Revolutions aren’t slow, and they don’t usually involve booths, swag, and lawmakers up late in Sacramento arguing policy. But we saw stages set for two huge shifts this week: One was in Frankfurt, where automakers gathered to show off their latest and greatest concept cars, a melange of hybrid and electric shinies. The other was in California’s capital, where legislators passed a bill that promises to rewrite portions of the state’s economy, and the way some of its marquee companies—Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Doordash—deal with their workers. Come back here often, because these are big stories that are just beginning.
Plus, we dug into why some runway construction brought San Francisco’s airport—and its fliers—to their knees, and cities’ latest thinking on building for a self-driving-car future. It’s been a week; let’s get you caught up.
Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week
- Land Rover ups the high-tech wizardry in the 2020 hybrid Defender.
- Why a spot of planned runway construction totally screwed over fliers at San Francisco’s airport.
- Chinese electric-car maker Byton unveils its $48,000 production SUV, and you will want to watch the next Star Wars inside of it.
- The Trump administration’s spat with California and carmakers over emissions—and, perhaps, the fate of the planet—continues, now with even more lawyers.
- Cities aren’t sure when autonomous vehicles will arrive, but transportation officials are trying really hard to figure out how to prevent them from creating even more traffic.
- California passes a bill that will transform many gig economy workers into employees.
- But Uber doesn’t think the law will apply to its drivers—even if that’s what the lawmakers who wrote it had in mind.
A UK board this week released details on an April event that could have gone very badly—though it fortunately did not. Two skydivers were traveling at 120 mph in free fall in the sky above an airfield in western England when they were almost hit by two US F-15 fighter jets out of a nearby air base. The UK authorities chalked the incident up to a series of miscommunications and labeled the incident as a “medium” miss.
48%
The share of all car trips in the most-trafficked US cities that are shorter than 3 miles, according to a report from the traffic analytics company Inrix. That, combined with warm climates and flat roads, make some American cities particularly well suited for scooter and bike trips: Honolulu, New Orleans, and Nashville.
News from elsewhere on the internet
- It’s Porsche versus Tesla on Nürburgring.
- Uber lays off more than 400 engineering and product employees.
- More US layoffs hit the Chinese EV company NIO.
- Following New York’s first-in-the-nation minimum pay law, Uber says it will join Lyft in blocking its NYC drivers from working when and where demand is low.
- Voyage, the AV robotaxi company focusing on serving retirement communities, raises $31 million.
- Why have headlights when you could have drones?
- DMVs are selling data to private investigators.
- A trip to the hyperloop believers’ conference.
Essential stories from WIRED’s canon
Back in 2015, WIRED profiled the up-and-coming “demand economy” delivery startup DoorDash, and the business model now threatened by California’s new law: “building a vast service empire with a full-time staff that can easily be accommodated at an Il Fornaio dinner seating, and an army of contract workers that would barely squeeze into Levi’s Stadium.”
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