Plenty of publicly available transportation pilot and permanent driverless projects are in the works. These can be somewhat neatly divided into taxipod and small or mini-bus transit. This post represents just a sample from recent news reports, but if you read this blog or other driverless news sources, you know there are pilots and plans in the works in England, Japan, Singapore, and the US. That is just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are others. That's what the index to the blog archives is for. Before the news, one cute video from Sweden that imagines a perhaps overly optimistic driverless future in a generic city with Lego people and ice cream cone and cardboard architecture, with sweet parks to replace parking lots.
Taxi and tandoori Construction should begin in India on a taxi-pod project in Gurgaon. This project appears similar to the Morgantown, West Virginia personal rapid transit (PRT) project built in the 1970s in the US. That's basically why I have not written about it before. The similarity with the Morgantown PRT being that the pods will operate on a fixed guideway rather than as automotive vehicles on roads. There is still an unresolved issue of which agency will be responsible for auditing the safety (and performance?) of the project. The project will start out with a 13-km pilot phase and the intent is to scale up to a full 70-km project. Careem - not Kareem Abdul Jabbar Okay, my basketball knowledge is not exactly current, but when I hear Kareem mentioned, the former basketball star is the one who comes to mind. That might be about to change because a Dubai driverless project with Careem is in the works. Careem, which is currently a ride hailing app (Uber-like) in the Middle East and Pakistan, plans to operate a driverless taxi-pod option in the future. The taxi-pods will be able to function solo or attach to other pods. Careem's partner, US-based Next Future Transportation, makes driverless pods. Careem is also partnering with Next Future Transportation to raise money for the project. The leadership of Dubai has been proclaiming its enthusiasm for driverless transportation for a while. Euro buses sans drivers Europe is a pretty transit-friendly place, but it's still nice to see transit again and again as a ground floor participant in driverless transportation. Mercedes Benz has created a driverless bus that has successfully been tested on an actual road in the Netherlands. It's called Future Bus. Now Mercedes is telling the world. There is a boring video, but it is very short. (It feels like the start to a horror movie with its cool, impersonal surroundings and muzak.) In the video, there is a driver and a driver's seat, but there's no hands on the wheel. The goal is to begin operations with the buses by 2020. Testing facilities - everyone wants one
Two testing facilities being discussed this week: the Smart Cities winner of Columbus, Ohio, and the long-planned Willow Run near Detroit, Michigan. The Columbus testing site is a track at a now-empty, unused stadium. Driverless transportation is just one facet of the winning Smart Cities project. The Columbus project focuses on using transportation to help neighborhoods with struggling, low income residents. If you've visited Columbus, you know this is a huge issue. Willow Run gets closer Not sure why Willow Run is taking so much time for the land to be purchased and whatever needs to be built at Willow Run, which is intended to be a driverless testing facility. This is former GM land - location of a GM WWII bomber facility - for which the state of Michigan is helping to fund the acquisition and infrastructure for. Also Michigan gets enough snow to adequately test driverless technology to be able to navigate real winters. But Willow Run is old news. It's the purchase agreement that just got signed. Here's the news in a nutshell.
The Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust on Monday announced a $1.2 million purchase agreement for the acquisition of 311 acres at Willow Run in Washtenaw County’s Ypsilanti Township.
Trucking companies investing and salivating If you are the owner of a large trucking company, I can only imagine your glee when considering the benefits of driverless hauling. No maximum limits on driver time, no rest stop shower and eating time, no obesity and other health problems to get bad PR about. Of course, there are details, but this is a huge opportunity. Daimler, one such company, is investing heavily in connected and autonomous systems (CV and AV). One of its buses just completed a complex, but quick AV test. CargoX is a freight broker working on a tech platform for AV and CV. It is now expanding internationally with the help of funding from Goldman Sachs. Click here for the trucking article. By the way, the Columbus Smart Cities program will include testing of truck platooning and driverless non-lead trucks near the airport. Platooning is a connected vehicle approach for trucks so they can travel quite close together (I'm thinking of brio train magnets). The webpage linked to has an incredibly bad video that demonstrates an awesome and seamless platooning experience. Legal stuff China has cold feet - for now - as far as allowing driverless vehicle testing on its roads. The country has ambitious plans, projects underway, and companies heavily invested in driverless. But until further notice, Chinese roads are off limits. However, players in China are actively working out the details of regulations that will allow driverless operations on public roads. Tesla crash news continued Here is a link to the letter to Tesla from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). The letter requests all sorts of information about the fatal crash in May and about all Tesla autopilot cars. No question that the NHTSA feels public pressure to investigate fully. There's competition with sibling agency NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), which is also investigating. Also NHTSA has no history of a close relationship with Tesla, in contrast to its coziness with the traditional automakers.
A California Assemblywoman has introduced a bill that would specifically permit the Contra Costa Transportation Authority to operate a pilot driverless shuttle at speeds of less than 35 MPH on public roads, with passengers, and - without a steering wheel. The bill, AB 1592, is limited to this one situation and even designates where the shuttle may operate. I'm guessing that Assemblywoman Bonillla is constrained by the fear in her legislature and wants to make sure that the pilot, already arranged, will be allowed to get off the ground, or rather on the road. Go transit! Woo hoo! Off in a quiet neighborhood of Pittsburgh, meanwhile Uber will be testing driverless vehicles in a Pittsburgh neighborhood - off the roads in a private now-unused site that is slated for future development, post-Uber use. The city believes that the Uber name will help home values for the post-Uber testing development. If this works out, no one will have to deal with pesky or murderous Uber drivers. Off in Texas and Colorado - off road all the way to Afghanistan
And a place called the Southwest Research Institute - or SwRI - in San Antonio and at a campus in Boulder is working on several driverless projects, some involving the military and some for navigation on unpaved roads, which the Institute says amount to 36 percent of US roads. There's also a lot of unpaved roads in Afghanistan and elsewhere in locations where soldiers are very much at risk of attack. They work on interesting projects for materials scientists. Stuff like vehicles that won't melt on other planets. I have a budding one in the family, so I'm always interested in fun projects such specialized smart people work on. Off in India, just some guys saving the world from sleepy drivers In India, one small team has created a driverless-in-a-box kit to turn any car into a self-driving one. Great story of the impetus and the development of the prototype car and the kit.
Type in your destination and ride - on a campus or in an office park - in the future. But for now, in India, a driverless shuttle is open to the public at the Auto Expo in Greater Noida, India. (Don't ask me where that it is; I know NY, DC, parts of Boston and Chicagoland, but not India.) And the pride part is that the vehicle - a transit-like shuttle - is made in India. Well, of course, it's the Indians who are proud. Sitting here in the US, I am smiling for them. One minor complaint here. For a shuttle that is open to the public, the vehicle looks quite unfriendly to people with disabilities. Other nice factoid Battery powered and can run for 150 km on one charge. That's 92 miles. Why do we even have the word factoid? Fact is sufficient.
Well, you could have, or maybe you did, hop on a driverless mini-bus at the recent ITS World Congress conference, where driverless shuttles transported attendees between sites. Over 11,000 attendees from around the world, a few shuttles, and no mishaps. I was going to link to an article with information about driverless transit pilots going on now or soon to be tested - with real-people as passengers. But the article is incomplete. That's how fast the developments are. To be complete requires daily following of this topic. Vacations = huge setback. Where can you ride a driverless bus or shuttle of some kind? Plan to travel in the new year. In 2016, there will be driverless opportunities in California, Japan, Singapore, England, a few places in Europe, and China. Not all will be on roads; some will be on a private campus of some kind. Okay, I'm not sure if the Chinese bus is accepting passengers yet. Boring ... In fact, an article I'm just reading from yesterday reminds me of the old news that the 2020 Olympics, to be held in Japan, will offer driverless taxi service. Japan, get with the program: Go for the driverless bus as well. Otherwise, you'll be behind Europe's CityMobil2, an office park and a university in California, and a bus in China. And to think I listened to baseball on Japanese transistor radios. Step up to the plate. If you want to invest One company that produces and develops technology that supports driverless vehicles to safely operate is expanding yet again. Nvidia, a California-headquartered company that does lots of its work in India is expanding in India to Pune, the country's seventh-largest city and a place that seems well worth a visit (I have never been to India, by the way, though almost everyone I know who has traveled there has ended up with a terrible gastrointestinal bug that lasted a month.)
After weeks of travel and lots of work - okay, mainly incredible numbers of emails - I am finally returning to writing about driverless developments. Even in just weeks, the pace of these developments is speeding up. It is not hyerbole to say that more countries, more universities, more municipalities, and more companies are joining this competition every day. We are at the point that there is quite a bit one can ignore, for example the patent for Ford's interior of a driverless car, which looks so similar to the Mercedes-Benz design that I wonder if Ford did not have a twelve year old trace it. Or Audi's almost-but-not-quite autonomous luxury sedan. I don't want an almost driverless vehicle, personally. What's new the last few weeks is mostly speculation - huge speculation - about Apple and worries about hacking driverless vehicles so that they stop, start zigzagging, or go straight off cliffs. No cute photos, just news. Everyone speculating about Apple Almost all of the speculation about Apple's foray into the driverless world is based on the Guardian article that reported on hard evidence of Apple's secret - or perhaps secretive is a better word - development of driverless vehicles. Here's articles with educated speculation based on the Guardian article as well as tea leaves. Christian Science Monitor NextGov University News University of Texas is getting to work on hacking/security issues with driverless technology. I'm seeing more and more articles about how easy it is to hack into any connected device, which includes driverless technology. For some reason, this and the you-ll-be-nauseous in a driverless vehicle have caught the media's attention. And in Canada, the University of Waterloo is getting the country's first driverless vehicle transit service. Varden Labs will operate a driverless shuttle at the university. The university president hitched a ride with a second-year engineering student. Catching a Ride on Campus Speaking of campus driverless shuttles, a driverless pod effort is being aimed at universities, amusement parks, and retirement communities. Seems that Auro Robotics is planning to push driverless, but avoid government regulations that control our roads. TechCrunch reports that Auro is already in agreement with Santa Clara University. Update 9/3/15: Driverless shuttle vehicles are already at the Santa Clara campus and will be giving driverless rides this semester during a three-month pilot program. One big plus of the Auro Robotics plan is that it will emphasize driverless vehicle safety in heavily pedestrian environments. Would be great to see that driverless networks will be safer for walking than the past century of human-controlled vehicles. Hacking Fears Abound From the same philosophy that brought you Murphy's law - updated for the 21st century - a common refrain, this time reiterated by National Defense Magazine: Anything that can be hacked (and that's anything) will be hacked. The attention in the last week or so has been on the easy hacking of driverless vehicles. You can add baby monitors, GPS devices, and a hundred other common devices that enable us to stay connected to personal information. It is remarkably easy to hack all of these devices and no one wants to be in a vehicle suddenly speeding, darting in and out of traffic, or careening off a cliff (that's all of the California coastline, by the way). No question that software developers involved with driverless technology must address this one; the insurance industry will make sure of that. Possibly legislators as well, but they are generally behind the eight ball, not being a class of tech-savvy, up-to-the-minute individuals. Independence Day Meanwhile an Indian startup has created a semi, but mainly, autonomous car for people who are blind or have serious visual impairments. The driver is the navigator and the car is designed to mimic a driving experience for the visually-impaired navigator. Now that we're on the verge of driverless and we're all going to give up the steering wheel, I'm not sure this invention will go anywhere, except, perhaps, to incrementally contribute to driverless technological development. And - why driverless for everyone? We humans are terrible drivers. It's an informative game.
