GM has taken a big step towards offering autonomously driven robotaxi services, hinted in a press release in October 2015, by making a $500 million investment into Lyft. The companies pledged “a long-term strategic alliance to create an integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles in the U.S.” That investing $500M into…
How good is the Tesla Autopilot feature? This feature was rolled out to Tesla Model S owners over the last couple weeks, and marks a large advance towards fully autonomous vehicles. Since then some Model S owners have posted videos of the autopilot system doing amazingly good things, and also…
Yesterday, Nissan unveiled a bold new concept car fulfilling the “zero emissions zero fatalities” promise made a couple years ago. It’s an all-electric car with self driving autonomous features galore. Its story is told with an enticing image gallery and a series of video’s demonstrating usage scenarios that aren’t quite the challenges…
Tesla Motors is delivering the promised Autopilot mode with an Over-The-Air update scheduled for tomorrow, Oct 15, 2015. Maybe we will look back on October 15 as the first day of the robot dominance of humanity. Maybe this will simply make Tesla’s automobiles that much more attractive, and cement Tesla’s…
Ahead of tomorrows DEFCON conference is tomorrow there’s been several announcements of car security vulnerabilities. I’ve long suspected these vulnerabilities would exist as more infotainment and communications capabilities are built into new cars. Projecting into the future we should expect more of these vulnerabilities, and that the Government (NSA, etc) will…
Tesla Motors has been criticized for not including any kind of driver assist features in the Model S. Driver Assist features are commonplace among not only luxury cars, but regular cars, now. Some of them take care of tasks like parallel parking, while others help the driver do so safely.…
All the car companies are working on what’s called Intelligent Transportation Systems, that will lead to self-driving cars over the due course of time. Today, Toyota announced the fourth annual Toyota Advanced Safety Seminar (TASS), convened in Ann Arbor, Michigan ahead of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) World Congress next…
Whether we like the idea or not, self driving or autonomous cars are coming. It’s more a matter of “when” rather than “if” because enough companies are working on the technologies that we are certain they’ll work out enough bugs within a few years to make autonomous cars viable. My…
Drivers have a big responsibility, they’re operating a big heavy machine, capable of high speeds, that can do a lot of damage when it hits something or someone. But, looking around at fellow drivers, it seems most of them abdicate their responsibility and go on with distracted driving behaviors, such…
What can automakers do to improve highway safety? The other day I wrote about the coming age of autonomous vehicles and how they might both reduce traffic congestion and reduce traffic accidents. Today, Toyota has announced some in-car-gizmos meant to increase Driver Awareness, and therefore reduce traffic accidents. Having been…
By now we were supposed to have flying cars, right? Maybe that will never happen but one prediction of the future is beginning to become true – self-driving cars. When fully implemented self-driving cars MIGHT be a big positive win for green transportation. Today, Ford announced a big step towards…
Nissan as well as Tesla Motors is pledging to develop autonomous driving. In Nissan’s case the pledge is to develop a “commercially viable” autonomous driving system by 2020 and to marry this with their pledge for zero emissions. The two pledges together are “zero emissions” and “zero fatalities”. The technology…
As I noted a couple weeks ago, Tesla Motors is looking to hire engineers to develop automated driving features for their cars. That was based on finding a job posting that flat out said, Tesla looking to develop autonomous driving. Since then the job posting caught the attention of the…
In early August I noticed a job listing on Tesla’s Careers area looking for RADAR expertise in the kind of systems (LIDAR etc) used in autonomous vehicles. Now the company is flat out looking for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Controls Engineer to develop fully autonomous driving. I’ve written up…
There’d been a rumor recently that Tesla Motors is interested in self-driving cars, or what’s more formally known as Autonomous Vehicles. It’s kind of the cool thing, because Google has gotten all this attention developing self-driving cars, as have other organizations. Additionally the automakers are coming out with these amazing…
