Loud Wake Up Calls from Columbus and VW

Two mostly inactive contestants in different aspects of the race to driverless are announcing plans to push full steam ahead. One is a car manufacturer and the other is a Midwestern state in the US.

Join the label club

I didn't even have Volkswagen in the index to this blog. The company has been absent from the driverless race. Not any more. The company is making waking up noises to signal its intentions.

Like Ford Motor Company, VW is aiming for a 2021 rollout of fully autonomous vehicles. Both companies are rejecting the Tesla/Nissan approach of incrementally increasing autonomous features of partially self-driving cars. According to the Reuters article, VW is hiring 1,000 software engineers and developing a much larger presence in Silicon Valley.

On the way to Chicago, Get Graeters Ice Cream

There is a reason to go to Columbus, OH, and it is Graeter's Ice Cream. I like the place on Main Street in Bexley, which is a town surrounded on all four sides by the city of Columbus, but that is a whole other story. Columbus is the state capital, though driverless testing will not be happening there anytime soon.

Ohio is planning to open up a highway - actually one US interstate highway - to driverless testing. I-80 does not go through Columbus, so sorry about the Graeters recommendation. You'll be going to a different ice cream place somewhere in Cleveland or Toledo. So we're talking an interstate highway, with cars switching lanes at 80 mph, or 70 mph in heavy traffic, in the mix with testing vehicles. Okay, I'm told that I-80 has much less traffic than I-70, but still. The testing could begin by the end of this year.

Four benefits of driverless testing on I-80:

1. Ice and snow in the winter.

2. Flat and straight. (I'm not sure why that is a benefit as the people of Seattle and San Francisco will one day be clamoring for rides in driverless vehicles.)

3. The road already has a fiber network.

4. Space available on the roadway for maintenance.