First – did you know DCHQ now operates only through Facebook and Twitter?

https://www.facebook.com/driverlesscarhq

https://twitter.com/driverlesscarhq

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Yesterday I paid the domain renewal for Driverless Car HQ, which means it’s now one year since we first started discussing self-driving cars.

Paying the renewal caused me to reflect on the last year and the ridiculous progress made just in the last 12 months.

12 months ago…..

- Google was the only genuine declared player

- Testing hadn’t been approved in any jurisdiction

- Very few articles were ever published on the topic and it wasn’t even close to being mainstream knowledge. We seriously were scratching around trying to find even remotely related topics to talk about given that the news had very little for us.

- Only the bravest predicted that self driving vehicles would arrive by 2020.

Now…

- Nearly all major manufacturers have publicly announced some kind of project – GM, Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, the list goes on. Not only that, but Continental (the German tire-maker) was the second company to receive approval for testing in Nevada, and the Chinese government also appears to have some fairly advanced technology.

-Testing has been approved in Florida, California and Nevada, the latter having implemented self-driving vehicle number plates under a sanctioned testing system. The response from legislators and bureaucrats has been incredible, but also assisted by Google’s highly competent lobbying efforts. The enthusiasm shown by bureaucrats – most publicly the Nevada DMV (this video here is 100 minutes but is fascinating watching), whose leadership actively smoothed the path for successful passage through the local legislature.

- Articles abound on the net, with discussion taking place on blogs, fora and news websites around the globe. Where we used to link to anything remotely related to driverless cars, we now have to be quite selective in determining what is worth posting in our feeds and what is not.

- Many manufacturers – most notably GM, Nissan, Audi and Mercedes – have declared that we will see an autonomous vehicle by 2020. That’s only 7 years away – yikes!!. Sergey Brin goes one better – he  believes this technology will be commercialized within 5 years.

The momentum is unstoppable and the excitement is palpable, most especially after CES. There can now be no doubt that other manufacturers who have not yet shown their hand (Honda, Subaru and Mazda) are also working on the technology in some way.

Just read what Professor Thomas Weber of Mercedes had to say:

““It’s very important [to be first]. We are in a position [to be first].”

Wow.

Thanks for what has been an amazing last 12 months. Shouts go to Gabriel and Paul who have contributed so much since the start, to my fellow co-moderators and to Anthony who has been with me from the very first moment.

Mat.

At Driverless Car HQ we have always tried to link to websites we love, giving credit where it’s due in as many cases as possible.

Today I want to share with you five websites I really like that are related in some way to driverless cars.

1. Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen operates a super awesome site which covers broad topics but mostly confined to public policy and technology. Most often he and his co-writers often just uncover awesome content, like this ridiculously fascinating post about Uruguay (which got me carried away reading other articles for 10 minutes), this one that shows women perceive inflation to be higher than men, and regular assorted links posts. In my opinion this is one of the best blogs on the internet (and this is not biased by the fact that Cowen linked to us twice).

2. Ideas 4 Brad. Brad Templeton is an experienced technology veteran who founded the world’s first online business. He pioneered online discussion about robocars well before anyone else was speaking about it. Now a consultant to Google’s self-driving car program, he blogs regularly including this recent post about driverless cars. He can come across as a bit cranky but once you get past this, you can enjoy some really high quality thinking, such as this post about Nate Silver’s election predictions.

3. Next Big Future. Amazing technology blog for anyone who wants to follow the forefront of new technology. They keep us updated on things like Google Fiber, which is everywhere, and less talked about stuff such as recent stem cell research about growing cells in sponges. Most of the stuff they report on will probably turn out to be vaporware but this site does more than any other to stay positive about the future.

4. Motorscore.com. A bit more relevant to cars, this site is like a Rotten Tomatoes for cars but what’s most cool is that they have compiled the different car reviews into mini guides for specific types of models. To be specific, check out this list of AWD cars or this one that looks at 7 passenger cars. It doesn’t work in all cases – this Small SUVs guide is slightly awkward – but overall the site is highly useful.

5. Bryant Walker Smith is a law lecturer at Stanford University. He’s probably the leading authority in the United States on the topic of autonomous vehicle law and blogs occasionally. He needs to blog a bit more, but here’s his most recent paper which concludes that autonomous vehicles are already legal in the United States. Nice.

Bonus Site: Autopia.

What do you think? What are your favourites?

In recent months, the news in Australia has been filled with hard luck stories from physical retailers small and large all bemoaning the current state of retail. There’s a simply awesome article stuck behind the pay wall of this website talking about the rise of online retail.

Between reduced spending and competition from the internet, it’s tough times. This is not just a problem faced by Australians – internet spending is eating up retailers world wide.

Websites like Zappos –  who have exploded on the basis of free shipping shipping both ways – are growing and expanding.

There are three big disadvantages suffered by online retail at the moment.

The first disadvantage is the time delay – purchasers must wait at least a while for their product. If they need something urgently – say, in the next 20 minutes – they are in trouble.

The second is the shipping cost suffered by one member of the transaction. The free shipping back and forth sounds great to consumers but we know that all this does is eat into the margins of those retailers, thereby leading to higher costs.

The third is the lack of touchability of their products.

Driverless cars can – and will – solve all three problems, in combination with warehouse automation. We’ll get to the point where you order a product and it will not be touched by a human being.

Want to try on a pair of pants at 10pm at night at your home? NOW? Done! Desperately need mint choc chip icecream – at 5am? Done!

This sort of thing is really going to tear retail a new asshole. Those retailers that don’t add any value – such as an amazing customer service experience – are going to be directly in the firing line. People still want to leave home and have fun so the mix of businesses in retail precincts is going to keep moving towards service based small businesses such as cafés and massage shops.

The proportion of service businesses to retail in shopping centres is growing at a rapid rate because people still want to leave their homes and have fun. If someone can get it done without leaving the house, your business is dead.

KPMG, the famous accounting firm, has just released a highly detailed and well-researched white paper into driverless cars. With respect to the authors of previous white papers, this one is far and away the most detailed document ever compiled and released publicly on the topic. It simply kicks ass.

This sort of document is perfect for giving to people in positions of influence – it carries the KPMG brand, is very bullish on the technology and is overall very well researched.

It goes through all the aspects of the current situation in a highly detailed manner. They also provide some hypothetical discussion which shows they truly get it:

Imagine this: It’s 2022, and autonomous vehicle technology is fully developed and priced within reach of most vehicle owners. Interest is high; the technology appeals to the usual technophiles, but many people are still on the fence. Now take a densely populated urban area like Southern California, where car ownership is high and commutes are often agonizing. The California Department of Transportation has been weighing its options to deal with the rising cost of congestion. The costs for building and repairing transportation infrastructure are also high, and now self-driving vehicles offer real promise. The DOT has thoroughly tested the new technology and even designed special autonomous vehicle permits, and decides to pilot a special HOV lane for self-driving cars. Perhaps it even provides tax rebates or other financial inducements for vehicle owners who buy the self-drive package—either on a new car or in the aftermarket—assuming it will make back the investment in usage fees.

Now you start to see those cars whiz by with their self-drive E-ZPasses®. You start to read stories about commute times cut drastically. Your colleague starts bragging about the e-mails she answered on the way to work, the books she’s read, and movies she’s watched on her way home.

Thanks to Paul Godsmark for sending it in!

After the last post giving the run down on the TRB conference (apologies for the horrendous formatting – my fault), our anonymous reader has filed another report!

Here it is:

Some more thoughts and opinions from the conference – and I fully accept if others at the conference saw things very differently from me – it would be great if other participants would post on here and balance it out.

One key comment from yesterday that I forgot to mention was that Mercedes will continue with their successful business model approach of implementing new systems one at a time on their continual progression towards full autonomy (whoops – should I have written automation?).

In one of the breakout sessions today on Driver Vehicle Interaction a key research topic identified is the need to work out the whole of issue of how disengaged the driver can become in some of these ‘semi-autonomous modes’ like CACC (co-operative active cruise control; a bit like platooning) and how long would it take to re-engage the driver. Which I guess is seeking reassurance of when and how is it safe to disengage the driver and how long does it take to re-engage him. So this would be driving with periods of ‘hands and feet off’ as the car handles longitudinal and lateral movements.

My preference is that we just jump a few steps and disengage the driver completely; to which I ask, is the Google car intended to be a ‘body out’ solution at some point in the future? It would be really interesting to know whether that is what the public wants. Although when you think of the way some companies have managed to sell vast quantities of products that people never knew that they wanted (well I never knew that I had wanted an iPad until I had read about it and handled it) – then maybe there is a market for this type of vehicle.

The breakout session groups discussed a load of topics around the autonomous vehicle and its implications – seeking to develop ideas for research and in part guide a roadmap that will help the US government to implement this technology in an optimal way. A lot of topics that were discussed would be very familiar to DriverlessCarHQ readers and I know I was able to contribute more for having kept up to date with editorials and comments.

My overall impression was that it was a great workshop and some really useful research will result from it.

Many may not know this but there’s a conference on right now in Irvine, California hosted by the Transportation Research Board about driverless cars.

Brad Templeton has blogged his impressions:

I’m here in Newport beach at the Transportation Research Board’s conference on self-driving vehicles. Today in a pre-session there was discussion of pre-robocar technologies and in particular applications of “managed lanes” and what the might mean for these technologies. Managed lanes are things like HOV/carpool lanes, HOT (carpool+toll), reversible lanes etc. Many people imagine these lanes would be used with pre-robocar technologies like convoys, super-cruise, cooperative ACC, Bus Rapid Transit etc.
As I’ve said before the first rule of robocars is “you don’t change the infrastructure.” First you must make the vehicles operate fully on the existing infrastructure. And people are doing that. But we can also investigate what happens next.

Robocars as many envision them do not thus need dedicated lanes, even though some of the simpler technologies might. Earlier we talked about electrification which is a pretty expensive adaptation. Let’s talk about high speed lanes.

He goes on to discuss the idea of dedicated lanes during off-peak times.

I would give good money to be there but am on the other side of the world, unfortunately. However, there’s good news…

We have also had an anonymous reader send in a full run-down (slightly redacted):

Richard Bishop is here – and so many others that are probably familiar names to the DriverlessCarHQ aficionados.

There has been some really interesting discussion already – and one or two subtle digs around the turf war of the connected vehicle piece and the autonomous vehicles piece.

Levandowski’s presentation was ruined a bit by a Microsoft Powerpoint malfunction – very few of the presenters were able to present their embedded videos without some sort of hiccup. Broggi’s presentation was great as they gave gone down the vision route and he basically used his presentation to have a dig at the expensive sensors that the others use as they produce 3-D from their stereo cameras. Later on Luca Delgrossi had a similar dig as Mercedes use stereo vision, but they go one (or more) better and get 6-D! Do these guys know that Ibeo are going to produce the liar sensors at $250 each in a couple of years?…….

Early on today it was made very clear to delegates that we should no longer be talking about autonomous vehicle, but automated vehicles – I think that was in Steven Shladover’s Lexicon and Taxonomy intro . After which all of the speakers being developers of ‘automated’ technology were bending over backwards to apologise for using autonomous in their slides – including most of Levandowski (Google), Chris Gerdes (Stanford), Alberto Broggi (VIsLab), Chris Borroni–Bird (GM) and Luca Delgrossi (Mercedes).

Bryant Walker-Smith made a great presentation on legal aspects, and near the end, on a slide showing that Nevada had already passed laws, added something like “Autonomous – Sorry Steve, but it’s the law” – which earned a roar of laughter from the participants.

Some questions were asked after the talks – Levandowski was asked when their technology would go on sale to the public – I think he answered something like “When it’s certified safe”. The next question was “When is safe ‘safe enough’” and that led to some interesting discussion between the panel of presenters on the subject – hopefully that got caught on the webinar.

There were three presentations on platooning – a lot of commonality between the projects, but each did something different that added to the overall knowledge. The Volvo guy made it clear that their cars took a lot of front end and windshield damage from gravel thrown up from behind the lead truck – and it affected the second and third car too. Not the sort of stuff that leaves me wanting to save a few dollars in fuel.

Its workshop day tomorrow when we break out into discussion groups and start to sort out the areas of research needs and build the data set of questions and comments needed to start a roadmap to take this whole piece forward.

All in all a great workshop and plenty more to come tomorrow.

Quick thoughts…

If a truck loaded up with valuable goods is travelling without any humans to stop it, what’s going to stop people from taking that cargo?

Surveillance doesn’t help because balaclavas are a simple counter-measure.

Heavily fortified trucks could impede the road pirates while distress signals are sent.

Electrification – the internal shell of the trucks could be heavily electrified, making it highly difficult for the pirates to get to the goods.

Convoys – A human could potentially travel with massive convoys of, say, 50 vehicles as a protective measure.

Tear Gas/Pepper Spray could be deployed if threats are sensed.

Self Destruct could even be included as a final counter-measure to make pirate raids futile.

Of all the above solutions, I think a heavy lockdown in combination with guarded convoys would be the solution that is reached. What do you think?

For smaller vehicles performing part of a final-mile solution, there would need to still be quite strong protection but without humans required.

There’s still much conjecture around the topic of what to name driverless cars. We’ve blogged about it previously. Here’s a cheeky suggestion, however, from a commenter named Bonapart O Cunasa  on this post at Marginal Revolution:

Call them “personal buses”, not “driverless cars” – much more effective way to bring the enviromental lobby round in support, at least on my side of the Atlantic where greens have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything called a car…

It’s part of a discussion about driverless cars initiated by an opinion piece in the WSJ. It didn’t say much new and is behind a pay wall so we didn’t link to it – we’re trying to avoid opinion pieces as much as possible because they are a dime a dozen.

The quote featured by Cowen is worth quoting here:

Driverless cars don’t need the same wide lanes, which would allow highway authorities to reconfigure roads to allow travel speeds to be raised during peak travel periods. All that is needed would be illuminated lane dividers that can increase the number of lanes available. Driverless cars could take advantage of the extra lane capacity to reduce congestion and delays.

Another design flaw is that highways have been built in terms of width and thickness to accommodate both cars and trucks. The smaller volume of trucks should be handled with one or two wide lanes with a road surface about a foot thick, to withstand trucks’ weight and axle pressure. But the much larger volume of cars—which apply much less axle pressure that damages pavement—need more and narrower lanes that are only a few inches thick.

Building highways that separate cars and trucks by directing them to lanes with the appropriate thickness would save taxpayers a bundle. It would also favor the technology of driverless cars because they would not have to distinguish between cars and trucks and to adjust speeds and positions accordingly.

Maybe for new infrastructure.

A question to our readers: Does Jevrons Paradox apply in a future where Transport as a Service (TaaS) is delivered almost entirely by autonomous vehicles?

For those not familiar with Jevrons Paradox, this is my interpretation: as humans are able to use energy more efficiently, we will compensate our efficiency by using more energy. For example, a household replaces all of their old incandescent light bulbs with new energy saving LED, however, instead of keeping to their normal habits they keep the lights on longer because the new lights use less energy.

The reason I ask this question, is because driverless car based TaaS will be far more efficient (and cheaper) than current human driven vehicles (particularly with single passenger vehicles on highways).  Will the lower costs mean we take more frivolous journeys? Or will knowing the exact fare of a driverless car trip make us more frugal?

To cap off this post I leave you with the thoughts of commenter Koshchei The Deathless from a few months back:

What about the effect on driverless taxis on walking habits? People who own cars tend to use them at the drop of a hat, not much thinking about petrol costs as they have already paid large costs to acquire the car such as buying it, insurance etc, and petrol and wear-and-tear costs aren’t obvious. Driverless cars differ in two ways here: 1) you pay per trip. People are more likely to think about the cost with pay-per-trip as the cost is always upfront and obvious. 2) Driverless is a little less convenient, you might have to wait 15 min or so after ordering.

Put those together and people might value living within walking distance of things. A short trip to buy milk using a car currently makes some sense, the waste of money there is a lot more obvious with driverless.

What are your thoughts?

A conversation that Anthony and I continuously return to is the idea of driverless car home delivery.

When we say that, we mean the delivery of goods to your home address

How will it work? How will you keep your goods secure if you’re not present at home?

1. The first option is that the goods are left outside like postal services sometimes soon. This is a sub-optimal solution and I doubt would gain much traction.

2. The delivery portal. This could be like today’s dog flap or a converted garage. Brad Templeton has a few ideas on this:

It might even make sense for a house to have a room, with a garage-door to the outside, which is the “rental room.” This in fact might well be the former garage of the home. The rental room, with a remotely openable door for deliverbots, would perform different functions based on delivery.

For example, a deliverbot might bring exercise equipment into the room, and it would be a home gym for an hour. In the evening, it might bring in a guest bed and be a guest room for the night. Another day it might bring in big tools to be the machine shop. A “room of requirement” for the modern age.

The biggest issue we see here is, again, security. Limiting access to just the robot only shouldn’t be too difficult using some sort of  validation technology but the big issue is what if a human being sees the bot going to the house and just walks into the garage with it? The dog flap is a potential solution to this but creates another set of limitations.

3. Robocopters (eg. Tacocopter). This one’s a bit further in the future and has some issues of its own in terms of commercial viability and public policy.

4. User Initiated Delivery. This could potentially work in conjunction with Brad’s rental room idea.

The idea is that if the delivery is made by driverless vehicles, why does it have to be done while the owner isn’t present? When the object is ready for delivery from a logistics centre, the owner could receive some sort of notification and then decide whether to receive it then and there. If they don’t want to at that particular moment, they could receive another alert when they get home reminding them of the still-pending delivery. Alternatively, they could schedule a time for delivery.

This kind of method will turn the idea into a genuine, robust solution. Maybe the recipient could be charged $1 for every additional 24 hours that the package spends in the centre?

What are your thoughts?