Yet another automotive proving ground opened in Ann Arbor, Mich. today, but the Mobility Transformation Center (MTC) is quite different from existing tracks. There is no shortage of automotive test tracks scattered around southeast Michigan mostly operated by automakers and larger suppliers that do everything from salt baths to high-speed stability to running over pounding potholes. These facilities tend to be highly secured facilities where outsiders are rarely welcome. Ford engineers don’t get to hang out at GM’s Milford Proving Ground and GM people are persona non-grata in Dearborn. At MTC Mcity course, all of these engineers will have a place where they can come together and collaborate along with researchers from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).
Mcity is a 32-acre facility located in northeast Ann Arbor, adjacent to the former Pfizer R&D center. UMTRI has partnered with 48 companies including more than a dozen primary partners including Toyota, Ford, GM, Honda, Bosch, Delphi, Verizon, State Farm and numerous other companies along with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and Department of Transportation on this unique facility. Unlike other tracks that focus on product development and durability testing for individual companies, MTC is focused on technologies that require vehicles from all companies to coexist and interoperate such as automated driving and connectivity.
To date, most of the news headlines about automated vehicles have been coming out of northern California where Stanford University researchers and companies like Google have been leading the charge to take the human out of the driving loop. Most of the automakers and major suppliers have their own research outposts in Silicon Valley and automated vehicles have been prowling the roads their for several years.
While tremendous progress has been made on autonomous technology, Northern California has its limitations as an automotive testing site. Along with being an enormously expensive place to live and work, the region is largely devoid of weather variation. This is good for test repeatability and proving out the basic control functionality, but not terribly representative of much of the world where these vehicles will ultimately have to exist if they are ever adopted.
MTC has been set up to address these issues and enable the engineers developing this technology to ensure that it is robust enough for real world use. Along with being in close proximity to tens of thousands of automotive engineers, technicians and support facilities, it will also operate year-round from humid summer heat to polar vortex winters. The MTC track has a range of paved and unpaved road surfaces including asphalt, concrete, brick and dirt as well as features that include roundabouts, overpasses and tunnels. Movable building facades and both stationary and mechanized pedestrians and cyclists will help the engineers verify that all of the systems are working reliably.
In addition to the automated driving technologies, connected vehicle systems will also be tested at Mcity. GM will start deploying vehicle-to-vehicle technology in 2016 and Mcity will provide a location where automakers and suppliers can make sure their systems interoperate reliably. The facilities can also be used to develop testing and performance standards that can be applied industry-wide in the future to validate new vehicle systems as well as trying to resolve the questions of how to program ethics into autonomous vehicles. More importantly, having a dedicated facility that replicates features in the real world will enable the engineers to capture the data when they find problems and then reproduce it as work out solutions.
Automakers and suppliers aren’t the only ones with access to the facility. The University of Michigan has a huge engineering program and has trained the people that build what we drive for decades. Those aspiring engineers will also be able to use the track for their own projects. One of the projects that UMTRI will be pursuing at the facility is a test of 3D printed self-driving low-speed electric vehicles produced by Local Motors.
The Local Motors electric car with 3D printed chassis
Silicon Valley will likely remain a hot-bed of advanced development of bleeding edge new technologies. The opening of Mcity probably means the center of gravity of efforts to bring these capabilities to customers is shifting back to Michigan.