The Volvo brand is all about safety. Today the company announced that it will equip its next-generation vehicles with lidar, an expensive sensor that has almost entirely been reserved for fleet-based robotaxis — not passenger cars. Tesla rejected lidar entirely. But Volvo believes lidar’s robust capabilities can be applied to millions of vehicles for hands-off highway driving.
NVIDIA has unveiled what they call the “world’s most advanced processor” for use in autonomous vehicles and robots. The new NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin chip can perform 200 trillion operations per second, which is almost seven times as many as NVIDIA’s previous Xavier chip (30 trillion operations) and more than Tesla’s FSD Computer (144 trillion).
Lidar startup Luminar announced today that it’s received $100 million in new funding, as the company also introduced Iris, an autonomous platform that it expects to bring to production vehicles by 2022 — for less than $1,000.
The “Self Drive Act” (H.R. 3388), which sets new federal self-driving car measures, is smoothly going through the legislative process with apparent bipartisan support.
It was unanimously approved by the U.S. House today. expand full story
While reports of Apple’s work on electric and self-driving cars have been surfacing for years, CEO Tim Cook has been careful about not confirming or denying any detail.
But he now makes rare comments on Apple’s effort in developing self-driving cars, which he referred to as “a core technology” for the company. expand full story
A new article in the May edition of Transportation Research took up the question of how much, if anything, consumers would pay for autonomous driving capabilities in their vehicles. The survey of 1,260 American households concluded that the average household would be willing to pay $3,500 for partial automation, or $4,900 for full automation.
There was a lot of variance in the data however, as several households said they would pay upwards of $10,000 for full automation, and others said they would not be interested in paying a premium at all for this technology. The research also concludes that because of this large variance in consumer price preferences, there will be plenty of room for vehicle models with varying levels of automation at various price points.