Research & Development

Sales of Ford’s F-Series, which includes the F-150 light duty pickup as well as the F-250 through F-550 Super Duty range, are up nearly 9 percent this year. Ford sells more F-Series trucks than any other automaker, and given the average F-Series transaction price approaches $50,000 according to Kelley Blue Book data, well, that’s a good segment to dominate. Even better for the Blue Oval’s financial picture, it attained this position before the launch of the all-new 2017 Ford F-Series Super Duty.

Ford Motor Co. is among five investors providing $6.6 million in seed funding for Civil Maps, a California startup that creates three-dimensional maps for autonomous cars.

The other participants are Motus Ventures, Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford and AME Cloud Ventures, a fund led by Yahoo! Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang, Civil Maps said in a statement. The company, which has 16 full-time employees, is based in Albany, California, and grew out of an accelerator program sponsored by Stanford University.

General Motors has no desire to let the future pass it by. That’s why the company has been spending lots of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

In January, GM invested $500 million in ridesharing startup Lyft. Then in March, it spent $1 billion on Cruise Automation, a self-driving vehicle startup.

“We think rideshare is interesting, and we think autonomous vehicles is really interesting, and we think it gets really interesting if you put the two together,” Dan Ammann, GM’s president, said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday.

Following a trip to the International Space Station, General Motors plans to lending a helping hand back here on Earth next.

General Motors and Swedish medical technology company Bioservo announced on Wednesday that they are developing a new wearable robotic glove that will serve as the successor to a previous robotic glove developed by GM and NASA.

The new glove is meant to prevent repetitive-stress injuries that may occur when workers spend hours of the day performing laborious tasks like operating power tools or putting together components on an assembly line.

General Motors is going for a dip. The automaker has begun working with the U.S. Navy to develop a hydrogen-powered underwater drone. The unmanned undersea vehicle is being designed for stealthy reconnaissance missions that can last for months at a time.

For the project, GM provided a version of the hydrogen fuel cell stack that it originally engineered for automotive use. The system uses a catalyst to combine hydrogen and oxygen to form water, the chemical reaction producing electricity as a byproduct.

General Motors is still a car company, at least for now. “Our core business will be the core for a very very long time,” CEO Mary Barra said today at the WIRED Business Conference in New York.

That business is making personal vehicles that people drive and own, with a focus on trucks, SUVs, and middle America. But it’s hardly exclusive, and in the past six months General Motors has made a series of bold, future-facing moves to cash in on what Barra calls “an accretive opportunity”—a chance to add some apple flesh around the steady core.

Parents think they would never forget their children, yet in a world filled with distractions, they sometimes do, and with tragic results.

General Motors is introducing a new feature on the 2017 GMC Acadia to help prevent such tragedies.

Much like a seat belt reminder, a warning tone will sound and a reminder to “Look In Rear Seat” will appear in the center of the Acadia’s speedometer.

General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V., despite their hidebound reputations, actually spend more on research and development than companies such as Facebook, according to a new report.

The report from the American Automotive Policy Council, the Washington D.C.-based lobby for the domestic auto industry, reported that, based on the latest data, the auto industry ranks second in global R&D spending and invested more than $20 billion in the U.S. last year.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, the first major automaker to strike a deal with Google on driverless cars, now has started discussions on a similar partnership with Uber Technologies Inc., people familiar with the matter said.

Fiat Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne has been pursuing partnerships with tech companies, including offering to build a car for Apple Inc.