Our reporters trouped down to Las Vegas this week to revel, play a few slots, and oh yeah, check out the shiny, gizmo-laden future of transportation. The annual CES tech show tends to offer intriguing and sometimes nutty glimpses into the future, but interestingly enough, what we saw this year wasn’t all that different from what we already have. The Department of Transportation rolled out a new policy on self-driving cars that’s mostly a continuation of what it’s doing now. A provocative concept car from Sony, of all companies, seems to prove that infotainment is going to keep being super important in the automotive space. And sure, yes, there were big flying-car prototypes from companies like Hyundai and Bell.
Outside of Vegas, we examined how a law meant to protect tech company contractors has affected therapists, of all people, and how disgraced Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, charged in Japan for financial crimes, snuck out of the country. It’s been a week; let’s get you caught up.
Headlines
Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week
Dad of the Week
The award obviously goes to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He began the week by pulling some extremely dad-ish moves while celebrating the Shanghai Gigafactory’s very first cars, and rounded it out with the (maybe?) reveal that his girlfriend, cyberpunk musician Grimes, is expecting a new baby. Looks like the unique school on the grounds of the SpaceX campus in California may have a new student.
Stat of the Week: 14%
The share of workers laid off by scooter-share company Lime this week, as it announced it would close down 12 of its markets worldwide. Like many of its transportation startup brethren, the unicorn is trying to figure out how to turn a profit. In the US, Sunbelt cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Diego are going Lime scooter-less.
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