Volkswagen Wants a Driverless Taxi to Take You Home
A new Silicon Valley start-up wants to make driverless vehicles accessible to the masses, and is teaming up with Volkswagen and Hyundai to do it.
“Our goal at Aurora is to provide the driver,” said Chris Urmson, the company’s CEO and the former technology chief of Google’s Waymo. “Our partners build vehicles. They understand their customers, and they understand the businesses they want to be in. And we are going to provide them the capabilities for their vehicles to drive around.”
“We think that by developing a driver with a variety of other companies, we can actually make it better and safer, quicker.”
Aurora plans to develop fleets of self-driving electric taxis to roll out across major cities. Urmson told Cheddar that the company will be working with city governments to ensure a reliable system.
Founded about a year ago by Urmson, robotics expert Drew Bagnell, and Tesla alum Sterling Adelson, Aurora also announced a partnership this week with Nvidia to use the chip maker’s products in its autonomous systems.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/why-the-worlds-biggest-automakers-are-turning-to-this-company-for-self-driving-technology).
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority blocked Facebook parent company Meta's acquisition of the image sharing platform Giphy, stating that the deal would harm UK advertisers and social media users. Meta responded and said that it is considering an appeal.
Jill and Carlo cover the latest developments with the Omicron variant that are spooking markets once again. Twitter's @Jack is leaving, SCOTUS takes up abortion rights and the world has a brand new republic.
Phyllis Newhouse, the first black woman to bring a company public via SPAC on the NYSE earlier this year, has launched her second SPAC, ShoulderUp Technology Acquisition.
Phyllis is a serial entrepreneur, retired military officer, and founder of the ShoulderUp movement, which educates and encourages women around the world to reach their greatest economic, political and cultural potential. Shawn Henry is part of the ShoulderUp team, bringing his expertise on cybersecurity to the new company. Both Phyllis and Shawn joined Cheddar to discuss this new venture and how it plans to tackle the issue of cybercrime.
Don Basile, CEO, Monsoon Blockchain & Founder of Bitcoin Latinum, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why we're seeing major crypto investors look to purchase expensive pieces of art, and discusses what the NFT space could look like in the not-too-distant future.
Jack Constantine, chief digital officer and product inventor at Lush, joined Cheddar to talk about the cosmetic company's mass exodus from major social media platforms TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, in the wake of recent reports that Instagram specifically had negative impacts on teen girls. He noted that with teenage girls being a large part of its consumer base and audience, Lush had a responsibility to market its company on outlets that prioritize mental wellbeing. "For us, we've always been a social brand, and it started to feel that social media was no longer offering what we felt we wanted to gain from it," he said. "And then obviously when you add that to the damage that it's causing, it just feels like a combination that we can't continue on with." The company also pulled out of social media platforms in 2019.
Jon Lowen, Co-Founder of Surfside, joined Wake Up With Cheddar's Baker Machado to discuss Uber's partnership with cannabis retailer Tokyo Smoke, as it's the first time a cannabis merchant has been listed on UberEats across all of its global markets.
