autonomous


Tesla AutoPilot Cost and Take-Rates

Model S autopilot

Last October, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk stepped onstage in Los Angeles to announce the new P85D edition of the Model S and a new semi-autonomous driving feature called AutoPilot. Surprisingly, Musk told the audience that, starting two weeks prior to the event every Model S coming off the line was already equipped with the package of radar, camera and ultrasonic sensors that would enable AutoPilot. The engineers were still working on the software and it would debut in 2015. It’s now August 2015 and AutoPilot still hasn’t been turned on but the company’s second quarter earnings release did make an interesting mention of the new capability.

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Can an Apple User Experience Be Enough to Succeed in Cars?

carplay

In recent days, the speculation that Apple, Inc. has embarked on an effort to develop and produce cars has blown up all over the internet. If indeed Apple is doing this, they come at this market segment as the industry may be entering the most transformational period in its near 130 year history. I believe Apple can do some very interesting things in this field in the near term, but it’s not at all clear if the company behind the Mac and iPhone has the traits to succeed in the long run. Even if Apple does succeed in the near-term, Tesla is likely to be the first automaker to feel the pain.

The auto industry is scrambling right now to develop future cars capable of driving themselves, taking the humans completely out of the loop. As I’ve discussed previously, there are still a great many technical issues to resolve before we can turn over full control of our mobility needs to sensors, actuators and algorithms. It may in fact be decades before we have fully autonomous general purpose vehicles that can go anywhere.

The era of personal vehicle ownership may be coming to an end

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At just 7.6 feet long and 4 feet wide, the minimalist Renault Twizy is a vehicle…

At just 7.6 feet long and 4 feet wide, the minimalist Renault Twizy is a vehicle you probably won't see on American roads anytime soon.

However, we will probably start to vehicles with a similarly small footprint by the end of the decade. The +General Motors EN-V http://www.youtube.com/user/generalmotorsenv?ob=0 is likely to evolve from the two-wheeled Segway-based balancing vehicles first shown two years ago in Shanghai to something more like this. These tiny electric commuters obviously can't meet everyone's needs, but they could certainly do the trick in crowded urban centers especially when combined with autonomous capabilities that allow them to park themselves and be summoned by smartphone when needed.

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Until his retirement in 2009, Larry Burns was SVP of research and development for…

Until his retirement in 2009, Larry Burns was SVP of research and development for +General Motors for 11 years where he led a team that worked on all kinds of really cool technology. Larry oversaw development on tech as ranging from robotics to fuel cells to autonomous vehicles and I was lucky enough to chat with him on a number of occasions.

GM has been researching semi and fully autonomous vehicles since at least the early 1990s and in 2007 a fully autonomous Chevy Tahoe built by GM and Carnegie Mellon University won the DARPA Urban Challenge. I was lucky enough to ride shotgun in "Boss" at CES in 2008 as it magically avoided obstacles in the parking lot of the Las Vegas convention center.

Following that victory Burns and director of advanced technology vehicle concepts Christopher Borroni-Bird turned their attention scaling down the technology to create personal urban mobility vehicles that debuted as the EN-V concepts during the 2010 Shanghai world expo.

Burns, Borroni-Bird and William Mitchell wrote a book on their ideas called Reinventing the Automobile that among other things looks at how cars can evolve to become more compatible with increasingly crowded urban environments in the 21st century. Smaller footprint vehicles that can drive and park themselves and be shared will likely be a big part of providing point-to-point personal mass transit in the coming years.
http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Automobile-Personal-Mobility-Century/dp/0262013827/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334063568&sr=1-8

#larryburns #autonomous #autonomousvehicles

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Self-driving vehicles on near horizon, GM's former r&d chief says
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Self-driving vehicles, once thought to be a thing far in the future, will be available by 2020, Larry Burns, former head of r&d at General Motors, said today. Speaking at the U…

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Fully autonomous vehicles are still quite a few years out, but the many of necessary…

Fully autonomous vehicles are still quite a few years out, but the many of necessary pieces are appearing in cars now. The next big step is integrating all of those signals to build smarter control algorithms.

We also need more precise GPS data which will be enabled by the next generation of satellites that are going up over the next couple of years, assuming LightSquared doesn't mess it all up first.

#cars #autonomous

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Five Reasons The Robo-Car Haters Are Wrong
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