Gov. Jerry Brown criticized a U.S. Senate bill that aims to simplify auto efficiency standards, warning the measure represents a step toward decimating requirements that manufacturers produce cleaner cars.

Uber Technologies wants to re-introduce its self-driving cars in California — legally this time.

It wasn’t taken as a joke or a typo or an anonymous quote from some trolling conspiracy theorist. It was a real-live tweet from a billionaire with mystery hair: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

If you are like me, you hate being stuck in traffic. But most of us don’t have a hired driver and public transportation isn’t always convenient.

Carmakers are working on what they think is a better idea — let the car do the driving.  Autonomous vehicles sound very Jetson-like. But as futuristic as it sounds, many vehicles already on our streets rely on computers. 

The Gigafactory has been activated.

Hidden in the scrubland east of Reno, Nev., where cowboys gamble and wild horses still roam — a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions is emerging from the sweat and promises of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. It’s known as the Gigafactory, and today its first battery cells are rolling off production lines to power the company’s energy storage products and, before long, the Model 3 electric car.

Last year was one for the history books. But as we start the new year, we wanted to take one last look back at some of our best-performing and most-read articles of 2016. Take a look and see if you missed any of our greatest hits — or if something might deserve a second read.

Sacramento to Stockholm: It takes about a day to travel between these two capital cities. But they have more similarities than you might think, considering they are half a world apart. They also have lessons to teach each other.

Californians in April will start paying more to register their cars — not to help maintain roads, but to keep the pension checks rolling for the motorcycle cops who policed them.

Oak Park neighbors Aimee Phelps and Kevin Greenberg delivered their first Art-Through-Pod in September and by year-end will exceed their initial goal of 10 mobile housing units for the homeless.

But they don’t plan to stop there.

California’s regulator that played a key role in busting Volkswagen AG for cheating on emissions tests laid out a detailed list of options for how the automaker will have to spend $800 million toward advancing cars that don’t pollute the air.

Investors who pushed up shares of GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler on a bet that Donald Trump will gut clean-air rules may have forgotten another player with a big say: California.

In 2005, GR launched Crete Crush, a sister company to its trucking operation that includes two concrete and asphalt crushing and recycling centers, one at the company’s Rancho Cordova headquarters, and another at its 15-acre facility off Bradshaw Road in Sacramento. When the company first started, it was paying someone else to crush the concrete and asphalt that was accumulating from demolition site hauls.

I was getting more hesitant as the hours passed. Would I run into unsavory people? How crowded are we talking? And, being inherently conservative, I wondered about the cost.

I’m talking about my decision to take light rail for the first time … and doing so alone.

The effort to keep the Sacramento Kings in town showed what a community can do when everyone rallies around a cause. Now that the Golden 1 Center is opening and fans are coming downtown to enjoy the Kings, it’s bringing many people together again — perhaps too closely.  

In 2014, we reported on the progress of the contentious and embattled California high-speed rail project starting to take shape (“One-Track Mind” by Allen Young, January 2014). We recently checked back in with Jeff Morales, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, to see where the project is now and why it’s still making headlines.

Are Uber and Lyft mainly replacing existing taxi and limo services or mainly adding to them?

Automakers didn’t build the self-driving car: Google did. That’s a big problem for them. Hoping to catch up, Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen are betting on academics. Along with Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Panasonic, they’re each giving $300,000 to the University of California at Berkeley to fund artificial intelligence research.

Sacramento RT employs approximately 941 people locally, 77 percent of whom are dedicated to operations and maintenance of the bus and light rail systems. John Haswell has been a light rail vehicle technician at Sac RT for the past seven years and says he is “genuinely and thoroughly thrilled to be working on the light rail vehicles.

When the new Golden 1 Center opens its doors in October of this year, several thousand people will flood into downtown Sacramento. They’ll bring their friends, their Kings jerseys, their money and perhaps most worryingly for those who work along busy streets in the area — their cars.