Mercedes-Benz's parent company Daimler AG unveiled Thursday its newest battery-powered sedan that challenges Tesla in the high-end electric car space. CNBC reports: The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS, unveiled Thursday, marks a new era for the German automaker as it pivots to EVs. The car will be part of its large S-Class car family when it arrives in U.S. showrooms in the fall. Most notably, the interior of the vehicle looks like a cockpit out of a futuristic spacecraft more than a car. It has screens across nearly the entire dashboard of the vehicle. In total, it features three screens under a single 56-inch curved glass surface, including a passenger screen that will not be visible to the driver.

The automaker did not release pricing for the EQS, however industry experts expect it to easily top $100,000. The starting price on the 2021 Mercedes-Benz S-Class ranges between $94,000 and $160,000. Its Mercedes-Maybach S models can top $200,000. The price range for Tesla's Model S large sedan ranges from around $79,990 to $149,990, including a new high-end performance model, Model S Plaid.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Throughout December, someone was setting fires at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church, a "predominately Black" congregation located in Springfield, Massachusetts. An FBI affidavit claims that the last of these fires, set on Dec. 28, "essentially destroyed" the building -- burning away large parts of the interior. During this period, the same person is suspected of having carried out a "series of tire-slashings" targeted at vehicles near or around the church -- a majority of which were owned by Black individuals. Now, 44-year-old Maine resident Dushko Vulchev has been arrested in connection to the crimes. He was charged in a federal court in Springfield on Thursday, a release from the U.S. Justice Department shows, and is potentially facing decades behind bars.

Court documents illustrate how state, local and federal authorities used a variety of surveillance footage and data collection to piece together Vulchev's whereabouts and place him at or near these crimes. In particular, the vandal slipped up when he allegedly slashed the tires of a Tesla located not far from the church. Authorities say one of the car's many pre-installed security cameras caught blatant images of the culprit as he damaged the tires, then later returned to steal them along with the vehicle's rims. "Based on my training and experience and this investigation, I am aware that the Tesla mentioned above is equipped with cameras at various points around the body," said the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit. "I have reviewed video footage retrieved from the Tesla showing an individual that I can identify as Vulchev...The video footage from the Tesla shows Vulchev at a close distance crouching near the Tesla and using a tire iron to remove the wheels." Using other data collected and a variety of local surveillance footage, law enforcement was able to build a case against Vulchev.

France is offering residents $2,975 to trade in their gas-powered vehicle for an electric bicycle. The Next Web reports: Earlier this week, lawmakers in France approved the measure in a preliminary vote. The French Federation of Bicycle Users claims that if France does go ahead with the scheme, it would be the first nation in the world to give people money for old cars to put towards new electric bicycles, Reuters reports. However, the organization must be leaving out crucial details as to how it reached that conclusion as there have been other similar schemes.

For example, as Martti Tulenheimo, chief specialist at the Finnish Cyclists' Federation points out, Finland has a similar rebate which citizens have used to fund more than 2,000 ebikes, 1,000 new low emission cars, and 100 public transport tickets. Lithuania also offered such a scheme last year. The nation's Environmental Project Management Agency (APVA) offered residents $1,200 if they traded in their old cars. The money could then be used against anything from escooters, to ebikes, to public transport tickets. The scheme was considered a success with more than 8,500 people applying for the grant.

Ford has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada. Engadget reports: The aim, to no one's surprise, was to gauge how BlueCruise handled in a wide range of realistic road and traffic conditions. Ford had already racked up 500,000 miles of development testing, but these were shorter, narrowly-focused dry runs. The road trips helped Ford look for changes in everything from road signs to weather while traveling cross-country.

BlueCruise will reach 2021 Mustang Mach-E and F-150 models later in the second half of the year through a software update, although you'll need the Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package. Like Super Cruise, it relies on looking for "prequalified" highway sections and verifies that you're paying attention to the road. You really can take your hands off the wheel, but you'll have to be ready to intervene when you either leave the BlueCruise-ready area or face an unexpected issue on the road.

Most business travellers in the UK will take fewer flights than they used to, according to a poll, thanks to increased use of video conferencing. Only a third expected to return to the same level of flying as before the coronavirus pandemic, once travel restrictions are lifted. From a report: The huge reduction in air travel caused by Covid-19 had no impact on the work life or productivity of the majority of the business flyers, the poll found, with one in five saying the shutdown had had a positive impact. Carbon emissions from aviation were growing at 5.7% a year before the pandemic, despite many countries committing to cut all emissions to net zero by 2050 to tackle the climate crisis. Green campaigners argue that the aviation shutdown provides an opportunity to put the sector on a sustainable trajectory. Business-class seats provide most of airlines' revenues but result in more emissions than those in the economy cabin because of the greater space occupied by each passenger. Business fliers also fly far more frequently than most holidaygoers, with 10% of those in the poll taking more than 10 flights in the year up to the first lockdown in March 2020. Bill Gates recently estimated that more than 50% of business travel would end as companies adopted online meetings and cut costs.

Mobileye, the company that specializes in chips for vision-based autonomous vehicles, announced that it will launch a full-scale, fully driverless delivery service starting in 2023. The company, a subsidiary of Intel, is joining forces with self-driving delivery startup Udelv to run this new service. From a report: Deliveries will be made using a new type of cabin-less vehicle called The Transporter. While manufacturing plans are still in flux, Mobileye and Udelv say they will produce 35,000 Transporters between 2023-2028 -- a signal of their seriousness to launch a driverless delivery system at scale. "This is a real commercial deployment," Jack Weast, vice president of automated vehicle standards at Mobileye, told The Verge. "Thirty-five thousand units starting in 2023 that will fully integrate our self driving system for commercial use for automated goods delivery." Mobileye's turn-key self-driving system features a full-sensor suite of 13 cameras, three long-range LiDARs, six short-range LiDARs, and six radar. It also includes the Israeli company's EyeQ system-on-a-chip and a data crowdsourcing program called the Road Experience Management, or REM, which uses real-time data from Mobileye-equipped vehicles to build out a global 3D map.

Huawei will invest $1 billion on researching self-driving and electric-car technologies, accelerating plans to compete with Tesla and Xiaomi in the world's biggest vehicle arena. From a report: Huawei's autonomous-driving technology has already surpassed Tesla's in some spheres, for instance by allowing cars to cruise for more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) without human intervention, Rotating Chairman Eric Xu told analysts in Shenzhen Monday. The Chinese telecom giant will partner with three automakers initially to make self-driving cars that carry the Huawei name as a sub-brand, said Xu, one of three executives who take turns to fill the post. It will keep its circle of partners small and get its logo onto cars -- not unlike how Intel calls attention to its microprocessors on PCs -- that adopt its autonomous driving technology, he added. The mobile giant has so far agreed to team up with BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile and Guangzhou Automobile Group.

phalse phace writes: A minor change in Boeing's 737 MAX manufacturing process that was insufficiently vetted caused an electrical system problem that on Friday temporarily grounded more than 60 of the aircraft -- out of almost 200 MAXs that have returned to service since December. While this latest manufacturing flaw is unrelated to the flight-control system implicated in two fatal crashes that grounded the MAX for nearly two years, it slows the positive momentum that had begun to build as more MAXs took to the air and new orders came in from United, Alaska and Southwest.

The problem, according to two people with knowledge of the modified manufacturing process, arose when a backup electrical power control unit was secured to a rack on the flight deck with fasteners -- in place of the rivets previously used. This change was executed in such a way that it did not provide a complete electrical grounding path to the unit. The lack of secure electrical grounding could potentially cause malfunctions in a variety of electrical systems, such as the engine anti-ice system and the auxiliary power unit (APU) in the plane's tail. Boeing said it discovered the issue "on a production airplane during normal build activity" and that inspections are needed to verify "that a sufficient ground path exists" for this control unit.

AmiMoJo writes: French MPs have voted to suspend domestic airline flights on routes that can be travelled by direct train in less than two and a half hours, as part of a series of climate and environmental measures. After a heated debate in the Assemblee Nationale at the weekend, the ban, a watered-down version of a key recommendation from President Emmanuel Macron's citizens' climate convention was adopted. It will mean the end of short internal flights from Orly airport, south of Paris, to Nantes and Bordeaux among others, though connecting flights through Charles de Gaulle/Roissy airport, north of the French capital, will continue. The climate commission set up by Macron had originally recommended the scrapping of all flights between French destinations where an alternative direct train journey of less than four hours existed. This was reduced to two and a half hours after strong objections from certain regions and from Air France-KLM, which, like other airlines, has been badly hit by local and international Covid-19 restrictions on travel.

Elon Musk's Boring Company showed off its 1.7 mile loop of tunnel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center this week, and Electrek writes that "it proved to be, well, quite boring... The vehicles are not going faster than 35 mph, and they are not being driven autonomously."

CNET's headline even calls the tunnel "lame," complaining that the project "is quickly turning into Tesla cars driving people underground, rather than some sort of futuristic transport system."

"Detractors say that makes The Boring Company's projects little more than reinvented subways with significantly less passenger capacity," adds Business Insider: Critics also point out that The Boring Company's noble aim of building congestion-alleviating tunnels under cities worldwide ignores the phenomenon of induced demand, which says that more roadways — even underground ones — will give way to more cars.
But Jalopnik had probably the harshest reaction to the Vegas Loop, noting that the speed of the system is "about 10 mph less than the top speed of a 1908 Ford Model T," and calling it "about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park..." Musk's The Boring Company own the machines that dug the tunnels, and those machines, some of which were heavily modified by the company, are capable of using the excess dirt from the tunnel to turn into bricks, which is pretty cool, I guess. Raw, humid thrills of brick-making aside, all this really is are some Teslas driving in tunnels lined with LED lights.

Sure, it's a 45-minute walk (correction, more like 20 minutes, sorry) on the surface and only a few minutes ride underneath, but the system is still remarkably bad at moving large numbers of people per hour, the metric normally used to evaluate mass transit systems. While it was originally intended to move up to 4,400 people per hour, fire regulations will limit the system to moving between 800 and 1,200 people per hour. That said, it looks like the company still states the 4,400 number, when used with 62 cars in the tunnel, though based on the safety issues, this does not seem likely. That's in the same ballpark as normal vehicular street traffic for private cars (600 to 1,600 people per hour) and a lot less than a dedicated bus lane (4,000 to 8,000 per hour) — hell, normal 60-passenger buses can do about 1,800 per hour, if we have them going back and forth every two minutes or so.

A dumb old sidewalk can move 9,000 people an hour! But that's walking, which is what animals do, and it takes a while and has the potential to make you sweat. Proposed moving high-speed sidewalks, similar to the ThyssenKrupp ACCEL system used in the Toronto Pearson International airport, are expected to move about 7,000 people per hour, and such a system would be far cheaper and easier to build... As it stands now, we have a few Teslas driving around in long, narrow loops under the convention center, saving you a bit of walking but doing every other part of the job of moving people worse than almost any other solution.
Business Insider's report adds that the Boring Company "aims to expand the system to other Las Vegas destinations, including the airport and downtown" — and that the company also in talks with Miami officials about a similar project.

Slashdot reader alaskana98 shared this report from The Drive: In July of 2019, a truly bizarre series of events unfolded around California's Channel Islands. Over a number of days, groups of unidentified aircraft, which the U.S. Navy simply refers to as 'drones' or 'UAVs,' pursued that service's vessels, prompting a high-level investigation. During the evening encounters, as many as six aircraft were reported swarming around the ships at once.

The drones were described as flying for prolonged periods in low-visibility conditions, and performing brazen maneuvers over the Navy warships near a sensitive military training range less than 100 miles off Los Angeles. The ensuing investigation included elements of the Navy, Coast Guard, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
One drone on the first night even "managed to match the destroyer's speed with the craft moving at 16 knots in order to maintain a hovering position over the ship's helicopter landing pad... By this point, the encounter had lasted over 90 minutes — significantly longer than what commercially available drones can typically sustain... If the drones were not operated by the American military, these incidents represent a highly significant security breach."

In a follow-up, they report that America's chief of naval operations was asked Monday if the Navy had positively identified any of the aircraft involved, and responded "No, we have not. I am aware of those sightings and as it's been reported there have been other sightings by aviators in the air and by other ships not only of the United States, but other nations — and of course other elements within the U.S. joint force."

The chief of naval operations was also asked if there was any suspicion that the drones were "extraterrestrial." He replied, "No, I can't speak to that — I have no indications at all of that."

A software mistake caused a flight on Tui airlines "to take off heavier than expected," according to The Guardian, citing an investigation by the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch An update to the airline's reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child's "standard weight" of 35kg [77 pounds] as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg [152 pounds]. This caused the load sheet — produced for the captain to calculate what inputs are needed for take-off — to state that the Boeing 737 was more than 1,200kg lighter [2,645 pounds] than it actually was.

Investigators described the glitch as "a simple flaw" in an IT system. It was programmed in an unnamed foreign country where the title "Miss" is used for a child and "Ms" for an adult female.

Despite the issue, the thrust used for the departure from Birmingham on 21 July 2020 was only "marginally less" than it should have been, and the "safe operation of the aircraft was not compromised", the AAIB said.
They're still classifying it as a "serious incident" — and also note that because of the same software glitch, two more UK flights also took off on the same day with inaccurate load sheets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial-intelligence systems are nowhere near advanced enough to replace humans in many tasks involving reasoning, real-world knowledge, and social interaction. They are showing human-level competence in low-level pattern recognition skills, but at the cognitive level they are merely imitating human intelligence, not engaging deeply and creatively, says Michael I. Jordan, a leading researcher in AI and machine learning. Jordan is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science, and the department of statistics, at the University of California, Berkeley. He notes that the imitation of human thinking is not the sole goal of machine learning -- the engineering field that underlies recent progress in AI -- or even the best goal. Instead, machine learning can serve to augment human intelligence, via painstaking analysis of large data sets in much the way that a search engine augments human knowledge by organizing the Web. Machine learning also can provide new services to humans in domains such as health care, commerce, and transportation, by bringing together information found in multiple data sets, finding patterns, and proposing new courses of action.

"People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends -- that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans," he says. "We don't have that, but people are talking as if we do." Jordan should know the difference, after all. The IEEE Fellow is one of the world's leading authorities on machine learning. In 2016 he was ranked as the most influential computer scientist by a program that analyzed research publications, Science reported. Jordan helped transform unsupervised machine learning, which can find structure in data without preexisting labels, from a collection of unrelated algorithms to an intellectually coherent field, the Engineering and Technology History Wiki explains. Unsupervised learning plays an important role in scientific applications where there is an absence of established theory that can provide labeled training data.

Aaron Blake, writing at The Washington Post: Americans turned their clocks forward an hour earlier this week for what some hope will be the last time, as bipartisan momentum builds for making daylight saving time permanent. As The Post's Capital Weather Gang notes, a bill spearheaded by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has united lawmakers from opposite parties who can't agree on much of anything these days. It also builds upon legislation already passed in 16 states -- both red and blue -- and current debates in states such as Nevada. All of it reflects apparently real momentum behind the effort. But as most of us bemoan our messed-up sleep schedules on the first Monday after losing an hour, it's worth a little history lesson: We've tried this before, and it didn't go over well. Whatever momentary mental anguish you're experiencing right now, there are huge trade-offs that many or most Americans have previously decided aren't worth the switch.

The year was 1973, and the United States was experiencing an energy crisis. Among the proposals put forward by President Richard M. Nixon in a November address was making daylight saving time permanent for the next two winters. Despite scant evidence of daylight saving time's past benefit on the energy supply (dating back to DST's various introductions since World War I), Americans really liked the idea. Polling in November and December 1973 showed strong and in some cases overwhelming support -- 57 percent in a Gallup poll, 74 percent in a Louis Harris and Associates poll, and 73 percent in a poll from the Roper Organization. The policy was quickly implemented in early January 1974. But it just as quickly fell out of favor. In a Roper poll conducted in February and March, just 30 percent remained in favor of year-round daylight saving time, while a majority favored switching times again. Louis Harris polling in March showed just 19 percent of people said it had been a good idea, while about twice as many -- 43 percent -- said it was a bad one.

A big reason for the about-face? Whatever benefits might have been gleaned by giving people more sunlight in the evening during the winter, it also meant longer, darker mornings. Parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end. As the Capital Weather Gang noted, such a change means the sun wouldn't rise before 8 a.m. in Washington for more than two and a half months, between late November and mid-February. The morning darkness would linger even longer farther north. Polling later that year -- after the dark mornings had waned -- was more mixed, with an Opinion Research poll in September showing 31 percent of people strongly favored the idea and 42 percent strongly opposed it. But even that wasn't good. And the idea was abandoned shortly before the next round of morning darkness would descend in the winter of 1974-1975. A Department of Transportation study at the time concluded that the change actually had minimal impact on saving energy and might have actually increased gasoline consumption.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is the ninth-richest person in the world — and he loves airships. Now new details have emerged about Brin's secretive airship company, LTA Research and Exploration (which stands for "Lighter Than Air"). SFGate reports: Although back in 2017 the word on the street was that Brin intended the aircraft to serve at least in part as a luxurious "air yacht" for his family and friends, the LTA website states only humanitarian goals: "LTA airships will have the ability to complement — and even speed up — humanitarian disaster response and relief efforts, especially in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed by plane and boat due to limited or destroyed infrastructure." Unlike jet planes, airships have the ability to land or deliver goods almost anywhere.

In addition, the LTA site says that their airships are intended to serve as a zero emissions alternative to airplanes, used for both shipping goods and moving people. Climate change has made airships sound more appealing to scientists in recent years — while slower than airplanes, airships are faster than cargo ships and have fewer emissions than both boats and planes. In fact, airships produce 80% to 90% fewer emissions than conventional aircraft.

They're going to be huge — and they're not going to be cheap. "It's going to be massive on a grand scale," a source told the Guardian in 2017, estimating that Brin's airship would be about 650 feet long... A recent job description posted on the LTA website revealed the company's plans to build a 1.5-megawatt hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system.
TechCrunch reports that one airship — named Pathfinder 1 — has already been built, and could be ready to launch from Silicon Valley as soon as this year.

The New York Times reports: Not long ago Volkswagen was a global pariah after pleading guilty to the biggest emissions fraud in automotive history. Now it is the toast of the stock market, with its shares worth twice as much as they were a year ago.

What happened?

Ironically, Volkswagen's misdeeds helped pave the way for its reversal of fortune... The financial commitment Volkswagen made then, when sales of electric vehicles were minimal, is paying off now as the company rolls out a line of vehicles developed from the ground up to run on batteries, with more interior space and more appeal than adaptations of gasoline vehicles... Investors have noticed, lighting up online stock forums with chatter about Volkswagen and rewarding other established carmakers, like General Motors and Ford Motor, that are pivoting to electric propulsion. Shares of Tesla, on the other hand, have slipped. Tesla is still the most valuable car company in the world by a wide margin, but investors are no longer as certain that Tesla will have the fast-growing electric car market to itself...

Volkswagen also benefited from a report issued this month by analysts at UBS, the Swiss bank, which rated it as the traditional carmaker best positioned to compete with Tesla because it already has the ability to mass-produce electric cars economically... With 665,000 employees and sales of 9.3 million vehicles last year, Volkswagen is the second-largest carmaker in the world after Toyota. It can spread the cost of developing new technologies over millions of vehicles and undercut Tesla on price. By 2025, Volkswagen will be able to produce electric vehicles for less than it costs to build a gasoline or diesel car, UBS analysts wrote in this month's report.

They cautioned that Tesla retains a significant lead in battery technology and autonomous driving software.
Sales of electric VW cars tripled last year, to 230,000 vehicles, the article points out — noting that that's just the beginning. This week VW also announced plans to employ 10,000 software engineers to work on new technologies including autonomous driving, becoming the second-biggest software company in all of Europe.

"The diesel scandal remains a financial burden. The company disclosed in its annual report this week that potential liabilities from lawsuits, such as one by shareholders claiming the company misled them, could cost 4.2 billion euros, or $5 billion. That is in addition to the tens of billions of euros Volkswagen has already paid in fines and settlements since 2017 after admitting that it programmed diesel cars to produce lower emissions in testing conditions than in normal use."

But "Investors this week were focusing on Volkswagen's future rather than its past..."

hackingbear writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that China's government is restricting the use of Tesla's vehicles by military staff and employees of key state-owned companies (Source paywalled; alternative source), citing concerns that the data collected by the cars could be a source of national security leaks. "The move follows a government security review of Tesla's vehicles, which Chinese officials said raised concerns because the cars' cameras can constantly record images, the people said, as well as obtain various data such as when, how and where the cars are being used, and the contact list of mobile phones that are synced to the cars," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The government is concerned that some data could be sent back to the U.S., the people said."

The move appears to be a retaliation against U.S. restrictions on the use of communications equipment made by a slate of Chinese companies including Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that Washington has labeled a national security threat over fears it could spy for Beijing -- allegations which Huawei denies and which base more on overheating US-China rivalry than actual evidences.

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead NASA, settling on a longtime booster of the space program to lead the agency's return to the moon, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: If confirmed by the Senate, Nelson would lead the space agency as it partners with the new crop of private space companies to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars. A Senate staffer and a second source familiar with the decision told POLITICO that the administration has picked Nelson, and that the announcement will come on Friday. Both sources spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement. Nelson, 78, who himself spent six days in orbit when he flew to space in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, served as the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee during his 18 years in Congress, where he was instrumental in establishing many of NASA's current priorities.

With the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed into law, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is ready to tackle the next major challenge: President Joe Biden's call for a massive infrastructure bill. As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one. From a report: "It's a bold new plan designed to accelerate America's transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing," Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. "And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040."

The top-line details of the "cash for clunkers"-style plan haven't changed much since Schumer first proposed it in an op-ed in The New York Times in late 2019. But the political landscape has certainly shifted in favor of the Democrats, breathing new life into the idea. Under the proposal, anyone who trades in their gas car for an electric one would get a "substantial" point-of-sale discount, Schumer says. He wouldn't say how much of a discount, only that it would be "deep." A spokesperson later confirmed they are eyeing rebates that are "more generous" than the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit. He also wants to provide direct incentives to auto manufacturers to phase out their production of internal combustion engine vehicles and tax breaks for property owners to install EV chargers at their homes or apartment buildings. Lastly, he proposes to send direct subsidies to local governments to improve and expand the nation's network of EV charging stations. Schumer would deploy $45 billion in grants to upgrade the nation's charging infrastructure and $17 billion to encourage manufacturers to retrofit their facilities for EV production.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For years, Uber has successfully deployed armies of lawyers and lobbyists around the world to fight attempts to reclassify drivers as company workers entitled to higher wages and benefits rather than lower-cost, self-employed freelancers. Now the ride-hailing giant is retreating from that hard-line stance in Britain, one of its most important markets, after a major legal defeat. On Tuesday, Uber said it would reclassify more than 70,000 drivers in Britain as workers who will receive a minimum wage, vacation pay and access to a pension plan. [It does not give the full protections of the classification known as full "employee," which includes paternity and maternity leave and severance pay if dismissed, among other benefits.] The decision, Uber said, is the first time the company has agreed to classify its drivers in this way, and it comes in response to a landmark British Supreme Court decision last month that said Uber drivers were entitled to more protections.

The decision represents a shift for Uber, though the move was made easier by British labor rules that offer a middle ground between freelancers and full employees that doesn't exist in other countries. That middle ground makes it unclear whether Uber will change its stance elsewhere. More labor battles are coming in the European Union, where policymakers are considering tougher labor regulations of gig-economy companies, as well as in the United States. In a statement, Uber said last month's court decision "provides a clearer path forward as to a model that gives drivers the rights of worker status -- while continuing to let them work flexibly, in the same way they have been since Uber's launch in the U.K. in 2012." Uber hasn't disclosed how much the reclassification would increase its operating costs, but the company maintains that it will become profitable this year.