2014-05-04

May 04, 2014Newsletter archive →

Insurance Business | Apr 16, 2014 "...Vehicle owners will no longer buy collision insurance since manufacturers will be solely responsible for damage. Owners will only need theft and comprehensive coverage for hail, falling objects, flood, etc. Think about it. The experience and exposures will be similar to those of a driverless tram at the airport. To take this one step further, personal vehicle ownership may dramatically diminish. Car dealers will maintain lots full of vehicles for hire on a daily or hourly basis instead of vehicles for sale/lease. When you need a car, you'll summon one using your smartphone and the closest unmanned vehicle will be dispatched to your home to take you where you need to go..."

"...For insurance companies, their primary revenue streams will shift from personal lines to commercial lines as carriers retool their offerings to sell product liability insurance to vehicle manufacturers. The impact will be of a higher magnitude than that of Obamacare, which shifted healthcare marketing targets from employers to consumers. We should expect to see extremely competitive pricing and some very big winners and losers in the insurance industry, since there are far more insurers than there are vehicle manufacturers..." Read more Yup! Alain

John Villasenor Apr 25 2014 "It may seem odd, but we already have the laws we need for dealing with this inevitable situation." Read more especially the source report:

John Villasenor, April 2014 "...This paper provides a discussion of how products liability law will impact autonomous vehicles, and provides a set of guiding principles for legislation that should—and that should not—be enacted. In some very specific, narrow respects, state-level legislative clarity regarding autonomous vehicle liability can be beneficial. Vehicle manufacturers that sell non-autonomous vehicles, for example, should not be liable for defects in third-party vehicle automation systems installed in the aftermarket. But broad new liability statutes aimed at protecting the manufacturers of autonomous vehicle technology are unnecessary..." Read more This is a good one!!! Alain

April 28: "Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. At a busy time of day, a typical city street can leave even experienced drivers sweaty-palmed and irritable. We all dream of a world in which city centers are freed of congestion from cars circling for parking (PDF) and have fewer intersections made dangerous by distracted drivers. That's why over the last year we've shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving..." Read more

Marc Scribner April 23, 2014 "...But regulatory and legislative intervention also poses great risks to the development of the technology. In particular, laws and regulations that narrow the scope of permissible development, testing, and operational functionality risk locking in inferior technology, delaying adoption, and increasing prices faced by consumers. To reduce these risks, lawmakers and automakers should adopt a liberalized approach toward innovation and a cautious stance on legislation and regulation, particularly at this early stage...

Conclusion: Technical hurdles remain before developers can confidently sell their highly automated vehicle technologies to consumers. But many of the largest potential impediments are related to public policy. Politicians and bureaucrats, however well-intended, generally suffer from a variety of biases and rational ignorance. When implemented in statute or regulation, this can have profound negative effects on society. This risk of over-regulating — or regulating badly — looms large.

Policy makers must remember that their actions can produce harm. If automated vehicles are demonstrated to be significantly safer than manually driven vehicles, any misstep, convoluted law, or burdensome rule that leads to unnecessary higher costs or delays translates to increased injury and death." Read more This is another good one!!! Alain

Apr 16, 2014 "Rio Tinto has grown its driverless truck fleet to 53 vehicles across four mine sites, setting a new milestone in its autonomous haulage capacity. The miner's CEO Sam Walsh told its annual general meeting in London last night the fleet had "moved more than 150 million tonnes of material" — up from 100 million tonnes a year ago." Read more Non-trivial advancement of the state of the art. Alain

11 April 14 by Liat Clark "Light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings have replaced streetlights on a 500m stretch of highway in the Netherlands..." Read more

Chris Davies, April 16 "...Humanized Driving, giving computer-controlled cars similar characteristics to the people they're replacing so as to preserve a feeling of normality, even potentially becoming a virtual twin with the same style as the car's owner...Drive too well, too efficiently - too much like a computer, in effect - and it only serves to highlight the scale of the difference between the vehicle's brain and our own. Rather than becoming a beyond-human proficiency we can trust, it instead runs the risk of leaving us jittery and uncomfortable.." Read more

Janice Partyka April 24, 2014 "...

Automated vehicles require multiple types of sensors to obtain information about the vehicle, its movement, and the surrounding environment, which includes the roadway, other vehicles, obstacles and infrastructure. All sorts of ambient information may be captured. Perhaps activity outside of your house, or your kids on their way to school, or the licenses of cars in your driveway will be caught on camera." Stationary cameras are already capturing this information. Alain

"The massive amount of data collected needs to be crunched, and only some of it will be processed within the vehicle. Other captured data will be sent off-board to the cloud for handling, with results then returned to the vehicle." I disagree. essentially everything will be done on-board. The technology that requires substantial off-board process is doomed because off-board connectivity is way too unreliable. Alain

"The amount of data that will be created by automated vehicles is uncertain, but I've seen estimates of 1 GB per second..." Read more

From page 106, item 1642 of http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/PDFs/Induct_EBODACC-A_20140003_0001_p000(1).pdf courtesy of Adriano Alessandrini. Alain

Atlanta April 26-30 Session on Planning for Automated Vehicle Technologies

Tyler C. Folsom

By Nancy Scola | Next City | April 17, 2014 "...But far more women than men — 59 percent to 46 percent — think that devices like Google Glass will actually make life worse..." I knew women were in general much smarter than men.. Alain "...And bit more popular... are self-driving cars .... The public is about evenly split about whether or not they'd like to take a ride in an autonomous vehicle. There's a geographic twist. While just about half of urban and suburban Americas are interested, among rural Americans that response drops to 36 percent. ... Read more

Hmm.. Seems right. We've reached new heights, SmartDrivingCars are more exciting than Goofy Google Glasses. I have a renewed appreciation for American opinion as measured by Pew. The source report follows:. Alain

Aaron Smith April 17 "...riding in a driverless car: 48% would like to do this if given the opportunity, while 50% say this is something they would not want to do. College graduates are particularly interested in giving driverless cars a try: 59% of them would do so, while 62% of those with a high school diploma or less would not. There is also a geographical split on this issue: Half of urban (52%) and suburban (51%) residents are interested in driverless cars, but just 36% of rural residents say this is something they'd find appealing..." Read more

The Future of Transportation Technology

May 8th & 9th, 2014

Hyatt Regency Coconut Point

Bonita Springs, FL

Sponsored by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society

http://www.auvsi.org/avs2014/register

April 18, 2014

Wyrough, Alexander Penn Hill Jr.: A National Disaggregate Transportation Demand Model for the Analysis of autonomousTaxi Systems

Included is one synthetic realization for each of the 308.7 Million individuals contained in the 2010 Census and each of the 1.01 Billion trips {oLat, oLon, oTime, dLat, dLon} these individuals were synthesized to have made on a typical weekday in October. Persons are organized in individual Home County Files (All 186,49 persons that lived in Peoria County, Il., or the 1,585,873 persons that lived in Manhattan, for example). Trips are available in files for each person residing in a county (with many trips diffusing into other counties, states and even countries) as well as by oCounty (the 649,781 trips that originate in Peoria County or the 8,085,055 trips that originate in Manhattan, many of which are made by 1.5 million persons that don't live in Manhattan.). For example, one can get all the trips made by the residents of Manhattan or by all trips originating in Manhattan. The user is left with the task of finding all trips that either originate, terminate or go through Manhattan. Note, trips to work where the work place was greater than 200 miles from the home location were routed via the nearest major airports. Alain

Lee, Eileen: Uncovering Systemic Corruption in the ER: An Empirical Analysis of Motor Vehicle-Related Hospital Bill and their Impact on Insurance Companies

Sun, Zhuyi (Judy): Causal Price Discrimination: An Analysis of the Healthcare Costs Associated with Motor Vehicle and Transportation Collisions

Rhodes, Brandon Xavier: An Analysis of Economically Efficient Insurance Schemes for Automated Vehicle

April 11, 2014

By Scott Schaen on April 7, "...Lane keep assist worked very well if you're slow to make a slight turn. It doesn't work for the bigger turns. Similarly, smart cruise control and the automatic emergency breaking system would slow you down a lot, but it won't bring you to a complete stop. They're SAFETY features; they're not intended to auto-drive (yet)..." Read more

April 4, 2014

Thursday, March 27, 2014 Video of Webinar. Excellent presentation by Prof. Alberto Broggi Alain

March 28, 2014

"...millennials, with their relative propensity for urban lifestyle components (whether they live in cities or in suburbs), dexterity with technology, while starting careers during economically constrained times can leave a lasting impact on society...." Read more

March 21, 2014

By BILL VLASIC and MATT APUZZO MARCH 19, 2014 "Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general, talked in impassioned tones on Wednesday about Toyota's behavior in hiding safety defects from the public, calling it "shameful" and a "blatant disregard" for the law. A $1.2 billion criminal penalty, the largest ever for a carmaker in the United States, was imposed. Read more

March 14, 2014

By DANIELLE IVORY and HILARY STOUT MARCH 13, 2014 "As lawmakers press General Motors and regulators over their decade-long failure to correct a defective ignition switch, a new review of federal crash data shows that 303 people died after the air bags failed to deploy on two of the models that were recalled last month...Read more

March 7, 2014

A.L. Kornhauser, et al March, 2014 ".... Examined are the rail ridership opportunities that NJ Transit (NJT) might enjoy if autonomous Taxis (aTaxis) were available to readily bring customers to or from its rail stations. Such collection and distribution services would not only shower NJT with new customers but they would enable NJT to redevelop its parking facilities to more profitable "Transit Village" uses. Read more

2014-05-04

Half-baked stuff that probably doesn't deserve your time:

Calendar of Upcoming Events:

June 8 - 11, 2014, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

Recent Versions of:

Newly Available Drafts of Recent Student Theses