Tech company cuts employees from eight offices in Santa Clara in its first big wave of post-pandemic job cuts Apple is laying off more than 600 workers in California, marking the company’s first big wave of post-pandemic job cuts amid a broader wave of tech industry consolidation. The iPhone maker notified 614 workers in multiple offices on 28 March that they were losing their jobs, with the layoffs becoming effective on 27 May, according to reports to regional authorities ..read more

Do you have to brush your own hair, own an umbrella or keep at least one hand on your steering wheel? Don’t blame these visionary thinkers “Things can only get better”, D:Ream promised, but they were wrong, and so were most people in history who have tried to predict the future. It never stopped us from trying, though, and a few visionaries have been pretty good at it. There was Leonardo da Vinci, of course, with his helicopters and fridges, and Joseph Glanvill, who in 1661 suggested moon voyages and communication using “magnetic waves” might be a thing. Civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, wr ..read more

Reports say tech giant made announcement during meeting and forecast layoffs, ending secretive and resource-heavy project Apple is canceling its plans to build an electric car, according to multiple outlets, ending a secretive project that has consumed immense resources over the past decade. Executives from the company made the unexpected announcement during an internal team meeting on Tuesday, forecasting layoffs and telling employees that many of them would shift to working on generative artificial intelligence, per reports. Apple is believed to have spent billions of dollars attempting to d ..read more

Electric cars might seem like a no-brainer on a warming planet, but there are plenty of people who remain sceptical about everything from their battery life to their carbon impact and the environmental and human rights costs of their parts. Madeleine Finlay consults Auke Hoekstra, known as the internet’s ‘EV debunker in chief’, to unpick the myths, realities and grey areas surrounding electric cars Clips: Joe Rogan, Global Radio Read Jasper Jolly’s EV mythbusters series here ..read more

California authorities investigating if attack on Google’s Waymo car is latest in series of protests targeting autonomous vehicles Authorities in California are working to determine if the destruction of a driverless taxi in an arson attack by a mob of lunar new year revelers was the latest in a series of protests targeting autonomous vehicles in the state. According to the San Francisco fire department, which posted images of the incinerated SUV on Twitter/X, a group of people jumped on the electric vehicle in the city’s Chinatown district on Saturday night, smashing windows and spraying it w ..read more

Councils in England will have to digitise all traffic regulation measures such as temporary speed limits or road closures Satnavs and Google Maps will soon include live data on road closures, parking restrictions and temporary speed limits in England under a UK government scheme aimed to ease drivers’ pain and pave the way for driverless cars. Councils will be ordered to digitise all traffic regulation orders (TROs), short-term traffic measures such as temporary speed limits or road closures ..read more

Laws in California have yet to catch up to autonomous vehicles, even though hundreds are already on the road Autonomous vehicles in San Francisco are exempt from traffic tickets if there is nobody in the driver’s seat, according to the San Francisco police department (SFPD), underscoring ongoing legal and safety concerns surrounding the expanding technology. California law has not caught up to the cars, even though they are already on the road, say public safety agencies and experts. SFPD policy states that officers can make a traffic stop of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for violations, but can o ..read more

Mark Harper says vehicles can improve road safety and personal freedom, as autonomous cars face increased scrutiny Autonomous vehicles could be on UK roads as soon as 2026, the transport secretary has said, as ministers seeks to capture as much as £42bn of the international self-driving market within the coming decade. “This technology exists, it works, and what we’re doing is putting in place the proper legislation so that people can have full confidence in the safety of this technology,” Mark Harper told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday ..read more

Sales surge as cities and states look to cut pollution from cars and improve options for Americans to get around After several years of false starts, electric bikes are finally entering the American mainstream, amid booming sales of a multiplying number of models on offer and as more states offer incentives for people to ditch their cars and shift to two, motor-assisted, wheels. This year could be considered “the year of the ebike”, according to John MacArthur, a transport researcher at Portland State University. Ebike sales in the United States leaped by 269% between 2019 and 2022, with the m ..read more

Autonomous vehicle unit cuts about a quarter of its workforce as it moves to reduce costs and remake itself after accident General Motors’ troubled Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is cutting over 900 jobs, about a quarter of its workforce, as it moves to reduce costs and remake itself after a grisly accident in San Francisco and subsequent regulatory scrutiny. Early last month, the company recalled all its robotaxis, which it had been testing on roads in California, and regulators accused Cruise of hiding the severity of the incident. The subsidiary announced the cuts on Thursday in a letter to ..read more