Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is pretty good at preventing low-speed rear-end crashes but kind of sucks when vehicles are traveling at more average speeds, according to new research from the American Automobile Association (AAA).
Starting September 2022, all new cars sold in the US are required to come standard with AEB, which uses forward-facing cameras and other sensors to automatically apply the brakes when a crash is imminent. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that AEB may help prevent 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries by 2025.
Using four common vehicles, AAA wanted to put AEB to the test to see how it’s progressed since first rolling out to production vehicles nearly 20 years ago. What they found was not that…
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Nick Barclay / The Verge It’s been a little while since we had a high-profile media feed hijacking, but tonight someone sent an Apple News notification from Fast Company containing a racial slur and invitation for a particular sexual act.
Apple has addressed the incident on its Apple News Twitter account, saying that it’s disabled Fast Company’s channel.
We are investigating the situation and have suspended the feed & shutdown https://t.co/U9iS8QOhkW until we are certain the situation has been resolved.
— Fast Company (@FastCompany) September 28, 2022 The publication confirmed the hack. “Fast Company’s Apple News account was hacked on Tuesday evening. Two obscene and racist push notifications were sent about a minute apart. The messages are vile and are not…
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The Roomba Combo j7 Plus is iRobot’s first combination robot vacuum and mop. | Image: iRobot Robot vacuums that can also mop have been around for a while, but most make you remove the mop before they can vacuum your carpets — unless you like slightly damp carpets. iRobot’s newest bot looks to solve this problem with a retractable robot mop arm that can lift itself up and under the vacuum to mop when it’s needed and stow itself up top when it’s not.
The Roomba Combo j7 Plus costs $1,099 and is available to preorder today. It will ship on October 4th, and is only being sold with the auto-emptying Clean Base at launch. The two-in-one vacuum mop uses a new combination of acoustic sensors to detect the different types of flooring in a home and “decide” when to lift its pad to avoid thread counts and when to lower it to clean hard…
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A new Prime Day is on the Horizon | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The rumors were true: Amazon’s holding a second Prime-exclusive sales event starting on Tuesday, October 11th at 3AM ET / 12AM PT and running through Wednesday, October 12th. We first heard about the possibility of another day of deals back in June, but now Amazon has made it official — the only difference is that it’s calling the event Prime Early Access Sale instead of Prime Day.
Besides the name, it doesn’t look like too much is changing between the two events. Just like Amazon Prime Day, the Prime Early Access Sale should still bring some of the best deals of the year out to play, as well as feature sales on Amazon devices in addition to a wealth of other cool tech. So, if you’ve waited this long to buy a new pair of noise-canceling…
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Darth Vader in Disney Plus’ Obi Wan. | Image: Lucasfilm James Earl Jones has been the iconic voice of Darth Vader since the beginning of Star Wars, but at 91 years old, it seems he’s ready to have the work done for him. According to a report from Vanity Fair (via Deadline), Jones signed over the rights to his archival voice work, allowing the Ukrainian startup Respeecher to leverage AI technology and recreate the sound of his voice in Disney Plus’ Obi-Wan Kenobi.
To do this, Respeecher uses sound bites to “clone” an actor’s voice, allowing a studio to record new lines without having the actor present. Matthew Wood, Skywalker Sound’s supervising sound editor, told Vanity Fair that he presented Jones with the option once he “mentioned he was looking into winding down” the role of Darth Vader….
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Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images Yankees star Aaron Judge could break a home run record at Friday’s game against the Boston Red Sox, and you’ll be able to watch the game for free through Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball broadcast. But in tweets ahead of the game, New York Attorney General Letitia James confusingly called for the game to be brought over to New York’s local Yankee Entertainment and Sports (YES) cable network, and after slightly walking that back, called the steps to watch Apple’s broadcast “burdens.”
The whole saga started with a tweet from James at 3:04PM ET.
Millions of New Yorkers paid their cable bills expecting to see live sports programming. Denying them the chance to watch Aaron Judge step up to the plate to make history tonight is wrong and…
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I love the cute characters in the game. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Google’s Arts & Culture division has released a charming new educational game all about ancient Mesoamerica. The game, The Descent of the Serpent, is available to play right now in your browser or via the Google Arts & Culture iOS and Android apps.
There’s a light plot to Descent of the Serpent, shown in a short video that plays at the beginning of the game. While exploring a museum, a large artifact is stolen by Tezcatlipoca, the Lord of the Smoking Mirror, and a living statue asks for your help to recover 20 icons included on the artifact to prevent floods from taking over the world. You, naturally, agree, and the statue says they’ll send you back in time to ancient Mesoamerica.
You’ll be able to pick from one of four adorable animal…
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AAA says the auto industry needs to update their testing protocols for AEB. | Image: AAA Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is pretty good at preventing low-speed rear-end crashes but kind of sucks when vehicles are traveling at more normal speeds, according to new research from the American Automobile Association (AAA).
Starting September 2022, all new cars sold in the US are required to come standard with AEB, which uses forward-facing cameras and other sensors to automatically apply the brakes when a crash is imminent. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates that AEB may help prevent 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries by 2025.
Using four common vehicles, AAA wanted to put AEB to the test to see how it’s progressed since first rolling out to production vehicles nearly 20 years ago. What they found was not that…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire this morning at the local utility company PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California, as reported by local news stations KSBW Action News 8 and KRON4.
The fire started at around 1:30AM this morning, according to PG&E’s operations comm manager, Jeff Smith. No injuries were reported at the scene.
Around 7PM PT / 10PM ET, the North County Fire Department and Monterey County Sheriff’s Office lifted the advisory and reopened the roads. In a tweet from the Public Information for Monterey County account, officials reported on the Megapack battery fire at the Elkhorn facility, saying, “While the fire is considered fully controlled, smoke may still occur in the area for several…
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Put a disc in and play. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft is making it easier to play games on your Xbox Series X, even if it’s offline — as of the 2208 update released earlier this month, you won’t be forced to do an online compatibility check to play a game from an Xbox One disc (via Windows Central). Instead, you can just pop the disc in, install the game, and play; no internet connection required.
The change, which isn’t listed as a feature of the 2208 update on Microsoft’s site, was confirmed by Xbox engineering lead Eden Marie, who tweeted that the check was removed because it wasn’t necessary “in the vast majority of cases” when playing a cross-generation game on the Series X.
Yes, this is true since the 2206 update. We examined data since Series X|S launch & determined the…
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