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Aurora Innovation’s 2018 is off to a booming start. The self-driving car company with offices in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley started the year announcing partnerships with Hyundai and Volkswagen.

On Feb. 27, Ford announced it had chosen Miami-Dade to be the first large-scale test site of its self-driving vehicle fleet.

Self-driving cars with no human backup behind the wheel will be legal on California roads for testing and transporting the public starting April 2.

Though it will likely be a decade or more before commercial trucks roll down the road without human drivers, trucks with sophisticated, semi-autonomous driving systems will soon be on the street — with a person aboard to supervise.

As automakers spend billions to rack up autonomous miles and map city streets, Toyota Motor Corp. and BMW AG are also betting on a startup with a more modest approach.

Washington, D.C., is preparing for a future with self-driving cars by inviting companies to test their autonomous vehicle technology in the District.

The world’s largest car maker and biggest ride-hailing company plan to team up on autonomous driving as technological changes sweep through the transportation industry.

Bexar County, Texas, Commissioner Kevin Wolff believes that a meeting he had last month in Washington with federal transportation officials could lead to construction of lanes for driverless automated vehicles on the Austin-San Antonio section of Interstate 35.

Fans of self-driving cars will have breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Uber and Google’s Waymo, two giants in the industry, have settled their intellectual-property lawsuit. This removes a huge distraction for companies, freeing them up to focus on their own research.

Waymo, a unit of Alphabet Inc., got a permit in late January from the Arizona Department of Transportation to operate as a Transportation Network Company, according to Ryan Harding, a spokesman at the state agency.