self-driving

In a recent interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, BMW CEO Harald Krüger reiterated the company’s intention to phase out diesel models and introduce more electric vehicles in order to comply with increasingly strict emission regulations.

The CEO also commented on Tesla’s Autopilot, which he doesn’t see as the lead semi-autonomous option on the market at the moment. Of course, this comment shouldn’t come as a surprise since you rarely hear an executive admiting that a competitor’s technology is more advanced than his own company’s, but Krüger’s comments went beyond boasting BMW’s tech.
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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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Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company can’t offer the Autopilot as a retrofit. There are a few aftermarket options available to add driver assist features to a car, but nothing close to Tesla’s ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’ features… until now.
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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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During the conference call to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results, Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the recent release of the Autopilot and the ways Model S owners are using it. Musk said that the company was aware of many accidents that were prevented by Autopilot, and not aware of any caused by it.

But he added that they saw some “fairly crazy” videos on Youtube, which is now prompting the company to implement some additional constraints on when Autopilot can be activated, in hope of making it more difficult for owners to place themselves in those “crazy” situations.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a conference call today to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results with analysts. During the call, Musk commented on the recent release of the Autopilot and the technology going forward. When asked how he sees the market with full autonomous driving and manual driving vehicles, the CEO said that once self-driving cars are being produced, non-autonomous cars will have a “negative value” and be the equivalent of owning a horse – meaning it would be for “sentimental reasons”.
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Nissan unveiled the IDS concept at a preview of the Tokyo Motor Show today. The company described the concept as the embodiment of its vision for electric vehicles and self-driving cars going forward. The concept is fitted with a 60 kWh battery pack, which represent exactly twice the energy of the biggest battery pack option for the Nissan’s flagship LEAF. Although the company didn’t confirm a range for the vehicle, if we consider the size of the battery pack combined with its aerodynamic design and full-carbon-fiber body, the IDS concept could achieve a range of around 200 miles on a single charge.
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A team of engineers at Stanford University teamed up with Renovo Motors, the makers of a Corvette-like all-electric car, to build a self-driving electric DeLorean. The group unveiled the prototype yesterday, just before the day Marty McFly time-travels to in the “Back to the Future” film franchise, which popularized the DeLorean.
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GM CEO Mary Barra made a series of announcement today about the “future of personal mobility”, most notable of which a new plan for autonomous Chevy Volt to be available to GM employees to drive on private property next year.

A fleet of 2017 Volt equipped with GM’s self-driving technology will be made available in late 2016 for GM employees to reserve through a new car-sharing app and drive around the company’s Warren Technical Center campus in Michigan.
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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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During yesterday’s conference call about Tesla’s second quarter financial results, Elon Musk refused to answer a question from a financial analyst about Travis Kalanick’s, Uber’s CEO, recent comments that his company would buy 500,000 Teslas in 2020 if they are equipped with Tesla’s self-driving technology by the end of the decade.

The short conversation was very revealing. Here it is in full:
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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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Self-driving cars are a popular topic of discussion and the times of Google singlehandedly spearheading the effort seem long gone with what feels like every tech company on earth working on their own autonomous driving projects. One thing that inevitably comes up when talking about self-driving vehicles is predictions, but as the tech comes closer to reality, predictions and reality are blending to create misconceptions.

During Tesla’s recent shareholders meeting, Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, confirmed that the company will be pushing a new software update by the end of the month to their early access customers that will enable new autonomous features to their Model S. This could soon lead to the most advance autonomous capabilities to date in a vehicle currently on public roads. 
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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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