Google

Tesla launches in Mexico this week by opening a “Pop-up” store in the Mexican capital and we learn that the company hired Google’s longtime brand and communications manager for Latin American markets, Ricardo Blanco, to lead Tesla’s communications and marketing in the country.
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Google has announced its largest ever purchase of renewable energy to power data centers across the U.S., Sweden and Chile, reports The Washington Post. The new projects, mostly wind-powered, add a massive 842 megawatts of green energy, which Google claims is the largest investment ever by anyone other than a power company.

The investment brings Google’s total renewable energy capacity to 2 gigawatts, which is equivalent to the total energy output of the Hoover Dam. Google has pledged to power its entire operations from green energy by 2025, and Re/code reports it was 37% of the way there prior to this deal. That suggests this deal ought to take the company to around 60%.

There is a little small-print, however … 
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Some parts of Google’s self-driving car are still mysterious, but slowly more pieces of that mystery are being uncovered. One mystery, in particular, has been the inside of the car. While Google has allowed dozens of journalists, random lucky souls, and Google employees (of course) to ride in the car, only on very few occasions have we been able to see the inside. The company specifically told journalists not to take pictures of the inside at an event earlier this year, and we barely got a glimpse into a very early prototype in Google’s “A First Drive” video last summer. Now, with a couple of patents Google has received, we’re getting a more detailed look inside for the first time…
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Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.

Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.

In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
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Up to June of this year, Google’s self-driving cars had yet to be at fault in any accidents, and it seems that record has held true over the last few months. Of the dozen or so accidents up to that point, the majority had happened when the self-driving car wasn’t even moving, and the rest occurred when Google’s safety drivers were in control of the vehicles.

Unfortunately, in the months after Google released the first report, Google’s cars continued to see a couple of accidents per month. But that trend has come to an interesting halt recently. As we’ve learned thanks to Google’s recently-published October report, the self-driving cars have now gone more than two months without a single accident…
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While it seems near-certain that Google plans a full-scale commercial rollout of its self-driving cars, and that Apple has serious plans for a competing vehicle of its own, neither company is likely to manufacture the cars itself. As a recent opinion piece argued, actually manufacturing a car is massively complex undertaking.

Both Google and Apple will therefore be looking for partners to pull together different elements of the car, and Re/code has put together an interesting look at the most likely candidates. Though the piece is focused on the Apple Car, the analysis applies to Apple, Google and Tesla alike … 
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference a couple of days ago to explain the Autopilot features included in the company’s 7.0 software update, but LIDAR, one of the remote sensing technologies that Google uses in its self-driving car, also came up briefly. Elon Musk had some bold comments about to use of LIDAR in autonomous vehicles, in response to one inquiry from a WSJ reporter, which questioned whether the Model S would need more sensors for greater levels autonomy…
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Starting on January 1st, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to open its roads to testing of automated vehicles, according to a recent report (via CBC). The province will allow testing of self-driving cars (Google has been a pioneer in the space with both its Lexus models and its smaller, prototype EVs), as well as “related technologies,” starting on January 1st 2016…
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Google’s self-driving cars may have an impressive safety record – having never caused an accident in more than a million miles of driving on public roads – but the company admits that their ultra-cautious approach can make them a little unpredictable and annoying to other drivers, reports the WSJ. Examples include taking a very wide approach on turns, and braking at the slightest sign of danger.

The cars are “a little more cautious than they need to be,” Chris Urmson, who leads Google’s effort to develop driverless cars, [said]. “We are trying to make them drive more humanistically” … 

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Last month we wrote a first look at Tesla’s much-anticipated v7.0 software update with new ‘Autopilot’ features expected to be released later this year. Today we learn that Tesla released the second version of its beta v7.0 update to early access testers.

For previous releases, Tesla was able to update the beta fairly quickly for a wide-release just weeks after the original release to testers, but v7.0 being highly sensitive safety-wise, the beta testing process is taking longer than usual.
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When Google originally showcased the newer low-speed “cute-mobile” self-driving car, it mentioned a goal of having about 100 of them on the road for testing within a couple years. Now, as the company is bringing its low-speed electric prototypes to Austin a year later, Sarah Hunter, head of policy for Google [X], has revealed that the company is expanding production of the cars (via The Guardian). Hunter says that Google is now producing at least a “few hundred” and hints at a potential future of mass-production…
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The Chinese auto giant Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co, through its Beijing Electric Vehicle Co subsidiary, opened a research and development center in Silicon Valley. The center will be dedicated to electric vehicle research.

In its current “launch phase”, the R&D center has just over 20 employees and the company expects them to develop “4 to 6 models per year”.
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Chris Evans was until recently the head of Google’s Project Zero, a team of hackers employed full-time by Google to find zero-day vulnerabilities on not only their own products, but any software that could affect Google’s users. Today, Evans announced that he will soon join Tesla Motors to lead its security team. 
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Google is currently operating a fleet of Lexus SUVs retrofitted with their self-driving technology – these cars were recently being tested in Austin – but Google is also testing a fleet of prototypes developed in-house from the ground up (picture above). The company’s different approaches to the car business can get confusing and adding to the confusion, according to documents recently obtained by the Guardian, the company created a wholly owned subsidiary to operate their car business – Google Auto.

There are a lot of different reasons for a large corporation to create a subsidiary, but with this being a first for a project coming out of the Google X division, for example the company didn’t create a subsidiary for Google Glass, it raises a few questions.
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Google’s fleet of self-driving Lexus cars have notched up a total of 140,000 miles on public roads, and the company is now ready to begin road-testing its first purpose-built autonomous cars.

We first saw the cute-looking cars almost a year ago, when the company explained that they were not intended to ever make it to public sale. Their purpose is to see how people respond to a next-generation driverless car before later seeking partners to actually bring the technology to market.

We learned earlier this week that Google’s existing Lexus fleet has been involved in three low-speed accidents, none of them the fault of the car, but the company still isn’t taking any chances in this latest phase … 
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Great find from @mgillet onTwitter. This appears to be a Tesla dashboard at the headquarters showing significant growth in charging over the past few months.   More importantly, we some highly anticipated charging stations ‘coming soon’.  Probably most exciting for Tesla is the Oregon and northern California stations that will close the I5 corridor meaning the West Coast will be covered.  Also two stations on the California/Arizona border will allow trips to/from Phoenix and LA/San Diego.

You’ll notice that two stations, one in Colorado and one in Texas, are lit up even though Tesla hasn’t pushed to the  Supercharger Station website Map, below.

Texans will get two more Supercharger stations in Eastern Texas linking them to Arkansas and Louisiana. East coasters will get a couple in Northern New Jersey as well as Virginia and North Carolina allowing folks in Vermont/New Hampshire to travel to the Carolinas and vice versa.

Some fun facts:

• Fremont (Tesla Factory) and Hawthorn in SoCal seem to be far and away the busiest Superchargers with Gilroy coming in third over the last 30 days.
• Unsurprisingly, most people put 20-40kWh into their Teslas during a stop.
• 1576 cars visited superchargers in the last week
• Almost 4 million miles have been charged at Supercharging stations…
• That equates to 14,000 MWh…
• Which has saved nearly 160,000 gallons of gas.

Compare with the current map as of today, 10/21/2013:

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[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/380451200782462976]

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/380454034659753984]

[tweet https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/380459687050608640]

After plans for Autonomous driving were revealed this week via Tesla’s job site, Musk went on the offensive saying that yes they were working on a program and the team reports directly to him.

This is a stark (get it?) change from a previous stance where Musk said Tesla was taking a more wait and see approach. Perhaps Google’s plans to build their own car spurred him on?
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