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Autonomous Tech Scales Capitol Hill

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Burney Simpson

The autonomous transportation industry brought its game to Capitol Hill this week, holding a nearly all-day event that featured speeches from a U.S. Senator, four Congressmen, and a number of driverless leaders, all over the course of a luncheon, a seminar, and a showcase event/cocktail party with several dozen of the top firms in the business.

Not bad for a day’s work.

Trade group ITS America put on ‘The Future of Mobility: Rethinking Transportation for the Next 30 Years’ and garnered the participation of Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, and Representatives Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat, Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican, and Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon.

While much of the conversation was positive and friendly, a few of the seminar panelists took the opportunity to raise issues that Congress may have to address someday.

  • Data Privacy and Security — Daniel Morgan, chief data officer with the US Department of Transportation, noted that the security and privacy of citizen travel data was essential but that the information could be beneficial for metropolitan planners. Morgan floated the idea that a third party firm be responsible for collecting and storing the data if people objected to the federal government holding it.
  • Reserving DSRC wavelength for V2V and V2I — Alan Korn, an executive with heavy-truck parts supplier Meritor WABCO, said the Dedicated Short-Range Communications 5.9 GHz spectrum must be reserved for Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications to ensure autonomous driving safety. Later, Sen. Peters said that new technology may allow for the sharing of the 5.9 spectrum with other Wi-Fi users.
  • Driverless Timeline — Supplying a welcome dose of reality was Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). Dingus said developing a truly autonomous system would be considerably more difficult and probably take longer than some recent studies and press reports suggest. Driverless vehicles will have to be safer than the much-maligned human driver but consider that the average human has one rear-end crash every 25 years, and makes 3 million braking decision in that time, said Dingus. “It is very difficult to build a system that is that robust,” said Dingus.

The exhibition hall featured 22 organizations involved with autonomous transportation development, including Eberle Design, Econolite, GM, Iteris, the University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center, NXP Semiconductors, Southwest Research Institute, and Uber.

VTTI was there too taking a bit of a victory lap after its successful demo this week on a nearby highway of its driverless Cadillac SRX. The ride along featured Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and generated extensive media coverage (See “Virginia Seeks Autonomous Research Lead,” October 20, 2015).

The showcase garnered a little more exposure for the technology with another half-dozen members of Congress visiting the exhibit hall to check out the firms on display, according to an ITS spokesperson.

The day also offered an exhibit of a DeLorean car from an old movie that predicted people would fly on skateboardy-type things. This fascinated a number of Gen-Yers and Millennials who took selfies.

Photo: United States Capitol, 2015, Matt C.

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Virginia Seeks Autonomous Research Lead

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Burney Simpson

The competition for autonomous driving research dollars was ramped up Monday by the state of Virginia and its research university Virginia Tech at a driverless vehicle test drive in Arlington held for members of the Washington, D.C., press corps.

On hand for the one-hour drive on I-395 in Arlington, and for a press conference after, were Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the state’s transportation secretary, a leader from the US Department of Transportation, and several other Virginia transportation movers and shakers.

The test was organized by the VaTech Transportation Institute (VTTI) which announced in June it would begin offering for autonomous and connected vehicle tests about 70 miles of congested highways, suburban streets and rural roads in the Washington metropolitan area. Auto OEMs, the US DOT, and industry vendors test their vehicles and technology on the tracks. (“VaTech Leaves ‘Em Eating Its Dust in the Race to be the Top Driverless Test Track”).

Warner said Virginia was working to become a major research area for autonomous-aerial, -vehicle, and -maritime technology. “This is the next great disruptive technology,” said Warner. “Put billions into this and you will see the commercial aspects of this much, much faster.”

A NEW ECONOMY

Virginia Secretary of Transportation Karen Jackson said the state is reaching out to grab more automated vehicle research dollars as it shifts away from its reliance on defense spending.

Virginia is home to the Pentagon – the test drive began on Army Navy Drive around the corner from the complex – and a long-time beneficiary of military research dollars. But the budget sequestration of 2013 brought automatic 10 percent spending cuts to the Defense Department that year, and continuing reductions into 2021.

“The sequestration made us brutally aware of our reliance on the defense sector,” said Jackson. “We are building a new Virginia economy.”

The VaTech testing program has brought $300 million to the state since it began about 20 years ago, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Testing of autonomous technology could go on for decades. Several speakers noted that expert firms predicted that it could take anywhere from three to 30 years for driverless technology to become commonplace.

TEST TRACK RIVALRY

The high profile road show also was a sign of the rivalry for autonomous driving test dollars between VTTI, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and the GoMentum Station in Concord, Calif.

UMTRI operates the 32-acre Mcity test track in Ann Arbor, Mich., (“Michigan Launches Mcity Automated Vehicle Test Track as AVS Convenes”), while GoMentum Station offers 20 miles of urban-like test roads near Silicon Valley, home of driverless leader Google, satellite offices of the major auto OEMs, and rumored players like Apple.

Dr. Tom Dingus, director of the VTTI, suggested that his organization is now the international autonomous track leader.

“Ten years ago, we were half the size of UMTRI. Now we are double the size and we have 75 sponsors, more than UMTRI,” said Dingus.

The event on Monday successfully garnered attention with stories by The Washington Post, the Associated Press, items on several local TV stations, and the local radio news leader. In June, VTTI earned about a half-dozen stories from local media at a test near its Blacksburg, Va., campus (“Get Me B-Roll! Driverless Car Test a Hit With Local TV”).

WORKED LIKE A CHARM, EXCEPT …

The actual autonomous drive occurred in a Cadillac SRX with much of its driverless operating system contained in the trunk. In addition, German-based auto-parts supplier Continental operated a Chrysler 300C. Warner and US DOT Assistant Secretary of Research Greg Winfree got to ride in the Caddy while about a dozen reporters followed in a driven van that offered a large screen with shots of the action in the Cadillac.

The lunch-time drive was on nearly-empty lanes that are typically busy but are turned around after rush hour.

The Cadillac was operating at Level 3 of autonomous technology, with the vehicle operating the accelerating, braking, and steering, while a driver in the driver’s seat remained capable of taking immediate control of the car.

During the demo the driverless car reacted to staged events including some workers standing at a stopped vehicle, a squad car roadside, and slower autos in front of the Caddy. For the most part the Caddy worked like a charm except when it suddenly switched lanes and the test driver took over as a patrol car came speeding up behind it.

Warner admitted afterwards he had a moment of terror but that the drive overall was a success.

VaTech has partnered on the Northern Virginia part of its automated testing roadways with hi-tech mapmaker HERE, toll road operator Transurban, and the state’s DOT and DMV.

Photo courtesy VaTech Transportation Institute.

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ITS World 2015 Challenges US Lead in Driverless Vehicles

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Burney Simpson

There have been stories recently about Silicon Valley vs. Detroit battling for autonomous vehicle development dominance.

Guys, while you’re busy fighting, the rest of the world just may pass you.

The ITS World Congress held in Bordeaux, France, this week generated a slew of news about the driverless programs going on in Asia and Europe. One grabber was the fully-driverless 360-mile trip (580 kilometers) from Paris to Bordeaux in a Peugeot Citroen.

Volvo announced it would begin on-road testing in 2107 of its IntelliSafe Auto Pilot system. Drivers will use a push-button system on their XC90 steering wheel to switch to automated driving mode when they are traveling on sections of Swedish roads designated for driverless operations. Tests will be conducted on 30 miles of roads around Volvo’s headquarter city of Gothenburg.

Meanwhile, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson traveled to Washington, D.C. to warn the feds they need to set national rules around the testing and development of driverless vehicles.

“The U.S. risks losing its leading position (in autonomous driving) due to the lack of federal guidelines for the testing and certification of autonomous vehicles,” Samuelsson said in a press release. “Europe has suffered to some extent by having a patchwork of rules and regulations. It would be a shame if the U.S. took a similar path to Europe in this crucial area.”

(Thanks for the thought, Mr. Samuelsson. Capitol Hill will get to it. First they have to pass extension 3,000 of the Highway Trust Fund. Then they need to investigate whether the next Speaker of the House is having an affair. We’re busy over here.)

Several thousand miles east of Gothenburg a Chinese transportation official said his country would invest $30 billion in its intelligent transportation system through 2020. A spending pledge from a bureaucrat may be wishful thinking but it indicates China is alert to the international attention shown to driverless technology. Besides this is the country with a driverless bus going 20 miles through a cityscape.

And then there are the Japanese. This week Toyota announced that it would offer in Japan this year three models equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication capability. Toyota also pledged to bring cars to market by 2020 that the driver could put in autonomous auto-pilot mode so the vehicle could independently change lanes, merge with traffic, and pass other cars.

Also in the Land of the Rising Sun, the coastal city of Fujisawa will next year see a driverless taxi test provided by Robot Taxi (site is in Japanese). Plans call for the cabs to take about 50 participating residents on local shopping excursions of about 3 kilometers, The Guardian reports. The test is in preparation for the 2020 Olympics which will be hosted just down the road in Tokyo.

Granted, similar products and concepts are going on in the U.S. And granted, some of this is savvy marketers who are just as smart as Americans when it comes to grabbing headlines.

For that matter, the competition between Detroit and California is driving tech advances and helping to make the U.S. the place to be when it comes to driverless research and development.

But fighting in your own backyard only gets you so far. Let’s hope we don’t see a repeat of the 1960s-1970s when Japan ate Detroit’s lunch.

 

Photo—Elliott Brown, World Cup Flags, 2010.

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Does Fewer Daily Travelers Today Indicate a Shift to Shared Driverless Cars Tomorrow?

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Burney Simpson

You may feel like your travel time is more like stuck-in-traffic time, but Americans are actually spending a little less time getting around these days, according to a new report from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).

In 2014, Americans spent 1.11 hours making trips for daily activities, down from 1.23 hours in 2004, reports UMTRI’s Michael Sivak who used data from the nationwide American Time Use Survey for the study. Sivak looked at all modes of travel not just automobiles.

This is the latest study on motorization trends from the research professor. Sivak previously found that 2004 was the peak year for distance driven for Americans.

For the new study, Sivak concluded that there was no overall reduction in the duration of the daily activity trips, but that the percentage of persons traveling to conduct the activities had decreased.

The findings together indicate that Americans are reducing their auto travel, suggesting that consumers may be open to the use of shared autonomous vehicles as the technology develops. A number of forecasts have suggested 2020 as the turning point year when driverless vehicles become available at least in select markets.

In the new study, Sivak reports a decline in average travel time since 2004 for such activities as dining out, shopping, caring for and helping non-household members, work, education, and leisure and sports.

Meanwhile, there was no change in the average travel time for such activities as caring for and helping household members, and engaging in organizational, civic and religious activities. Personal care was the only activity that registered an increase.

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Tesla Trumps Apple in Summer’s Driverless Car Mashup

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Burney Simpson

The only trend moving faster than driverless transportation this August is Bernie Sanders.

This last week saw major interest in the autonomous vehicle industry, first with the Guardian breaking the news that Apple is seeking to use the driverless test track in Contra Costa, Calif., and, second because a Morgan Stanley analyst predicted that Tesla’s stock could nearly double in value, primarily because of its potential driverless technology.

Now, August can be a slow news month. But since when did vehicle test tracks become major clickbait?

The Apple story brought new life in the media to the battle between Michigan’s Mcity and California’s GoMentum Station. (See “Driverless Car Testing to Expand at Contra Costa,” March 20, 2015).

WEST COAST VS MIDWEST VS SOUTH

In brief, that’s the competition between the solid but dull Midwesterners and the creative but out-there Silicon Valley-ites. The next big angle is Virginia Tech’s track in Blacksburg, so we can learn about the hard-driving but backward good ol boys. (See “Va Tech Leaves ‘Em Eating Its Dust in Race to be the Top Driverless Test Track,” June 7, 2015)

A quick question — didn’t test tracks used to mean a bunch of sweaty guys jotting down notes on a clip board? Now it’s tattooed millennials tip-tapping into tablets.

The Guardian obtained secret documents that show, supposedly, that Apple is ready to spend some of the $200 billion it has in the bank, and it wants to become a car company.

Apple has been looking into reserving space at the GoMentum test track, the 5,000-acre site with 20-some miles of roads that Honda and Mercedes have been using in the last 12 months. Apple likes the fact that GoMentum has barbed wire fences and security guards with guns, claims the Guardian, because the firm is very secretive and their headquarters are in the area anyway, and they need to use that talent they’ve been poaching from competitors.

By the way, the Apple project is “codenamed Project Titan,” the Guardian reports, and it is led by Professor Charles Xavier. (No, we just made that up, the professor part. But it is called Project Titan.)

ELECTRIC DRIVERLESS RIDE-SHARING

Meanwhile, Tesla may be working on marketing an electric, driverless-vehicle ride-sharing service directly to consumers, according to Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas. This builds on the comment a few months ago by an Uber executive that the cab company would gladly buy half a million driverless cars from Tesla if only the electric car OEM were to make them.

The Tesla theorizing actually takes the futuristic aspect of driverless vehicles to the next logical stage, which is using an engine that reduces the use of fossil fuels.

TeslaStore1Currently, much of the power used to recharge Tesla’s electric cars is generated by plants burning coal and oil. But let’s look down the road about 10 or 20 years. Perhaps by then solar and wind will have displaced coal/oil as the principal fuels generating the power we will use to charge our driverless vehicles.

Under Jonas’ concept, Tesla will make a driverless electric vehicle, then build and operate a mobility service using these creations, cutting out such middlemen as Uber and possibly local mass transit systems.

This projection is similar to the study released this year by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that a self-driving, electric taxi could reduce operating costs and produce 90 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than a 2014 gasoline-powered, privately-owned vehicle. (See “Driverless Electric Cabs Will Cut Emissions, Save Bucks: Berkeley Study,” July 21, 2015). The costs savings would come from eliminating the driver and from lower fuel and maintenance expense.

Yes, the Tesla theory is based on a lot of what ifs and assumptions. But it comes from current trends and the stated goals of western governments.

Could it happen? Who knows, but it’s a lot more interesting than a Dick Tracy watch.

 

Feature photo – Mini car (electric car), Milan, Italy by Dzhingarova.

Photo in story – Amsterdam: Tesla Store by harry_nl, 2014

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Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015

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The Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015 will be a multidisciplinary forum designed to advance the deployment of automated vehicles.  Each day will kick off with high-level presentations by some of the brightest minds in the field.  Network over lunch, and then in the afternoon, choose from interactive breakout sessions where you can go in-depth with your colleagues, share perspectives and have an open dialogue on the industry’s most pressing issues.

 

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Michigan Launches Mcity Automated Vehicle Test Track as AVS Convenes

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Burney Simpson

The giant Mcity driverless-vehicle test track in Ann Arbor, Mich., is scheduled to open Monday, setting the stage for increased competition among such tracks in the U.S.

The $6.5 million Mcity boasts 32 acres featuring a simulation of urban and suburban roads with traffic signals, intersections, crosswalks, circles, tunnels, construction sites, buildings, and Potemkin Village-style building fronts. The facility is operated by the Mobility Transformation Center of the University of Michigan.

UMTRI’s partners on the project include such blue-chip autonomous-driving firms as Delphi Automotive, Denso, Honda, Ford, GM, Toyota and Xerox. Monday’s official opening is scheduled to feature University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel, Michigan’s U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, and the mayor of Ann Arbor.

A number of test tracks have expanded recently in the quest for business from the growing ‘hands-on’ research into autonomous vehicles.

In June, Va Tech announced it planned to operate the Virginia Automated Corridors, 70 miles of real roads in the Washington, D.C.-area that offer highway, suburban, urban and rural driving. Va. Tech already operates the 2.2 mile Virginia Smart Road near its campus in Blacksburg. (See “Va Tech Leaves ‘Em Eating its Dust in the Race to be the Top Driverless Track”).

In March, GoMentum Station in Concord, Calif., reported Honda had joined Mercedes Benz in testing autonomous cars at its 5,000 acre space on the former Concord Naval Weapons Station. The decommissioned base is about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco and around the corner from Silicon Valley. (See “Major Test Beds Gear Up for Autonomous Vehicles”).

GoMentum claims 20 miles of paved roads and a variety of cityscapes, along with a slew of intersections, traffic signals and other accoutrements for driving tests.

AVS OPENS TUESDAY

The Mcity opening coincides with the Automated Vehicle Symposium 2015 at the Ann Arbor Marriott Ypsilanti that brings together some of the top researchers in the industry. The symposium runs from Tuesday, July 21 to Thursday, July 23, but ancillary meetings will be held on the 20th and the 24th.

There will be demonstrations at Mcity for AVS attendees on both Tuesday and Wednesday from 12:30 to 5:00 p.m. On Thursday, a Mcity demonstration will be open to the public from noon to 8:00 p.m.

Suppliers and research organizations that are scheduled to provide Mcity demonstrations for AVS include Bosch, Changan, Delphi, Denso, Nokia’s HERE, IAV Automotive Engineering, Iteris, Qualcomm, Rosco, Southwest Research Institute/TARDEC, and the University of Michigan. Learn more here.

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