Latest Business News

• Self-driving cars could only prevent a third of U.S. crashes: study
  Self-driving cars, long touted by developers as a way to eliminate road deaths, could likely only prevent a third of all U.S. road crashes, an analysis of traffic accidents released on Thursday has found.
  
• France, Germany back European cloud computing 'moonshot'
  France and Germany threw their weight on Thursday behind plans to create a cloud computing ecosystem that seeks to reduce Europe's dependence on Silicon Valley giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
  
• A robot walks into a bar, helps make a cocktail
  One robot makes cocktails from 25 bottles hanging upside-down from the ceiling, another carves perfect ice balls in the fraction of the time it takes a human with a knife and an ice pick.
  



• German auto stimulus to boost VW's electric push
  Germany unveiled sweeping incentives for cheap electric cars, providing a boost to Volkswagen's electric push while penalising heavy sports utility vehicles (SUVs) with new staggered taxes for polluting combustion-engined cars.
  
• Ex-Apple engineers aim to help U.S. hardware makers troubleshoot from home
  For years, hardware engineers at American consumer electronics firms have hopped on a flight to China to iron out manufacturing kinks on assembly lines, but the COVID-19 pandemic and Sino-U.S. tensions have made travel between the countries difficult.
  
• Spain's lower house to draft 3% digital tax on internet giants
  Spain's lower house voted on Thursday to begin drafting a 3% tax on revenues of internet giants, the latest of such moves by U.S. trading partners that has spurred a U.S. investigation and could lead to punitive tariffs.
  
• Zebra adds social distancing warnings to warehouse workers' barcode scanners
  Zebra Technologies Corp, which sells barcode scanners and other computers used in warehouses globally, introduced a feature on Thursday that sounds an alert when workers breach physical distancing guidelines over the novel coronavirus.
  
• Robot to safely swab for coronavirus developed by scientists in Denmark
  Danish researchers have developed a fully automated robot that can take coronavirus swabs so that health care professionals are not exposed to the risk of infection.