Archinect - News

Driverless taxis are about to hit Los Angeles. How will Waymo's impact affect the city's changing streetscape?

2022-10-25T13:55:00-04:00

The company has been mapping Los Angeles using human drivers since 2019. Next, a spokesman said, trained drivers will test out Waymo’s robot taxi service on L.A.-area highways and neighborhood thoroughfares, with runs downtown, along the Miracle Mile and in Koreatown, Santa Monica and West Hollywood.

Waymo has already eked out footholds in Phoenix and San Francisco and will need a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand its West Coast operations into what it says is a now $2 billion market.

The Public Utilities hurdle and technically complicated mapping process aside, Waymo’s eventually-expanded commercial fleet could arrive in line with a host of other transportation changes that LA is enacting ahead of the 2028 Olympics, especially near Downtown. The question of whether potentially adding thousands of EVs to its clogged roads and freeways remains the ever-larger existential factor, and opponents argue their presence undermines efforts at pedestrianization and funding for micromobility alternatives central to state and city plans despite demographic factors that are also in the company's favor.

Earlier on Archinect: What it means to add 20,000 Waymo self-driving robot taxis to America's roads

"If we want to change the car culture in Los Angeles, we need ...

Autonomous vehicles in urgent need of regulation, says urban research group

2022-10-11T11:50:00-04:00

The Urban Institute has warned that the proliferation of autonomous vehicles in the United States needs to be met by regulations at the federal, state, and local level to ensure equity and environmental sustainability. The non-profit group, which describes its role as inspiring “effective decisions that advance fairness and enhance the well-being of people and places,” set out their position in a 78-page report published this week.

“The mobility system in the United States is unsafe, inequitable, and environmentally destructive,” the report says. “Autonomous vehicles (AVs) — self-driving cars that can travel along publicly accessible streets some or all of the time without human involvement — could help mitigate these problems, if they are implemented in a thoughtful, well-regulated manner.”

Archinect Feature: Smog City: The Fight Against Urban Air Pollution

According to the group, fully autonomous vehicles would “in theory” offer a positive step for the future of transportation, poi...

Waymo partners with Chinese automaker Geely to develop fleet of autonomous, electric taxis

2021-12-30T09:00:00-05:00

Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo is partnering with Chinese automaker Geely to create a fleet of all-electric, self-driving robotaxis.

The cars will be designed in Sweden, where Geely owns Swedish car manufacturer Volvo. Waymo will integrate the Waymo Driver, their autonomous driving technology, into Geely's electric, transportation-as-a-service (Taas)-optimized Zeekr vehicle. Waymo plans to deploy the vehicles in the US within their existing fleet of autonomous taxis "in the years to come."

Waymo's self-driving cars have started 3D-mapping Los Angeles

2019-10-17T06:00:00-04:00

Currently, Waymo has started undertaking an extensive mapping activity of having a few of their specially outfitted data-collecting vehicles crisscross the Los Angeles area. These vehicles contain a state-of-the-art barrage of sensory equipment, the idea is to first map out the area and then use those maps to get the self-driving cars ready for hitting our streets.

"The conventional mapping did not go as in-depth as does this specially performed new mapping," writes AI and Autonomous Vehicles expert Lance Eliot for Forbes. "Tons of added data of a 3D nature and including subtle but significant aspects like where the curbs are, and the locations of intersection traffic signals are considered a savvy aspect to have in-hand for their driverless car efforts."

Waymo, the Mountain View-based Google sister company, hasn't unveiled yet if and when it will launch its fleet of driverless robotaxis in LA, but the current mapping efforts signal a strong intent to win early market dominance in the nation's second largest, and likely most sprawling car-centric, metro area.

Tokyo launches first autonomous 'robot taxi' ahead of 2020 Olympics

2018-08-29T14:37:00-04:00

A venture firm and a major taxi company began trials of passenger-carrying autonomous taxi services on Monday with an eye on launching the full service around 2020 when Tokyo hosts the Olympics and the Paralympics. ZMP Inc., a Tokyo-based developer of autonomous driving technology, and Hinomaru Kotsu Co., said they are the first in the world to offer autonomous taxi services to fare-paying passengers in the test through Sept. 8.

Other tech companies and automakers have also been testing autonomous driving services in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. If the Tokyo RoboCar MiniVan trial is successful, officials hope to scale up the program to assist with the increased transportation demand during the 2020 Summer Olympics and, beyond that, help the rapidly ageing population in Japan's rural areas get around.

What it means to add 20,000 Waymo self-driving robot taxis to America's roads

2018-04-03T18:19:00-04:00

On Tuesday, Waymo announced they’d purchase 20,000 sporty, electric self-driving vehicles from Jaguar for the company’s forthcoming ride-hailing service. [...] They estimate that the Jaguar fleet alone will be capable of doing a million trips each day in 2020. [...] if Waymo is even within 50 percent of that number in two years, the United States will have entered an entirely new phase in robotics and technology.

In his piece for The Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal looks beyond the technological and economic implications of Waymo's latest announcement to add 20,000 electric self-driving Jaguar I-Pace SUVs to its rapidly growing ride-hailing fleet by 2020 and instead think about the social (how comfortable/uncomfortable will we be around so many robots?), legal (what if a city wants to declare itself a "robocar-free zone"?), and urban planning effects (how will infrastructure redevelopment change our existing cities in the 21st century?).

Is City Transformer's new folding car the answer to our parking problems?

2017-11-15T15:22:00-05:00

Urban drivers spend an average of 20 minutes per trip looking for parking and studies have found that anywhere from about 30 to 60 percent of the cars you see driving around a downtown core are doing just that. The energy spent looking for parking burns 47,000 gallons of gas and generates 730 tons of carbon dioxide a year and in dense cities like New York City, can account for up to 40% of energy consumed by automobiles.

Urbanists have long seen the emergence of self-driving cars as the solution to problems posed by parking as well as other urban ills; as fleets of robocars replace the need for individual car ownership, the amount of parking needed will decline accordingly freeing up large swaths of space for other uses while reducing energy consumption.

Adding to this vision for new urban transportation, the Israeli company City Transformer has designed a self-driving car with an added bonus: it folds itself, shrinking at the push of a button to fit into a motorcycle parking spa...

MIT study predicts autonomous vehicles to fuel construction boom

2017-10-24T19:46:00-04:00

It’s 2027 (or 2037) and the age of the self-driving car. City-dwellers have traded in their car keys for ride hails. Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing. That’s one vision of how self-driving cars will affect U.S. real estate, laid out in a report by MIT’s Center for Real Estate. But it’s not the only one.

"Even as reclaimed parking spaces fuel a downtown building boom," Bloomberg reports, "autonomous vehicles will encourage builders to push deeper into the exurban fringe, confident that homebuyers will tolerate longer commutes now that they don’t have to drive, according to the report [...]."

Read the full report Real Trends: The Future of Real Estate in the United States here.

Renault's Symbioz is a self-driving car that becomes one with your house

2017-09-18T15:45:00-04:00

Renault recently revealed their new concept for an autonomous vehicle that fully integrates into one's home. Called the Symbioz, the idea seems obvious enough—many models for self-driving vehicles have interiors that convert into arrangements typical of the living room and this one comes dressed in wood, marble, felt and porcelain afforded by its large car proportions.

Photo courtesy of Facebook page @Renault.

Beyond the interior, the car and home share energy that is distributed through a smart grid. This system allows the home to use power stored in the batteries of the car temporarily for lights, screens, and home appliances during periods of peak use or in the event of a blackout. In reverse, drivers can program their car to use the home’s energy for recharging when needed. Additionally, the car can plan ahead and adapt to usage by syncing to the owner's calendar and drawing charge from the grid accordingly.

Drivers can switch between manual and autonomous modes of driving and w...

Lyft joins the race in building its own self-driving technology

2017-07-24T14:36:00-04:00

[P]erhaps enticed by predictions of a $7 trillion autonomous driving industry, Lyft is saying it wants a build its own technology stack so it can operate its own self-driving cars. To accomplish this, Lyft is opening a new 50,000-square-foot engineering facility in Palo Alto, California, that it’s calling the “Level 5” center in reference to the most advanced level of autonomous driving. Kapoor said the goal is to have “hundreds” of engineers working out of the facility by the end of 2018.

According to The Verge, Lyft is yet to release more concrete details of their plan, including which components of a self-driving car they will build themselves or how much money they plan to spend. Last month, Lyft announced their partnership with self-driving car startup NuTonomy to launch a test pilot of NuTonomy's cars in Boston later this year.

Pittsburgh disappointed with Uber's self-driving car experiment

2017-05-23T11:58:00-04:00

When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. [...] Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. [...] The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and others.

"Starting later this month," wrote Bloomberg less than one year ago, "Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved." Since then, Pittsburgh appears to have fallen out of love with the ride-sharing giant's promises for the city.

How does one design against "magic" used to trap self-driving cars?

2017-03-21T12:45:00-04:00

As if the challenges of politics, engineering, and weather weren't enough, now self-driving cars face another obstacle: purposeful visual sabotage, in the form of specially painted traffic lines that entice the car in before trapping it in an endless loop. As profiled in Vice, the artist behind "Autonomous Trip 001," James Bridle, is demonstrating an unforeseen hazard of automation: those forces which, for whatever reason, want to mess it all up. Which raises the question: how does one effectively design for an impish sense of humor, or a deadly series of misleading markings?

U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the future of transportation: "We had to do something different."

2016-10-28T13:49:00-04:00

Car and Driver caught up with Foxx in Pittsburgh. The DOT chief, previously mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, reflected on the promise of autonomous and connected cars, the recent Smart City Challenge, the massive increase in traffic deaths, the potential of the shared vehicles unfolding right outside the window, and more. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for grammar and brevity.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Uber lets you hail its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this month

2016-08-19T14:54:00-04:00

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot [...] But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.

Related stories recently in the Archinect news:

How autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawl

2016-06-21T13:21:00-04:00

If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Would self-driving cars be useful to people living outside urban cores?

2016-06-07T18:47:00-04:00

So a lot of us own or lease cars...But when the talk turns to autonomous cars – and it always does – I sigh. Our overcrowded highways really could use a break from human stupidity, and that human factor is behind nearly all of the fatalities and injuries and property damage we see strewn across our roads every day. Get rid of the human behaviour to save the human body! This is where autonomous cars make sense; but not all the world is a crowded, urban highway.

A look at the history and future of the American commute

2016-05-02T17:34:00-04:00

"The idea that you can replace the 10 trips with one autonomous car and travel less distance, that’s the biggest misconception," says Fagnant. "You can get rid of vehicles, but not vehicle miles traveled. Without ridesharing, there's an 8 to 10 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled based on simulations we've run in Austin. You’re not replacing trips [..] the vehicle has to bounce between locations, and relocate to where it’s needed. Those in-between miles will create a lot of extra travel."

Related stories in the Archinect news:

World's first fully autonomous taxi service will arrive in Singapore later this year

2016-04-06T12:58:00-04:00

[nuTonomy's] Level 4 autonomous vehicle "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip;" all you have to do is provide a destination and (possibly) open and shut the doors. Google's autonomous cars, in contrast, are currently at Level 3, with limited self-driving automation [...] [nuTonomy] is building into [its] decision-making engine the ability for cars to actually violate the rules of the road when it's necessary to do so

This startup hopes to bring autonomous campus shuttles to colleges by 2017

2016-03-30T13:34:00-04:00

Since summer 2015, [Alex] Rodrigues and his team [at Varden Labs] have been tinkering with autonomous golf carts on university campuses...On the one hand, campus transit agencies, and particularly university ones, are uniquely posed to experiment with pricier autonomous vehicles...But these shuttles will also need maintenance...Plus, driverless shuttles will be the diving bell for a tricky, tricky question: how important are bus drivers?

Seven U.S. cities competing to be the "smartest" in urban transit systems

2016-03-22T13:50:00-04:00

The seven American cities that made the shortlist in the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Smart City Challenge are now deciding their strategies for winning the $40m prize fund...Transportation is the focus, so judges will be interested in self-driving and 'connected' cars, as well as 'smart streets' fitted with sensors. The aim will be to cut accidents, reduce pollution and increase commuter convenience.

The DOT shortlisted seven finalists instead of the originally planned five. They are:

Austin, Texas
Columbus, Ohio
Denver, Colorado
Kansas City, Missouri
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Portland, Oregon
San Francisco, California

The winning city is expected to be announced in June.

More related to transportation technology on Archinect:

U.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to go to the DMV

Google's self-driving car hits bus and causes its first crash

A first look at the Hyperloop's real tubes and imagined winged terminals

"In LiDAR We Trust" – Poking the subconscious of autonomous vehicles with special guest Geoff Manaugh, on Archinect Sessions #43

Google's self-driving car hits bus and causes its first crash

2016-03-01T14:11:00-05:00

Google said on Monday it bears "some responsibility" after one of its self-driving cars struck a municipal bus in a minor crash earlier this month. The crash may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hitting another vehicle and the fault of the self-driving car. [...] Google said in the filing the autonomous vehicle was traveling at less than 2 miles per hour, while the bus was moving at about 15 miles per hour.

Related stories in the Archinect news:

Finally, self-parking office chairs

2016-02-16T18:21:00-05:00

To demonstrate an alternate application of their "parking assist" technology, Nissan has outfitted a herd of office chairs to find their own way back to their desks. With a single clap, the chairs swivel and move into position, like the obedient office drones that they are – watch below:

Of course, this technological application is not setting out to solve the controversial issue of runaway chairs. It's an example of how ubiquitous the tech for autonomous vehicles could become (or is becoming, as regulations slowly allow it onto the highway), and a way to familiarize consumers with its very idea at a smaller, more accessible scale.

h/t Contemporist

U.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to go to the DMV

2016-02-11T12:54:00-05:00

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law [...] "NHTSA will interpret 'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants" [...] Google told NHTSA that the real danger is having auto safety features that could tempt humans to try to take control.

The technological and legal impediments to making self-driving cars a reality on U.S. roads seem to be falling away – and as the regulatory market opens for business, so may more competition, with Google and California (which legalized self-driving cars in 2012) leading the way.

More on the development of autonomous vehicles:

"The Haves and the Have Nots" – digesting the most important news of the week that was, on Archinect Sessions #49

2016-01-21T18:46:00-05:00

As last week's episode was taken up by Pritzker-hooplah, this episode takes a look back at the major news items of the last week(ish) and gets you caught up with what's been happening in Archinect news.

We discuss: the recent photo exhibition on homelessness at USC (which closes tomorrow!); the Treasury Department's controversial new practice of tracking and identifying secret buyers of luxury housing; how BIG's 2 World Trade Center is now in limbo after "anchor tenant" Rupert Murdoch has pulled out; the demolition of yet another not-beloved-enough Brutalist building; the big ol' chunk of cash the U.S. now has to prepare for driverless cars; and the ongoing debacle over the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, as Zaha Hadid Architects accuses Kengo Kuma Associates of copying their design, while Japan won't pay ZHA until they hand over the design copyrights.

Phew! What a week. All original news postings are available in the shownotes.

Listen to episode 49 of Archinect Sessions, "The Haves and the Hav...

Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot function

2015-10-21T18:48:00-04:00

Using cruise control, you can set the [Tesla] to a particular speed and it will accelerate and turn within a lane in a straight line. It will dodge cars attempting to swerve into your lane, objects that it can see, pedestrians or fellow drivers simply trying to swerve into you because you’re an obnoxious prick with a Tesla blasting Party Rock Anthem. [...] It can’t, however, direct you along every street...

Can a loss of driver autonomy save lives?

2015-10-01T13:20:00-04:00

Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that's nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century.

Accidents happen. But do they have to? Researchers estimate that driverless cars could save up to $190 billion in health-care costs and 50 million lives worldwide over five decades.

For more of Archinect's coverage on changes in driving and car culture, check out these stories:

• Traffic Lights are Easy to Hack

• More roads won't ease traffic, but charging drivers more at peak hours will

• From California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopoly

Apple and Google are poised to shake up the auto industry

2015-09-17T14:14:00-04:00

This year, “connectivity” has supplanted “horsepower” or “torque” as the prevailing buzzword in Frankfurt. The talk is of self-driving cars, battery-powered cars, and information technology designed to link cars with data networks to make driving safer and more efficient. Even though neither Apple nor Google is close to mass-producing a vehicle, nervousness about their intentions — which remain cloaked in mystery — is understandable.

Designers imagine a world of self-driving, mobile offices

2015-04-28T15:12:00-04:00

Self-driving cars will certainly change our habits on the road. But truly autonomous vehicles will also affect how we work, says Tim Brown, chief executive officer and president of design consultancy IDEO...Without having to navigate city streets, people will be more productive during their commute. IDEO also envisions self-driving trucks...delivering everything from new jeans to grilled cheese. Most radical of all: Your workplace could be set on wheels to travel to you, rather than you to it.

Los Angeles envisions the first "decentralized" World's Fair (yes, including Hyperloop)

2015-04-17T19:51:00-04:00

A group of venture capitalists, architects, engineers, and marketing gurus, under the name Los Angeles World's Fair (LAWF), are brewing plans for a two-year fair showing off the technology and culture of the future—including a Hyperloop, “3D-printed gourmet delicacies,” and self-driving cars. Theme: "The Connected City." Right now, they're trying to pull together $100,000 on Indiegogo to support economic and architectural feasibility studies for their plans [...].

Visit (and support if you're so inclined) the initiative's Indiegogo campaign here.

Are driverless pods the future of public transportation?

2015-03-18T17:34:00-04:00

Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city...

SkyTran claims the pods, weighing just 300 lbs, would consume about a third of the electricity used by today's hybrid cars. And the infrastructure can be built for $10 million per mile, at least according to the CEO Jerry Sanders.

Later this year, the company plans to complete its first pilot project at the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries in Tel Aviv.