LONDON – Industry groups warned that Britain will face higher food prices unless the government offers “unambiguous reassurance” to workers from the European Union about their right to remain in the UK after Brexit.

In a letter published by the Guardian, directors of 30 trade groups warned that Britain relies heavily on EU migrants to grow, harvest, and sell produce in the UK.

It said that EU workers play a “significant role” in keeping UK food prices stable and called for the government to place food and drink “at the heart of Brexit negotiations.”

The letter also warned that “some workers are already leaving the UK,” echoing concerns that the UK’s food industry is facing a major labour shortage in the wake of the Brexit vote, despite overall immigration being up.

A survey released last week by the Association of Labour Providers, which supplies the bulk of the UK’s short-term agricultural labour, said job applications from EU workers had slumped by as much as 70%.

It said: “The government should offer unambiguous reassurance to EU workers throughout our supply chain about their right to remain.

“For the longer term, it is important to recognise that these workers are highly flexible and provide an essential reservoir of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labour.”

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has stated her intention to reduce overall immigration to the “tens of thousands” after Brexit, which would represent a huge cut from its current level.

Annual levels currently lie at around 650,000 – a record high which has been boosted by a large number of EU migrants moving to the UK before it exits from the union.

The letter called for the government to consider “all options” for a post-Brexit immigration policy, including a sector-based points system – something Theresa May has already ruled out.

Signatories of the letter include directors of major trade bodies such as the Food & Drink Federation, the National Union of Farmers (NUF), and the British Beer & Pubs Association.

A new Bugatti doesn’t come along very often. In fact, the Bugatti Chiron is just the third production car to carry the vaunted badge in the last 25 years and just the second car this millennium.

As the successor to the game-changing Veyron, the Chiron has the unenviable task of following in the foot steps of an automotive icon.

Fortunately for Bugatti, the Veyron is about as competent of a start point as one can ask for. And Bugatti’s director of design Achim Anscheidt is one of the best in the business.

Anscheidt, a veteran of VW Group and Porsche’s design departments, joined Bugatti as its design boss in 2004 just as the Veyron was readied for production.

With the Chiron, Anscheidt got his shot at the momentous task of creating the first new Bugatti in a decade. During its development, Bugatti built more than 30 prototypes that completed more than 300,000 miles of testing and went through more than 200 sets of tires.

With a $2.6 million asking price, it will have to live up to the high bar set by the ground-breaking Veyron.

Here’s a closer look at the new Bugatti Chiron.

Photos by Hollis Johnson unless otherwise credited.

Here are the credentials for the car that wowed the automotive world upon its debut at the 2016 Geneva motor show in March.

It’s powered by a 1,500 horsepower, 8.0 liter, quad-turbo W16 engine. In case you need a reminder, the power output and cylinder layout are imprinted on the exposed engine.

The exposed engine helps dissipate the incredible amount of heat generated while producing 1,500 horsepower. In total, the Chiron is equipped with a whopping 10 radiators.

To get to 1,500 hp, Bugatti developed high performance air and liquid cooled intercoolers to lower the temperature of the air being forced into the engine by the four twin scroll turbochargers. After all, the cooler the air, the more dense it is. And the more dense the air, the more oxygen molecules there are per cubic inch of air for the engine to combust.

The air cooling systems allows nearly 3.7 million cubic inches of air per minutes to pass through the engine while the coolant pump can circulate 211 gallons of fluid per minute.

The Chiron gets all that power to road through a Bugatti-developed 7-speed, twin-clutch transmission, and permanent-four-wheel-drive system.

According to Bugatti, the Chiron is good for a 0-60 mph sprint in less than 2.5 seconds and a top speed of 261 mph.

To bring the Chiron to a stop, Bugatti installed a set of massive disc brakes measuring 16.5 inches in the front and 15.7 inches in the back. In addition, the retractable rear spoiler doubles as a large air brake which can be deployed under hard braking.

To compensate for the high speed, the Chiron is built around a carbon fiber monocoque driver’s compartment that offers the same level of strength and rigidity as those used for Le Mans Prototype race cars.

To illuminate the road, Bugatti installed eight LED headlights.

Currently, the “holy trinity” of million-dollar hypercars consists of the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, and LaFerrari.

According to Anscheidt, what makes his car unique is not its top speed, but the manner with which it achieves that speed.

Anscheidt sees the McLaren, Ferrari, and Porsche as purebred race cars for the road.

But that’s not the case for the Bugatti. The designer believes his car is a hyper GT car that’s geared toward covering large distances at high speed…

… While coddling its occupants in supreme luxury and comfort.

The Chiron is designed to be as easy to drive at top speed as a regular car is on the highway, Anscheidt told Business Insider earlier this year.

Speaking of luxury, the cabin is as spectacular as one would expect from a Bugatti. The materials used must meet the exacting stands of the car’s future owners.

The cabin is designed with a focus on the driver.

The steering can be optioned in full leather or with carbon fiber inserts.

The Chiron’s gauge cluster features a large center analog speedometer flanked by a pair of digital read outs. The speedometer tops out at 310 mph and is designed to mimic the look of a Swiss watch.

Bugatti also offers a choice between a standard and a sport seat.

Currently, Bugatti offers 31 colors for leather and eight colors for Alcantara. As with any car in this price point, they can whip up something special upon customers’ request.

The Bugatti Chiron entered series production in September at the company’s headquarters in Molsheim, France .

Only 500 will be built over the lifetime of the car. By its introduction at the Geneva Motor Show, more than 1/3 of the production run had already been sold.

Sex is everywhere.

Ads. Tinder. “Game of Thrones.” Flowers in a garden.

But just because we see it everywhere doesn’t mean that we can definitively explain why it’s everywhere.

Sexual reproduction is a costly endeavor: You need two parents to reproduce, and the male half of a sexually reproducing species is fundamentally incapable of directly producing offspring.

Given the Darwinistic and cutthroat rules of natural selection and the high evolutionary cost of sexual reproduction, why sex continues to exist, and why so many different organisms reproduce that way, is a fascinating and difficult question.

Bio 101

Before we jump to the research, let’s run through a refresher of the terminology.

Reproduction is the process by which organisms (parents) produce new organisms (offspring.)

There are two types of reproduction: asexual and sexual. With asexual, a given organism can reproduce by itself (without the assistance of another organism). Examples include budding – in which a new organism develops as a growth from the original organism – and cloning. The key thing about asexual reproduction is that the offspring is identical or extremely similar genetically to the parent.

Meanwhile, sexual reproduction requires two organisms, a male and a female. The male fertilizes a female of the same species to create offspring. The key thing here is that the offspring’s genetic composition derives from both parents, meaning it is not identical to either parent. A simple example: A child could have the hair color of one parent but the eye color of the other.

So what’s the big problem with sexual reproduction?

Natural selection is ruthless and efficient, but sexual reproduction is not the most efficient way of reproducing. After all, in asexual reproduction, all the organisms can reproduce, while in sexual reproduction, only half of the organisms can reproduce – the females.

In less abstract terms, two hydra can both reproduce asexually, which gives you two offspring. But a human female and a human male together only create one offspring (excluding the possibility of having twins, etc.) since the male cannot directly create offspring.

“This is a huge cost in evolutionary terms, so there must be something very valuable about [sexual reproduction],” Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the mind behind a computer study of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, told the Evolution Institute a few years ago. “The fact that sex is so universal means that it must be something that large animals and plants have in common.”

A look at the reproduction of yeast

So what gives?

As noted above, sexual reproduction leads to genetic variation in the offspring. And so it’s possible that sex, although costly in terms of the rate of reproduction, could help the offspring organism adapt to an environment better than its parents. (Anyone who took biology in high school likely remembers the example of the peppered moth during the Industrial Revolution.) This makes intuitive sense, but the trick is actually getting empirical evidence.

Notably, there are a few organisms that reproduce both asexually and sexually, which makes them the prime candidates to test the benefits of sexual reproduction. One such organism is yeast.

Yeast reproduce asexually when there’s an abundance of food. But if there’s not enough food, then they reproduce sexually.

Back in 2005, a team of researchers led by Matthew Goddard, then a postdoc at Imperial College London, genetically engineered yeast so that it would continue to reproduce asexually in dire circumstances. This, then, allowed them to compare how yeast that can reproduce sexually fare in tough conditions compared to those that could only reproduce asexually.

And here’s where it gets interesting: under normal conditions, both yeasts did equally well; but in the harsher conditions, the yeast that could sexually reproduce adapted more quickly and survived better.

“Our results indicate that sexual reproduction can provide a selective advantage during adaptation to new environments,” the team wrote in Nature. “A challenge now is to understand the nature of the mutations that underlie adaptation and to extend these techniques to larger plants and animals.”

Parasites?

Another stunning idea about sexual reproduction came from a paper produced by William Hamilton, Robert Axelrod, and Reiko Tanese back in 1990, which explored the idea of sexual reproduction as an adaptation helping organisms resist parasites.

“Darwinian theory has yet to explain adequately the fact of sex. If males provide little or no aid to offspring, a high (up to 2-fold) extra average fitness has to emerge as a property of a sexual parentage if sex is to be stable,” the team wrote in the abstract.

“The advantage must presumably come from recombination but has been hard to identify. It may well lie in the necessity to recombine defenses to defeat numerous parasites.”

As Axelrod explained at the Evolution Institute:

“Parasites evolved to mimic our cells so that our immune system wouldn’t attack them. As a result, they can evolve around thirty times faster than we can since their generation time is so short. If you were to reproduce asexually it would mean you’d have an offspring that was almost identical to you, so the parasites that are adapted to you would also be adapted to your offspring. However, by reproducing sexually our offspring are quite different from us. Therefore, the parasites have to start all over. [Hamilton’s] idea was that sexual reproduction is an adaptation to resist parasites. It is just a brilliant idea.”

Here, too, offspring appear better set up for survival because of sexual reproduction. However, what’s notable in this theory is that offspring do not evolve just for an advantage to a changing environment – as with the yeast example – but rather just to survive as other rival organisms also change and therefore threaten the survival of the their species.

Why do males still exist?

One final interesting thing to think about is why men continue to exist if their primary contribution to reproduction is sperm. A possible explanation is sexual selection: Males competing for females, and females choosing among males.

In research published in Nature in 2015, a team from the University of East Anglia, led by professor Matthew Gage, evolved replicate populations of flour beetles over several years under controlled conditions. The only difference between populations was the intensity of sexual selection at each adult reproductive stage – which ranged from 90 males competing for 10 females to the “complete absence of sexual selection, with only single males and females in monogamous pairings, where females got no choice and males experienced no competition.”

And after seven years they found that populations with stronger sexual selection were fitter and more likely to survive than those without:

“Lineages from populations that had previously experienced strong sexual selection were resilient to extinction and maintained fitness under inbreeding, with some families continuing to survive after 20 generations of sib × sib mating [Editor’s note: sibling x sibling]. By contrast, lineages derived from populations that experienced weak or non-existent sexual selection showed rapid fitness declines under inbreeding, and all were extinct after generation 10.”

“Multiple mutations across the genome with individually small effects can be difficult to clear, yet sum to a significant fitness load; our findings reveal that sexual selection reduces this load, improving population viability in the face of genetic stress,” they added.

Ultimately, it’s important to note that it would not be appropriate to oversimplify or extrapolate from any of these studies. And, moreover, none of this even begins to touch on how sexual reproduction came about. However, it is still fascinating to consider the evolutionary benefits from sexual reproduction.

2014’s “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” was the highest-grossing movie from the “Planet of the Apes” franchise yet with over $700 million worldwide at the box office, so 20th Century Fox and “Dawn” director Matt Reeves had a big challenge with the next movie, “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

But as the first trailer shows, they are up for the challenge.

Business Insider attended a Fox event on Thursday that showcased footage from “War for the Planet of the Apes,” and once again the franchise has stretched what is possible with digital effects, specifically motion capture, which uses the movements of actors who play apes, like Andy Serkis who’s back as ape leader Caesar.

In “War,” we are two years into humans battling apes and Caesar’s legend among his kind has risen to mythic proportions. Along with showcasing incredible action sequences, the trailer also delves into the journey Caesar and his most trusted allies take to hunt down an evil Colonel (played by Woody Harrelson) and his battalion.

As you can see in the trailer below, this looks to be the most grim movie yet in the franchise.

“War for the Plant of the Apes” opens in theaters July 14, 2017.

At its latest policy meeting on Thursday, the European Central Bank announced it was extending its quantitative easing program until at least December 2017, while at the same time trimming its asset purchases to a pace of €60 billion a month, down from €80 billion.

While many were quick to suggest that this was the beginning of the ECB tapering its asset purchases because they are buying less each month, ECB head Mario Draghi dismissed this talk. “There is no question about tapering,” Draghi said at this press conference following Thursday’s decision. He added that tapering ” has not even been discussed” and that tapering could only happen if the central bank has a policy ” whereby purchases go to zero.”

That hasn’t stopped peripheral bond markets – in Italy and Portugal – from coming under significant pressure. The worry is that if the ECB were to taper its asset purchases then demand for those bonds would dry up, and peripheral Europe could find itself in the next leg of its seemingly never ending debt crisis.

Portugal under the radar

Recent attention has been on Italy after the December 4 referendum’s ‘No’ vote on constitutional reform cost prime minister Matteo Renzi his job. Problems within the Italian banking system are bubbling to the surface once again, and Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest bank, finds itself on the brink of default an in need of a bailout.

Those worries have begun to show up in Italy’s bond market. While the front end of the curve remains anchored below zero thanks to the ECB’s negative deposit rate, yields at the long end have been marching higher as investors sell the bonds. The 10-year has rallied 100 basis points since the middle of August and is holding near its highest level since July 2015. In the wake of Thursday’s ECB announcement, the 10-year has tacked on about 15 basis points alone.

While many have been focused on Italy, the action in Portugal’s bond market has been more under the radar. Back in October, ratings agency DBRS held its rating for Portuguese bonds at BBB (low), ensuring the ECB would continue to purchase its debt. DBRS remains the only ratings firm that has an investment grade rating for Portugal as all of the others cut theirs to junk following the country’s 2011 bailout.

Post-ECB selling has run Portugal’s 10-year yield up 35 basis points to 3.81%, which is its highest levels since February as traders zero on what could be Europe’s next big problem.

Back in July, Marc Chandler, the global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, noted, “The UK referendum hit an already vulnerable banking system in the eurozone. Italian banks are on the front burner, but the temperature is rising in Portugal.”

Additionally, a Barclays team led by Antonio Garcia Pascual observed, “The country is struggling with a systemic banking crisis, the lack of a convincing medium-term fiscal plan and excessive public and private sector leverage.” The continued, “This brings into question whether Portugal can address all of these issues without the help of another programme.”

And that seems to be the worry. Further aid to Portugal could cause DBRS to cut its rating for Portugal to junk. This in turn would prevent the ECB from being able to buy the country’s bonds, and could lead to the next leg of the region’s financial crisis.

Indeed, the temperature is rising in Portugal.

Consumer sentiment unexpectedly spiked in December, according to preliminary results of the University of Michigan’s survey.

The index of consumer confidence jumped to 98, the highest since January 2015. It was forecast to improve to 94.5 from 93.8, according to Bloomberg.

Consumer confidence rose right after the election, and the UMich survey cautioned that it may have been exaggerated by a sense of relief that the election was over. However, this new survey showed that people were more direct about why they turned more bullish.

“When asked what news they had heard of recent economic developments, more consumers spontaneously mentioned the expected positive impact of new economic policies than ever before recorded in the long history of the surveys,” said Richard Curtin, the survey’s chief economist.

It was in line with other surveys of confidence among consumers, investors, and CEOs that improved after the election.

More to come …

Kellyanne Conway

source

Screenshot / CNN

President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly keep his job as an executive producer on “Celebrity Apprentice,” a move a top adviser defended Friday morning.

Kellyanne Conway didn’t confirm whether Trump would indeed stay in the role, but she told CNN that Trump is a “very transparent guy, and everybody can see what he’s doing.”

“The fact is that he is conferring with all types of experts to tell him what he is allowed to do and not to do as the president of the United States, and if this is one of the approved activities, then perhaps he’ll consider staying on,” Conway said.

CNN host Alisyn Camerota pushed back by saying an hour Trump is working on “Celebrity Apprentice” is an hour he’s not devoting to other issues as president.

Conway responded by pointing to President Barack Obama’s golf hobby.

“Were we so concerned about the hours and hours and hours spent on the golf course of the current president?” Conway said. “Presidents have a right to do things in their spare time or their leisure time. I mean, nobody objects to that.”

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will host the upcoming season of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

MGM, the production studio behind the show, told Variety on Thursday that Trump will remain an executive producer on the show that made him famous for a per-episode salary in the low five figures. Trump will also get a cut of the show’s profits.

Kellyanne Conway on Trumpremaining Celeb Apprentice EP: “Presidents have a right to dothings in their spare time.” https://t.co/OPx1TEEPhW

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December9, 2016

Kellyanne Conway on Trumpremaining Celeb Apprentice EP: “Presidents have a right to dothings in their spare time.” https://t.co/OPx1TEEPhW

https://t.co/OPx1TEEPhWDecember9, 2016

Many startups flock to Silicon Valley in a bid to access talented engineers and the deep pockets of region’s venture capital firms.

But Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, told an audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week that being “somewhat removed” from Silicon Valley has worked in his company’s favour.

“One of the things that made us successful as a startup was being in London, and being somewhat removed, you know, [from] the sort of Valley way of doing things,” he said.

DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 for around £400 million, employs a team of around 250 people at Google’s new office in King’s Cross.

The company, founded in 2010, is aiming to build self-learning AI systems that can help to address some of the world’s biggest problems, including healthcare and climate change.

So far, the company’s algorithms have been successful in mastering arcade games like “Space Invaders” and “Pong” but they’ve also learned how to slash the amount of energy Google uses to cool its data centres.

Scientists and philosophers from the world’s top universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, have joined DeepMind on its broader mission to “solve intelligence,” as have employees from Google and Facebook.

“It turns out that the very top tier of people can work anywhere they want in the world,” said Suleyman. “They can work in finance and banking, they can work in the Valley, they can go to New York.

“They also want to work with the very best peers, colleagues also, but they want to work on problems that really matter. I think that’s something that’s changing in the last sort of 5-10 years or so, particularly recently, people really want to make a difference in the world. So presenting the opportunity to work on those sorts of problems is something that is very core to our mission and motivation.”

Research published by venture capital firm Balderton Capital this week found that London is home to 300,345 developers, which is more than any other European city.

De CIA gelooft dat Rusland zich met opzet heeft gemengd in de Amerikaanse verkiezingen om Donald Trump te laten winnen.

De beschuldiging is onthuld in een geheime CIA-presentatie die aan ambtenaren is gegeven, schrijven de Washington Post en de New York Times.

De geheime dienst stelt dat het meerdere individuën heeft geïdentificeerd met banden naar de Russische overheid, die WikiLeaks duizenden gestolen emails en andere documenten gaven.

Tijdens de verkiezingen heeft WikiLeaks meerdere keren documenten gepubliceerd die schadelijk waren voor de Democratische Partij en presidentskandidaat Hillary Clinton. Het schandaal rond deze e-mails kwam tot een hoogtepunt in de laatste weken van de campagne.

WikiLeaks-oprichter Julian Assange ontkent dat zijn organisatie een rol heeft gespeeld in de vermeende bemoeienis van de Russen met de verkiezingen.

Het team van Trump heeft een opvallende verklaring gegeven, waarin de bevindingen worden ontkend.

“Dit zijn dezelfde mensen die zeiden dat Saddam Hussein massavernietigingswapens had”, staat er in de verklaring. “De verkiezingen zijn een tijd geleden geëindigd in een van de grootste overwinningen in het Kiescollege. Het is nu tijd om door te gaan, en ‘Make America Great Again’.”

In besloten ontmoetingen van afgelopen week heeft de CIA een toelichting gegeven aan senatoren, waarin werd vermeld dat het ‘vrij duidelijk’ is dat Rusland probeerde om Trump aan de overwinning te helpen.

In eerste instantie dacht de geheime dienst dat Rusland simpelweg probeerde om de verkiezingen te ondermijnen. Die aanname werd ondersteund door de vrees dat Rusland mogelijk de stemmachines zou willen hacken.

Maar, zo schrijft de Washington Post nu, nu gelooft de CIA dat de Russen een ander doel hadden – Donald Trump als president. “Het is de inschatting van de geheime dienst dat Rusland een voorkeur had voor één kandidaat, en om Trump te laten verkiezen”, stelt een anonieme ambtenaar.

De New York Times citeert een ambtenaar van de Obama-regering: “We hebben nu zwaarwegend bewijs dat de Russen het bestuur van de Democratische Partij en de Republikeinen heeft gehackt.” Van de Republikeinen zouden opzettelijk geen documenten zijn gelekt.

Naast de publicatie van de e-mails kwam er ook een stroom aan verkeerde informatie en complottheorieën op het internet. Het overgrote deel van dat nepnieuws was gericht op Hillary Clinton. Deze berichten werden goed gelezen doordat ze veel aandacht kregen op social media.

President Barack Obama heeft opdracht gegeven om de hack opnieuw te onderzoeken.

In oktober beschuldigden het ministerie van Binnenlandse Veiligheid en het Hoofd van de Nationale Inlichtingen Rusland ook al van het hacken van de Democratische Partij, en van meerdere cyberaanvallen op de partij.

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on human rights on Saturday was interrupted by a group of protesters holding signs that read “Sanction Russia for war crimes.”

The demonstrators were led by British human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who criticized the Labour leader for not demanding action on Syria.

Sky News tweeted a clip of protesters storming the stage during the speech:

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech hadbeen disrupted by protests led by Peter Tatchell https://t.co/98nguJsSmY

— Sky News (@SkyNews) December10, 2016

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech hadbeen disrupted by protests led by Peter Tatchell https://t.co/98nguJsSmY

https://t.co/98nguJsSmYDecember10, 2016

“We haven’t heard the leader of the Labour Party speak out enough to demand UK air drops,” Tatchell announced on stage. He added: “What’s happening in Aleppo is a modern-day Guernica.”

Corbyn briefly left the podium but returned to address Tatchell’s criticisms.

“Just to be absolutely clear on the point that Peter made,” Corbyn said, “Emily Thornberry on our behalf during Foreign Office Questions and on many other occasions has made it absolutely clear that we do think there should be aid given to people in Aleppo, we do think the bombing should end, we do think there should be a ceasefire, we do think there should be a political solution, we do think the war should end in Syria.”

Aleppo, one of Syria’s largest cities, is the epicenter of fighting between President Bashar Assad, backed by Russia, and the rebels seeking to oust him. The fighting has set off a large-scale humanitarian crisis as civilians are bombarded daily and areas are cut off from receiving aid.

President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that he will have no role on “The Apprentice” as commander-in-chief, one day after a top adviser defended his role on the show.

Trump tweeted, “Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are rediculous (sp.) & untrue – FAKE NEWS!” He said his only relationship with the show was that he conceived it and had a big stake.

Variety reported Thursday that MGM, the production studio behind the show, said Trump will remain an executive producer on the show that made him famous for a per-episode salary in the low five figures. This role would not require him to be nearly as actively involved as he would be if he were a presenter, for example. Trump gets a cut of the show’s profits.

On Friday, Kellyanne Conway said Trump had a right to do other things in his spare time, but did not confirm whether the president-elect would have a role on the show.

“The fact is that he is conferring with all types of experts to tell him what he is allowed to do and not to do as the president of the United States, and if this is one of the approved activities, then perhaps he’ll consider staying on,” Conway told CNN.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will host the coming season of “Celebrity Apprentice” returning on January 2.

Trump’s potential business conflicts of interest have been under greater scrutiny since he won the election in November.

Soon, Audi cars are going to be able to tell drivers when a light will turn green.

The new feature marks the first time an automaker has successfully launched something called a vehicle-to infrastructure (V2I) communication channel. V2I refers to any time a structure in a city, like a traffic light, relays data to a car.

The traffic light timer will be displayed behind the wheel of the car. At this point, the system only works in Las Vegas and in Audi’s A4, Q7, and A4 allroad models built after June 1, 2016.

Audi plans on introducing the feature in other cities going into 2017.

Despite its limitations, the development illustrates how Audi is looking to become a major player in the self-driving car space. Its implementation of V2I will help the system gather more data and strenthen the self-driving tech long-term.

Data gathered by V2I can help self-driving cars operate more safely by giving them more information about their surrounding environment. For example, the data can help self-driving cars see the general traffic flow and areas of congestion.

“The primary benefit right now is to the person driving the Audi,” Scott Keogh, president of Audi America, said on CNBC. “Where it’s going to lead to is the information can go from the car back to the infrastructure. […] We have good information about traffic flow and highways, but we really don’t have good information on traffic flow in inner cities.”

Automakers are also exploring vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, which allows cars to send data to other cars on the road.

Audi has teamed up with BMW and Mercedes to supply digital map-maker HERE with the same kind of data being collected in Las Vegas as part of an effort to advance its self-driving cars.

Other automakers are also interested in integrating cities with smart tech to help advance self-driving cars.

Artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng, who is currently helping lead Chinese automaker Baidu’s self-driving car efforts as chief scientist, wrote in Wired that it’s necessary to make “modest changes to our infrastructure” for self-driving cars to operate safely on public roads.

Sidewalk Labs, a division run under Google’s parent company Alphabet, is also pursuing ways to connect cities to make them starter.

Columbus, Ohio was awarded $40 million by the Department of Transportation to help it “become the country’s first city to fully integrate innovative technologies – self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors – into their transportation network.”

All of this is to say the connected city will become a greater focus as Silicon Valley and traditional automakers ramp up their self-driving car efforts and Audi is looking to stay ahead of the curve.