Lawmakers, jurists, labor unions, and organizers want the companies to treat their workers better, even as the companies remain unprofitable.“Over the past 12 months, there’s been a pendulum swing by the courts towards protecting worker rights in the gig economy,” says Ruwan Subasinghe, the legal director of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents nearly 20 million workers in 150 countries.

A ballot measure would create a new legal classification for Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and DoorDash deliverers—not quite employees, but not the independent contractors they’ve been until now.

The Cornell paper examines the pay and expenses of more than 14,100 Seattle Uber and Lyft drivers during one week in October 2019, using data from the ride-hail companies.

It might surprise you to know that in the United States there are several hundred cities that intentionally discharge untreated, raw sewage into their coastal waters whenever their sewer systems are overwhelmed with stormwater.

Since early March, Sinnott-Armstrong has been making the rounds of the Bay Area’s wastewater treatment plants, collecting samples that may offer clues to Covid-19’s spread around the region.

Separately, the Justice Department has opened an antitrust probe into the deal, in which four automakers reached a pact on compromise tailpipe emissions with California, defying federal regulators, according to a person familiar with the matter.

BugattiBugatti’s new champion is a pre-production prototype of a special edition of the $3 million Chiron , which in its base form is electronically limited to 261 mph and goes from 0 to 60 mph in under three seconds.

The idea is to that, like the old Beetles enthusiasts turned into dune buggies, today’s electrics can become just about anything.“In the 1960s people took the Beetle and built onto it, including most famously dune buggies like the Meyers Manx.”.

Though the Crewe factory employs just one robot —a rather disappointing rig that applies adhesive to windshields—it has automated sleds shuffling assemblies down the line, high-tech analytical gear for developing new materials, and several computerized leather cutters that map out all the bits and pieces for seats, steering wheels, and door panels that they can extract from a single hide, leaving just wispy remnants to go into the recycling.

Or that after breaking up with self-driving developer Aurora earlier this year, Volkswagen on Friday invested $2.6 billion in Argo AI , with plans to use its tech to launch an autonomous service (likely meaning robo-taxis or trucking, somewhere, sometime).

Volkswagen is investing $2.6 billion in Argo AI, the self-driving-car developer leading Ford’s effort to deploy an autonomous taxi service. Along with boosting VW’s robotic efforts, the deal extends the automakers’ nascent alliance, which includes jointly developing conventional vehicles, to the coming world of self-driving cars.

The California Assembly passed legislation on Wednesday that could have a profound effect on hundreds of thousands of workers by requiring companies like Uber , Postmates, Amazon Flex, and others to recognize much of their workforce as employees entitled to labor protections and benefits.

Robert Bosch GmbH agreed to pay 90 million euros (US$100 million) to end a probe by German prosecutors into rigged diesel engines, following much more costly settlements by its customer Volkswagen AG.

But Facebook reported that the compensation of its median employee declined almost 5 percent last year, to $228,651—the biggest decline among the companies in WIRED’s analysis. A spokesperson says median pay for Amazon’s US employees last year was $35,096; on November 1, the company lifted its minimum US wage to $15 an hour.

It’s pushing suppliers to ramp up battery production and has already locked in battery supplies for 15 million vehicles, CEO Herbert Diess told Automotive News late last year—a huge number even for a company that builds 10 million cars annually.

Michael Jost, Volkswagen's chief strategist, told German business weekly magazine Wirtschaftswoche, that the Volkswagen group alone is responsible for around 2% of global carbon emissions -- roughly the same amount as Germany.

Volkswagen AG plans to save 1 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions a year by making production of its first electric model carbon neutral, part of an effort to clean up its image in the aftermath of the diesel-cheating scandal.

Plus: Lyft sues to halt a driver minimum wage law in NYC, LA Metro experiments with ride-hail, and we connect the dots between carbon fiber production and flying taxis.

(Via’s utilization rate is higher than Uber’s not because it has more drivers but because it offers only shared rides, much like Uber’s ride-pooling service, UberPOOL.) “Our lawsuit does not target the law passed by City Council but instead addresses the specific way the TLC plans to implement the rules, which would advantage Uber in New York City at the expense of drivers and smaller players such as Lyft,” Lyft spokesperson Campbell Matthews said in a statement.

Volkswagen “This is probably more expensive than just having a charging station, but this concept of ‘mobile charging’ might induce some folks to become EV buyers who are worried about a place to plug in,” says Costa Samaras, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies electric vehicles and systems. Mobile electric vehicle chargers are nothing new.