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c-Automotive
Designing simple, cheap cars of the future
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
17 Jun 2016
What does that car of the future look like? There is no one answer; in this world, the car that is sent to pick you up can be tailored for your trip. The more people traveling, the bigger the car. If ...
Letting policymakers handle the trolley problem
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
10 Jun 2016
When I give talks on robocars the most common question asked is the one known as the “trolley problem” question. That is: “what will the car do if it has to choose between killing one person or ...
How much can customers test robocars?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
07 Jun 2016
Reports from Tesla suggest they are gathering massive amounts of driving data from logs in their cars — 780 million miles of driving, and as much as 100 million miles in autopilot mode. This contras...
An alternative to specific regulations for robocars: A liability doubling
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
02 Jun 2016
Can our emotional fear of machines, and the call for premature regulation, be mollified by a temporary increase in liability which takes the place of specific regulations to keep people safe?
So fa...
Robocar news around the globe: Tesla crash, Declaration of Amsterdam, and automaker services
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
01 Jun 2016
We have the first report of a real Tesla autopilot crash. To be fair to Tesla, their owner warnings specify very clearly that the autopilot could crash in just this situation. In the video, there is ...
Self-driving trucks are coming — what will that mean?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 May 2016
Today sees the un-stealthing of a new company called Otto which plans to build self-driving systems for long haul trucks. The company has been formed by a skilled team, including former members of Goo...
The coming nightmare for the car industry
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
11 May 2016
I have often written on the challenge facing existing automakers in the world of robocars. They need to learn to completely switch their way of thinking in a world of mobility on demand, and not all o...
Google develops a Chrysler minivan
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
05 May 2016
If you had asked me recently what big car company was the furthest behind when it came to robocars, one likely answer would be Fiat-Chrysler. In fact, famously, Chrysler ran ads several years ago duri...
Stakeholders likely to be disrupted by the changeover to self-driving vehicles
Frank Tobe
26 Apr 2016
Volumes have been written about the possible beneficial (and negative) effects of self-driving cars and systems. But few have studied what industries will be disrupted by the transformations as self-d...
What to expect from autonomous cars
SPARC
21 Apr 2016
Over 25,700 people died in car crashes in the European Union in 2014, and 200,000 came home with life-changing injuries....
Self-driving cars, meet rubber duckies
MIT News
21 Apr 2016
MIT has offered courses on everything from pirate training to “street-fighting math,” but a new robotics class is truly one for the birds....
GM’s purchase of Cruise fuels interest in self-driving car kits
Frank Tobe
19 Apr 2016
Most car companies are remaking themselves into tech startups as they move toward offering fully autonomous self-driving vehicles. Yet thousands of tractors already use self-driving kits as ...
How would a robocar handle an oncoming tsunami?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
19 Apr 2016
Recently, a reddit user posted a short video of a lucky driver in Japan who was able to turn his car around just in time to escape the torrent of the tsunami....
comma.ai’s neural network car and new technology in robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Apr 2016
Perhaps the world’s most exciting new technology today are deep neural networks, in particular convolutional neural networks, such as “Deep Learning.” These networks are conquering some of the...
Autonomous truck platoons travel across Europe
Frank Tobe
14 Apr 2016
A dozen trucks arrived in Rotterdam after traveling across Europe in the European Truck Platooning Challenge. Six different truck makers participated: Scania, Daimler, Volvo, IVECO, MAN and DAF....
Robust and transparent governance is key to building trust in driverless cars
Alan Winfield
12 Apr 2016
Sooner or later there will be fatal accident caused by a driverless car. It's not a question of if, but when. What happens immediately following that accident could have a profound effect on the nasce...
Startup bringing driverless taxi service to Singapore
MIT News
27 Mar 2016
An exciting “driverless race” is underway among tech giants the United States: In recent months, Google, Uber, and Tesla have made headlines for developing self-driving taxis for big cities....
Calculating why we should make a lot more robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
24 Mar 2016
I frequently read that people claim one effect of robocars will be car share (when they work as taxis) and fewer cars being made (because most cars stay idle 95% of the time) — which is good news ...
Robotics has its first unicorn – small SF startup Cruise Automation
Andra Keay
18 Mar 2016
Forget about Google and Boston Dynamics. This week the real news is that GM acquired small San Francisco based startup Cruise Automation for the rumored sum of more than $1B US, according to Fortune....
Replacing public transit at night for Uber and Lyft
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
12 Mar 2016
I have a big article forthcoming on the future of public transit. I believe that with the robocar (and van) it moves from being scheduled, route-based mass transit to on-demand, ad-hoc route medium an...
Why Google’s crash is a good thing
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
04 Mar 2016
Reports released reveal that one of Google’s Gen-2 vehicles (the Lexus) has a fender-bender (with a bus) with some responsibility assigned to the system. This is the first crash of this type — all...
NHTSA redefines “driver” of self-driving car
Frank Tobe
13 Feb 2016
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) took an important step towards interpreting safety standards in ways that could make self-driving cars a reality for the public: it said that...
First look at 2015 statistics on industrial robots from the IFR report
Frank Tobe
13 Feb 2016
A first look at numbers from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) report on industrial robots shows that worldwide robot sales grew again in 2015, and were 15% more than 2014. Explosive grow...
The inevitability of the global march toward self-driving vehicles
Frank Tobe
22 Jan 2016
Perhaps the biggest upcoming robotics-driven economic and social change will be the arrival of fully autonomous (self-driving) vehicles. Imagine a world full of self driving cars, planes and boats ...
Could robotaxis be the answer to electric car depreciation?
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
21 Jan 2016
I’ve been electric car shopping, but one thing has stood out as a big concern. Many electric cars are depreciating fast, and it may get even faster. I think part of this is due to the fact that elec...
Toyota Research gets Kuffner, and Google gets Brondmo
Frank Tobe
18 Jan 2016
At a press conference last week at CES, Toyota, led by Gill Pratt of DARPA fame and now CEO of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), informed the world what Toyota intended to do with it's billion dollar...
US feds propose $4B investment in robocars, seek unified regulatory policy
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 Jan 2016
NHTSA, the federal car safety agency, has been talking about getting into the robocar game for a while, and now declares it wants more involvement with two important details:
Unlike California, th...
Google’s detailed intervention rates reveal the real unsolved problem of robocars
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
15 Jan 2016
Hot on the heels of my CES Report is the release of the latest article from Chris Urmson on The View from the Front Seat of the Google Car. Chris heads engineering on the project (and until recently l...
Robocar news from CES 2016
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
13 Jan 2016
I’m back from CES 2016 with a raft of robocar news, some of which was reported before the show. Almost everybody in the robocar space had something to say — even if it was only to have something...
Two New Year’s resolutions for developers of automated vehicles
Bryant Walker Smith
12 Jan 2016
In the spirit of the New Year, and especially in the wake of California's draft rules for the (theoretical) operation of automated motor vehicles, I offer two resolutions for any serious developer of ...
Robocar news roundup: Lyft and GM, Sidecar, the nature of competition, and CES
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
04 Jan 2016
Lyft announced a $500M investment from GM with $500M more, pushing them to a $5.4B valuation, which huge but also just a tenth of Uber's. This was combined with talk of a push to robocars: GM will p...
The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars
CIS Blog
30 Dec 2015
Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. ...
California’s new DMV regulations may kill the state’s robocar lead
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
18 Dec 2015
Be careful what you wish for. Google had previously requested that state regulations on robocars be clarified, to help ensure that their cars were legal. When California's DMV finally released its pr...
No, a Google car was not ticketed for going too slow (and other robocar stories)
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
23 Nov 2015
Almost every newspaper in the world reported the story of how a motorcycle cop pulled over one of Google’s 3rd generation test cars, the 2-seaters, and many incorrectly reported that the car was gi...
Why Tesla’s Autopilot and Google’s car are entirely different animals
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
28 Oct 2015
In the buzz over the Tesla autopilot update, a lot of commentary has appeared comparing this Autopilot with Google’s car effort and other efforts and what I would call a “real” robocar — one t...
Stanford’s self-driving Delorean goes drifting for Back to the Future Day
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
21 Oct 2015
Last night, I attended Stanford’s unveiling of their newest research vehicle for self-driving. An old Delorean has been heavily modified in order to perform drifting experiments - where you let the ...
