It’s fun to imagine how new technologies and design trends will influence future cars. Car bodies of the future might be completely 3D printed. They may be completely autonomous — and now, they might have multi-directional spherical tires.

Goodyear’s new “Eagle-360” spherical tire concept, recently unveiled at the Geneva International Motor Show, would allow cars of the future to move in all directions by using magnetic levitation, rather than axles, to suspend the tires under the car body.

While this is still firmly a concept, it seems Goodyear just got a bit closer to designing the car Will Smith’s character drives in I, Robot.

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law, a major step toward ultimately winning approval for autonomous vehicles on the roads.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet, of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week.

Google and Tesla may be pushing full-speed ahead in their self-driving car development and testing, but auto manufacturers aren’t sitting idly by. Judging from the outputs of this week’s North American Auto Show in Detroit, as well as CES in Las Vegas last week, it’s clear that incumbent car companies are rising to the challenges of competing in an autonomous world.

Silicon Valley startups and tech giants are launching many threats to the traditional auto industry as part of the Collaborative Economy movement, from ride- and car-sharing platforms like Lyft, Uber, RelayRides, and Getaround, to more recent innovations of autonomous cars that will further enable ride access over car ownership from Google, Uber, and others.

The self-driving car is a huge computational problem. It’s so tough that traditional computer vision techniques don’t work tackling it. So Nvidia has turned to an artificial intelligence technique, dubbed deep learning, to train brain-like computers that can learn how to identify hazards on a road and safely direct a self-driving car.

General Motors (GM), the century-old car company behind major automotive brands Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, and Vauxhall, announced today that it’s investing $500 million in ride-sharing company Lyft.

Founded out of San Francisco in 2012, Lyft had received $1.2 billion in funding prior to this deal. But more than the latest cash influx, the news heralds a major partnership between the two companies, who spoke of plans to create an “integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles” in the U.S.