Cities Feet First? And Buy Driverless from Comma.ai in December, January?

Beverly Hills is jumping on the bandwagon - before there is one - to bring driverless transit shuttles to the pretty, enormously wealthy, city, really an enclave of Los Angeles. 

With its tall trees and pretty, oh-so-expensive houses, can't you see zipping around in a driverless shuttle while sipping a latte? (I take mine with actual dairy cream, but in Beverly Hills, you are probably talking a soy or almond latte crowd.)

Canada was first - but quietly

Toronto is already a year and a half into a two-year planning exercise to get ready for the driverless future and envision what it will look like. But where Beverly Hills differs is its proclamation to bring on the future now.

The Beverly Hills city council voted unanimously in favor of the transit shuttle. 

Maybe the city should contact George Hotz at Comma.ai, which just received more than $3 million in venture capital. Hotz, an arrogant and brilliant former hacker, whom Tesla tried to hire, is vowing that by the end of the year - that's 2016 - he will be selling a self-driving kit or $1000 or less. 

So for $999 (and the jitsu knife for free?), Hotz will sell the camera, sensors, and software. Unlike the piece-by-piece, rule-by-rule approach to driverless technology improvement, Hotz is "teaching" the vehicle. The software learns and accumulates knowledge. 

Here's yesterday's Bloomberg news interview with Hotz. 

Nocturnal, too?

I don't know whether Hotz's car is ready for night-time driving, but Ford is letting it be known that it's driverless cars can "see" at night. In fact, they don't need lights because of the LIDAR technology. Here's the best video news coverage I have seen. Velodyne is the manufacturer of the in-the-dark technology.

And in a land far away, ...

A 2000 mile driverless journey has already started with its first mile in China. The car will drive on highways and, I think, in city traffic in several cities, including Beijing. The wording of the article is somewhat unclear when it comes to urban streets. The company is not Baidu, but Chang'an Automobile. This is a state-owned, no-frills, company.

Since I'm reporting on ambitious plans today, I'll add that Chang'an plans to begin selling driverless cars in 2018. Okay that's my interpretation of the words "put into commercial use." Maybe they are thinking more in terms of taxi pods. Not sure.