Popping Up Like Weeds from the Sidewalk

[Image from Cision PR Newswire.]

Gov. Hickenlooper of Colorado declared Monday, Dec. 4th to be Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Day. No word on store sales for that holiday. Part of Hickenlooper's C-and-AV Day photo op was to showcase Colorado's upcoming AV pilot project.

The declaration of the special day was a way for the pro-AV governor - whose administration paved the way for the driverless truck beer delivery PR stunt - to continue to highlight AV partners and Colorado's enthusiasm.

According to the press release, in very press-release-y language:

"Panasonic, a global leader in smart cities and smart automotive technology solutions, welcomed Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, Denver offices, where he proclaimed December 4 as "Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Day" to reinforce initiatives like Panasonic's connected vehicle partnership with CDOT's RoadX Program, as well as acknowledge EasyMile, a leader in autonomous technology, for their North American headquarters grand opening co-located within the Panasonic building."

Best of luck to Lauren Isaac of EasyMile as she awaits the birth of her baby. By the time that baby is a teenager, he or she will never need a driver's license. My own kids told me about six years ago that their generation would be the last for that.

Other EasyMile news is that the company is graduating, or rather expanding, from cute AV shuttles to real buses, AVs, of course. EasyMile is partnering with the French government and "IVECO, Sector, Transpolis, ISAE-SUPAERO, Ifsttar, Inria, and Michelin" to produce the AV buses. The buses will be large enough to transport 100+ passengers. (A warning to all of you traveling with more than one small child: Whether or not a bus has a driver, get on at a stop where you can sit together and where you do not have to stand holding a child of 30 pounds or one wearing a snow suit. AVs will not solve every transportation conundrum.)

Watch this nice video of the EasyMile AV shuttle at Bishop Ranch office park in California, being piloted in a partnership with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority.

In the state where everyone believes every visitor wants to move there

Look at the cute Colorado license plate for the EasyMile AV shuttle. It will be spring 2018 before regular passengers can get on board to ride the first-mile/last-mile route near Denver's 61st and Peña Station. Political and business partners came out to shine anyway for the early dog and pony show on Monday.

Perfect would be taking that shuttle from the commuter bus stop near Louisville, CO (near Boulder) to the Moxie Bread Company hipster bakery and coffee place. It's a Denver transit bus, so why not?

[Off topic: Moxie bialys are nowhere near the real thing, but their whole grain, naturally-leavened bread is excellent. In the bialy/bagel realm, I remain true to my pre-hipster Brooklyn roots.]

Pilots popping up everywhere

Nissan will be starting a pilot in Japan for app-based AV ridehailing. Will start with only two Nissan Leaf electric vehicles. The pilot will begin in March 2018.

Lyft riders in Boston's Seaport neighborhood may be experiencing AV ridehailing trips due to a pilot program and a partnership between Lyft and nuTonomy.  Delphi owns nuTonomy, which has experience in Singapore with AV pilots.

Previous posts about nuTonomy activity in Singapore: AV ridehailing in 2018; Singapore is a driverless sandbox; plus more posts about AV activity in Singapore.

Will vans be cool again?

The company first known for its cool vans is trying to climb back to regain that reputation. Volkswagon has developed an AV van called MOIA that will be launched as the vehicle for a ridehailing service. "The van-pooling MOIA service will launch in Hamburg in 2018 with 200 vans, letting passengers enter a departure point and destination in an app. "We've set ourselves the goal of taking more than a million cars off the roads in Europe and the USA by 2025," said MOIA CEO Ole Harms."

[Image from Endgadet.]

FYI: No flower power on these sleek, corporate-looking VW vans.

Fiskers has also developed an AV shuttle called Orbit and its shape varies from the cute boxy design of other companies. No word on when this van-like shuttle vehicle will appear on roads or where it will launch.

School bus without driver

[Image from Teague.]

So, I hope parents are aware that school bus drivers do not actually supervise children who ride the bus. I mostly walked my kids to school up to high school, but I overheard plenty of kid conversations about school bus rides.

The AV school bus design, named Hannah,  crafted by the Teague design firm is cute. The affluent-and-white world portrayed in the photographs suggests a crime-free, suburban paradise. In the real world, perhaps parent volunteers would be needed up to high school, especially in the prime cliquey years of fourth grade through middle school.

Still Looking Like State/University vs. State/University

Despite proposed national guidelines and lots of talk about how a national approach is needed so that driverless vehicles will be licensed, for want of a better word, to travel across jurisdictional and state lines, we continue to see a vacuum at the federal level in terms of legislation. That is to be expected because the United States Constitution established a system where it would be difficult, not easy, to pass legislation. Presently, there is no fire under Congress, no immediacy, for consensus to propel the enactment of a law. So the decision making remains with the states, which police and license motor vehicle travel and road design, building, and maintenance.

And in that vacuum, more and more states are seeing opportunity or, at least, they are attempting not to be left behind. Last week, I reported on Maryland, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Here are a few more, plus a sales tour for a driverless transit-like shuttle.

Nevada and transit?

Who would have thought that Nevada would be a leader in the testing of driverless transit? Or that Nevada will be the first state to have driverless transit-like shuttle pilots going on in multiple cities? Well, count me in as someone who is surprised because with my East Coast glasses on I did not look into a crystal ball a year or two ago and proclaim Nevada! And I did not read anyone else predicting this either.

Las Vegas is already a location for driverless experimentation and soon Reno, Carson City, and Sparks (a city I have never heard of) will be hosting driverless shuttles as part of a project out of the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC). This project is a collaboration among the RTC, the University of Nevada (link to Reno campus), transit, and others.

Sales tour for driverless transit-like service

Speaking of transit or transit-like, Transdev and Easy Mile are taking their cute driverless shuttle across the country to market it for providing transportation for events and on private campuses, basically off of public roads. Right now, the shuttle is in Florida, but they will be showcasing the vehicle in Atlanta, New Orleans, LA, San Jose, and Arlington, TX. 

Riding easy in the Sunshine state

Florida Polytechnic University is, perhaps, taking a first step to follow Carnegie Melon University and a few other universities, to train students in driverless vehicle software and design, except that the Florida course - only one course - is not growing out of anyone's research, but rather is an intentional move by the university. What remains to be seen is whether a program will grow out of the course, now being taught by a retired Air Force colonel, who has a background in computer science and drone technology. The course is based on one taught at MIT (that's Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

The Florida university is located right near the testing ground recently picked by the US Department of Transportation.

MIT spawn

It is not only Carnegie Melon and Stanford with spawn in the driverless world, MIT's offspring nuTonomy is doing pretty well in Asia and in its extended hometown of Boston, crossing over one of the bridges from Cambridge for its driverless testing and, hopefully, pilot project. The linked article is a nice update and summary of the nuTonomy Boston project. No doubt the very progressive and innovative MassDOT secretary, Stephanie Pollack, will make sure there is a welcoming environment in Massachusetts for driverless. She gave some great talks at the recent TRB (Transportation Research Board) conference. I am a big fan.

By the way, nuTonomy has lots of job openings in engineering, cybersecurity, and mapping.

And out on the Northern Plains

To show how popular it is for states to attract driverless testing, research, and industry, even very sparsely-populated states are trying to get in on the action. Here's an article from North Dakota about consideration of legislation and driverless testing possibilities. The state hasplenty of space, weather, and open roads. Not much congestion.

10 chosen sites

Just so I have this somewhere in my blog-file cabinet of driverless stuff, here is a link to the 10 chosen proving ground sites in the US. 

Happy New Year - and Driverless Testing

Boston

A successful hometown startup, nuTonomy, operating driverless vehicles in Singapore, has come back to Beantown to do driverless testing in a restricted area. Nothing unusual except that this is new for Boston and that its neighbor, Cambridge, spawned nuTonomy at MIT. Testing began this week.

Testing will be at low speeds and only in good weather, just like all Boston driving. Ha ha! Go to the Globe article and see a short unimpressive video of the initial spin.

Las Vegas

Sometime in 2017 this sin city, whether downtown, on the Strip, or both, will have a driverless shuttle. Two possibilities are Olli from Local Motors and NAVLY from Keolis. 

Video below is Nvidia's latest, this time with music and an attempt to generate excitement outside of nerd community.

Pennsylvania

Since its heyday with Philadelphia as the nation's capital and hosting the Continental Congress as well as the convention that produced the US Constitution, perhaps due to closed windows and doors in terrible summer heat (like hot yoga meets intellectual debate), the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has not been an urban leader (talking general reputation here), but it is fighting hard to keep Pittsburgh's prominent position in the race for driverless development, testing, and perhaps a real rollout - as opposed to what is essentially a PR pilot by Uber.

Actual news: Pennsylvania through its transportation agency, PennDOT, is throwing its hat into the USDOT ring to get funding for a driverless proving ground designation. Really no idea why it can't just be called a testing ground. This news is being reported everywhere.

Link to USDOT intent to designate proving grounds.

Michigan - Eastern time zone, but Midwest in nature

My brain is asking: Embarrassed by Trump, seeing marketing possibilities, needing highly-educated talent or all of the above? Ford canceled its plans for a plant in Mexico and will be staying more grounded in its ancestral homeland of Michigan, where it is now a progressive mobility company instead of pusher of car in every driveway - at least while it considers its transformation to be profitable. Ford will be producing its hybrid and driverless vehicles in its home state, to the happy applause of unions and Trump, making for interesting bedfellows. Yes, this news is everywhere; tons of articles if you want to spend ten more minutes reading.

Michigan has also applied to host a USDOT-approved proving ground, which will exist whether or not the national Department of Transportation designates it as such. I suspect the chances are excellent, however. A new administration in DC will want to reward those states that gave the Electoral College to Trump despite the popular vote for Hillary Clinton. Just a guess.

Balancing hobbies

So nice to take time off, but driverless never sleeps and to avoid Lucy-and-Ethel mind crushing mental experience of shoving metaphorical or actual chocolates in my mouth as they burst forth down the assembly line, I will be concentrating on driverless trends and what interests me. There's plenty of others speculating - 70 percent of driverless news - or reporting absolutely everything. Plus, I am also committed to finishing my 108 Breads project this year, which will require effort and assistance of friends who will serve as tasting committee for a significant challenge I have given myself for the last 14 or so breads. Project has achieved initial goals of (a) being busy as transitioned to empty nest and (b) learning about and experimenting with different doughs, pre-doughs, and bread making approaches. The empty nest is the new adolescence.

There's also a sudden burst of energy to do my artwork of paintings, collage, and book, so driverless has to fit in, but not obliterate, actual creative production ongoing in my small walk-in closet a/k/a art studio (sometimes using a sink elsewhere when water becomes necessary).

Today Is Sponsored by the Letter N

nuTonomy - One of the driverless cars tooling around Singapore in anticipation of AV-taxibot services got into an accident with a truck. In marked contrast to Tesla, but in taking a page from Google PR on handling minor accidents, nuTonomy has been up front about what happened: nuTonomy has halted driverless operations and it has released all data.

Nvidia - This AI savvy company is cuddling up with Tesla, which makes sense because the founder is the proud owner of a Tesla car. Musk and Huang, Nvidia's CEO, have met at various forums and now the companies of these friends are going to capitalize on Nvidia's AI system for driverless vehicles, DRIVE PX 2, which will be used in Tesla cars. 

DRIVE PX 2 is an end-to-end AI computing system that uses groundbreaking approaches in deep learning to perceive and understand the car’s surroundings… [and] lets carmakers first train their own deep neural networks on GPU supercomputers. Once loaded into the car, it processes the networks at high speed to provide the real-time, accurate response required for autonomous driving.

It is safe to say that Nvidia is the leading or one of the leading companies developing AI for driverless vehicles.

Nashville - The Tennessee city has been selected as one of five international cities for technical assistance in planning and technology to prepare for driverless and connected vehicles. The other cities are Austin, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles; plus, five more will be added within the next two months. Today is for the letter N, so we will celebrate Nashville. The program is officially called the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles and it aims to develop a set of policy recommendations for ways cities should plan and use their land and resources for when automated vehicles arrive on their roadways.

With a word from the letter W

Wheego is changing its image and its purpose from being a tiny electric car company to being an autonomous car company - yet another driverless testing permit for the state of California - with an emphasis on deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Using the word of the month, pivoting is what Wheego is doing and the pivot has a geographic element. The company is shifting its focus from the US to China. The new official name of Wheego is Wheego Technologies.

Alphabet bomb

Google is ready for its car business to go out on its own. Google's Alphabet car will soon be a standalone business. Corporate legal stuff (a technical term) is in the works. No plans released yet for how the cars or travel will be sold.

Grammar

Comma.ai has been stopped in its tracks. Slated to sell its driverless-in-a-box add-on for existing cars by the end of this year (within the next two months), NHTSA has warned Comma.ai to not sell its product due to possible conflicts with federal regulations.

More on Corporate/Start Up Musical Chairs

When the music stops, who is sitting on whose lap as shakeups and pairings continue in the race for developing and bringing driverless vehicles and services to market? Some pairings are partnerships and others are financial investments.

Quick update

Late players in both the technology and car manufacturing worlds have found each other. Microsoft partnering with Renault-Nissan.

nuTonomy is searching for additional funding. The MIT-based company has found willing partners in the government of Singapore, where the start up has a pilot driverless taxipod program currently in operation, and in a venture capital firm co-founded by Ford Motor Company, as well as other backers.

Crazy Weeds of Soon-to-Launch Autonomous Services

Speaking of Drive.ai

Drive.ai has developed a sweet vehicle-to-pedestrian signal system with text and emojis for communication with sighted pedestrians and auditory signals for those without an adequate sense of sight. The article was not entirely clear about what those auditory signals would be and whether they would be sufficient to put people with visual impairments in an equitable position to their sighted peers. 

Drive.ai is developing a kit that will transform a regular car into a self-driving one and is using artificial intelligence technology. The company just named a former General Motors executive to its board of directors. Drive.ai is like Cruise Automation, but without GM as its patron, or like Comma.ai, but without a genius crazy guy as its founder and leader.

Chinese Company Moves Ahead in California

Baidu, which is reportedly partnering with Nvidia, also recently received a permit to begin driverless testing in California. The former is big news because this is China's Google, as Baidu is known, getting an instant surge from an artificial intelligence enterprise that is perhaps the leading concern in terms of driverless technology.

Autonomous, yes, but no stairs

Boston-based Bridj, a ride-hailing-meets-fancy-transit company that operates in Beantown, DC, and, with subsidized service, in Kansas City, is getting into the delivery drone business, presumably to fill vehicles or to make some money with them in off hours. The three-mile-an-hour drone is not such a great robot. It will deliver as long as there are no stairs or doors to open. I guess it needs a human to be present.

While I'm here

Tesla decides to insure its own partially driverless vehicles. Speculation is that Tesla will be well positioned for fully driverless insurance when those vehicles go on the road.

nuTonomy is partnering with a ride hailing company in Southeast Asia. No surprise, this is seen as a move for both companies to be better positioned to compete with a future driverless Uber.

Singapore - A Driverless Sandbox

Singapore's LTA (Land Transport Authority = Department of Transportation) is partnering with Delphi and nuTonomy on an MOD (Mobility on Demand) program that will provide first-and-last-mile services. Nice moxie for a small island nation. 

nuTonomy just issued a press release today that the company has:

... entered into a new partnership with Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) to begin trials of an autonomous mobility-on-demand transportation service. The partnership will expand and accelerate the company’s development efforts in Singapore as it progresses towards the launch of a commercial autonomous vehicle (AV) service in 2018. 

Back in early April, 2016, news broke that Cambridge, MA-based nuTonomy had succeeded in being selected by Singapore to do a driverless taxi-pod pilot project. 

Delphi loving Singapore

For some reason, the Delphi Automotive news is all over, whereas the nuTonomy information is not catching as much buzz. Delphi will be providing the self-driving Audi cars. Here's another article with more details. 

This article makes matters much more clear in terms of the different Singapore projects and what Delphi and nuTonomy are doing.

And a testing facility

Perhaps in a bid to get beyond low-speed shuttles and taxipods, Singapore is also opening a small driverless testing facility. In its ambitious quest, the country is also working on being a forerunner in driverless regulation, though another island nation is the first with that.

Singapore vs. North Dakota vs. Google vs. ...

Singapore + nuTonomy = Pod-mania

OMG, the twittersphere and conventional journalism - here, via Forbes - are full of Singapore's plan to introduce taxi-pods (taxibots?). These will be accessible by apps. How else, right? (Not quicker, by the way, than catching a cab on CPW in Manhattan.) This could beat Uber at its own game and get a leg up on shared-use plans by Google, GM, Ford, and others. 

Google stays out West

Google is bringing its cute driverless vehicles to Phoenix, Arizona. Who wants to be there? No offense, but it' not a pedestrian-friendly place. Maybe it's just my East Coast sensibilities. Google says there's good air-born dust, as in dust storms. I was there for one once and it was creepy. Thank goodness someone else was driving. 

North Dakota to have driverless highway? Every hardly-any-people state has two senators

One weird aspect of the US Constitution is that every state, no matter how small and no matter how few people, gets two senators. Hence a state like Wyoming, which has a population the size of a Brooklyn neighborhood, gets somewhat outsize representation. In a way, this is a good thing. Some of those senators are able to push through interesting ideas and not get swamped by the more populous states.

North Dakota (pop. a bit under 750,000) Sen. John Thune is backing an idea to allow a particular highway that runs north-to-south and goes through seven states to be the first to allow driverless hauling of freight. Lots of driverless trucks. There's an association formed to push the idea toward fruition, the Central North Trade Corridor Association. 

This would mean seven states permitting driverless travel, whether through laws, regulations, or pure neglect. It could just mean interpreting existing provisions to not require a human driver. They're all laissez-faire/no-government-intervention out West, (super broad generalization there) so maybe that could happen.

Truck trip success in Europe

Speaking of a trucking company fantasy, a convoy of connected trucks - lorries, to those of you in the UK - has completed a trip across Europe. I think the first truck needs a driver, but the followers do not, though, of course, there were drivers present during this test. I'm not sure what happens to the CV trucks when obnoxious, speeding drivers of cars weave into the middle of the convoy. That will be the New Jersey Turnpike test.

Volvo going to China

First, Volvo is now owned by a Chinese company. Second, Chinese companies are pushing for their government to establish driverless-friendly rules. Third, China presents good challenges for driverless vehicles, as in crazy congestion and drivers. Volvo plans to essentially give 100 ordinary people 100 driverless vehicles to test on urban Chinese roads. I think the drivers must be present and they will be able to take over the wheel. This pilot will not happen until 2017.

NHTSA and technical details that make driverless possible

Tomorrow, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will be hosting a public meeting at the USDOT (Department of Transportation) building. One of those details is the technology that allows driverless vehicles to "see" its surroundings and "communicate" - as in connected vehicles or CV - with others. It will be interesting because DOT announced it will come out with regulations within the next few months. Okay, I remember that, but I don't have a link right now. That is warp speed for a government agency.

Too Many Driverless Restrictions in the States?

The answer seems to be "oh yes," at least for nuTonomy, started by MIT-related folks, which will be testing a shared-ride driverless service soon in Singapore. Singapore has been ambitious to push the driverless revolution. nuTonomy was also involved with the Singapore week-long pilot of ferrying around public garden visitors in a driverless golf cart.

nuTonomy claims that it's fleet management algorithms are so efficient that Singapore will be able to reduce by half its taxi fleet and keep the same level of service. We're talking about a current fleet of 700,000 taxis (Manhattan on steroids?). nuTonomy vehicles use LIDAR, which sometimes is capitalized and sometimes not.

Minnesota joins the race - a slow, state-by-state race

Minnesota is throwing its hat into the self-driving ring, but it is acting similarly to other gun-shy states. Report by Dec. 31, 2018; a big task force; blah, blah, blah. Nice to see, however, that people with disabilities are included in the rationale for the legislation along with generating revenue for the state.

One important tidbit: In terms of operating a self-driving vehicle, although a licensed driver must be available, that human does NOT have to be present in the vehicle. I re-read the text because I don't trust myself. Here it is, in bold, italic, and underlined.

a person who holds a class D license or its equivalent is present in the vehicle or is monitoring the vehicle from a remote location during operation, and in either case, the licensed person is able to take control of the vehicle's movements immediately, if necessary.

The bill, SF 2569, calls for a whopping $5 million. In case you did not get it, the previous sentence was dripping with sarcasm. Just yesterday, I wrote about Japan spending $3 TRILLION. I can't write trillion, dollars that is, without capital letters (woo, just did).

I'm sure that $5 million, with a chance to be near the Mary Tyler Moore statue, will be a huge temptation for those billion dollar companies. Maybe a tiny start up. Sarcasm dripping again. Okay, but if you do go to the Twin Cities, definitely have pancakes at Mickey's Diner in St. Paul. So, so good.

California in the Back Mirror for Google Car?

No a surprise at all that Google is threatening to leave California and take its driverless testing and business elsewhere due to the state's draft regulations for autonomous vehicles. The draft regs read like they could have been written in the 1950s. 

But where should Google go?

Google (or rather Alphabet, which, we all know, is Google) driverless could leave the U.S. There's a driverless shuttle transit service already being tested - on public roads - with passengers - at slow speeds - in the Netherlands.

If Google would prefer being in an English-speaking country, there is the United Kingdom, which is about to start three driverless pod pilot programs, also on local roads. In 2016, travel to England and hop on for an exciting ride before even getting to a plane at Heathrow airport.

With all of the driverless pilot shuttles and tests going on, Google staff might be in their Mountain View bathrooms and screaming ...

Shoot, we're already behind!

Google is correct to be freaked out. Driverless competition is not only coming from overseas, but from its own American backyard. A small Cambridge company, nuTonomy is right on its heels, as well as every conventional car company and Uber. nuTonomy is promising a more human-driver-like experience. I hope that does not mean more crashes and fatalities.

GM is reported to be stepping up its driverless game with a team that will be going beyond research into actual product development. And now they have Lyft on board as well.

States are begging

Michigan sorely wants to remain the center of automotive technology and manufacturing, even if that means driverless taxi pods and shared shuttles. Ann Arbor is reported to be one of the places Google is either considering or actually going. This story is everywhere and maybe it's just a head fake to freak out California. No one knows at this point, but Google would like its cars to experience rain and snow.

Other states are making noises about wanting driverless. Some seem pretty desperate. That will be Part Two of this post if I get to Part Two.

Lawmakers need to step up to the plate

Like it or not, developers and sellers of driverless vehicles will have to account for a legal system that governs what is permitted on the roads of states and countries. That's just a fact, according to former Google-employee and now Baidu-employee Andrew Ng.

In my opinion, the setback for driverless in the US is that our states independently govern their own roadways, with responsibility often at the city and county levels. A hodgepodge of conflicting laws would be the worst situation. In the next year or two, we need either federal legislation to pass, which is unlikely, or a meeting of the minds for a uniform code of driverless laws among the states. The uniform code approach works well in many areas of the law, including many aspects of commercial law. It would also allow the states and state judiciaries to retain their authority over regulation and litigation concerning driverless vehicles.