Author: News Room
Get The Drive’s daily newsletter The latest car news, reviews, and features. For the past several years, Mazda has remained the sole mainstream holdout in the broader industry push toward touch-based infotainment systems, relying instead on a now-anachronistic, console-mounted dial. It wasn’t bad to use, and it leaned heavily into Mazda’s “hands on the wheel, eyes on the road” safety philosophy. But after a generation of development as the only major outlier in the industry, the company is now pivoting to a conventional, touchscreen-style experience—and axing most of its physical controls in the process. “It’s all new,” Mazda’s Stefan Meisterfeld,…
Get The Drive’s daily newsletter The latest car news, reviews, and features. We’ve already reached the point where AI is everywhere. It’s in our phones, in our computers—heck, it’s even in our cereal. OK, maybe not, but would you be surprised? I wouldn’t, especially since this report about AI-wielding trash trucks from the Dayton Daily News is real. The city of Centerville, Ohio’s Public Works department rolled out a fleet of recycling rigs this week, equipped with artificial intelligence-powered sorting capabilities. These bots scan through citizens’ refuse to ensure they aren’t tossing food waste and batteries into the wrong bins.…
Get The Drive’s daily newsletter The latest car news, reviews, and features. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a Hertz customer in Atlanta who rented their vehicle from a location that used an AI-powered scanner for inspections. Their story of being charged $440 for a small scratch on a wheel gained some attention, and we’re already seeing similar accounts bear out. One case from another customer strikes us as even more egregious. Adam Foley went to LinkedIn to share his story, saying that a few hours after returning his vehicle, he received a notification that the system found two…