV sales are still growing but barely -- up just 6 percent between January and August 2025 compared to the same time period in 2024."

Global automakers are licensing Chinese electric vehicle technology to accelerate development and cut costs. Audi built its E5 Sportback in 18 months using SAIC's batteries, powertrain and software after the Zeekr 001 "shocked quite everyone" in 2021, according to Stefan Poetzl, president of SAIC Audi Sales and Marketing. Toyota and Volkswagen have joint development agreements for China-specific models using GAC and Xpeng technology respectively.

Renault and Ford plan to develop global models on Chinese platforms, according to Reuters. The licensing deals provide Chinese automakers additional revenue amid domestic price wars. Ready-made Chinese EV chassis and software can save billions of dollars and years of development time, industry experts told the publication. CATL and other Chinese suppliers are expanding chassis production for domestic and international customers.

Amazon's Zoox officially launched its driverless robotaxi service in Las Vegas with free rides from a few select locations. "Riders will eventually have to pay, but Zoox said it's waiting on regulatory approval to take that step," notes CNBC. A broader rollout is expected in the coming months. From the report: ... unlike Waymo and Tesla, Zoox's electric robotaxi doesn't resemble a car. There's no steering wheel or pedals, and the rectangular shape has led many in the industry to describe it as a toaster on wheels. Zoox co-founder and technology chief Jesse Levinson says, "We use robotaxi or vehicle or Zoox." "You can shoehorn a robotaxi into something that used to be a car. It's just not an ideal solution," Levinson told CNBC in an interview in Las Vegas. "We wanted to do that hard work and take the time and invest in that, and then bring something to market that's just much better than a car."

Zoox was founded in 2014, five years after Google formed the project that became Waymo. Following Las Vegas, the company said it plans to debut an early rider program in San Francisco before the end of the year. The company has been testing a fleet of 50 robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Austin and Miami will be Zoox's next locations, the company said. Zoox will soon begin testing robotaxis in those markets, and said it's already driving retrofitted test vehicles in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Seattle. "We think it's very, very early days, and the future is not written yet," said Levinson, during a demo ride with CNBC.

Zoox's Las Vegas depot spans 190,000 square feet, which is about the size of three football fields. At the facility, the company houses the dozens of vehicles set to start operating around the city. Smartphone users will be able to order them from Top Golf, Area15, Resorts World Las Vegas, New York-New York Hotel & Casino and Luxor Hotel & Casino. The robotaxi features two rows of seats that face each other and can transport up to four people at a time. The front and rear are identical, with bidirectional wheels that allow it to move forward or backward without turning around. The vehicle can run for 16 hours on a single charge. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sightseeing experience for passengers who want a clear view of the endless rows of casinos. But the interior design is meant to enable easy conversation with fellow riders. "It's not a retrofitted car," said Zoox CEO Aicha Evans. "It's built from the ground up around the rider."

U.S. officials issued an advisory warning that foreign-made solar-powered highway infrastructure may contain hidden radios embedded in inverters and batteries. Reuters reports: The advisory, disseminated late last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, comes amid escalating government action over the presence of Chinese technology in America's transportation infrastructure. The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered "in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS," referring to battery management systems.

The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China. There is increasing concern from U.S. officials that the devices, along with the electronic systems that manage rechargeable batteries, could be seeded with rogue communications components that would allow them to be remotely tampered with on Beijing's orders. [...]

The August 20 advisory said the devices were used to power a range of U.S. highway infrastructure, including signs, traffic cameras, weather stations, solar-powered visitor areas and warehouses, and electric vehicle chargers. The risks it cited included simultaneous outages and surreptitious theft of data. The alert suggested that relevant authorities inventory inverters across the U.S. highway system, scan devices with spectrum analysis technology to detect any unexpected communications, disable or remove any undocumented radios, and make sure their networks were properly segmented.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motor1: BMW watched from the sidelines as Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, Volvo, and others announced lofty EV goals a few years ago, only to backtrack in recent months. Munich never vowed to go fully electric within a set timeframe, instead preferring to give customers the freedom of choice. It projects demand will be evenly split between gas and electric cars by 2030, but Bavaria hasn't committed to a combustion-free future. The company maintains its desire to give people what they want rather than artificially restricting powertrains to EVs, as the European Union plans for 2035. In an interview with Australian magazine CarExpert, Chief Technology Officer Joachim Post argued it should ultimately come down to buyers, not the EU: "Finally, the customer decides."

Provided the ban takes effect in a little over nine years, the board member fears it could have massive repercussions: "If the European Commission is going to say they have a plan to cut the combustion engine in 2035, they're not asking the customers and how [EV charging] infrastructure is coming up, how the energy prices are and all the things there. It's stupid to do that in that way. And you can kill an industry doing it that way."

His concerns are echoed by Mercedes CEO Ola Kallenius, who recently warned the European car industry is "heading at full speed against a wall" and could even "collapse" if the EU doesn't reconsider. The statement came shortly after Stuttgart's boss admitted the company had to make a "course correction" to keep combustion engines longer than initially planned. Mercedes continues to invest in conventional powertrains, and there's even a completely new V-8 from AMG on the way. The report notes that BMW continues to generate strong profits from its combustion engines, ranging from three-, four-, six-, and eight-cyclinder engines to a Rolls-Royce V-12 -- even supplying rivals like Toyota and possibly soon Mercedes.

In fact, the "M" in BMW stands for "Motoren" (German for "engine").

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a safety alert [PDF], warning airlines about lithium battery fire risks in passenger compartments after recording 50 incidents involving smoke, fire, or extreme heat from the devices this year.

The FAA recommended airlines implement risk mitigation strategies including clear passenger messaging and updated firefighting procedures and training.

Britain's road death rate has declined 22-fold per mile driven since 1950, dropping from 111 deaths per billion miles to approximately 5 today, according to new analysis from Our World in Data. Annual road fatalities fell from 5,000-7,000 deaths in the 1920s and 1930s to 1,700 in recent years despite a 16-fold increase in vehicles and 33-fold increase in miles driven.

The UK now ranks among the world's safest countries for road travel at 1.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Key interventions included mandatory breathalyzer tests in 1967 that reduced drunk-driving deaths by 82%, the introduction of motorways beginning in 1958, conversion to roundabouts that cut fatal accidents by two-thirds, and 20-mph speed zones around schools. If global road death rates matched Britain's current levels, approximately one million lives would be saved annually from the current 1.2 million road deaths worldwide.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from CBC News: Prime Minister Mark Carney is delaying a plan to force automakers to hit minimum sales levels for electric vehicles. The move is part of a series of measures the government announced Friday to help the sectors most affected by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs. The EV mandate will be paused as the government conducts a 60-day review of the policy, and will be waived for 2026 models. Sources told CBC News that the review will look at the entire mandate and next steps.

"We have an auto sector which, because of the massive change in U.S. policy, is under extreme pressure. We recognize that," Carney said at a news conference in Mississauga, Ont. "They've got enough on their plate right now. So we're taking that off." The government is using the review as part of broader look at all the government's climate measures, he added. [...]

Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, called it "an important first step." "The EV mandate imposes unsustainable costs on auto manufacturers, putting at risk Canadian jobs and investment in this critical sector of the economy," he said in a statement. "A full repeal of the regulation is the most effective way to provide immediate relief to the industry and keep it competitive."

Switzerland has launched Apertus, a fully open-source, multilingual LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens and over 1,000 languages. "What distinguishes Apertus from many other generative AI systems is its commitment to complete openness," reports CyberInsider. From the report: Unlike popular proprietary models, where users can only interact via APIs or hosted interfaces, Apertus provides open access to its model weights, training datasets, documentation, and even intermediate checkpoints. The source code and all training materials are released under a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use. Since the full training process is documented and reproducible, researchers and watchdogs can audit the data sources, verify compliance with data protection laws, and inspect how the model was trained. Apertus' development explicitly adhered to Swiss data protection and copyright laws, and incorporated retroactive opt-out mechanisms to respect data source preferences.

From a privacy perspective, Apertus represents a compelling shift in the AI landscape. The model only uses publicly available data, filtered to exclude personal information and to honor opt-out signals from content sources. This not only aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, but also provides a tangible example of how AI can be both powerful and privacy-respecting. According to ETH Zurich's Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the project at ETH Zurich, Apertus is "built for the public good" and is a demonstration of how AI can be deployed as a public digital infrastructure, much like utilities or transportation. The model is available via Swisscom's Sovereign Swiss AI Platform. It's also available through Hugging Face and the Public AI Inference Utility.

Waymo is expanding its U.S. robotaxi footprint by bringing its Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and Zeekr vans to Denver and Seattle. Testing is set to begin this week, with commercial rides expected as early as 2026. TechCrunch reports: The vehicles will be manually driven to start, before the company starts testing its autonomous tech in both cities. Waymo told TechCrunch that it hopes to start offering robotaxi trips in Denver next year and the Seattle metropolitan area "as soon as we're permitted to do so." Denver and Seattle will be two of the most extreme-weather cities that Waymo is feeling out, giving it a chance to test out its tech in snow, wind, and rain that is harder to come by in places like Phoenix. The report notes that Waymo currently operates more than 2,000 robotaxis in the U.S., concentrated in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. The self-driving car company is expanding to Dallas, Miami, Washington D.C., and New York, while also "dipping its toes" in additional markets such as Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Houston.

Further reading: 'Why Do Waymos Keep Loitering in Front of My House?'

Waymo robotaxis are repeatedly selecting identical parking spots in front of specific Los Angeles and Arizona homes between rides, puzzling residents who document the same vehicles returning to precise locations daily. The company states its vehicles choose parking based on local regulations, existing vehicle distribution, and proximity to high-demand areas but cannot explain the algorithmic specificity.

Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman attributes the behavior to machine learning systems optimizing for specific spots without variation. Waymo said it had received neighbor complaints and has designated certain locations as no-parking zones for its fleet. The vehicles comply with three-hour parking limits, according to Los Angeles Department of Transportation regulations, governing commercial passenger vehicles under 22 feet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After bringing 4G and 5G connectivity to the Underground, London's public transport authority has started scolding noisy passengers who subject everyone to music and calls blasting out of their phones. A new poster campaign launched by Transport for London (TfL) this week encourages customers to wear headphones when watching or listening to content on their devices to reduce disruption for other commuters.

"Please don't disturb others with loud music or calls when traveling on the network," reads the "Headphones On" poster. The posters are already being displayed on the Elizabeth rail line, according to TfL, and will expand to bus, Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, London Underground, and London Tram services from October.

The campaign targets headphone dodgers as data coverage becomes more available across the underground rail network, making it easier for passengers to stream content and make calls on the go. People who do so without donning headphones are annoying other commuters, however, with TfL research showing that 70 percent of 1,000 surveyed customers reported loud music and phone calls disrupting their journeys. "The vast majority of Londoners use headphones when traveling on public transport in the capital, but the small minority who play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys," says London's deputy transport mayor, Seb Dance. "TfL's new campaign will remind and encourage Londoners to always be considerate of other passengers."

Amtrak's new 160 mph tilting Acela trains have debuted on the Northeast Corridor, offering smoother rides, upgraded interiors, faster Wi-Fi, and 27% more seating capacity. However, "they don't complete the journey any faster than the old trains," reports The Independent. From the report: Acela runs from Washington, DC's Union Station to Boston via Philadelphia, New York Penn Station, New Haven, and Providence. It's a total distance of 457 miles, with the fastest next-gen Acela journey being six hours and 43 minutes, five minutes slower than the quickest end-to-end time offered by the old Acela trains, introduced in 2000. However, this may be because, as is common practice with new trains the world over, Amtrak is scheduling longer dwell times at stations so staff and passengers can adjust to them. The next-gen sets have a top service speed that's 10mph faster -- though this can only be achieved on certain sections of the mostly 110mph route -- and an enhanced "anticipative" tilting system that allows for higher speeds through curves.

Stellantis has put its fully developed Level 3 driver-assistance system on hold due to high costs, technical hurdles, and weak consumer demand. Reuters reports: As recently as February, Stellantis said its in-house system, which is part of the AutoDrive program, was ready for deployment and a key pillar of its strategy. The company said the system, which enables drivers to have their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road under certain conditions, would allow them to temporarily watch movies, catch up on emails, or read books. That Level 3 software was never launched, the company confirmed to Reuters. But it stopped short of saying that the program was canceled.

"What was unveiled in February 2025 was L3 technology for which there is currently limited market demand, so this has not been launched, but the technology is available and ready to be deployed," a Stellantis spokesperson said. The three sources, however, said that the program was put on ice and is not expected to be deployed. When asked how much time and money was lost on the initiative, Stellantis declined to say, responding that the work done on AutoDrive will help support its future versions. [...] Stellantis said it is leaning on aiMotive, a tech startup it acquired in 2022, to deliver the next generation of the AutoDrive program. Stellantis declined to say when that program would be ready for market or if it would include Level 3 capability.