5.34-Important-101517

Proposed Driverless Testing and Deployment Regulations – Released October 11, 2017

 Rulemaking Actions, Oct 1The following 3 PDFs are important:
1. Autonomous Vehicles Notice of Modification (PDF)  Act

2. Autonomous Vehicles Statement of Reasons (PDF)  Act

3. Autonomous Vehicles 15 Day Express Terms (PDF)   Act  Hmmmm..This is all about Driverless!  Thank you California, and especially Dr. Bernard Soriano, for leading this noble effort and for continuing to distinguish this technology from Self-driving and all of the various other names seemingly meant to confuse.  Alain

  Shared Mobility: Simulations for Helsinki

International Transport Forum, F. Furtado, Oct 2017, "This report examines how the optimised use of new on-demand shared transport modes could change the future of mobility in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area in Finland. Based on simulation, it provides indicators for the impact of shared mobility solutions on accessibility, metro/rail ridership, required parking space, congestion and CO2 emissions. The model also analyses service quality, efficiency and cost competitiveness of the shared solutions. In addition, the report explores the willingness among the citizens of the Helsinki region to adopt shared mobility solutions based on focus group analysis. The findings provide an evidence base for decision makers to weigh opportunities and challenges created by new forms of shared transport services. The work is part of a series of studies on shared mobility in different urban and metropolitan contexts….  Read more Hmmmm…This looks like an excellent study that is similar to the studies that we have done in New Jersey and are continuing to do across.the US.  We both start from individual synthesized trips for a typical day (3M for Helsinki (them),  32M for NJ, 1B for US (us)), investigate ride sharing opportunities using similar, yet different, levels of service and include retention of conventional high-capacity transit services.  Their results, findings and suggestions, including implications on the environment, are very well presented displayed.  Well worth absorbing. Alain

Waymo gives federal officials a detailed safety report on self-driving vehicles

M. Laris, Oct 12, "…NHTSA said in a statement Thursday that Waymo is “the first company to make a voluntary safety self-assessment public.” While such reports are now voluntary, the House and Senate each passed bills that would require companies to submit safety assessments in the coming years…
…“You can’t expect to program the car for everything you’re possibly going to see,” said Ron Medford, Waymo’s safety director and a former senior NHTSA official. Extensive driving experiments feed simulations that essentially provide the car with experience, which helps greatly, and what it learns is passed on to the entire fleet.  And if it really doesn’t know what to do, it can pull over safely, he said."  Read more Hmmmm.. Congratulations Ron!  Excellent! See next link for the actual report.  Alain

Waymo Safety Report 

Waymo team, Oct. 12,  "…Fully self-driving vehicles (aka Driveless) will succeed in their promise and gain public acceptance only if they are safe. That’s why Waymo has been investing in safety and building the processes that give us the confidence that our self-driving vehicles can serve the public’s need for safer transportation and better mobility.  Read more Hmmmm… A MUST read, digest and understand!  This documents where society is on the road to Driverless (or what Waymo unfortunately prefers to call ‘fully self-driving’.  This is unfortunate because adding ‘fully’ to Self-driving doesn’t sufficiently distance what Waymo has done to address the very substantial Driverless hurdles.)  Alain

USDOT Releases 2016 Fatal Traffic Crash Data

NHTSA01-17, Oct 6, "… 37,461 lives were lost on U.S. roads in 2016, an increase of 5.6 percent from calendar year 2015. The number of vehicle miles traveled on U.S. roads in 2016 increased by 2.2 percent, and resulted in a fatality rate of 1.18 deaths per 100 million VMT – a 2.6-percent increase from the previous year. 
Click here to view 2016 Fatal Motor Vehicle Crashes: Overview
Click here to view 2016 Quick Facts…" Read more Hmmmm… While Distraction-related deaths decreased 2.2% the rest of the news was nothing but BAD. Yet the NYT editorializes that we should be cautious about new technology, which may be the only hope that we have to avert future fatalities.  Elon is right.  See next article. ALain

Would You Buy a Self-Driving Future From These Guys? 

The Editorial Board, Oct 14, "…A larger problem with both bills is that they would do nothing to increase the size of the budget or staff of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for overseeing the industry and will have to write new rule s for self-driving cars…Yet Mr. Musk’s point about the hazards of human drivers is well taken: If automated cars make the roads safer — as seatbelts, airbags and other innovations have done — millions of lives may be saved…" Read more Hmmmm… Major point of this editorial is the need for a larger budget for NHTSA.  I contend that SmartDrivingCars are new modes, especially Driverless, for which we need a new safety regulator which has electronic technology and AI in its wheelhouse and not structural design, crash tests, airbags, seat-belts…which are NHTSA’s expertise.   NHTSA has a tough enough job dealing with conventional road  vehicles.  Just as trucks (FMCA), trains (FRA) and airplanes (FAA) have their own, this new mode including Safe-driving, Self-driving along with Driverless needs its own. 

Furthermore, on the minor points… I’ve already commented or the irrelevance/irresponsibility of the Pew report, giving credibility to NTSB’s findings on the Joshua Brown crash is disappointing, ( although they do specify that Brown was cutoff ("truck illegally crossing in front")),  and the NYT editorial board really doesn’t understand the fundamental and substantial difference between Self-driving and Driverless (and it is more than just ‘fully").  Alain

Tesla is expanding its insurance program to the US and Canada

F. Lambert, Oct 13, "Last year, we published an exclusive report revealing that Tesla was working on a new car insurance program, which it started offering to its customers in Australia and Hong Kong. Tesla executives have since been talking about working more closely with insurance companies as self-driving technology improves.  Now we learn that Tesla is preparing to launch the same program in North America.’s called InsureMyTesla and it features custom insurance plans for the automaker’s electric vehicles underwritten by insurers partnering with Tesla.

In Hong Kong, Tesla is partnering with AXA General Insurance and in Australia, the automaker released its new plan with QBE Insurance.  Now Electrek has learned from sources that Tesla partnered with Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Aviva to offer the service in the US and Canada respectively. They are getting ready to launch the programs and start marketing them to customers.  Read more Hmmmm…  Here we go!  This is the beginning of the total disruption of both the consumer and the corporate auto/truck/bus insurance business in the US.  Alain

Can LeBron James make us less afraid of self-driving cars?

A. Hawkins, Oct 9, "Intel taps basketball’s biggest star to build trust in autonomous vehicles.  …Starting today, James will headline a broadcast and digital ad campaign aimed at building trust in autonomous vehicles. The campaign, which features a trepidatious James getting in the backseat of a driverless sedan, will lead up to the NBA season opener between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics on October 17th. It’s the first time self-driving cars have been marketed to the general public, and it’s airing before this technology is even commercially available…"   Read more Hmmmm… See Video  I wish that Intel would pay attention to California and call this Driverless cars and NOT Self-driving (or autonomous or Level24876 or ??? which are nothing but confusing.)  which requires the presence of a human driver capable of taking over like SuperMan "saving the day" should something be about to happen!   (Not that any of us are such good drivers that we are capable of "saving the day" nor will have been trained and certified to do that.)  Alain

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT A SELF-DRIVING CAR IS, AND IT’S BECOMING A PROBLEM

A. Marshall, Oct 12, " "WE HAVE NOW self-driving cars." So declared no less an authority than the United States’ chief of transportation, Secretary Elaine Chao, in a May interview with Fox Business. "They can drive on the highway, follow the white lines on the highway, and there’s really no need for any person to be seated and controlling any of the instruments.”
This is wrong. …"    Read more Hmmmm…I agree!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m blue in the face from saying this.  There is nothing but confusion out there.  Alain

Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety

Oct 2017 "Today, our country is on the verge of one of the most exciting and important innovations in transportation history—the development of Automated Driving Systems (ADSs), commonly referred to as automated or self-driving vehicles…" Read more  Hmmmm… Whatever!  At least US DoT has moved on from Connected Vehicles, but it fails to really champion what will deliver most of the Safety which is AEB that works; what I call Safe-driving cars.  Much of this report is an effort to make sure Self-driving cars don’t lose all of the Safety benefits gained by Safe-driving cars. With respect to Driverless, it completely fails to address its fundamental difference from Self-driving.  Given that highway deaths continue to increase,we’ll need a version 3.0 very soon.  Alain

Autonomous Vehicles for the Postal Service

RARC-WP-18-001, Oct 2, "Autonomous vehicles (AVs) that are able to partially or fully drive themselves could become a reality within the next decade.  AV technology promises to increase safety, reduce fuel costs, and improve worker productivity. More importantly, it has the potential to change the nature of the transportation and delivery industries, and to spark new business models…." Read more Hmmmm… Certainly the postal service should ONLY buy Safe-driving vehicles (as should any/all fleet owners).  The savings in liability expenses resulting from reduced crashes will more than pay for the technology.  Driverless parking and Platooning are a real stretch and likely have IncrementalBenefit/IncrementalCost ratios substantially less than 1.0.  Driverless unlocks completely new delivery strategies that readily dovetail with what Amazon must be thinking… Mail and package delivery in the wee hours of the morning.  Unfortunately the report has no input from Amazon or Waymo. Alain

NVIDIA unveils next-generation platform for fully autonomous cars

E. Auchard, Oct 10, " Silicon Valley graphics chipmaker NVIDIA unveiled on Tuesday the first computer chips for developing fully autonomous vehicles and said it had more than 25 customers working to build a new class of driverless cars, robotaxis and long-haul trucks.The third generation of NVIDIA’s Drive PX automotive line, code-named Pegasus, is a multi-chip platform the size of car license plates with datacenter-class processing power.

Pegasus can handle 320 trillion operations per second, representing roughly a 13-fold increase over the calculating power of the current PX 2 line.  A single NVIDIA Xavier-class processor can be used for level 3 semi-autonomous driving, while a combination of multiple mobile and graphics processors would run level 5 full-scale driverless cars, the company said…." Read more Hmmmm… Excellent. Alain

Self-driving cars are on a collision course with our crappy cities

A. Hawkins, Oct 13, "…A new crop of research released this week underscores some salient facts about our increasingly automated future: self-driving cars will reshape the way our cities look and feel; the services through which most of us will experience this technology, ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, are shockingly creating more traffic problems than they are curing; and too many cities are failing to plan for this fast-approaching future…."  Read more Hmmmm… This is largely a lead in to the next posting from the RPA; however, it and the RPA report fail to realize that Driverless makes auto-like on-demand ubiquitous mobility extremely affordable if shared, when appropriate; just as we share, when appropriate, the use of elevators.  That kind of mobility service will lead to a much different city than individually owned and personally used  Self-driving cars.  Alain

New Mobility: Autonomous Vehicles and the Region

Regional Plan Association, Oct 2017, "Autonomous vehicles are one of the most exciting emerging mobility solutions, but also one with many unknowns.  Will AVs be as transformative and as ubiquitous as smartphones have become in shaping how we think about moving around? Or will they be more like telecommuting – a trend that is still yet to seriously alter transportation patterns in the region?…

This brief provides an overview of AV technology, the barriers to adoption, and when we should anticipate AVs in the region. It analyzes current and past trends that could affect AVs and evaluates how AVs might impact the built environment
in our cities and suburbs. Finally, it summarizes RPA’s findings and guidance for preparing for the eventual rise of AVs.  Read more Hmmmm… This report does address the issues, and asks the important questions (but as with all of these, provides few answers.)  It does focus on AVs (and not on CVs). As with essentially every other report, it continues to adopt the "Levels" of the technology rather than the fundamental differences between Self-driving (which fundamentally reduces the disutility of driving by individuals and thus may well make the distant suburbs even more attractive.  In contrast, the fleet-oriented Driverless versions are basically high-quality shared-ride transit that could substantially enhance the attractiveness of middle-density near-in urban living.  Alain

LM Advisors  A Train Without Tracks: Talking Points on the Impact of AV on Land Use

G. London, Oct 4, "The inevitable arrival of autonomous vehicles (AV), will be a game-changer for Cities and real estate developers.  Here is my breakdown on some of the more interesting possible impacts:"…" Read more Hmmmm...  A reasonable list.  Alain

Tesla is adding automatic emergency braking to ‘Autopilot 2.5’ cars with new update

F. Lambertm Oct 11, "… As we previously reported, Tesla’s recently introduced a new Autopilot hardware suite, dubbed “2.5”, in all its vehicles to enable more power and redundancy for its future self-driving capability.  The new hardware has been under a ‘calibration period’, which resulted in those vehicles not having ‘automatic emergency braking’. Now we learn that Tesla started gradually rolling out the safety feature…. Tesla started pushing a new software update today that activates the automatic emergency braking feature in those cars with the latest Autopilot hardware.  Under the new update, the feature will be still limited to up to 50 mph. In April, Tesla had a similar rollout for vehicles equipped with Autopilot 2.0 cars, but it was actually limited to 28 mph.   Tesla updated the feature to work at full speed two months later and the speed limit is also expected to eventually be lifted for Autopilot 2.5 cars…." Read more Hmmmm… It is rather amazing that AEB wasn’t the first feature in AutoPilot.  The fear is, of course, false alarms, whereby full brakes are applied when no danger exists.  However, nothing happens instantaneously and false alarms tend to not persist, so an intelligent AEB should slow you down as the danger evolves and not descend into a situation in which it is too-little, too-late. 

The article further states: The automaker describes its automatic emergency braking (AEB) system:
“Automatic Emergency Braking, a new collision Avoidance Assist feature, is designed to automatically engage the brakes to reduce the impact of an unavoidable frontal collision with another vehicle. The brakes disengage when you press hard on the accelerator pedal, release the brake pedal, or sharply turn the steering wheel.” This clearly points out the problem with having a human in the loop.  First the AEB waits too long, assuming that the human is going to do something.  When the human eventually does the wrong thing, sharply turns the wheel, the system turns off and the car rolls and kills the driver.  This AEB is at best a crash-mitigation system and not a crash avoidance system and should be called: "Too-Little, Too-Late, Marginally -Better-Than-Useless AEB".   Alain

PodCasts

Smart Driving Cars Podcast Episode 7

F. Fishkin, Oct 12, Episode 7 …. California to allow completely driverless vehicle testing, advances in Greenville County, South Carolina and Australia. Is public ready? Many Tesla owners are, while Intel hires LeBron and Waymo partners with MADD to push the technology forward.

Smart Driving Cars Podcast Episode 6

F. Fishkin, Sept 30, " This edition: moves in Washington, coming innovation from Cadillac, Tesla moving to Intel, Uber out of London, Ford working with Lyft and James Dyson!" Listen Hmmmm… Nice.  Alain

Some other thoughts that deserve your attention

 

On the More Technical Side

https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/

Half-baked stuff that probably doesn’t deserve your time

C’mon Man!  (These folks didn’t get/read the memo)"

Calendar of Upcoming Events:

Nov 8-10
Las Vegas, NV
Smart City, Smart Transit, Smart Energy

2nd Annual Princeton SmartDrivingCar Summit
May 16 & 17, 2018
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
Save the Date

Recent Highlights of:

Friday, October 6 , 2017

FHWA Awards $4 Million Grant to South Carolina’s Greenville County for Automated Taxi Shuttles

Press Release, Oct 4, "Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) officials today awarded a $4 million Advanced Transportation and Congestion Management Technologies Deployment (ATCMTD) grant to South Carolina’s Greenville County for its automated taxis.

“Technology is the future of U.S. transportation,” said Acting Federal Highway Administrator Brandye L. Hendrickson. “These funds will help Greenville County lead the nation into a future with more driverless vehicles, which will improve mobility for some and reduce traffic congestion for all.”

County officials will use the funds to deploy an integrated system of “taxi-shuttles,” known locally as “A-Taxis,” on public roads. These are driverless taxis providing shuttle service to and from employment centers–expected to improve access to transportation for disadvantaged and mobility-impaired residents…" Read more Hmmmm… Wow!! FHWA is actually going to fund aTaxis!!!  Congratulations, Fred Payne!  This is a non-trivial achievement.  Alain

Friday, September 29, 2017

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Driver Errors, Overreliance on Automation, Lack of Safeguards, Led to Fatal Tesla Crash

Press Relaes, Sept 12, "The National Transportation Safety Board determined Tuesday that a truck driver’s failure to yield the right of way ( a fact )and a car driver’s inattention due to overreliance on vehicle automation (  a deduction among several others that can easily be made, including:  the failure to yield was so egregious that there was nothing that he could do about it except lift his arms to protect his head and he wasn’t inattentive.  What the truck was doing was so absurd, it wasn’t believable. ) are the probable cause of the fatal May 7, 2016, crash near Williston, Florida…" Read carefully as well as links below.  Hmmmm… Wow!  Seems as if NTSB has decided to use this crash as a platform to weigh-in on automation.  A fact and a questionable deduction are given equal weight in reaching ‘probable’ cause.  Interesting  Probability Theory going on here.  "… Findings in the NTSB’s report include:

• The Tesla’s automated vehicle control system was not designed to, and could not, identify the truck crossing the Tesla’s path or recognize the impending crash. Therefore, the system did not slow the car, the forward collision warning system did not provide an alert, and the automatic emergency braking did not activate. "   This is an enormously damaging finding that should motivate the NTSB to investigate ALL of the forward collision warning and emergency braking systems that are on the market today.  Are any of them designed and do any of them work in cutoff situations? 

• …, highway design … were not factors in the crash.   The turn lanes at this intersection have no traffic control devices, or signs (yield or stop) to discourage the running of the turn. This isn’t a design issue? Doesn’t seem as if the NTSB considered that maybe, because there was no traffic or ???, the truck driver ran the turn wide, crossing Brown’s lane at maybe even 590 ft/sec.

…The NTSB issued a total of seven safety recommendations based upon its findings, with one recommendation issued to the US Department of Transportation, three to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, two to the manufacturers of vehicles equipped with Level 2 vehicle automation systems, and one each to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Global Automakers. …
…Reiterated Recommendations
As a result of its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board reiterates the following safety recommendations:
To the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Develop minimum performance standards for connected vehicle technology for all
highway vehicles. (H-13-30)
Once minimum performance standards for connected vehicle technology are developed,
require this technology to be installed on all newly manufactured highway vehicles. (H-
13-31)   What???  C’Mon Man!!!  Hasn’t the NTSB gotten the memo?  This has NOTHING to do with "Connected Vehicles" .
…"The abstract of the NTSB’s final report, that includes the findings, probable cause and safety recommendations is available online at https://go.usa.gov/xRMFc. The final report will be publicly released in the next several days.  The docket for this investigation is available at https://go.usa.gov/xNvaE. …. Alain

Friday, September 8, 2017

CONGRESS UNITES (GASP) TO SPREAD SELF-DRIVING CARS ACROSS AMERICA

A. Marshal, Sept 7, "ON WEDNESDAY, THE House of Representatives did something that’s woefully uncommon these days: It passed a bill with bipartisan support. The bill, called the SELF DRIVE (Safely Ensuring Lives, Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution) Act (H.R. 3388), lays out a basic federal framework for autonomous vehicle regulation, signaling that federal lawmakers are finally ready to think seriously about self-driving cars and what they mean for the future of the country…. Lawmakers, for their part, hope the legislation strikes a balance between allowing tech and car companies to test whatever, wherever, and giving them enough leeway to try stuff out, collect some data, and determine the best way to operate vehicles without a driver….
First, the legislation works out a way for the federal government’s rules to trump state laws and rules. It officially gives the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration power to regulate vehicle design, construction, and performance—the way it does with, well, normal cars. States still have authority over vehicle registration and licensing, but they’ll have a harder time making demands about what goes on inside the car….
Second, the legislation requires autonomous vehicle manufacturers be deliberate about the way they share their passengers’ data….
Finally, the legislation makes it a lot easier for self-driving cars to hit the road….
What’s Next?  Well, this is just the first half of this process. Now the Senate has to pass its own bill. Then both houses will work together to come up with compromise legislation that the president can sign…."  Read more Hmmmm… While not a high bar, this is likely to be the best thing Congress has done so far this year.  Putting the burden on NHTSA when it has so much to do with conventional cars may be just too much.  Since all of this, especially Driverless, is so radically new, it probably deserves a new ‘Administration’, a new entity, that has a clean sheet of paper with which to work this technology, much as trucks and airlines have with their own ‘Administration’.  Alain

Friday, September 1, 2017

Automated Vehicles: Are We Moving Too Fast or Too Slow?

M. Sena, Sept, ’17, "ARE WE MOVING too fast to get ‘No Humans Needed’ automated vehicles onto our roads, or are we dragging our feet? The Move Faster lobby says every day that passes without robots driving all our cars, close to a million people die needlessly in traffic accidents.  Here are the numbers, and they are grim:…

The Move Slower camp says that we don’t really know for sure that robots are better drivers than humans, we are not yet certain what changes will be required to the transport infrastructure to accommodate a mix of human and robot-driven vehicles and, perhaps most importantly, turning over our cars, trucks and buses to robots may be just another nail in the human race’s coffin….

… I am arguing in favor of caution…." Read more Hmmmm… First, as I have pointed out many times, the safety objective can be fully obtained with Safe-driving (automated collision avoidance and lane keeping) and doesn’t need Self-driving (automated with a ready and able driver just waiting to "save the day" and take control and drive conventionally)  or Driverless (no one is there to take control and/or there are no controls available to drive conventionally).  The mobility objective (leveling the mobility ‘playing field’ (affordable on-demand ubiquitous mobility) for everyone (including goods) requires Driverless (is not addressed by Safe- or Self-driving vehicles).  With respect to safety, there can be no support for anything more than politically-correct caution because there is no evidence to date that any of the automated collision avoidance systems and automated lane centering systems cause any crashes.  So it should be ‘ full steam ahead’!

With respect to our desire to address the mobility objective, which requires Driverless, extreme caution is where we are (we are still at ‘absolute zero’) and the enormity of the undertaking is so large that extreme caution is all that is possible.   To my knowledge, we have had only one ride (by Waymo) that was ‘Driverless in mixed traffic on an unaltered/unprepared public street’. (and that ride was likely (and appropriately) monitored remotely by an army of Waymo engineers ready to take over if anything bad or challenging was about to happen. So while we have logged ‘the first VMT (vehicle mile traveled)’,  we aren’t yet to even two decimal places of VMT (100th VMT).  Caution is what we have been doing and is the only thing that we can do.  But we must get on with it else we make zero dent in the mobility objective.  (Self-driving is all about enhancing the comfort and convenience of the conventional private automobile and enhancing the existing legacy auto industry.  While it claims, it doesn’t deserve, the safety kudos and it exacerbates rather than soothe the mobility gap between the haves and have-nots.).   See also the other articles in this issue of The Dispatcher.   Alain

Friday, August 25, 2017

Inside Waymo’s Secret World for Training Self-Driving Cars

A. Madrigal, aUG 23, " a corner of Alphabet’s campus, there is a team working on a piece of software that may be the key to self-driving cars. No journalist has ever seen it in action until now. They call it Carcraft, after the popular game World of Warcraft….Hmmmm…  Waymo’s naming should have been a play of GTA V such as "Maximus Furtum IV". Oh, but that’s our version of this.   🙂 Alain
 
…Scenarios like this form the base for the company’s powerful simulation apparatus. “The vast majority of work done—new feature work—is motivated by stuff seen in simulation,” Stout tells me. This is the tool that’s accelerated the development of autonomous vehicles at Waymo…
…Collectively, they now drive 8 million miles per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 2.5 billion virtual miles…
…In that virtual space, they can unhitch from the limits of real life and create thousands of variations of any single scenario, and then run a digital car through all of them….
…Not surprisingly, the hardest thing to simulate is the behavior of the other people. It’s like the old parental saw: “I’m not worried about you driving. I’m worried about the other people on the road.”…
…They call it “fuzzing,” and in this case, there are 800 scenarios generated by this four-way stop. It creates a beautiful, lacy chart—and engineers can go in and see how different combinations of variables change the path that the car would decide to take….
…“That iteration cycle is tremendously important to us and all the work we’ve done on simulation allows us to shrink it dramatically,” Dolgov told me. “The cycle that would take us weeks in the early days of the program now is on the order of minutes.”…
…The power is that they mirror the real world in the ways that are significant to the self-driving car and allow it to get billions more miles than physical testing would allow. For the driving software running the simulation, it is not like making decisions out there in the real world. It is the same as making decisions out there in the real world…"  Read more Hmmmm… Excellent!! However, the description focuses on the ‘testing’ side.  What about the ‘training’ side?  Not much divulged here.   Alain

Monday, August 21, 2017

Driverless-Car Outlook Shifts as Intel Takes Over Mobileye

E. Boudette, Aug 8, "…Mobileye will remain based in Israel, and its co-founder Amnon Shashua will head all of Intel’s autonomous-vehicle efforts. The other founder, Ziv Aviram, is retiring from Mobileye to focus on another company he started, OrCam, which makes artificial-vision devices that allow the visually impaired to understand text and identify objects…" Read more Hmmmm…  Will Intel really not screw this up?   Alain

Monday, August 7, 2017

Cadillac’s Super Cruise ‘autopilot’ is ready for the expressway

M Burns, Aug 3, "Cadillac is about to start selling vehicles with an autonomous driving mode …Once the light bar on top of the steering wheel turns green, the driver can let go…

“Wait for the green light and let go,” the Cadillac engineer instructed. That’s it. The car was driving itself. I, the person behind the steering wheel, was no longer the driver. Cadillac’s Super Cruise system was driving.  The 2018 Cadillac CT6 sped along US-23 under the direction of Super Cruise. Traffic was light and the weather was perfect. The system held the Cadillac sedan in lane and responded appropriately to traffic. I spent an hour on the expressway and touched the steering wheel and pedals only a few times.  Super Cruise made the drive boring. I think that’s the point….

When active, Super Cruise controls the steering and speed, but again, only on an expressway. This is done through on board sensors and using GPS and mapping data. GM employed GeoDigital, a startup in GM Venture’s portfolio, to map 160,000 miles of expressways in the U.S. and Canada. The car company then used Super Cruise-equipped vehicles to test each mile.

Cadillac’s system also lacks several autonomous features found on Autopilot including the ability to pull the car out of a garage and change lanes by using the turn signals. Hmmmm…  fluff features with little value.

Super Cruise’s IR sensors tracks eye location and head movements. As long as the driver looks at the road every seven to 20 seconds, the system works as expected.  Hmmmm… Fantastic!

General Motors will have to rely on independently owned dealerships to correctly position this product and train buyers on its capabilities. Hmmmm… Yup!

For better or worse, Super Cruise is built into the CT6 like a standard system and not something a driver must use every time they’re on an expressway. This should help timid buyers.  Super Cruise feels like a feature ready for the masses. The system is deeply integrated into the vehicle and using it is akin to using cruise control or turning on the lights. There’s a button for Super Cruise on the steering wheel. Press the button when the system is available and it works. It’s that easy to turn a driver into a passenger. Read more Hmmmm…  Over the air updates?  See also Motor Trend’s view: "… a stand-alone option (as yet unpriced) on CT6 models with the premium luxury trim package and as standard equipment on top Platinum models (the price of which went up $500 for 2018, if that’s any indication)…."  Finally, I guess that I’ll have to go test drive one.  Alain