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WASHINGTON — The transportation committee in the U.S. House of Representatives is likely to consider a long-awaited highway bill early next year, Rep. Peter DeFazio, the chamber’s top transportation policymaker, said in an exclusive interview with Transport Topics.

Significant upgrades of freight and commuter corridors would vastly improve motorists’ quality of life and regional commerce, a panel of infrastructure experts told a congressional panel Sept. 25.

LISLE, Ill. — Navistar International Corp. announced it is pushing into 2020 with plans for a new truck plant, electric trucks and a Class 8 with a Level 2 option, and it will place greater reliance on a single vehicle platform to optimize R&D, parts and tooling.

Hyundai Motor Group will spend $1.6 billion to develop autonomous vehicles with Aptiv Plc, marking one of the biggest investments yet by a traditional carmaker into the burgeoning robocar industry.

Walgreens and a Google affiliate are testing drone deliveries that can put drugstore products on customer doorsteps minutes after being ordered.

Truckers looking to autogenerate written reports from their databases now have a raft of choices available, thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence-enabled ­writing software. Essentially, these AI-generated writing solutions can drill down into company databases and autoproduce easy-to-understand, written reports.

What do the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 and a seminal 2012 study by Google on how people interact with self-driving cars have in common?

No discussion of the future of the trucking industry is complete without considering the advance of automated driving technology, and how it might support the movement of freight in the years and decades ahead.

After several years of fanfare and debate over when and how self-driving commercial vehicles would reach the market, early forms of this technology are beginning to become an option in new trucks.