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U.S. transportation regulators plan to take another step toward rewriting federal rules hampering the development and adoption of autonomous technologies — from cars and trucks to buses and trains.

Next year, General Motors Co. will no longer need an engineer in the front seat babysitting the robot brain that controls its self-driving Chevrolet Bolt. The steering wheel and pedals will be gone, giving total control to the machine.

Federal regulators are taking the first step toward creating a policy to guide the development of autonomous transportation beyond cars to include trucks, buses and other ground-based modes.

Ford Motor Co. is expanding its driverless delivery experiment beyond pizza by partnering with Postmates to test what it will take to eventually remove the driver from on-demand distribution.

Toyota and Pizza Hut announced Jan. 8 a “global partnership,” that could see Pizza Hut pizzas delivered in autonomous vehicles designed and built by Toyota.

Deals inked by the self-driving car firm Aurora with two major auto manufacturers will mean more jobs and more test vehicles on the streets in Pittsburgh, one of the company’s co-founders told the Tribune-Review.

LAS VEGAS — The self-driving car is getting closer to deployment in the real world for everyday passengers.

The futuristic appeal of the autonomous vehicles that began operating Dec. 21 on the Jacksonville Transportation Authority test track is the prospect that eventually hundreds of them could be shuttling passengers around downtown.

Self-driving cars may be the future, but relinquishing control of the wheel certainly takes some getting used to. It’s one thing to go (slowly) with the flow on well-marked city streets, for which many self-driving cars were initially developed and tested, but what happens when you throw icy winter road conditions into the mix?

The launch of self-driving vehicle testing at the American Center for Mobility west of Detroit came with something that frequently confounds human drivers in Michigan — snow.