Once upon a time, car companies were in charge of, you know, building cars. They put that widget against that gizmo and bolted and screwed until the whole thing hanged together—a thing you could buy and own and drive. No longer. Increasingly, car companies—and parts suppliers, and car-sharing startups, and ride-hailing giants—are in the business of data. Collecting it, compiling it, selling it.
This week, we got a few good looks into how these mobility-focused companies are using your data. Ski resorts are especially good at this, I report, and might be a model for the much-discussed, little-defined “smart city”. Uber launched Express Pool, a new service that asks riders to walk a block or so before meeting drivers. Based on pilots in two cities, Uber thinks it can get people, and especially commuters, to use their app more regularly thanks to this slightly less convenient, slightly less expensive service. And Cadillac’s finally showing off the fruits of 130,000 miles of laser-based mapping, which its Super Cruise function uses to drive by itself. But not, as transportation editor Alex Davis writes, everywhere—not yet.
It was a week! Let’s get you caught up.
Headlines
Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week
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Alex spent two weeks with a Cadillac CT6 equipped with General Motors’ Autopilot challenger, Super Cruise. The semiautonomous feature can drive on most American and Canadian highways—but not everywhere. He talked to the team behind the feature, and discovered its secret comes down to lasers. A lot of them.
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Uber launched its first new product in three years, Express Pool, in eight cities. It’s a shared ride, but users have to walk a block or so to reach an ideal pick-up spot. And in this way, Uber has officially come for your commute, I report.
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Speaking of commuting: Electric, dockless e-bikes might be the future. Fleets, which are slowly rolling out in cities all over the US, are challenging traditional bike-sharing, buses, car-sharing, and yeah, maybe ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft. But only if their makers can keep the speedy things charged.
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Transportation companies and the cities where they operate are increasingly interested in your data: info about how you get around, what you buy, and where you go every day. But if they want to get better at using it—to improving your life with its revelations—they just might turn to a ski resort for tips. It seemst those winter wonderlands are very good at knowing all about you.
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Cryptojacking—hacking into a server to use it for cryptocurrency mining—is a new technique, but it has already pulled down a big fish: Tesla. The cloud monitoring firm RedLock says it found the vulnerability and informed the car company of the infection. A Tesla spokesperson told WIRED security reporter Lily Hay Newman that the breach only affected internally engineering test cars, and that vehicle nor driver security was compromised in any way.
Fun DataViz of the Week
We know you love listening to us prattle on about transportation, but it’s nice to see the moving in action sometimes, yeah? Say Bonjour or Hola or Hallo or Namaste to French carpooling service BlaBlaCar’s fun map of global rides in its last month. (Really, pick your language—the service runs in over 20 countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.)
Required Reading
News from elsewhere on the internet.
- Check out this fun #longread from WIRED UK, on the secrets behind Chinese ride-hailing titan Didi Chuxing. If anyone can kill Uber, it’s Didi. In fact, it already has—in China at least.
- Watch out, Elon: UPS announces a partnership with battery-electric company Workhorse to build 50 plug-in electric delivery trucks with 100-mile ranges. Expect a larger scale electric deployment in 2019.
- Duck again, Elon: Daimler took a swipe at Tesla this week, with a truck exec saying the EV company’s plans to launch an electric heavy truck is unrealistic. Daimler says it own scheme, to sell battery electric big-rigs by 2021 under the Mercedes-Benz Actros brand, is more feasible given the rate of battery innovation.
- Audi announces new tech to solve the cross-country driver’s greatest enemy: incompatible electronic tolling transponders. The company says its solution will work on 97.8 percent of American toll roads.
- Automated vehicle developers will need a whole lot more people power in the next five to 10 years. So they’re sponsoring a new slew of programs at Michigan technical colleges.
- Wide scale deployment of shared autonomous vehicles may be years away, but parking garage operators say they’re already feeling the pinch from people abandoning personal cars—mostly in favor of Uber or Lyft.
- Ford fired North American business head Raj Nair this week, after an internal investigation of allegedly inappropriate behavior. Kumar Galhotra, who headed up the company’s Lincoln brand, will replace Nair next month.
- President Trump says he’d be open to hiking the gas tax by 25 cents in an effort to shore up infrastructure funding, which would be the first gas tax hike in 24 years. And then, the impossible: the White House signaled it could be OK with nixing the gas tax for a vehicle miles traveled tax. Looks like someone’s been reading WIRED contributor Nick Stockton.
In the Rearview
Essential Stories from WIRED’s canon
Back in 2012, a social media app called Path received a torrent of backlash after an internet Good Samaritan discovered the company swiped its users' entire phone address books—without their permission. Reporter Mike Isaac's take is a nice time capsule into the privacy debates of a half-decade ago—and how far we've come since.
