Self-driving car by 2020

Daimler, the maker of Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars, has announced that it will start selling a self-driving car by 2020.

It is thought the car will be able to drive on its own in most situations but will still hand control back to the driver during difficult situations such as dealing with traffic lights. The move could help Daimler regain its position as the leading luxury car market from its rival BMW.

‘We want to be the first to launch autonomous functions in production vehicles. You can be sure: we will accomplish that in this decade,’ said Daimler head of development Thomas Weber. The technology featured at this week's Frankfurt car show but won’t come to market for another 10 years.

The German car maker has been working on improving its driverless technology over the past few years and recently became the world’s first car manufacturer to demonstrate autonomous driving in rural and urban traffic.

Last month, a Mercedes Benz S 500 Intelligent Drive research vehicle, drove autonomously through a 100-kilometre-long route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany. Read more >>

€100 Billion In Secret Funds Props Up Greek Banks

There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100 billion or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank — approved secretly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug.

Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis. Separate from normal supplies of liquidity and meant originally as a temporary facility for national authorities to use when banks hit problems, ELA proved a lifesaver for the financial system Ireland and is now even more so in Greece.

As such, it has given the ECB — which has ultimate control over the facility — considerable power to determine countries’ fates. Whether that power would ever be exercised is unclear. ELA is a subject on which the ECB is deeply reluctant to provide information — even on where or when it is provided. More...

20,000 March at Frankfurt Occupy Protest Rally

At least 20,000 people held a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt on Saturday to decry austerity measures affecting much of Europe, the dominance of banks, and what they call untamed capitalism. The protesters peacefully filled the city center of continental Europe's biggest financial hub on a warm and pleasant afternoon, said Frankfurt police spokesman Ruediger Regis. 

He said 20,000 people were there, while organizers put the number at 25,000. The protest group, named Blockupy, has called for blocking access to the European Central Bank, which is located in Frankfurt's business district.

Organizer spokesman Roland Seuss the protest is "against the Europe-wide austerity dictate by the (creditor) troika of ECB, the EU Commission and the International Monetary Fund." Last year, thousands in Germany took to the streets in rallies during the worldwide Occupy movement. But as Germany's economy is robust and unemployment at a record-low, those protests have mostly fizzled out. More...