This week every U.S. agency was ordered to appoint a "chief AI officer".

But that wasn't the only AI policy announced. According to CNN, "By the end of the year, travelers should be able to refuse facial recognition scans at airport security screenings without fear it could delay or jeopardize their travel plans." That's just one of the concrete safeguards governing artificial intelligence that the Biden administration says it's rolling out across the U.S. government, in a key first step toward preventing government abuse of AI. The move could also indirectly regulate the AI industry using the government's own substantial purchasing power... The mandates aim to cover situations ranging from screenings by the Transportation Security Administration to decisions by other agencies affecting Americans' health care, employment and housing. Under the requirements taking effect on December 1, agencies using AI tools will have to verify they do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people. In addition, each agency will have to publish online a complete list of the AI systems it uses and their reasons for using them, along with a risk assessment of those systems...

[B]ecause the government is such a large purchaser of commercial technology, its policies around procurement and use of AI are expected to have a powerful influence on the private sector.
CNN notes that Vice President Harris told reporters that the administration intends for the policies to serve as a global model. "Meanwhile, the European Union this month gave final approval to a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence law, once again leapfrogging the United States on regulating a critical and disruptive technology."

CNN adds that last year, "the White House announced voluntary commitments by leading AI companies to subject their models to outside safety testing."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Biden administration on Friday announced a regulation designed to turbocharge sales of electric or other zero-emission heavy vehicles, from school buses to cement mixers, as part of its multifront attack on global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the new rule could mean that 25 percent of new long-haul trucks, the heaviest on the road, and 40 percent of medium-size trucks, like box trucks and landscaping vehicles, could be nonpolluting by 2032. Today, fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold in the United States fit that bill. The regulation would apply to more than 100 types of vehicles including tractor-trailers, ambulances, R.V.s, garbage trucks and moving vans.

The rule does not mandate the sales of electric trucks or any other type of zero or low-emission truck. Rather, it increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from trucks across a manufacturer's product line over time, starting in model year 2027. It would be up to the manufacturer to decide how to comply. Options could include using technologies like hybrids or hydrogen fuel cells or sharply increasing the fuel efficiency of the conventional trucks. The truck regulation follows another rule made final last week that is designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032, up from just 7.6 percent last year.

Together, the car and truck rules are intended to slash carbon dioxide pollution from transportation, the nation's largest source of the fossil fuel emissions that are driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden's strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation's emissions in half by the end of this decade.

An anonymous reader shares a report: New York City announced a new permitting system for companies interested in testing autonomous vehicles on its roads, including a requirement that a human safety driver sit behind the steering wheel at all times. As cities like San Francisco continue to grapple with the problems posed by fully driverless for-hire vehicles, New York City is trying to get ahead of the problem by outlining what it calls "a rigorous permitting program" that it claims will ensure applicants are "ready to test their technology in the country's most challenging urban environment safely and proficiently."

"This technology is coming whether we like it or not," Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to The Verge, "so we're going to make sure that we get it right." The requirements would exclude companies without previous autonomous vehicle testing experience in other cities. Applicants would need to submit information from previous tests, including details on any crashes that occurred and how often safety drivers have to take control of the vehicle (also known in California as "disengagements"). And in what is sure to be the most controversial provision, fully driverless vehicles won't be permitted to test on the city's public roads; only vehicles with safety drivers will be allowed.

Electricity demand from UK data centers will jump sixfold over the next 10 years as a boom in AI requires increased computing power, according to the head of National Grid. From a report: That will ramp up pressure on the country's electricity network, which must move vast quantities of renewable energy from as far away as Scottish wind farms to data centers around London. And it's a grid already under strain from the accelerating electrification of home heating, transportation and industries.

"Future growth in foundational technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will mean larger-scale, energy-intensive computing infrastructure," National Grid Chief Executive Officer John Pettigrew said Tuesday at a conference in Oxford. It's an outlook replicated in many other countries, which are grappling with how to fund the massive spending required to expand capacity. Global electricity demand from data centers, AI and cryptocurrencies may more than double over the next three years, according to International Energy Agency forecasts.

There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist.

And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.

"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).

The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.

Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."

Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: Vulnerabilities in common Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) required in US commercial trucks could be present in over 14 million medium- and heavy-duty rigs, according to boffins at Colorado State University. In a paper presented at the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, associate professor Jeremy Daily and systems engineering graduate students Jake Jepson and Rik Chatterjee demonstrated how ELDs can be accessed over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections to take control of a truck, manipulate data, and spread malware between vehicles. "These findings highlight an urgent need to improve the security posture in ELD systems," the trio wrote [PDF].

The authors did not specify brands or models of ELDs that are vulnerable to the security flaws they highlight in the paper. But they do note there's not too much diversity of products on the market. While there are some 880 devices registered, "only a few tens of distinct ELD models" have hit the road in commercial trucks. A federal mandate requires most heavy-duty trucks to be equipped with ELDs, which track driving hours. These systems also log data on engine operation, vehicle movement and distances driven -- but they aren't required to have tested safety controls built in. And according to the researchers, they can be wirelessly manipulated by another car on the road to, for example, force a truck to pull over.

The academics pointed out three vulnerabilities in ELDs. They used bench level testing systems for the demo, as well as additional testing on a moving 2014 Kenworth T270 Class 6 research truck equipped with a vulnerable ELD. [...] For one of the attacks, the boffins showed how anyone within wireless range could use the device's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios to send an arbitrary CAN message that could disrupt of some of the vehicle's systems. A second attack scenario, which also required the attacker to be within wireless range, involved connecting to the device and uploading malicious firmware to manipulate data and vehicle operations. Finally, in what the authors described as the "most concerning" scenario, they uploaded a truck-to-truck worm. The worm uses the compromised device's Wi-Fi capabilities to search for other vulnerable ELDs nearby. After finding the right ELDs, the worm uses default credentials to establish a connection, drops its malicious code on the next ELD, overwrites existing firmware, and then starts the process over again, scanning for additional devices. "Such an attack could lead to widespread disruptions in commercial fleets, with severe safety and operational implications," the researchers warned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: General Motors said Friday that it had stopped sharing details about how people drove its cars with two data brokers that created risk profiles for the insurance industry. The decision followed a New York Times report this month that G.M. had, for years, been sharing data about drivers' mileage, braking, acceleration and speed with the insurance industry. The drivers were enrolled -- some unknowingly, they said -- in OnStar Smart Driver, a feature in G.M.'s internet-connected cars that collected data about how the car had been driven and promised feedback and digital badges for good driving. Some drivers said their insurance rates had increased as a result of the captured data, which G.M. shared with two brokers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk. The firms then sold the data to insurance companies. Since Wednesday, "OnStar Smart Driver customer data is no longer being shared with LexisNexis or Verisk," a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, said in an emailed statement. "Customer trust is a priority for us, and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and policies."

Boom Supersonic's first aircraft, the XB-1, completed its first flight today and met "all of its test objectives." From a report: This initial test only saw the aircraft 7,120 feet above sea level and fly at a top speed of 238 knots (274 mph) -- far from Mach 1, the speed of sound. The first flight of XB-1 took place at the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, in the same airspace where the X-1 broke the sound barrier, the X-15 conducted test flights for altitude and speed records, and the SR-71 Blackbird was also tested. According to Boom, the XB-1 will be testing, among other things:

Augmented reality vision system: Two nose-mounted cameras, digitally augmented with attitude and flight path indications, feed a high-resolution pilot display enabling excellent runway visibility. This system allows for improved aerodynamic efficiency without the weight and complexity of a movable nose.
Digitally-optimized aerodynamics: Engineers used computational fluid dynamics simulations to explore thousands of designs for XB-1. The result is an optimized design that combines safe and stable operation at takeoff and landing with efficiency at supersonic speeds.
Carbon fiber composites: XB-1 is almost entirely made from carbon fiber composite materials, enabling it to realize a sophisticated aerodynamic design in a strong, lightweight structure.
Supersonic intakes: XB-1's engine intakes slow supersonic air to subsonic speeds, efficiently converting kinetic energy into pressure energy and allowing conventional jet engines to power XB-1 from takeoff through supersonic flight. Another thing being tested by XB-1 is the construction of a safety culture.

With XB-1 now a flying test vehicle, there are many flights ahead before we get to Overture One's first flight, much less dramatically expanding access to supersonic flight. This work will require much engineering and a resilient safety culture. But the first flight of the first step was carried out by Boom Supersonic today, March 22, 2024.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced it will conduct a review of the data practices of the country's ten largest airlines, amid concerns over potential misuse of customer information for upselling, overcharging, targeted advertising, and third-party data sales, as well as the security of systems handling sensitive data such as passport numbers. From a report: The probe will look at air carriers' policies and procedures to determine if they are safeguarding personal info properly, unfairly or deceptively monetizing it, or sharing it with third parties, the agency said yesterday. If they're indeed doing anything "problematic," they can look forward to scrutiny, fines, and new rules, says the DOT. "Airline passengers should have confidence that their personal information is not being shared improperly with third parties or mishandled by employees," said US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

"This review of airline practices is the beginning of a new initiative by DOT to ensure airlines are being good stewards of sensitive passenger data." The ten airlines going under the magnifying glass are Delta, United, American, Southwest, Alaska, JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Hawaiian and Allegiant.

sinij shares a report from the New York Post: The Biden administration finalized its crackdown on gas cars Wednesday, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing drastic climate regulations meant to ensure more than two-thirds of passenger cars and light trucks sold by 2032 are electric or hybrid vehicles. The EPA rule imposes strict limits on tailpipe pollution, limits the agency says can be met if 56% of new vehicles sold in the US are electric by eight years from now, along with 13% that are plug-in hybrids or other partially electric cars. That would be a huge increase over current EV sales, which rose to 7.6% of new vehicle sales last year, up from 5.8% in 2022. [...] The new rule slows implementation of stricter pollution standards from 2027 through 2029, before ramping up to near the level the EPA preferred by 2032. "Personal car ownership is about to get A LOT more expensive as it will have to carry the costs of deep discounts to entice EV sales," adds Slashdot reader sinij.

Press2ToContinue quotes a report from the Gateway Pundit: Stephen Scherr, chief executive officer of Hertz Global Holdings Inc. and a member of its board of directors, will step down on March 31, following the car rental company's largest quarterly loss since 2020 after a risky bet on electric vehicles. According to Fox Business, Scherr is working with Gil West, former chief operating officer of Delta Airlines and General Motors' Cruise unit, to ensure a smooth transition. West will officially start his new role at Hertz on April 1.

Scherr, 59, joined Hertz two years ago as the company was emerging from bankruptcy and putting a big focus on EVs during that time. Hertz soon discovered that EVs are more expensive to maintain than they had initially thought. Scherr reportedly told investors that Hertz's profits experienced a $348 million loss, which he blamed EVs for. In January, Hertz announced its plan to offload 20,000 electric vehicles from its U.S. fleet throughout 2024, and switch back to gas cars.

In November, the Associated Press reported on a Consumer Reports survey that found EVs from the 2021 to 2023 model years are significantly less reliable than gasoline-powered vehicles. A whopping eighty percent less reliable, according to the AP, particularly with battery and charging systems, as well as fit issues with body panels and interiors. Car dealers and manufacturers are reportedly also struggling to sell EVs despite using deep discounts and promotional tactics. In 2021, Hertz announced plans to order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022. It later said it would buy "up to" 65,000 Polestar EVs for its rental fleet over the next five years.

Last week 50 people were injured when a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner experienced a sudden mid-air drop — raising concerns about the possibility of a new safety issue. But the Wall Street Journal offers a follow-up report.

"A flight attendant hit a switch on the pilot's seat while serving a meal, leading a motorized feature to push the pilot into the controls and push down the plane's nose, according to U.S. industry officials briefed on preliminary evidence from an investigation." The switch, on the back of the chair, is usually covered and isn't supposed to be used when a pilot is in the seat. Boeing issued a memo late Thursday to operators of 787 jets recommending that they inspect the cockpit chairs for loose covers on the switches and instructing them how to turn off power to the pilot seat motor if needed. Boeing said it is considering updates to flight crew manuals. "Closing the spring-loaded seat back switch guard onto a loose/detached rocker switch cap can potentially jam the rocker switch, resulting in unintended seat movement," according to the memo, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The memo says this was a known issue and that Boeing had issued a related service notice in 2017....

American Airlines issued a notice to 787 captains advising them of the potential hazard. It asked them to instruct the crew not to use the switch while the chair is occupied and said that its maintenance teams would check that the switches are properly secured.
Ipeco, the cockpit seat supplier, didn't respond to the Journal's request for a comment. But in a new CNN video, a pilot demonstrates the location of the button — and speculates that a seat pushing a pilot forward could abruptly override the plane's auto-pilot system.

"It would be good news for Boeing if it is cleared of any fault in the Latam flight," adds another CNN report. "The company is facing multiple investigations by both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board..."

The Journal's article includes footage from inside the plane just moments after the incident and notes that some passengers had been "pinned to the ceiling as the airplane suddenly descended."

A Boeing quality manager for more than 30 years "learned of and exposed very serious safety problems with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner," according to his lawyers, "and was retaliated against and subjected to a hostile work environment."

After retiring in 2017 he'd filed a whistleblower retaliation case, and "was in the middle of giving deposition testimony... when he died, his lawyers, Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, told NPR." "He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on," the South Carolina-based attorneys said in a joint statement. "We didn't see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it."

Police said officers were sent to the hotel to conduct a welfare check after people were unable to contact Barnett, who had traveled to Charleston to testify in his lawsuit against Boeing. "Upon their arrival, officers discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head," police said in a statement sent to NPR. "He was pronounced deceased at the scene...."

Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Washington, and North Charleston, South Carolina, had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather than improve them, he added, managers had pressured workers not to document potential defects and problems.

"We are saddened by Mr. Barnett's passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends," Boeing said in a statement sent to NPR....

Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint against Boeing in early 2017; his case against the company was heading toward a trial this June, his family said. "He was looking forward to having his day in court and hoped that it would force Boeing to change its culture," the family said in a statement shared with NPR by his brother, Rodney Barnett. The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
"Two of his attorneys called on police to fully investigate how he had died," reports the BBC.

And for what it's worth, the New York Post says Barnett "made a grim prediction that he could potentially end up dead after raising safety concerns about the jetliner giant, allegedly telling a family friend: 'If anything happens, it's not suicide.'"

UPDATE: Fortune just published an article called "The last days of the Boeing whistleblower."

Thanks to Slashdot readers wgoodman and sinij for sharing the article.

America's National Transportation Safety Board "is investigating a fatal crash in San Antonio, Texas, involving a Ford electric vehicle that may have been using a partially automated driving system," reports the Associated Press: The NTSB said that preliminary information shows a Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV equipped with the company's partially automated driving system collided with the rear of a Honda CR-V that was stopped in one of the highway lanes.

Television station KSAT reported that the Mach-E driver told police the Honda was stopped in the middle lane with no lights on before the crash around 9:50 p.m. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed. "NTSB is investigating this fatal crash due to its continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with these technologies," the agency statement said.

Ford's Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn't fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada, Ford says.

After the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, barnacles offer "a potential breakthrough" in the search for its wreckage, reports WION: These barnacles were discovered clinging to the initial piece of debris conclusively linked to MH370 — a flaperon bearing the distinctive marking "657 BB," which washed ashore on Reunion Island, situated off the coast of Africa, a year following the event...

Scientists now posit that barnacles could provide invaluable insights into solving this mystery. These small creatures offer a unique biological record akin to the growth rings found in trees. Researchers speculate that by deciphering this information, it may be feasible to retrace the barnacles' trajectory along the flaperon, potentially leading investigators to the crash site.
This week the Independent also reported a new theory from a British pilot: Simon Hardy believes that the Malaysian Airlines flight plan and technical log reveal last-minute changes to the cargo including an additional 3,000kg of fuel and extra oxygen that indicate Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah directed the plane "to oblivion... It's a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew...."

Hardy also said that the flaperon found on Reunion Island indicates there was an active pilot until the end of the flight: "If the flaps were down, there is a liquid fuel, then someone is moving a lever and it's someone who knows what they are doing. It all points to the same scenario."
In a kind of rebuttal, long-time Slashdot reader Maury Markowitz suggests there's more innocent explanations for the extra fuel and oxygen, arguing that Hardy's theory "sounds like yet more balonium from someone who likes being in the newspapers."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue for sharing the news.

A Boeing 737-800 "was discovered to be missing an external panel" on the bottom of its fuselage, reports CNN, "after it landed in Medford, Oregon, Friday afternoon after taking off from San Francisco."

They stress that it's not a 737 Max, but the previous generation of Boeing aircraft. The plane carrying 145 passengers and crew landed safely and was parked at the gate at Rogue Valley International Medford Airport when a person on the ground first noticed the panel was missing, United Airlines said in a statement. The crew of Flight 433 did not declare an emergency and there was no indication of the damage during the flight, the airline said...

United said the missing panel did not affect the flying characteristics of the airplane...

Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport Director Amber Judd indicated to the Rogue Valley Times the aircraft is not in condition to fly and "will be here for a while." Judd added it is unclear where the missing panel is.

"They don't know where they lost it," Judd told the RV Times.
"The Federal Aviation Administration said it will investigate the incident."

Yahoo Finance notes that shares of Boeing "have declined over 30% in 2024."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When Romeo Chicco tried to get auto insurance in December, seven different companies rejected him. When he eventually obtained insurance, it was nearly double the rate he was previously paying. According to a federal complaint filed this week seeking class-action status, it was because his 2021 Cadillac XT6 had been spying on him. Modern cars have been called "smartphones with wheels," because they are connected to the internet and packed with sensors and cameras. According to the complaint, an agent at Liberty Mutual told Mr. Chicco that he had been rejected because of information in his "LexisNexis report." LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data broker, has traditionally kept tabs for insurers on drivers' moving violations, prior insurance coverage and accidents.

When Mr. Chicco requested his LexisNexis file, it contained details about 258 trips he had taken in his Cadillac over the past six months. His file included the distance he had driven, when the trips started and ended, and an accounting of any speeding and hard braking or accelerating. The data had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of his Cadillac. In a complaint against General Motors and LexisNexis Risk Solutions filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Mr. Chicco accused the companies of violation of privacy and consumer protection laws. The lawsuit follows a report by The New York Times that, unknown to consumers, automakers have been sharing information on their driving behavior with the insurance industry, resulting in increased insurance rates for some drivers.

The city council of Minneapolis on Thursday voted 10-3 to allow rideshare drivers to be paid the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour, overriding the mayor's veto of the bill. As a result, Lyft and Uber said they will cease operations in the city. From a report: Lyft said in a statement the bill was "deeply flawed" and that the ordinance makes its "operations unsustainable." "We support a minimum earning standard for drivers, but it should be done in an honest way that keeps the service affordable for riders," said a Lyft spokesperson. Uber said in a statement obtained by CNN that it's "disappointed the council chose to ignore the data and kick Uber out of the Twin Cities, putting 10,000 people out of work and leaving many stranded."

The ordinance mandates rideshare drivers make at least $1.40 per mile and $0.51 per minute within Minneapolis. However, the analysis Frey referred to showed lower numbers -- $0.89 per mile and $0.49 per minute -- to make minimum wage. The mayor is imploring local politicians to come up with a solution before May 1. The rideshare services say that user prices would double if they stayed in the city.

India will lower import taxes on certain electric vehicles for companies committing to invest at least $500 million and setting up a local manufacturing facility within three years, a policy shift that could potentially bolster Tesla's plans to enter the South Asian market. From a report: Companies must invest a minimum of $500 million in the country and will have three years to establish local manufacturing for EVs with at least 25% of components sourced domestically, according to a government press release on Friday. Firms meeting these requirements will be allowed to import 8,000 EVs a year at a reduced import duty of 15% on cars costing $35,000 and above. India currently levies a tax of 70% to 100% on imported cars depending on their value.

The policy change is likely going to pave the way for Tesla to enter India, as the Elon Musk-led company has been in talks with the government to lower import duties on its electric cars for years. The move also aligns with India's goal to boost the adoption of EVs and reduce its dependence on oil imports, with the country setting a target of achieving 30% electric car sales by 2030.