Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022

11.13 - Automotive AI

February 09, 2022Newsletter archive →

Click or tap if you trust this link. Friday, March 31, 2023

M. Sena, March 29, "….In this April issue of The Dispatcher for 2023, I have tried to summarize the discussions on Automotive AI that we had during the 2023 Future Networked Car Symposium. Amidst the warnings about the negative sides of AI, there are some positive signs that AI is being put to good use for automotive safety. I hope you will spare some time to read Musings this month. If you have ever wondered where the "We're in the railroad business" cliché came from, you will find the answer in Musings. There's also a tip on where to have lunch when you visit Steamtown National Park in Scranton, PA this summer…."

SmartDrivingCars ZoomCast 311 / PodCast 311 w/Michael Sena, Editor of The Dispatcher

F. Fishkin, March 30, "With Elon Musk and others joining the Future of Life Institute in calling for a pause in AI development, what's next? The Dispatcher publisher Michael Sena joins Alain Kornhauser and Fred Fishkin from Sweden to discuss that plus a freeze on ICE, Ford, Bill Gates and more. Episode 311 of Smart Driving Cars.

0:00 open
0:45 Future of Life Institute calls for pause in further development of AI
27:00 EU Big 3 Countries want to freeze the ICE ban
37:00 Mind your own business but know who your customer really is.. railroads, cars.. mobility
1:04 upcoming Smart Driving Cars Summit
1:04:30 Ford CEO says new electric truck will allow you to nap, use phone, on highways in good weather
1:04:57 Bill Gates posts about going for a ride in a self-driving vehicle in the U.K.
0:00 Intro / TSLA
0:36 PCE report
1:08 EV credit update
3:21 New product teaser
5:26 Semi recall
6:37 Franz interview
10:41 Q1 delivery and production forecasts
0:00 F. Fishkin, March 24, "Where does autonomous mobility go from here? Princeton's Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin explore...plus Ford's EV losses, SMART grants fail to fund autonomous mobility, Waymo, drones & more. open
0:35 Princeton basketball
1:25 More thoughts in aftermath of ITU 2023 Future Networked Car Symposium. Where does autonomous mobility go from here?
29:26 SMART grants from DOT fail to fund autonomous mobility
31:55 Ford's EV losses
32:57 Ford updates on BlueOval City mega site in West Tennessee
34:46 Waymo takes on task of writing the safety case for AVs. Alain emphasizes that companies shouldn't compete on safety
39:25 The Street headline… Four reasons self-driving cars, not drones, will deliver your packages.
0:00 open
0:53 Princeton sports!
1:40 ITU Symposium
4:35 Chat GPT
6:00 Missy Cummings at ITU
9:38 Safety systems not interconnected
13:45 ITU Symposium takeaways
30:40 UN regulations & autonomous vehicles Cruise and more
40:29 National Disability Institute report
45:11 Krogers and Gatik test autonomous trucks in Texas
54:30 Baidu reported offering driverless rides in Beijing
0:00 open
0:40 GM Ultra Cruise Chief Engineer Jason Ditman introduction
1:55 How did development go during Covid?
4:32 Announcement that Ultra Cruise will first arrive on 2024 Cadillac Celestiq
8:45 Alain comments on Super Cruise 9:50 How does Ultra Cruise availability figure into route planning
13:40 Why is hands-off important and not feet-off 16:45 If using intelligent cruise control… why does it disengage when brakes are tapped?
25:29 System is separate from automated emergency braking… how do they talk to each other
28:43 Response to Missy Cummings headlines that people using automated systems involved in crashes were speeding more often than people driving without automated systems engaged.
33:24 GM Cruise says focused on cutting costs this year according to Reuters
37:25 NHTSA opens probe, reportedly, into self-certification of the test procedures at Zoox
41:08 Embark winding down operations, laying off most employees
44:41 Kudos to GM Ultra Cruise team
49:24 Here comes Alain's spring break
0:00 open
0:44 Waymo Driver performance report
14:15 More layoffs at Waymo
15:00 Tesla Investor Day- what we learned
16:18 Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley impressed with Tesla Investor Day
23:05 Ford creates Latitude AI after demise of Argo AI
29:40 Guidehouse Insights research report
34:35 Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association seeks modernization of vehicle exemption process
39:05 Diane Gutierrez Scaccetti to chair Transportation Research Board Executive Committee
0:00 open
1:00 Is it time we admitted the world will change: the de-industrial revolution has begun
21:00 Impact on transportation, automakers
28:40 Run flat tires.. from Michelin and more
35:25 GM's waits for NHTSA okay for deployment of Cruise Origin autonomous mobility
46:00 Locomation denies reports of its demise
47:08 The Insider report on Tesla… and upcoming master plan. Alain's comments not what were reported.
0:00 open
1:00 Missy Cumming pushing for limits on autonomous tech
9:30 hands-free, feet-free driving dangers
15:00 Should tech be used to block speeding and reckless driving?
32:00 Issues with intelligent cruise control
40:30 Is the battle for cars that would forbid speeding winnable?
44:00 Are vehicle safety systems not communicating with each other?
50:00 Is the problem with vehicles identifying stationary objects being addressed?
55:20 Zoox begins carrying passengers on public roads in vehicles without steering wheels
57:17 Rob Mauer's Tesla Daily
58:30 Ken Pyle's ViodiTV compiles autonomous round up from CES
59:25 Brad Templeton launches Robocars podcast
59:48 Alain will lead off MIT Mobility Forum series Friday
0:00 open
0:48 Active Driving Assistance Evaluation Report from Consumer Reports
2:53 Ford's BlueCruise ousts GM as top in ADAS
10:33 What is the value of being able to drive hands-free and pedal-free
16:40 Why doesn't the technology prevent speeding and misbehavior
21:08 Are consumers using the safety features..
27:14 Proactive braking assist coming to more vehicles and is a great feature
36:00 Should there be a light or mechanism that shows others whether cars are being controlled by human or automated system?
43:43 Are there things that carmakers are really getting right or really getting wrong?
51:00 Corvette on top in CR report on vehicle owner satisfaction
52:43 Navya
53:00 Axios reports autonomous passenger planes inching closer to takeoff
54:00 a fight against sludge… from NY Times
54:51 Mobileye post advocating simpler language for autonomy levels
56:47 Waymo named Super Bowl officials autonomous technology partner
0:00 open
0:55 Autonomous chaos in San Francisco?
6:28 National Safety Council marks anniversary of national roadway safety strategy
9:41 Tesla boosts production at Giga Shanghai & more
11:25 More SpaceX success
14:05 Mercedes launch of level 3 systems in U.S.
19:12 U.K. Unveils First "Fully" Autonomous Bus Service
23:11 Layoffs at Rivian
24:35 Data Centers on Wheels: Emissions From Computing Onboard Autonomous Vehicles
27:47 Ford boosts production of Mustang Mach E touting 0-60 thrills in press release
30:54 Justice Department urged to look at leaders of TuSimple and alleged transfer of tech to Chinese start-up
0:00 open
1:00 Driverless Work Vehicles discussion
20:45 Stellantis Reaching for the Data Star
23:27 Winters can be cold, EVs like it hot
36:11 Tesla earnings, news and rebound
38:39 Layoffs hitting Waymo? And other tech companies too.
47:30 Ford's Blue Cruise top rated by Consumer Reports in active driver assistance

May 22-24, 2023 | Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

The objective of the 6th SmartDrivingCars Summit will be to put the eventual manufacturers of driverless passenger vehicles together with the eventual operators of transportation services to decide if there is a business to be made from delivering affordable mobility to a large segment of our societies who are underserved by the current options: private cars and public transport.

It's already happening with military and work vehicles, with Oshkosh and Robotic Research, and John Deere, Caterpillar, Komatsu and others manufacturing driverless vehicles that are getting the jobs done in military operations, on farms, mines, warehouses, seaports, and airports, jobs where experienced drivers are too few in number or where driver safety cannot be ensured. They will be at the Summit during the sessions on Driverless Vehicles in the Line of Duty to explain how they have made the transition to building tools that safely meet the market requirements for both affordability and performance.

After twenty years of development, it's time for the companies that will build the vehicles and the organizations that will operate the services to take the leadership position. Sensor manufacturers and software developers have gone as far as they can go, and some of them have already had to drop out of the race. Car manufacturers and energy companies are making the same mistake they made twenty-five years ago when they said they had to wait for a battery breakthrough before they could build an electric car. There is a ready and sizeable market for an inexpensive transport solution that has the flexibility of a passenger car for people who cannot drive themselves or afford their own car.

We have focused too much on the equivalent of the battery solution, on the technology, and not on the need. At the SDC Summit in May, we will focus on the need and how to satisfy that need. Join us in Princeton to be part of making this happen. Alain

Phil Koopman, March 31, "A pressing question for deploying autonomous vehicles is: will they be safe enough? The usual answer of "at least as safe as a human driver" (e.g., Positive Risk Balance) is likely to be both too simplistic and much more complex than might be apparent. Which human driver, under what conditions? And are fewer total fatalities OK even if it means more pedestrians die? Who gets to decide what safe enough really means when billions of dollars are on the line? And how will anyone really know the outcome will be as safe as it needs to be when the technology initially deploys without a safety driver? This talk covers risk acceptance frameworks, what people mean by "safe," setting an acceptable safety goal, measuring safety, accounting for uncertainty, a framework for deciding when to deploy, and a sampling of ethical challenges that must be addressed. The emphasis is not on how to build machine learning based systems, but rather on how to measure whether vehicles based on this technology will be acceptably safe for real-world deployment…." Read more

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

Open Letter, March 28, "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1] and acknowledged by top AI labs.[2] As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.

AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1] and acknowledged by top AI labs.[2] As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control…." Read more

M. Cunnings, March 30, "Another wacky petition from the Future of Life Institute https://lnkd.in/eriQCixR Their last fearmongering petition had no impact and now they are at it again. These kinds of chicken-little moments are not productive, and as a mom of a teen, I can promise you that these kinds of sentiments only drive MORE people to use these systems. We need to stop these overly-alarmist, click-baiting tirades and instead start educating people on what AI is and isn't. We also need to make all community college computer science classes free - the real problem is not ChatGPT or AGI, it is a profound lack of technical literacy." Read more

Andrew Hawkins, March 30, "Five months after it pulled the plug on its autonomous vehicle division Argo.ai, Ford is continuing to divest itself from fully driverless technology. Today, the company filed a notice with the feds that basically retreats from its former position of wanting to deploy vast numbers of robot vehicles. The reason?

We believe the road to fully autonomous vehicles, at scale, with a profitable business model, will be a long one.

A. St. John, March 24, "…In Elon Musk-like fashion, Ford CEO Jim Farley made bullish claims about self-driving tech and said the automaker's next electric pickup will drive itself.

In a new interview with Bloomberg published Friday, Farley upped his company's pressure on Tesla, saying the company's next electric truck set to debut in 2025 is a "breakthrough product."

"On the highway on a sunny day, you should be able to go to sleep in your truck or make a call or do whatever you want to do in your truck while it drives for you," Farley told Bloomberg…." Read more

W. Johnson, April 1, "Tesla has released its latest update to the Full Self Driving software, version 11.3.4, which brings massive improvements to safety and customization, along with a vast set of new features.

…Tesla has released yet another update to the FSD system, bringing a slew of safety improvements, customization updates, and new features.

According to NotaTeslaApp, the most profound change is coming to the software's highway functionality. On the technical side, Tesla has merged the "vision" and "planning" stacks and removed the four-year-old highway stack altogether. This improvement integrates Tesla's famous multi-camera video network system and next-gen planner, allowing for more complex interactions, less reliance on painted lanes, and introduces an overall improvement in vehicle behavior.

The Tesla FSD highway improvement also improves the vehicle's positioning in wide lanes, improves handling in significant turns, and improves the vehicle's positioning during cut-in scenarios, all thanks to the mining of Tesla's growing library of fleet data…." Read more

R. Maurer, March 31, "➤ Delivery and production expectations for Tesla's first quarter of 2023 ➤ PCE report below forecast ➤ Preliminary EV credit adjustments issued ➤ Tesla China teases new product unveiling ➤ Tesla recalls Tesla Semi ➤ Franz von Holzhausen discuss Tesla in Motor Trend interview:

R. Arbelaez, March 9, "How safe are electric vehicles? It's a question that keeps coming up in different ways in my role overseeing our vehicle crashworthiness evaluations.

When we first started testing electric vehicles in 2011, the question referred to fire risk. When damaged, lithium-ion batteries can ignite, and the fires can be extremely hard to put out. As a result, we have special procedures for EV testing, including monitoring the battery's voltage and temperature and asking our local fire department to be on site.

Fifty-five EV crash tests and zero fires later, I'm still worried about these batteries, but for a more mundane reason than their potential to burst into flames. My biggest concern is how heavy they are and what all that extra vehicle weight means for the safety of people on the road, specifically occupants of lighter vehicles as well as pedestrians and bicyclists…." Read more

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

B. Gates, March 29, "… The result was a memorable ride. The car drove us around downtown London, which is one of the most challenging driving environments imaginable, and it was a bit surreal to be in the car as it dodged all the traffic. (Since the car is still in development, we had a safety driver in the car just in case, and she assumed control several times.)…" Read more

Fridays 12:00-13:00 Boston Time Open to the public

Registration: https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIoduytqDsiE9ZKHfZ9Mf1hHIzSCx-TxIEq

Hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao

Save the Date:

Monday Evening, May 22 -> Wednesday 5pm, May 24, 2023

August. 9 & 10

On-line Conference

Click or tap if you trust this link. Friday, February 3, 2023

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SafeDrivingCars: Those in which the automated function are explicitly designed to not only substantially reduce driver misbehavior by constraining the performance characteristic such as incorporating speed governors that only permit excessive speeds in geofenced locations such as Watkins Glen International and stretches of the German Autobahn, but also automatically intervene to prevent crashes; thus, extending what is done today with anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control.
SelfDrivingCars: Those which allow the driver for some extended period of time to be "feet-off" the brake & throttle, delivering to the driver substantial comfort & convenience, but also "hands-off" the wheel for shorter periods of time providing a little more comfort & convenience. Absolutely required are "eyes & brain" focused the human task of driving, ready to intervene should the automated driver begin to fail.
DriverlessCars: Those which serve only passengers and/or goods from trip start, through finish. Luckily, the notion that individuals might own such vehicles for personal use and/or be able to "AirB&B" them for others to get from A to B is now realized by essentially everyone as exceedingly naïve. The Mercedes booth at this year's CES showed no sign of its Mercedes Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion | LIVE PREMIERE CES 2015. Yea!

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Click ">Sunday, October 30, 2022

Hawkins, Oct. 27, "When Ford announced yesterday that it was pulling its support for Argo AI, the autonomous driving startup it had financed since 2017, it cited as one of its reasons a belief that driver-assist technology will have more near-term payoffs....." Read more Hmmmm... I agree with Andrew, as I stated above. Alain

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Tesla FSD Beta V 10.69 Dominates Downtown Driving
FSD Beta 10.69 (2022.16.3.10) Release Notes
FSDBeta v10.69 - HEAVY TRAFFIC - Unprotected Left Turns... Amazing that such turns are legal let alone FSD's routing algorithm deciding that this is on the best way to go. Safety must not be part of its objective function C'mon Elon.
FSD Beta V 10.69 Initial Impressions. My impression is that 10.69 drove better than this tester who seemed intent on driving aggressively and not wanting to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Hopefully no one at Tesla pays attention to this guy.
Bullish News From Giga Berlin Tours, Production Rumors, Terrible Toyota
The Tesla Semi Is Officially Here!

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These systems outrageously reduce crash probabilities, and/or
maybe some, but we're probably not much luckier.
very few of the cars in use during that "10" month period had Level 2 capabilities, and/or
unfortunately, the VIN number doesn't identify these cars and only Tesla announces how many sold (I may have missed the reportings)
very few of the drivers of those cars rarely engaged the Level 2 features, and/or
likely. Only Tesla releases data on the utilization of its level 2 features but does so only in aggregate terms that don't allow for correction of sampling bias associated with engagement in "easy" driving conditions versus "challenging" driving conditions.
enormous under counting
likely, only Tesla has the opportunity to either "know all" or sample effectively because of their OtA monitoring of its vehicles. Everyone else has conveniently kept their heads in the sand. Mercedes didn't report any; however, during that period I think my Intelligent Cruise Control and Lane Centering were engaged when I hit a deer. Mercedes must not have been watching me, I didn't report it and I didn't get the memo that informed me to do anything.

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those that don't already have a stable full of their own personal mobility options.
those for which his aTaxi can substantially change their lives for the better.

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PersonTripLength (90%tile): 10 miles

Cost:

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