East Vs West in the the driverless race
The race in autonomous vehicle development continues to speed up! The concept of AV has become a case of “when” rather than “if” and here are the latest updates from the industry on the autonomous vehicles.
In the WEST
Delphi have been a leading Tier 1 in AV development for some time now and they announced last week that it is purchasing the self-driving car startup Nutonomy for US$450M. Nutonomy is an MIT-spin off technology startup founded in 2013, that has launched the robo-taxi service in Singapore last year. Nutonomy will be adding over 100 employees to Delphi’s own 100+ strong autonomous vehicle work force, thus putting Delphi at a definite advantage with intellectual property and engineering talent. Delphi is aiming to put 60 autonomous cars on the road by the end of this year.
Waymo, arguably the company behind the most tested self driving technology that’s in the market, has been training its autonomous vehicles with the help of law enforcement. Police and emergency vehicles has been brought in for a testing in Arizona to allow Waymo learning to recognize and respond to these vehicles properly. As autonomous vehicles slowly populate the street in a few years, the coordination between cars of various ‘intelligence’ levels are of utmost importance. At Castle, Waymo’s car training ground, there are even human assistants cutting off driverless minivans at high speed and throwing basketballs at them to test and improve car reactions.
Other OEMs are also bring its autonomous vehicles to test. Ford is aiming for 2018, GM is aiming in the next “few quarters”, Uber is testing it right now in Toronto, and opening a research group there in an attempt to create another driverless technology hub outside the Silicon Valley.
In the EAST
In Dubai, a trial of driverless shuttle service in Downtown Dubai is soon to be launched between Dubai Mall and an underground parking on Mohammad Bin Rashid Boulevard. The trial will also test the driverless vehicles with Dubai’s smart traffic lights. These lights would communicate with the vehicle fleet with the aim to reduce traffic. Dubai has already saved $34B in fuel and time over the last 10 years through transport innovations like smart traffic lights and more. City officials are aiming for 1/4 of the local trips to be made driverless by 2030 and the local police are rolling out tiny self-driving patrol cars by the end of 2017.
Eastern developing countries like India and China face even bigger challenges with the driverless car development than their counterparts in the West since the roads are less regulated and the environments are more likely to change. Take India’s Tata Motors for example - it has created a testing track outside Bangalore to simulate local road conditions, complete with pedestrians and cattle! Tata’s computer-vision systems still failed to identify 15% of the vehicles on Indian roads because of the variety shapes and sizes.
Baidu in China are teaming up with over 50 international companies to develop its autonomous driving software. It’s aggressively testing on Beijing roads, evening showing it’s CEO Robin Li in one of the self-driving cars in a recent demo. Baidu is confident that its self-driving cars could be on the road as early as next year. Check the video out here.
Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, predicts that the developing countries will eventually catch-up to driverless technology, much like what happened with mobile phones. Although the development of driverless cars have much more hurdles to go through than assembling mobile phones articulately, particularly in the regulatory and safety side.
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