In connected car news are Ford, PATEO, NVIDIA, ByteDance, Aeva, AiDEN Auto, Volvo Trucks, NOVOSENSE, Sasken, Amazon, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Valeo and BlackBerry.
Ford Draws a Line on Driver Data
Ford Motor Company has published what it calls a “Privacy Promise,” a formal set of commitments on how it handles data from connected vehicles. Kristin Jones, the company’s chief privacy officer, announced the policy, which bars Ford from selling driver-behavior information, including acceleration patterns, braking events and speed readings, to third-party data brokers. The timing is notable. General Motors recently settled with 36 states for $220 million over claims that it shared telematics data with insurance aggregators without proper authorization.
Owners get separate toggles, in the car’s touch screen and in the Ford app, for location data, diagnostic streams and driving-behavior metrics, along with a portal explaining what Ford collects. The company says it aggregates and anonymizes data used for research, diagnostics and predictive fleet maintenance.
Opting out comes at a price. Cutting off the flow of data from the vehicle disables features that depend on the cloud, among them BlueCruise hands-free driving assistance, live traffic routing, remote digital key and automatic roadside crash response. The trade-off captures a tension that software-defined vehicles will keep raising: the more control drivers take over their data, the less the car can do.
PATEO Puts Offline AI in the Dashboard With NVIDIA and ByteDance
PATEO, a supplier of cockpit systems, has unveiled an AI Box built on NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor chip that runs its artificial intelligence entirely inside the vehicle. The package combines NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 speech recognition, ByteDance’s 35-billion-parameter Doubao model, which uses a mixture-of-experts design, and a local 2-billion-parameter model that routes requests. Because everything runs on the car’s own hardware, the system can respond quickly and handle permissioned vehicle controls without a cloud connection.
PATEO developed the unit with ByteDance and an unnamed leading Chinese electric-vehicle maker, which has nominated it for a production vehicle with series manufacturing targeted for the second quarter of 2027. The box can also be added to older vehicles as a companion processor, giving them AI agent capabilities without replacing the existing infotainment chip. For revenue, PATEO plans a recurring-services model priced at the vehicle level, and it intends to bring the same Thor-based software to an unnamed robotics partner in China.
Aeva Takes Its Lidar Know-How to AI Data Centers
Aeva, best known for automotive lidar, is applying the same technology to a different problem: moving data inside the vast computing clusters that power artificial intelligence. The company has expanded its Optical Connectivity business with products that rely on silicon photonics and low-noise light sources originally developed for its lidar sensors. They are aimed at makers of transceivers and co-packaged optics, and at the cloud providers that buy them.
The lineup has three parts. Ultra-High Power laser chipsets deliver at least 350 milliwatts at 50 degrees Celsius with very narrow linewidth and low noise. SPECTRA, a software-defined multiwavelength array, holds wavelength precision to within 0.1 nanometer over its lifetime. The Multichannel External Source Assembly, or MESA, produces more than 600 milliwatts per channel at the same temperature and fits standard pluggable and near-package formats. Aeva says its automotive-grade manufacturing and foundry relationships can ease the shortage of high-power lasers while keeping the thermal stability and yields it achieved in vehicles.
AiDEN Auto and Volvo Trucks Move a Romanian Mandate Into the Cab
AiDEN Auto and Volvo Trucks have built compliance with Romania’s RO e-Transport rules directly into the truck’s infotainment display and the Volvo Connect back-office portal. Fleets can meet the national reporting requirement without drivers juggling a second handheld device or fitting aftermarket tracking hardware.
The system sends the Unique Transport Codes issued by Romania’s tax authority, ANAF, to the truck’s side display, replacing paper and phone handoffs. Location data required by the regulation travels through the truck’s factory modem, so drivers and operators can confirm on the dashboard that transmission is working and the code is valid. The feature works on Volvo trucks built from 2021 with the side display, and it is rolling out first in Romania and the Czech Republic, with other European transport corridors to follow on AiDEN Auto’s Android Automotive-based software.
NOVOSENSE Brings Power Chips for Cars and Servers to electronica
NOVOSENSE Microelectronics will show power and signal-chain semiconductors for both AI data centers and automobiles at electronica 2026 in Munich. For servers, the company will present its Isolation+ family, which covers digital isolation, isolated gate drivers, sensing and interfaces for solid-state transformers. Demonstrations include a server power supply that converts 220 volts of alternating current to 12 volts of direct current, and a modular all-silicon-carbide DC-DC reference design with a peak efficiency of 99 percent at 400-volt outputs.
The automotive exhibits include a crash power module that draws on a backup supercapacitor if the low-voltage battery fails, so that doors can still unlatch and exterior handles can deploy. NOVOSENSE will also show 800-volt electric-vehicle power conversion, an ambient lighting system that can drive up to 27 LEDs to indicate battery charge, drivers for body control and zonal architectures, high-speed links for cameras and displays, and ultrasonic radar chips for automated parking.
Sasken Signs On to Build a European Automaker’s Next Telematics Unit
Sasken Technologies has won a multi-year engineering contract from the software subsidiary of a major European automotive group to develop and bring to market the next generation of telematics control units. Sasken will handle cellular modem integration, embedded software, hardware design and validation, aiming for production-ready systems that support over-the-air updates, onboard diagnostics, cybersecurity compliance and cloud-connected fleet services in several international markets.
The company describes its approach as “chip-to-cognition,” joining low-level connectivity engineering with large-scale automotive validation. Work will be split between Sasken’s European automotive centers and its wider global engineering staff, in close collaboration with the client’s own software teams. The goal is a faster development cycle for software-defined vehicles and connectivity that can clear carrier certification and demanding automaker reliability standards.
Amazon Swaps Grubhub for Uber Eats
Amazon has teamed up with Uber Eats to offer restaurant delivery inside Amazon.com and the Amazon Shopping app in nearly 10,000 American cities and towns. The deal replaces Amazon’s earlier Grubhub+ arrangement and makes Uber Eats the main restaurant-delivery partner for Prime. Members can browse local restaurants, place orders and pay with the credentials and wallets already saved in their Amazon accounts, without setting up a separate Uber account.
Delivery is free on restaurant orders of $25 or more, and customers get Amazon push notifications along with Uber Eats order tracking. Launch promotions include up to $40 in credits, taking the form of $20 off each of the first two qualifying orders placed within 14 days, and 5 percent cash back for holders of the Amazon Prime Visa card on purchases through Dec. 5. The service reaches hundreds of thousands of fast-food, fast-casual and independent restaurants.
Valeo Wins Chinese Orders for a Camera Built on BlackBerry’s QNX
Valeo has received multiple production nominations from Chinese automakers for its next-generation front-facing smart camera, which runs BlackBerry’s QNX OS for Safety, an operating system certified for functional safety. The platform was shown at the Canada Pavilion at the ninth China International Import Expo in Shanghai. It combines Valeo’s camera hardware and its full driver-assistance software with the QNX operating system running directly on the chip. Production is set to begin before the end of 2026 on several domestic vehicle programs.
The camera uses artificial intelligence processing in the vehicle to identify cars ahead, pedestrians and cyclists, lane geometry and traffic signs. Because the operating system is already safety-certified, the perception software is separated from the underlying chip, which simplifies compliance with the ISO 26262 safety standard and cuts development effort as automakers spread driver-assistance features across more models.
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