The United States Department of Transportation has issued guidelines about self-driving vehicles.

The tone seems to be largely positive:

For DOT, the excitement around highly automated vehicles (HAVs) starts with safety. Two numbers exemplify the need. First, 35,092 people died on U.S. roadways in 2015 alone. Second, 94 percent of crashes can be tied to a human choice or error.2 An important promise of HAVs is to address and mitigate that overwhelming majority of crashes.

A goal that DOT highlights is to prevent a patchwork of regulations across state lines. Of course, one person’s “patchwork of regulations” is another person’s “laboratories of democracy”.

The full report is over 100 pages and I confess I’ve only read the Executive Summary. But so far, so good.

The Detroit Free Press has a long article on why self-driving cars will be mostly electric, instead of gas powered.

“There are a lot fewer moving pieces in an electric vehicle. There are three main components — the battery, the inverter and the electric motor,” said Levi Tillemann-Dick, managing partner at Valence Strategic in Washington, D.C., and author of “The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future.” “An internal combustion engine contains 2,000 tiny pieces that have to be kept lubricated and they break every once in a while.”

That’s probably true (although I’m not a powertrain expert), and it might account for why big OEMs are going electric vs. gas for their self-driving car fleets.

But there’s a more pressing and practical reason for self-driving car engineers working on today’s vehicles: it’s not possible to make most purely gas-powered vehicles self-driving.

It all comes down to braking. Hitting the brakes is still a purely mechanical function in almost all cars, for safety reasons. The logic is that computers are less reliable than mechanical parts, and you don’t want anything to jeopardize the functioning of the brakes.

However, that means that it’s not possible to retrofit the car drive itself, because there’s no computerized way to tell the car to brake.

The solution is to use electric and hybrid vehicles, which have electronic brake controls build into the hybrid powertrain. Combine that with some sort of brake control from parking assistance, and that’s enough to control to make a self-driving car stop.

Ford Will Sell Self-Driving Cars to the Public by 2025

Monday’s news of an employee-only autonomous service is a middle step before the automaker’s first self-driving public implementation in 2021. And President and CEO Mark Fields said such vehicles likely won’t be ready for sale directly to the public until at least the middle of next decade.

George Hotz Will Ship by the End of the Year

Would you pay $999 to give your car self-driving chops?

George Hotz is betting the answer is yes. The 26-year-old iPhone and PlayStation hacker turned entrepreneur is behind Comma.ai, a new Bay Area company that is powered largely by his brains and chutzpah, as well as $3 million in funding fromAndreessen Horowitz.

Google X Employees (get it?) Are Forming a New Company

[Nuro.ai] wouldn’t reveal too many additional details about what exactly they’re doing, but here’s what we know:

The company’s plans involve creating a “level four,” which is geek for an entirely hands-free self-driving car.

But the car is only the first in a line of products Nuro plans to develop. We don’t know what else they’ll create, but it won’t be solely transportation-related.

That’s because Nuro’s team includes engineers with robotics, artificial intelligence and self-driving experience who had a hand in either developing or shipping an unusually wide range of products including Nexus cameras, Google Image search, the Mars Exploration and Curiosity Rovers, Google street view, Google’s self-driving cars and a number of surgical tools.

The company has raised funding, but it won’t say how much and from whom.

Nuro plans to launch its first product — a self-driving car — in two to four years.

Volvo Self-Driving Mining Vehicles: I forgot to mention this in my round-up of niche industries for self-driving cars, but Paul Lienert reminded me on Twitter. Volvo has self-driving dump trucks operating in Sweden’s Kristineberg Mine.

Denso Buys Fujitsu Ten: Denso isn’t well-known in the US, but they are Japan’s biggest automotive supplier, and the second-largest in the world, behind Bosch. They purchased a controlling stake in a subsidiary of Fujitsu, specifically the radar group, which is critical for self-driving cars. It’s a move that signals the Japanese auto industry may focusing more on autonomous vehicles.

Layoffs in Apple’s Car Group: Apple’s self-driving car group, allegedly code-named Project Titan, is a little bit like the Delta Force — everybody knows they exist but nobody will confirm it. Recent layoffs in the group were reported by just about every major news outlet, though, so I think it’s safe to say that both the group and the layoffs are real. Reading between the lines, it looks like Apple may be moving away from physical hardware and focusing increasingly on self-driving software.