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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.
— Japan Times
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... View full entry
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.
— The Atlantic
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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 Street parking has been replaced by wider sidewalks and bike lanes, while developers are busy converting garages into much-needed housing.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.
— bloomberg.com
"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 [...]."... View full entry
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... View full entry
[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.
— The Verge
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... View full entry
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.
— nytimes.com
"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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — blog.caranddriver.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:U.S. Transportation Secretary Foxx on the troubled relationship between infrastructure and race: "We ought to do it better than we did it the last time"Uber lets you hail its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this monthColumbus, Ohio wins DOT's $50M Smart... View full entry
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. — Bloomberg
Related stories recently in the Archinect news:Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehiclesA look at the history and future of the American commuteNew study finds ride-sharing apps like Lyft and Uber have no effect on drunk-driving fatalities View full entry
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. — wsj.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Would self-driving cars be useful to people living outside urban cores?The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban designHow prepared are American cities for the new reality of self-driving cars? View full entry
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. — driving.ca
More on Archinect:What are the ethics of self-driving cars?A look at the history and future of the American commuteGoogle, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehicles View full entry
"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." — curbed.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:How prepared are American cities for the new reality of self-driving cars?The U.S. just got $4 billion to spend on self-driving carsMore Americans are becoming "mega-commuters", U.S. Census stats show View full entry
[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
— spectrum.ieee.org
More from the autonomous vehicle beat:The "Impossible" Car – Faraday Future's lead designer, Richard Kim, on One-to-One #17"In LiDAR We Trust" – Poking the subconscious of autonomous vehicles with special guest Geoff Manaugh, on Archinect Sessions #43This startup hopes to bring autonomous... View full entry
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? — CityLab
More on Archinect:Google's self-driving car hits bus and causes its first crashThe Ehang passenger drone might be another way people will get around town somedayU.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to go to the DMVThe U.S. just got $4 billion to... View full entry
