ANN ARBOR - With light truck sales declining, fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the U.S. last month reached its highest level since August 2014, say researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. The average fuel economy (window-sticker value) in July was 25.4 mpg—up 0.3 mpg from June and just 0.1 mpg
ROYAL OAK - What is the powertrain of the future? Will it be all electric? Hybrids? The answer is we don’t know the answer, Auto industry expert David Cole, chairman of Auto Harvest, explains in this edition of M2 TechCast. The battery remains the Achilles Heel for auto electrification, he said. A solid state battery
SANTA MONICA - Consumer Watchdog warned that a bill approved Thursday by the House Commerce Committee that would pre-empt state autonomous vehicle safety regulations would leave a regulatory void without meaningful safety protections. “Pre-empting the states’ ability to fill the gap left by federal inaction on safety standards leaves us at the mercy of manufacturers
GRAND RAPIDS - Keith Brophy, State Director of the Michigan SBDC, interviewed Bhushan Kulkarni, Chairman of GDI Infotech and CEO of InfoReady Corp. Both companies are located in Ann Arbor. Bhushan was also co-chair of BBM BizCon 2017, a conference that took place July 6 in Grand Rapids. This year’s conference was focused on 21st
LOS ALTOS, Ca. - Toyota Research Institute will invest an initial $100 million to launch Toyota AI Ventures, a new corporate venture capital subsidiary designed to provide early-stage financing to startup technology companies. TRI will launch the venture by contributing initial investments it has made in three technology companies: Nauto, SLAMcore and Intuition Robotics. The
ROYAL OAK - A study done to better understand how organizations in connected and automated vehicle sectors are related to each other was able to identify some 350 working in this space in Southeast Michigan, and some 1,400 connections, so says Tricia Walding of the Workforce Intelligence Network of Southeast Michigan. WIN wanted to generate
TEL AVIV, Israel - The former director of the Israeli Internal Security Service said Tuesday that auto makers should stop development of autonomous vehicles until the world auto industry solves the cyber security problem with the help of academia and governments. Yuval Diskin, now chairman of CyMotive Technologies, warned that the current auto industry practice
ANN ARBOR - Starting this fall, students at the University of Michigan will have access to an entirely new form of transportation in the form of this adorable, completely autonomous shuttle bus. The university plans to deploy two of the shuttles, manufactured by French startup Navya, to service a two-mile route between the Lurie Engineering
ROYAL OAK - Talent, talent, talent is what is needed to keep Michigan at the forefront of auto technology, David Cole, Chairman of Auto Harvest, said on this segment of M2 TechCast. Skilled trades and technicians, engineers with electro mechanical skills, are at the top of the list. Cole said the productivity improvements with the
ANN ARBOR - Americans love their pickup trucks, SUVs and minivans, as long as they believe they can afford them, a new University of Michigan study confirms. Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the U-M Transportation Research Institute examined the relationship between relative sales of cars (passenger cars and stations wagons) and light trucks (pickup
