To drive a car, you need to see the world around you. But computers are blind, so autonomous cars must rely on other ways to perceive their surroundings.

A U.S. district judge wants to determine why Uber failed to turn over some explosive evidence as it battled a lawsuit alleging it stole self-driving car secrets.

Big fleets of robot taxis — with no backup drivers — from General Motors could hit the streets of San Francisco and other cities in less than two years, the company said Nov. 30.

What is a trade secret? That seemingly simple question dominated discussions Nov. 14 during a federal court hearing on Waymo vs. Uber, one of the last pretrial sessions before the case, which could shape the future of autonomous vehicles, heads to a jury on Dec 4.

Putting self-driving cars on the road sooner rather than later could save hundreds of thousands of lives, according to a report released Nov. 6 by Rand Corp., a Santa Monica policy research nonprofit.

A bicyclist pedaled alongside the road and a pedestrian wandered into the crosswalk, as a self-driving minivan headed through a maze of roads in a desolate landscape. As the vehicle turned right, its steering wheel rotated above the empty driver’s seat.

Advanced driver-assistance features increasingly are embedded in cars you can find parked in dealers’ lots. Luxury makers such as Tesla and Mercedes-Benz began including them a few years ago, but now they have trickled down to many mass-market models, sometimes as options, sometimes standard.

The lightbulb moment came when Brandon Richardson, a former Detroit automotive engineer, had a tire go flat because it was underinflated.

Making shooing gestures with his hands, Ahti Heinla, an engineer who helped start Skype, stood on Balboa Street in San Francisco. “Can you come out of the way for the robots?” he said to an assembled scrum of journalists. “They’re programmed to not crash into people.”

For now, Otto is focused on logging as many test miles as possible with its five (soon to be six) retrofitted Volvo cabs that it runs almost 24/7 on highways in the Bay Area and elsewhere.