Parking Lot

I'm away from work, but peeking at driverless news before I delete a mountain of useless emails. Uch! I hope I don't miss any needle-in-a-haystack important ones. I'm pretty good, though I've done that before.

This parking lot is for my own brain. Peruse if you please.

Legislation

Legislation introduced in Pennsylvania.

GM pushing Michigan legislation and positioning itself for future mobility business-model possibilities.

GoMentum recycles old military into driverless neighborhood - Honda grabs opportunity

Honda going slowly on the partially autonomous route and testing at GoMentum north of San Francisco.

Simplistic video, but shows the GoMentum facility, an old Army site.

Honda working on an affordable self-driving car that is environmentally friendly. Not the shared-use model GM and Ford are pursuing? (That's my question). Likely that neither business model will take over the entire market when it emerges. Just a guess. 

$$$ flow

Quicker, more nimble driverless mapping data - in real time - from Mapbox, an open-source-based map provider.

Lots of money flowing to Zoox, which is betting and planning on fleets of driverless taxipods (my word).

Kind of sweet that a business can be valued at so much more than it has as yet delivered, considering the risks and stiff competition.

New Models of Driverless Cars, Some Sticky

When I was a little girl, every Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) we would pass a car dealership, with new cars, on our walk to Sheepshead Bay, that's the real Brooklyn, to throw away our sins. It's true. That's why the bay needed to be cleaned up. But we could not pass that dealership without a big pause. My father loved to look at those new, shiny cars in the window.

Well, we are sufficiently into the driverless age that we are getting second and third generation prototypes.

Honda Acura - Seems fancy. No technology breakthroughs; no design wows. This is NOT completely autonomous, which Honda is saying is at least 15 years away. Translation: Honda is nowhere near ready. Here's a link to some more details and a video.

GM - Chevy Volt EV, with driverless sensors, spotted on the streets of San Francisco. We need Karl Malden and Michael Douglas to investigate. (If you are a millennial, you probably do not get the reference to the long-ago TV show, the Streets of San Francisco.) Here's the theme song.

Google - According to several reports (I'm linking to just one), Google has patented and is, presumably, adding to its driverless vehicles a system to be used when a car crashes for spreading or oozing a sticky substance, akin to flypaper, onto the exterior of the vehicle. Wait, this is brilliant. Meant as a pedestrian safety technique, the flypaper-like substance would stick to the hit pedestrian - gluing the person to the car - so that the pedestrian would not be flung and further injured. Messy, but not harmed as badly. On all normal days, the car would have an "eggshell like" covering so that ordinary leaning against a vehicle would not result in ruined clothes and sticky hands.

Coalition Forms to Drive Regulation of Driverless

For now, it's Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford, and Volvo as the founding and only members of the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets (SDCST), but I'm wondering if Lyft partner-GM is soon to follow, along with the rest of the car companies. The coalition wants the same set of standards and regulations across the US and it is emphasizing the death and injury visited upon this country in the thousands and thousands of human-caused crashes each year. 

The coalition does not yet have a website, but it does have a leader. David Strickland, a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator and a current Google advisor, will act as the coalition's counsel and spokesman. No doubt, Mr. Strickland will be in attendance and speaking at the NHTSA hearing this morning at Stanford University.

No cabbies needed

Volvo will begin its Drive Me London program in 2017 with real families on real streets. I did that in Brooklyn and read to my kids en route. It was called the NYC subway. Okay, a bit different. Wait, Brooklyn was better. The Volvo program will only feature semi-autonomous vehicles, basically a Tesla equivalent.

And for your entertainment, this video from Honda, which will prompt thoughts of a tiny house on wheels and being a modern nomad in your own traveling home.

M City and Self-Driving Taxis (Uber?)

My apologies to the Buckeyes out there (a/k/a Ohio State students, alumni, and fans), but in terms of driverless vehicle technology, the University of Michigan is way ahead. U of M has its M City, currently under construction, with 41 companies signed up as partners. The idea, according to the linked article from Construction Equipment Guide (not a periodical I usually read), is to create realistic conditions - including pedestrians that run in front of cars, hills, and snowy days - in a safe testing environment. Plan is for vehicles to be "commercially viable" in 2021.

The article cites an estimate of 80 percent reduction in traffic accidents. I am guessing that is a conservative estimate because, currently, well over 90 percent of roadway injuries and fatalities are caused by human errors.

My mother the car might not be far off 
If you think your mother can learn from experience, then the driverless vehicles of the future - and not too far in the future, either - are what you should be envisioning. Honda's president, Frank Paluch, said yesterday that these vehicles will have sensors, true, but they will also be able to remember and learn from their experiences. They might be better, actually, will definitely be better, than you are at recalling that pothole between your home and the supermarket. They might also remember and be able to detect where there is traffic and go a different route, something we humans are hit or miss on. I do not believe they will scream out anything like "I should remember downtown Silver Spring is a mess at this hour. Ugh!!!"

I only saw My Mother the Car in reruns, but here's the opening credits. This intelligent car, by the way, despite also being a protective mother, still needed a driver. And the show was arguably the high point of Jerry Van Dyke's acting career (the brother of Dick Van Dyke), not that I know much about that either.