8.22-NetworkCar-052120

Thursday, May 21, 2020

SmartDrivingCar.com/8.22-NetworkCar-052120
22nd edition of the 8th year of SmartDrivingCars

Technology driving safer transport

H. Zhao, May 1, “This edition of ITU News Magazine discusses the latest trends in connected cars, new
ITU initiatives to improve smart transportation — and key insights from the annual Symposium
on the Future Networked Car (FNC‑2020), a gathering of top experts hosted by ITU and UNECE. Participants at the 5 March event discussed the technical, business and regulatory actions required to build public trust in connected, automated vehicles.

They highlighted the state of the art in automotive cybersecurity. Together, they explored the status
and future of safety-critical radio‑ communications for the road, and they presented the latest developments in the review of regulations governing road transport.

FNC‑2020 participants also had the opportunity to consider the crucial role of the latest 5G connectivity technologies in delivering safer and more effective transport. Read on to learn about the experts’ insightful discussions at the event, how ITU’s work is supporting the development of Intelligent Transport Systems —
and what key industry players are doing to leverage the power of ICTs for better transport.” Read more Hmmmm… This topic will be at the heart on the next Zoom-Tank Zoom-inar on June 1 (or June 15??)@ 2PM. An eloquent summary of this topic/symposium was presented by Michael Sena in his April 2020 edition of The Dispatcher. Alain

SmartDrivingCars Pod-Cast Episode 157 – Grayson Brulte

F. Fishkin, May 21, “Global auto makers must completely re-think their autonomous mobility strategy as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. So says innovation strategist Grayson Brulte of Brulte & Company….who joins Princeton’s Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin. Plus…Waymo, Tesla, Uber and more.” “Alexa, play the Smart Driving Cars podcast!“. Ditto with Siri, and GooglePlay … Alain

SmartDrivingCars Zoom-Cast Episode 157 – Grayson Brulte

Video version of SmartDrivingCars PodCast 157 – .… Alain

The Smart Driving Cars podcast is made possible in part by support from the Smart Transportation and Technology ETF, symbol MOTO. For more information: www.motoetf.com.

SmartDrivingCar Zoom-inar 002 The Future of Public Roadway Transit

(Will the Bus be Thrown Under the Bus?)

SmartDrivingCar Zoom-inar 003 Connected Cars: Maximizing Society’s Welfare (aka Communism) or Maximizing the Individual’s Welfare (aka Capitalism)

Live: Monday, June 1, 2:00pm New York Time

Free Pre-registration is required

Motor Vehicle Fatality Rates Jump 14% in March Despite Quarantines, Says National Safety Council

Press release, May 20, “Preliminary estimates from the National Safety Council show that as Americans began driving less and covering fewer miles, the emptier roads became more lethal. Early data indicate a year-over-year 14% jump in fatality rates per miles driven in March, in spite of an 8% drop in the total number of roadway deaths compared to March 2019. The actual number of miles driven dropped 18.6% compared to the same time period last year. The mileage death rate per 100 million vehicle miles driven was 1.22 in March compared to 1.07 in March 2019.

Through the first three months of 2020, the following states have experienced notable increases in the number of roadway deaths: Arkansas (16%), California (8%), Connecticut (42%), Illinois (11%), Louisiana (23%), Nevada (10%), New York (17%), North Carolina (10%), Oklahoma (9%), Tennessee (6%) and Texas (6%).

States with notable decreases include Arizona (-4%), Hawaii (-32%), Idaho (-28%), Iowa (-13%), Maryland (-13%), Michigan (-12%), Oregon (-24%) and South Carolina (-12%)….” Read more Hmmmm…I didn’t expect that… the fatalityRate increasing so much. 14% is a big number. What will it be April ’20 v April ’19? Are alcohol sales responsible? Anxiety/stress??

The naive policy implications of this is that congestion is good if your primary policy objective is Safety. However, in “2008” VMT went down, but no where near as much as it has gone down in March (and April, and …) I’m surprised that VMT was down only 18.6, but, of course, I’m sitting here in a bubble in New Jersey and driverless cars are everywhere… just sitting in people’s driveways and garages all day long with no place to go 🙂. Alain

Waymo CEO on how the Covid-19 pandemic could affect ride sharing long-term

P. LeBeau, May 22,”John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, joins CNBC’s Phil LeBeau and “Squawk Box” to discuss how ride sharing services and autonomous vehicle development could be affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.” See video Hmmmm… Well worth watching. While safety is indeed a fundamental necessity of this technology, it is a shame that he doesn’t emphasize the mobility opportunities that this technology can deliver to the mobility disadvantaged. That may be because Waymo today is focused on operating in communities where there are few mobility disadvantaged . It seems as if those on the margin are not their current customer set. They should really think about serving diverse communities such as Trenton NJ rather than just those that today are dominated by upper end overly entitled individuals that already have more than enough great ways to get from where they are to where they want to go. Alain

Top safety official at Waymo self-driving unit stepping down

D. Shepardson, May 21, “Alphabet Inc’s Waymo self-driving unit said on Thursday that its chief safety officer, Debbie Hersman, was stepping down but would remain as a consultant to the company. Hersman, the former chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), joined the company in 2019 to oversee its product safety program.

“We can confirm that Debbie has decided to return to her family home on the east coast and will continue on as a consultant to Waymo,” the company said in a statement….” Read more Hmmmm… Given Waymo’s essentially perfect safety record, Debbie and everyone else at Waymo has done a great job. Again, safety is absolutely necessary in the roll out of this technology. Without it being perceived to be safe, the technology is DoA! Perception of safety is actually tougher than safety because it needs to not only be safe, but overcome fears, anxiety and the “made-up stuff”. Alain

GM Super Cruise is evolving into Ultra Cruise, for hands-off city driving

Reuters, May 19, “GM has a “big team” working on an advanced version of its hands-free driving assistance system, Super Cruise, that will expand its capability beyond highways and apply it to city streets, the automaker’s vice president of global product development Doug Parks said Tuesday.

GM is also continuing to improve its existing Super Cruise product, Parks said during a webcasted interview at Citi’s 2020 Car of the Future Symposium. “As we continue to ratchet up Super Cruise, we continue to add capability and not just highway roads,” Parks said, adding that a separate team is working on the hands-free city driving product known internally as “Ultra Cruise.”

“We’re trying to take that same capability off the highway,” he said. “Ultra cruise would be all of the Super Cruise plus the neighborhoods, city streets and subdivisions. So Ultra Cruise’s domain would be essentially all driving, all the time.”…” Read more Hmmmm…Keep reading. There is no doubt GM is working on this, but given the caution exhibited by a Pre-Covid-19 GM, this may be largely Click-Bait. But given the pressure of Tesla and the Covid-19 Pause, a more progressive GM may emerge to save itself. Why isn’t plain old Super-cruise not “standard” across all models??? It is a very good system. Alain

Waymo’s AI uses vectors to predict pedestrian, cyclist, and driver behavior

K. Wiggers, May 14, “Called VectorNet, it ostensibly provides more accurate projections while requiring less compute compared with previous approaches.

Anticipating road agents’ future positions is table stakes for driverless cars, which by definition must navigate challenging environments without any human supervision. As tragically illustrated by the March 2018 collision involving an autonomous Uber vehicle and a bicyclist, perception is critical. … Wait a minute… Uber’s code explicitly disregarded stationary objects in the lane ahead (because of false positives). … Without it, self-driving cars can’t reliably make decisions about how to respond in familiar — or unfamiliar — scenarios.

That’s where VectorNet comes in. Unlike the convolutional neural networks it replaced, which operated on computationally expensive pixel renderings of maps, VectorNet ingests each map and sensor input in the form of vectors (sketches made up of points, lines, and curves based on mathematical equations)…” Read more Hmmmm… Wasn’t Waymo using “Vectors” to describe the road and objects ahead before they went to CNNs? Also, Aren’t the vectors in a coordinate system relative to the nose of the vehicle rather than in some fixed global system, Thus “centimeter accuracy” is “overkill” since the vector control points are not and don’t need to be that precise. “10 centimeter accuracy is just fine thank you. No???? Alain

Here’s how NYC is using powerful UV light to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses

A. Hawkins, May 20, “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched its pilot to use powerful ultraviolet lamps to disinfect New York City’s subways and buses.

The agency says it will deploy 150 mobile devices to clean subways, buses, and subway stations as part of the first phase of the pilot. The second phase will focus on MetroNorth and Long Island Rail Road commuter trains. The MTA says it will spend $1 million on the project, according to NY1.

The effort is part of a partnership between the MTA and Columbia University, which theorizes that UV light can be used to kill diseases on the transit system. The MTA is using the devices during its nightly cleaning procedures, for which it took the unprecedented step of shutting down the entire subway system for four hours every evening….

The dual-headed lamps were purchased from a Denver-based startup Puro Lighting, which says its UV lights “have efficacy against Class 2 and 3 viruses, including coronaviruses, SARS, Influenza and Ebola.”… “. Read more Hmmmm…. Let’s hope it works. If it does, then I suspect that it will “easy” to arrays of these lights in vehicles. Likely “easier/cheaper” than putting all the airbags in cars. 50 years ago, who would have thought that airbags would proliferate the interior of all cars? Alain

How Covid-19 preselects the winners in the race for autonomous vehicles

C. Lichtmannecker, May 11, “… But what kind of OEM board is now willing to allocate lots of its resources to a futuristic, complex robotaxi vision — a decade away before becoming relevant in market size and not yet proven to be viable? Who is opting for high technological, regulatory and competitive risks — when at the same time being responsible for hundreds of thousands of employees and their respective families? In his book, Clayton Christensen concludes that great, well-managed firms don’t miss out to stay ahead of the game because they made ‘bad’ decisions during crisis, but because making logical decisions may turn out to be the wrong thing to do after all — hence dilemma.

Even being aware of this Covid-19 quandary, it is now harder than ever for OEMs to uphold an ambidextrous business management which not only focuses on the core business but takes into account the long-term transition of the industry. A lot of these tough decisions must be made in the next weeks and months in OEM board rooms. In the context of AVs, they now run the risk of slowing down and waiting until market, technology and regulation are more mature — a strategy that gives way for other players to push them aside. …

Why is time advantage in AV development and roll-out important? And why can losing time now — by delaying and stretching investments for a couple of years — determine winners and losers?

There is evidence that companies rolling-out their technology earlier will have significant first-mover advantages over later entrants. This is due to the fact that network-effects are at work when it comes to learning and increasing autonomous driving functionality (there is a brilliant article on this topic). In the next years, this may not be too critical since most driverless vehicles will only be deployed in pilot environments with limited operational design domain (meaning designed to only properly operate on certain roads and in a very limited service area) and without facing real competition… ” Read more Hmmmm… Thoughtful presentation. The “Gartner Expectation” curve is somewhat useful but doesn’t map into sales/revenue/adoption/marketPenetration/… ?? Alain

Grayson Btulte @gbrult

G. Brulte, May 20, “As the global auto industry prepares for a significant uptick in car sales, auto companies must completely rethink their autonomous mobility strategy….” Listen to PodCast, Hmmmm… Put in more Safe-driving Car technology. Alain

Here’s how NYC is using powerful UV light to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses

A. Hawkins, May 20, “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched its pilot to use powerful ultraviolet lamps to disinfect New York City’s subways and buses.

Tesla installs more production robots at Fremont factory

F. Lambert, May 14, “Tesla is installing more production robots at its Fremont factory in order to increase capacity, according to new construction permits.:.

What I am really curious about is Tesla’s annual production capacity by the end of next year with Fremont, Berlin, Shanghai, and Austin. It will be such a different landscape for Tesla’s production than the current situation. My own guess is Tesla will have an overall annualized production capacity of 1 million cars by the end of 2021… ” Read more Hmmmm… If you can’t be using the facility, you might as well update it. Alain

Americans still don’t trust self-driving cars

A. Hawkins, May 19, “Self-driving cars are having a really rough time gaining our trust.

This is not a total shock considering autonomous vehicles remain theoretical and elusive for most people. The limited number of self-driving cars on the road today are mostly test vehicles that aren’t available to the riding public. Combine that with Americans’ very, shall we say, complicated feelings toward concepts like “freedom” and “control,” and you can see where this is going. Digging on technology in the streets, control freaks in the sheets…. “. Read more Hmmmm…. Actually, the more surprising number is that 25% think that AV tech is ready for prime time, since few of that 25% has ever seen one or ridden in one (unless the survey was extremely biases). Alain

CLEARING THE CONFUSION: Recommended Common Naming for Advanced Driver Assistance Technologies

May 2020, “Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have become increasingly prevalent on new vehicles, but the terminology used by automakers to describe them varies widely and so far has focused on marketing
strategies.

The common naming outlined is simple, specific and based on system functionality. The list is meant to aid in
reducing driver confusion and define the functions of ADAS in a consistent manner. This is critical to ensure
that drivers are aware these systems are designed to assist, not replace an engaged driver. …Fantastic…

The list is not meant to replace automaker proprietary system or package names, but rather help identify key
functions within those packages and provide clarity to consumers. The list will be continually refined as we
work with other stakeholders and as new systems are developed. …” Read more Hmmmm…What??? OEMs get to use whatever name they wish for whatever!? Who is going to use these names and who is going to do the translation between the OEM names and this terminology? Am I still going to need a PhD in Linguistics to understand what is in the car that someone is trying to sell to me? Is there a VIN code associated with each of these so that the customer knows which one of these features is in a particular car? (I know the answer. I’m just being nasty.)

Since this is only for ADAS (although the headline is … ADAT (Can’t even use consistent terminology throughout this fundamental document ), it must only apply to SAE “Level 2” vehicles. While this may help the naming, it doesn’t suggest performance measures for the features. Engines have horsepower, torque and fuel consumption measures. These systems seem to have no measures. Alain

Transportation Leaders Across the Country Report 50-to-90% Reduction in Traffic and Revenues Due to COVID-19

B. Cramer, May 21, “…During the briefing, national, state and regional transportation leaders discussed how COVID-19 social distancing and stay-at-home measures have led to the reduction in traffic and revenues of upwards of 90 percent, impacting the industry, the American driving public, our roads and bridges, and the future of transportation in the country.

“If this were any other year, we would be talking about Memorial Day traffic, one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. Instead, we are talking about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our nation’s economy and our daily lives. Since the middle of March our members’ toll facilities have seen traffic and revenue declines of 50 to 90 percent,” said Patrick D. Jones, executive director and CEO of IBTTA….” Read more Hmmmm… No places to go, Stay-cation! Alain

How coronavirus is accelerating a future with autonomous vehicles

Baidu, May 18, “…“Having been through the pandemic and supported the front line, we realize ‘automation’ and ‘intelligence’ are the best solutions for humans to respond to large-scale emergencies,” said Zhenyu Li, corporate vice president and general manager of the Baidu Intelligent Driving Group.

Baidu, one of the leaders in autonomous vehicle technology, has released 104 driverless vehicles in 17 cities across the country. These autonomous vehicles are helping carry out frontline anti-epidemic work such as cleaning, disinfecting, logistics, and transportation with support from partner companies. …” Read mo re Hmmmm… . How much did Baidu pay MIT Tech for this paid placement/advertisement ? Alain

Draft Program 4th Annual Princeton SmartDrivingCar Summit Postponed until Evening Oct. 20 through Oct. 22, 2020

A. Kornhauser, Feb 6, “The focus of the Summit this year will be moving beyond the AI and the Sensors to addressing the challenges of Commercialization and the delivery of tangible value to communities. We’ve made enormous progress with the technology. We’re doing the investment; however, this investment delivers value only if is commercialized: made available and is used by consumers in large numbers. Demos and one-offs are “great”, but to deliver value that is anywhere near commensurate with the magnitude of the investment made to date, initial deployments need to scale. We can’t just have “Morgantown PRT Systems” whose initial deployment has been nothing but enormously successful for 45 years (an essentially perfect safety record, an excellent availability record and customer valued mobility). Unfortunately, the system was never expanded or duplicated anywhere. It didn’t scale. It is a one-off.

Tests, demos and one-offs are nice niche deployments; however, what one really needs are initial deployments that have the opportunity to grow, be replicated and scale. In 1888, Frank Sprague, successfully deployed a small electric street railway system in Richmond, Va. which became the reference for many other cites. “… By 1889 110 electric railways incorporating Sprague’s equipment had been begun or planned on several continents…” Substantial scaled societal benefits emerged virally from this technology. It was eventually supplanted by the conventional automobile but for more than 30 years it delivered substantial improvements to the quality-of-life for many.

In part, the 4th Summit will focus on defining the “Richmond” of Affordable Shared-ride On-demand Mobility-as-a-Service. The initial Operational Design Domain (ODD) that safely accommodates Driverless Mobility Machines that people actually choose to use and becomes the envy of communities throughout the country. ” Read more Hmmmm… Draft Program is in flux. Consider all named individuals as “Invited yet to be confirmed”. Alain