Is UW a New Driverless Hotbed?

Two reports in the past few days about creative driverless developments out of the University of Washington Bothell, a campus I had never heard of before (probably because I have lived my entire life on the East Coast). 

1. Driverless tricycle - so I'm not sure why anyone would need this and does this machine pedal for you? Transport packages? Right now, this is an incredibly early prototype that goes in circles and thrills only the students working on it. But you never know where it will go. I wrote about this tricycle yesterday, very briefly, at the end of a pretty unrelated post.

2. The ELF, a tricycle that looks like a mini-car, is driverless and being developed with funding from Amazon. It is solar powered and can hold up to 550 pounds of persons and/or merchandise. That's a lot of books. The startup working with UW-Bothell is called Organic Transit. You can already buy a non-driverless ELF from Organic Transit. They come in cute colors and cost $7000 and above. I'm not sure you can bring it up to the office; might need conventional parking, though it is considered a bicycle and can travel at the speed of a heavy bike. This is definitely a vehicle that can go to the supermarket, but it might be really slow on steep hills on the way home.