Imagine a future where your car’s not just connected to the road between the tire rubber and tarmac. It’s connected to the internet and not only sending a steady stream of data but also receiving signals to speed up or slow down based on the traffic. This futuristic future is already here.
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Tesla is joining the race to build and sell the world’s first self-driving car, and it plans to win. In an interview with the Financial Times this week, Elon Musk said he’s working on building a car that can run on "auto-pilot" within three years. That would put Tesla way ahead of competition
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Self-driving cars stand to be the next piece of technology that shakes the foundations of modern life. It’s not hard to see why—it’s basically science fiction come to life. Since it seems like everybody wants to be involved, news that Mercedes and Nokia were teaming up didn’t come as a huge surprise.
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Nissan got bold on Tuesday afternoon by announcing plans to build and, more notably, sell an affordable self-driving car by 2020. And when Nissan say affordable, it means it. The company estimates the cost of upgrading a luxury sedan to a luxury autonomous sedan
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Google is reportedly having a hard time
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It’s no secret that Google has been slowly but surely finding its way into the automotive industry, as it’s already been working with manufacturers to build self-driving cars for quite some time. However, according to Amir Efrati, a former star reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the software giant is looking to drive a few extra miles down that road by designing and building cars of its own. The company has been in talks with component suppliers like Continental AG and Magna International in the hopes that it could put together an entire car under Google’s command. The idea, Efrati says, is to put more pressure on car brands to develop autonomous driving tech, regardless of if Google is directly involved or not.
So what would Google do with such a vehicle built under its direct supervision and brand? One idea on the drawing board is a “robo-taxi” service, which is exactly how it sounds: a self-driving car would come and pick you up and drop you off at your destination; at first, a human would need to be behind the wheel just in case, but that could easily change as the tech progresses and becomes more reliable. Steer toward the source link for a few more details about the thought process behind Google’s efforts.
Filed under: Google
Source: Jessica Lessin
No matter how robust a city’s transportation infrastructure, no matter how timely or how many buses and trains run, there’s still the issue of actually getting to the bus station. And it’s not like you’re going to walk there like a putz. Heck no, there are driver-less trolleys for that.
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In the world of self-driving cars and autonomous vehicle technology, Google gets most of the attention, but it’s far from being the only player in the field. Earlier this month, Mobileye, the Israeli and Dutch maker of advanced driver assistance technologies, claimed that self-driving cars “could be on the road by 2016.” Rather than Google cars’ array of radar, cameras, sensors and laser-based range finders, Mobileye wants to offer autonomous driving capability at a more affordable price point by using mainstream cameras that cost only a few hundred dollars.
While cars using Mobileye’s systems, like the Audi A7, aren’t quite as “autonomous” as Google vehicles, they could help advanced driver assistance technology make it onto the road long before 2025 — the date industry experts expect driverless cars to go mainstream. With its intelligent, camera-based “traffic assist” technology expected to begin arriving this summer thanks to partnerships with five major automakers, the automotive A.I. company is looking to take advantage while its stock is still high, so to speak.
Mobileye announced today that it is selling $400 million in equity to “five unaffiliated” financial investors, which include “some of the largest U.S.-based global institutional asset managers and a leading Chinese government-affiliated financial investor,” according to a statement released this morning. The transaction, which values the company at $1.5 billion (pre-money) and was overseen by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is expected to close in August.
The company attributes the timing, in part, to the current regulatory support and progression of global safety standards, which have helped encourage automakers to accelerate integration of intelligent driver assistance technologies.
Mobileye has been around since the 1990s, and like Google, is more interested in being an artificial intelligence company and, specifically, improving the intelligence of cameras to assist with autonomous driving, than being an automaker itself. The company’s technology has been tested in a number of capacities, but mostly it’s focused on helping drivers avoid collisions.
According to The New York Times, in the past, its tech has been used by companies like Volvo to detect pedestrians or vehicles up ahead or crossing in your blind-spots, alerting drivers when they get too close to those objects, for example.
The newer version of Mobileye’s system that arrives this summer aims to help steer the car in stop-start situations, though drivers are still required to keep their hands on the wheel. Coming up next, and expected to be street-ready by 2013, is a more advanced system that will allow for hands-free driving.
The company plans to begin experimenting with and adding to the number of onboard cameras in vehicles to improve the efficacy of its technology in autonomous driving cases and presumably push it closer to the kind of hands-free, full autonomy promised by Sergey Brin and Google in the years to come.
It’s no secret that late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was keen on bringing the company’s technology to the automotive world. In fact, according to longtime Apple board member Mickey Drexler, “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.” Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Shiller, echoed those sentiments during the company’s copyright infringement trial against Samsung, saying there had been discussion of Apple making a vehicle. More »
When you think of a self-driving car, you probably think of Google’s little project. And exciting as that is, we still have to wait a long time for pay-off. And even then, you can bet it’ll be pricey. Researchers in the UK are working on their own version of the tech, and it stands to be a lot cheaper. Maybe as cheap as $150. More »
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