2025-06-07

13.05 - D day81

June 07, 2025Newsletter archive →

D-Day 81-6/6/25

M. Sena, June 1, "…Enable, champion, finance, co-develop WHAT IS THE proper role of government in fostering social and technological developments in their countries? Herbert Hoover said, "The sole function of government is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise." This would suggest that he would do more than Jefferson but less than Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan said, "Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives." He was never very clear about how far that protection should extend. Alexander Hamilton asked, "Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint." Hamilton could have been a little less passionate himself; he would have lived longer if he hadn't offended Aaron Burr, who challenged him to a duel and was a better shot. …."
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The Real Case for Driverless Mobility
Narrated by Fred Fishkin, Available now

Published in 2024 (but still relevant)!!!
Go to Amazon.com…

SmartDrivingCars
ZoomCast 390 / PodCast 390 – w/ Michael Sena: Gov't. roles-Musk-Waymo-Uber & more

F. Fishkin, June 6 "What should governments be doing for robotic vehicles? What did they do for human driven vehicles? Mobility Industry Insights publisher Michael Sena joins Princeton's Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin to explore that plus the latest on Elon Musk as robotaxis are readied, Waymo, Uber, TRB and more. Tune in and subscribe.

0:00 open
0:44 Mobility Industry Insights: Should governments do any more for robot driven cars than they did for human driven vehicles?
16:20 What governments could do if they wanted to make driving more safe
18:18 Governments are doing things…but doing the wrong things
24:14 In Japan they are planning for some separate roadways for robotic vehicles
26:17 Tesla has planned to launch robotaxis in Austin next week- how would they be controlled? Differences from Waymo?
33:00 FinanceBuzz report on autonomous vehicle safety, accidents and reporting
39:00 Why aren't intelligent cruise control and automatic emergency braking systems working together?
44:20 How old does a person really need to be to drive? Why is age relevant? Does it need to be a human? What about responsibility in robotic vehicles?
50:29 From TechCrunch …a patent infringement case that could disrupt Uber and others
51:22 The Transportation Research Board revamping committee structure and activities- TRB value.
1:02:00 What is needed to solve the safety problem?
1:08:00 Space X posts video titled Elon Musk, Mars and Beyond: The Road to Making Humanity Interplanetary

C. Lewis, June 5, "Self-driving cars are becoming more commonplace on the road. While some vehicles can drive themselves entirely, most offer driver assistance such as cruise control, lane-centering, and partial driving automation. In this report, FinanceBuzz compiles data on automated vehicles, the differences between assisted and automated driving systems, crash trends, and their legal, ethical, and insurance implications.

Our data comes from the Pew Research Center, the Brookings Institution, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and the University of Michigan…."
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K. Karosec May 30, "A little-known patent infringement lawsuit could have big implications for Uber — and potentially dozens of other companies.

Carma Technology, a company formed in 2007 by serial entrepreneur and SOSV founder Sean O'Sullivan, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Uber alleging the company infringed on five of its patents that are related to the system of matching riders (or packages) with capacity in vehicles. In other words, ridesharing — a business Carma operated in some form for a decade until it changed its business model and applied its tech to road-pricing services like GPS tolling and HOV verification.

…."
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V. Sheehan, June 1, "Dear Esteemed Volunteers,

For more than 100 years, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) has mobilized expertise, experience, and knowledge to anticipate and solve complex transportation-related challenges. We could not have accomplished our mission without the dedicated support of generations of transportation professionals like you. Thank you for your service to TRB….

Today, TRB must make changes to our committee structure and activities. …

Effective immediately, TRB is sunsetting its current standing technical committees and launching a new, more streamlined cohort of committees. The new committees will be smaller and more focused, and TRB will no longer support subcommittees, helping ensure clearer coordination and more direct communication. We recognize that this is a significant shift for many of you. Some groups may feel like they're losing something. That's real, and we don't take it lightly. We have launched a website where you can learn about the new structure and have added functionality to MyTRB to allow you to express interest in joining one of the new committees. You can also sign up to be a friend of the committees you are interested in…
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K. Southern, June 06, "In the affluent Los Angeles beach suburb of Santa Monica, the sound of beep … beep … beep has become inescapable.

It permeates kitchens as families make breakfast, drifts through the windows at lunch and invades bedrooms at night, making sleep impossible.

The future has arrived, and it is driving the locals mad.

Waymo, the self-driving taxi firm owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, moved two charging station car parks into residential areas this year. The imposition of the cars, which emit an incessant beep as they reverse, has triggered a guerrilla war as fed-up homeowners take matters into their own hands. …
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E. Musk, May 29, "…
Watch video

S. Hurwitz, June 3, "Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a "disruptive" innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. Even Elon Musk gave it a try in 2018 with the "urban loop system" that never quite materialized beyond the Vegas Strip. And does anyone remember Chariot?

Now it's Uber's turn again. The ride-hailing company recently announced Route Share, in which shuttles will travel dozens of fixed routes, with fixed stops, picking up passengers and dropping them off at fixed times. Amid the inevitable jokes about Silicon Valley once again discovering buses are serious questions about what this will mean for struggling transit systems, air quality, and congestion. …
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F. Schlang, Jan 3, "This is the story of how SpaceX turned the impossible into something operational. Welcome to the story of the SpaceX Starship Raptor engine....."
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Rest is old I'll add more

Humans step up as Texas steps back from autonomous trucking How LA is waging a guerrilla war against robot taxis

J. Borras, May 24, "Texas technology firm Aurora made headlines earlier this month by launching the first fully autonomous freight service in the US – but those celebrations may have been premature. According to the company's CEO, human operators are back in the saddle.

In a blog post written by Aurora CEO, Chris Urmson, the company said the decision to put a human operator back behind the wheel of its tech-boosted Peterbilt Class 8 semi trucks was a result of pressure from the truck manufacturer's parent company PACCAR. PACCAR apparently wanted a human in place, "because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform."

In Urmson's own words:

A core part of our strategy has always been building a strong ecosystem of partners across the industry — from OEMs to logistics providers to regulators. These partnerships are essential to delivering a safe, scalable, commercial product.

One of those partners, PACCAR, requested we have a person in the driver's seat, because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform. We are confident this is not required to operate the truck safely based on the exhaustive testing (covering nearly 10,000 requirements and 2.7 million tests) and analysis that populates our safety case. PACCAR is a long-time partner and, after much consideration, we respected their request and are moving the observer, who had been riding in the back of some of our trips, from the back seat to the front seat. This observer will not operate the vehicle — the Aurora Driver will continue to be fully responsible for all driving tasks, including pulling over to a safe location if required. And we've shown we can do that safely, with the Aurora Driver operating for more than 6,000 driverless miles along our commercial launch lane between Dallas and Houston. This change has no impact on our near, mid and long-term development plans.

CHRIS URMSON, AURORA CEO

The re-introduction of human operators comes just as Texas State lawmakers are reviewing House Bill 4402 – a proposed law just passed out of the Texas House Committee on Transportation and would require trained human operators in autonomous vehicles, effectively banning fully self driving semi trucks in Texas.

...."
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T. Balk, May 27, "The semi truck rumbled down the congested, five-lane Texas highway, letting a small sedan pass on its right, then accelerating past another semi on its left.

In the back seat of the truck's sun-drenched cabin, a middle-aged man watched YouTube videos on his phone. Behind him, a 53-foot refrigerated trailer carried nearly 25,000 pounds of pastries.

Nobody was in the driver's seat.

Last month, Aurora Innovation, based in Pittsburgh, became the first company to operate a driverless 18-wheeler on an American highway, ushering in an era that could dramatically change how cargo moves across the United States....."
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J. Gallaher, May 27, New legislation introduced in the Senate attempts to spring the U.S. Department of Transportation into regulatory action that will lead to commercial rollout of driverless cars and trucks.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have initiated rulemakings to establish a regulatory framework for driverless cars and trucks but have yet to issue final rules.

"For nearly a decade, Washington has talked about autonomous vehicles without meaningful action," remarked Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., when she introduced her bill, the Autonomous Vehicle Advancement Act of 2025, earlier this month…."
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I. Grace, May 25, "As self-driving cars inch closer to the mainstream, one of the biggest unanswered questions isn't just how they'll navigate traffic—but how they'll reshape risk. If there's no driver behind the wheel, is it still "driver error"? And if the software crashes, will the insurer or the carmaker pick up the tab?....

"There's no question that insurance for automobiles is going to change dramatically once self-driving cars become a reality," he said.

"Most of the insurance that is sold and bought revolves around operator errors... To the extent these new self-driving cars are more safe and are involved in fewer accidents, that insurance will be less required. Instead, it'll be substituted by, as you mentioned, product liability."…
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Samantha Doniger, May 2025, "Accurate and robust object detection is critical for advancing autonomous driving systems. In recent years, transformer-based architectures have shown significant promise in this domain, offering improved performance over previous state-of-the-art technologies, largely due to their ability to handle long-range dependencies. This thesis explores the potential benefits of multimodal sensor fusion in autonomous driving by evaluating three transformer-based architectures for object detection tasks, each trained on the nuScenes dataset. The first model, TransFusion, integrates camera and LiDAR data within a unified transformer framework. The second model is a LiDAR-only variant, adapted from the TransFusion implementation to isolate the contribution from the LiDAR sensors. The third model, FCOS3D, is a camera-only model that isolates the contribution from the camera sensors.

The primary goal of this research is to identify scenarios in which single-modality models (camera-only or LiDAR-only) produce conflicting detections and to analyze how the fusion-based approach handles these discrepancies. By closely examining these instances, the study evaluates whether LiDAR offers critical advantages over camera-only systems in consumer vehicles. Given the higher cost and complexity associated with LiDAR sensors, understanding whether these advantages justify the integration of LiDAR is vital for automotive manufacturers and researchers seeking to optimize safety, reliability, and system efficiency under cost constraints.

Through extensive experimental evaluations, this thesis contributes insights into how multimodal fusion impacts object detection, revealing that while the LiDAR-only variant yields higher overall detection metrics in limited training environments, the camera-only approach excels at identifying near-range objects, and the fusion model effectively refines extraneous predictions. This synergy underscores trade-offs between cost and detection coverage, providing guidance for future sensor design and deployment strategies in the pursuit of a fully autonomous driving system.
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Koby Ginder, May 2025, "Today, we stand at a critical moment in the evolution of automotive technology. Driverless technology has made tremendous progress over the past decade, and driverless vehicles have begun to permeate our society. The growth of this technology and the path it takes is sure to redefine how we think about mobility. This exploration aims to introduce, simulate and test an innovative transportation style that has only recently been made possible by the strides in automotive driverless technology. This network, known as MOVES style transportation, will be analyzed in America's city: New York City. This paper will first analyze the current patterns of transportation systems in the city; by inspecting public transportation data it will show the current movement patterns of New Yorkers and visualize it. It will introduce and describe the MOVES style autonomous driving network as it will be implemented in this specific use case. It will then model and simulate the performance of this system using specialized software developed by the Princeton Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering. Financial performance will also be discussed based on the simulated results.
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Tyler Barretta, May 2025, "This thesis aims to explore the feasibility of data centers in Northern Quebec using machine learning models to determine feature importance of site selection factors. Specifically, Random Forests are used to learn feature importance on a large, multi-source dataset of hyperscale data centers and corresponding, important features captured across national and regional levels through 2006-2024. SVMs, LASSO regression, and XGBoost models are used to corroborate the feature importance results of the Random Forest. Installed Solar PV Power Capacity and Internet Adoption as the fraction of a country's population using the internet are determined to be robust predictors for the existence of data centers at a given location in a given year. Quebec and Canada show favorable internet adoption metrics but low solar PV power capacity, when compared to the average metrics across locations with hyperscale data centers. Thus, the model does not show Canada, and specifically rural northern Quebec, to be a likely site for a hyperscale data center. However, the model does not provide a comprehensive set of feature importance weights, and it has limitations in the simplification of complex features to simple data points, a weakness to collinearity in the determination of feature importance, and a time-stagnant nature which fails to capture an evolving set of optimal feature weights. Qualitative research shows that Canada is well poised to become a data center hub.
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Draft…
Orf467F24: Investigation of MOVES-Style Mobility Deployments
Draft

Alain Kornhauser, Dec. 19, "An updated note to the readers of the SDC eLetter:
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2025-06-07

MII Should governments do any more for robot-driven cars than they did for human-driven cars? If so, what?

MII
Should governments do any more for robot-driven cars than they did for human-driven cars? If so, what?