We WIRED transportation writers are obsessed with how technology and transportation have come together to revolutionize the way people get around in the 21st century. But sometimes—as a few stories we covered this week demonstrated—less transportation tech is better transportation tech. The Navy announced its moving away from touchscreens in favor of physical throttles, because engineers suspect it’s a safer way to operate big destroyers. A California driver discovered that when a too-clever license plate goes up against a creaky state database, the database will probably win (and issue him thousands of mistaken tickets in the process. Just read the story.) And a new report questions whether the century’s sexiest transportation companies, the ride-hailers at Uber and Lyft, are doing enough to keep recalled vehicles off their platform.

Some miraculous things happened this week, too. Russian pilots emergency-landed an airliner in a cornfield, and no one died. And truckers may get a reprieve from federal rules that have changed the way they do their work. It’s been a week. Let’s get you caught up.

Headlines

Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week

• If you’ve seen a gyrocopter in flight, you’re likely either an amateur gyrocopter pilot or a 90-year-old amateur gyrocopter pilot. But new tech has turned the funky predecessor to the helicopter into a viable option for our flying car future.
• Proposed federal regulations would give truckers more flexibility—and truckers are pumped.
• Navy destroyers will abandon touch screens and go back to throttles, after investigations into fatal ship crashes demonstrate that many personnel would rather do things the old way.
• Are ride-hail companies doing enough to get recalled cars off the road?
• Uber and Lyft run into an ever-growing list of regulations in New York—bad news for the bottom line.
• How to land a passenger airliner in a Russian cornfield.
• A vanity “NULL” license plate? Fun in theory; a nightmare in practice, according to a security researcher who still “owes” thousands in tickets accidentally assigned to him by government computer systems.

Extremely Weird Transportation News Crossover of the Week

The New York Times published a bizarre story this week intimating that now-deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had been hired by Elon Musk and Tesla to find a new chairperson after a tangle with the SEC last year forced Musk was to step down from the position. Tesla and Musk have denied the connection.

Click Here: liverpool mens jersey

Stat of the Week

30
The top mile-per-hour speed of shared Revel mopeds in New York City, where the brand new form of [blank]-share is making some people nervous.

Required Reading

News from elsewhere on the internet

• Congress seems ready to try again and pass federal self-driving vehicle legislation.
• Colorado joins California’s ambitious electric vehicle policy commitments.
• GM and VW abandon hybrids in favor of electric vehicles.
• Do Uber and Lyft’s new bike and scooter options cost too much?
• Navigation apps, including those built by Google and Apple, still haven’t put dangerous railroad crossings onto their maps.
• Uber sues Chicago over bike-share contracts.
• Why isn’t Scoot, an e-scooter company operating in San Francisco, letting riders park or pick up scooters in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods?
• E-scooter-share versus charming Belgian cobblestone streets.
• Lyft draws a flurry of sexual assault lawsuits.
• Decades of segregation help explain this country’s growing traffic problem.

In the Rearview

Essential stories from WIRED’s canon
Another alternative to abandoning technology all together? Working super, super hard to make sure the technology doesn’t fail. Here’s a long investigation into how a big company like Ford does that.

Updated 8-19-19, 12 pm EDT: This story was updated to correct its headline.