The Autonomous Cars News, Development, and Discussion Thread

[Xelebes]

Originally Posted by Eveningsong

I hope this doesn't compete with scarce transit funding...

For someone like me who is very much reliant on public transit to get around town, I am very much looking forward to this technology. It will put less pressure on buses and give trains an advantage because it will be less seen as moving people with mobility issues and more for moving people in and out of locations.

[Hatman]

That's food for thought. Will public transit become exempt from ADA accessibility laws? A transit company could provide 'alternate transportation' with ADA accessibility needs in the form of an accessible autonomous taxi. This would change a lot of engineering issues in regards to station accessibility (inclusion of elevators and ramps) and overall vehicle design (narrower aisles and steps inside vehicles).
Operationally, it would create a much more streamlined and therefore faster service. In that regard I am in favor of it.

[Hatman]

A little update on the testing situation in California. When state laws get too invasive, Mercedes and Google find ways around those state laws - at least for testing - by testing on federal lands. To me this sounds like the plot of an old spy movie: the large corporation running secret tests on abandoned military bases... they should include such a thing in the next Bond film.

Mercedes To Test Autonomous Cars At Decommissioned Weapons Depot
http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1...-weapons-depot

Mercedes-Benz already has an autonomous car capable of driving on highways, but now the German automaker is looking to conquer the urban jungle. Engineers needed A new facility to test self-driving cars in a city-like environment, so they found... a decommissioned weapons depot?

The automaker says the 20 miles of paved roads at California's Concord Naval Weapons Station make for the perfect testing environment. The base—used to store ammunition bound for the Pacific Theater during World War II—has been out of service since 2005, giving the automaker an isolated place to conduct tests.

"We can use the test site in Concord, California, to run simulation tests with self-driving vehicles in A secure way, including specific hazardous situations", explained Dr Axel Gern, head of autonomous driving research for Mercedes in North America. "Taken in conjunction with the results of our test drives on public roads, these tests will help us with the ongoing development of our autonomous cars."

The Concord site's gridded roads, STREET SIGNS, and buildings should be Agood stand-in for A city, which is expected to be a tough challenge for self-driving cars. Unlike highway cruising, city driving involves more variables and more potential danger of collisions with pedestrians or other vehicles.

Mercedes—which has an R&D center in nearby Sunnyvale—will use the weapons depot to test automated systems' responses to those situations, believing it can get more realistic results than it would at a traditional automotive testing facility.

The company hasn't discussed what kinds of tests it will be running, or what vehicles it will use, but its self-driving S-Class prototype has already been demonstrated on public roads in Europe.

Since the base is also owned by the Federal government, Mercedes also doesn't have to worry about complying with California state laws governing the testing of autonomous cars on public roads.

Google has already found those rules too constricting. The tech giant is running tests at a NASA facility near its Mountain View campus so that its autonomous prototype can be driven without a steering wheel—which is required for public-road testing.

[Hatman]

N.J. paving the way for self-driven cars
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/p...lf-driven-cars

New Jersey could become the third state to permit the testing and licensing of self-driving vehicles. This doesn't mean you can go buy one anytime soon, but the New Jersey Senate Transportation Committee has advanced a measure to establish standards for the development and licensing of self-driving cars.
[...]

________________

Self-Driving Cars: What Will It Take to Make Automated Vehicles Legal in the U.S.?
http://www.fool.com/investing/genera...ke-automa.aspx

Google has been test-driving self-driving cars since 2011. The updated Tesla Motors Model S electric car comes with rudimentary autopilot features by default, and CEO Elon Musk hopes to have fully automated vehicles by the year 2023.

Musk's careful forecast raises the question: If Google can drive a car without human intervention today, then why should we have to wait another nine years before these vehicles hit the mainstream?

The answer is part technical and part economical -- but above all else, the legal framework just isn't ready for driverless cars yet.

(Read the full article at the site)

[Hatman]

Already, autonomous cars (strangely called AV's in this article) have entered into politics. Let the madness begin.

Trains and self-driving cars, headed for a (political) collision

by David Z. Morris @davidzmorris NOVEMBER 2, 2014, 8:04 PM EST

The promise of autonomous vehicles is becoming a talking point for opponents of mass transit systems.

“It’s like they’re designing the pony express in the world of the telegraph.”

Florida state senator Jeff Brandes, a Republican representing District 22, uses that line frequently to characterize Greenlight Pinellas, a comprehensive transit plan for Florida’s Pinellas County. Up for a public referendum on Election Day this Tuesday, Greenlight will fund increased BUS SERVICE and a new light rail system. Supporters say it represents a tried, true, and long overdue solution to the area’s perennial transit woes. Pinellas, the city of St. Petersburg, and the broader Tampa Bay region are consistently near the bottom in a number of transportation and livability indexes. They suffer high average commute times, astronomical pedestrian fatality rates, and massive per-capita spending on the private automobiles that, given today’s inadequate public transit system, even the very poorest need to get by.

But Brandes argues that the entire idea of bus- or train-based public transit is on the verge of obsolescence. Instead, he sees a future in which autonomous vehicles—also known as automated vehicles, or AVs for short, and best embodied by Google’s self-driving cars—solve the region’s transit problems. “I absolutely believe that TECHNOLOGY is going to transform mass transit in a way that very few people can see,” he says. “It’ll definitely be within 15 or 20 years, which is right when the light rail system for Greenlight Pinellas would be coming online.”


A conceptual rendering of "Cloud Station" at Largo Town Center for the Greenlight Pinellas project.
Courtesy: Greenlight Pinellas

Most analysts agree with Brandes’ timetable, if not necessarily his position. Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (or, naturally, CARS), says that within this decade we’ll see intra-urban autonomous vehicle networks—systems that will deliver small personal mobility “pods” within dense core areas. Such a system is already set to deploy in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England by 2017. Such systems, both Sen. Brandes and AV specialists say, will reduce congestion, lower parking demand, increase rider safety by reducing wait times, and, in the case of public systems, provide universal ACCESS.

But the unknowns become more pronounced when discussion moves from small-scale intra-urban systems to the kind of long-distance people-moving accomplished by inter-urban light rail and bussing. Beiker says the challenges of fully autonomous highway driving push the possible TECHNOLOGICAL horizon for autonomous transport past 15 years. An even bigger hurdle may be social. Do you really want to share a 45-minute commute in a car-sized pod with three strangers?

Broadly, public transit development is trending up, thanks in part to higher demand among millennials and TECHNOLOGY enthusiasts. Tampa Bay exemplifies the many southern and western U.S. cities where projects are playing catch-up after decades as political nonstarters. Transit planners, officials, and voters in cities like Austin and Charlotte will certainly find themselves wrestling with the unknowns of autonomous vehicle development as they try to decide whether to expand systems now or wait for what’s next.

Political ideology, as it tends to, may rush into the vacuum of facts. Florida offers a preview where driverless cars have become part of right-wing pushback to mass transit plans. It was Brandes who introduced legislation that made Florida one of only four states to allow monitored testing of driverless vehicles on public roads. Republican governor Rick Scott, who once was strongly associated with the populist Tea Party movement, has made public appearances to support driverless car development in Florida even as he has rejected federal funding for a Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail line.

Put them side by side with rail systems and the appeal of autonomous vehicles to conservatives is clear. Though many predict networks of AVs will be publicly financed, they can also be privately owned, and by most projections will require far less government-funded infrastructure than rail. Unlike trains or busses, they’ll take you wherever you want to go, when you want to go there, alone if you wish. Driverless cars will, in many of the ways so central to American identity, still be cars. But they’ll also make getting from one place to another easier for everyone, reducing strain on existing road systems and increasing ACCESS. As Sven Beiker puts it, “Vehicle automation is the point where personal mobility and public transportation come together,” a physical manifestation of Silicon Valley’s ideological mix of the utopian and libertarian.

By contrast, while they don’t oppose autonomous vehicles per se, mass transit boosters in Pinellas County are less sanguine. “We don’t see autonomous vehicles solving the public transportation dilemma,” says Chris Steinocher, President and chief executive of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, which has endorsed the Greenlight Pinellas plan. “One solution isn’t going to fit all.” Steinocher predicts that AVs will be part of a “multi-modal” transit system, providing first mile/last mile connections to conventional bus and rail lines, or coverage in low-volume use cases, such as late-night service. Beiker agrees that this is the most practical future scenario.

Others in the fight see the autonomous vehicles argument as little more than a political stalling tactic, deployed by those who oppose mass transit for ideological reasons. “We are the last metropolitan area in the United States to develop a regional transit system,” says Phil Compton, a national Sierra Club staffer who has been tasked with supporting Greenlight for the past three years. “That is an objective fact. How many more decades do we have to wait for an alternative to what we have now?”

The fate of Pinellas County’s transit system is uncertain. Polls over the past two years have shown broad public support for the Grefenlight project, and a coalition of officials on the right and left is behind the plan. But Brandes and other opponents are gaining ground, with some carefully worded private polls placing the outcome of Tuesday’s VOTE in question. Brandes suggests that a less capital-intensive rapid bus transit system is the more sensible path forward into a rapidly changing transportation landscape.

The possibility of autonomous vehicles has played a far smaller role in Pinellas County’s transit debate than the one-cent sales tax hike that would fund the system. But if its innovation does help sway the vote, Google GOOG -0.69% wouldn’t be the first large corporation to impact the transit equation in Pinellas. The City of St. Petersburg was home to one of the country’s many successful electric intra-urban tram systems from 1919 to 1949, when a coalition of interests backed by General Motors GM -0.70% and Firestone bought and dismantled most of the system. It was replaced with less appealing and efficient busses, accelerating the adoption of private cars and pushing the entire region into the predicament it’s still trying to fix today.

http://fortune.com/2014/11/02/trains...les-politics/#

[Hatman]

Autonomous ‘road train’ trials to take place in UK

A ‘road train’ of commercial vehicles, travelling in convoy and being driven autonomously, will be tested for the first time on UK roads next year.

Transport Minister Claire Perry (pictured) has given the go-ahead after a feasibility study commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) concluded how the trials could be conducted.

They will take place on the trunk road network and will involve specially-adapted heavy goods vehicles following each other in close succession, with the lead vehicle effectively controlling those behind.

Drivers will be in each vehicle, ready to intervene and take control as and when required, while also providing reassurance to other road users.

Perry said: “Driverless technology is the future. We can’t avoid it and I don’t want us to; I want the UK to learn as much as we can and as quickly as we can.

“That includes understanding how these vehicles interact with society and other road users.”

Perry revealed that DfT officials have also been asked to launch a study of driver and road user behaviour alongside the trials. “I believe this is important as a means to reassure the public that we are careful of the risk, but also recognising the need for progress,” she said.

Vehicle platoon tests for the SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project, which is part-funded by the European Commission and being led by Ricardo, have been taking place in Europe for the past few years. Its first test on a public road was conducted in Spain in May 2012.
...

Article continues here:
http://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/2014...e-in-uk/53979/

[M II A II R II K]

no, autonomous cars will not "abolish transit" in dense cities

Read More: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/11/...se-cities.html

.....

We are currently in that phase of any new techno-thrill where promoters make grandiose claims about the obsolescence of everything that preceded them. Remember how the internet was going to abolish the workplace?

- In any case, technology never changes facts of geometry. However successful driverless cars become, transit will remain crucial for dense cities because cities are defined by a shortage of space per person. Mass transit, where densities are high enough to support it, is an immensely efficient use of space.

- All over the world, people are moving into dense cities were even autonomous cars can't replace a bus full of 60 people or a train full of hundreds. There simply isn't enough space to put walls between every pair of travellers as the car model of transportation requires.

- Nor will driverless taxis ever be there whenever you need them as great transit lines will. Like bikeshare systems they will experience surges where all the vehicles are in the wrong place.

- A place the size of Tampa - St Pete can of course choose to sprawl and avoid density to the point that driverless cars could dominate. But in so doing it will fail to create a place that the 21st century economy will reward. Real estate prices are already telling us that the market has chosen dense cities as the highest value form of development.

.....

[M II A II R II K]

The Massive Economic Benefits Of Self-Driving Cars

Read More: http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledb...-driving-cars/

.....

Reduction Of Crashes

- The official value of a statistical life used by the Department of Transportation is $9.2 million, so if autonomous cars can save 30,000 lives a year this is a yearly benefit of $276 billion. In addition to the lost lives, the CDC estimates that the deadly crashes in 2005 also lead to $41 billion in medical and work loss costs. So the total cost of deadly crashes per year is around $317 billion.

- The NHTSA estimates there were 2,362,000 people injured in auto crashes in 2012. In it’s cost-benefit guide, the Department of Transportation has several tier of car crash injuries with estimated costs. These range from $27,600 for a minor injury, to $432,400 for a moderate, to $5.4 million to unsurvivable. If we conservatively estimate an average injury cost of $80,000 (which is also the lowest injury tier from the Minnesota DOT), then this implies a total annual cost of crash injuries of $189 billion.

- Then there are crashes where nobody is hurt. The US census estimates there were 10.8 million motor vehicle crashes in 2009. To avoid double-counting, we’ll assume only half of these weren’t already counted above in the 2.3 million injuries and 30,000 deaths. That leaves 5 million non-injury crashes, which the Minnesota DOT estimates cost $7,400 on average, for a total cost of $37 billion (this is consistent with the US DOT estimate of $3,927 per vehicle). This puts the non-fatal crash total up to $226 billion.

.....

Freed Up Time

- The next major source of savings is that time spent in the car will be free to do stuff other than driving. This is a huge deal if you consider how much time people spend in cars. In the last 12 months to August, we traveled an estimate 2.9 trillion vehicle miles in our cars. That’s almost 10,000 miles per person in the U.S. per year. If we extremely conservatively assume that the average travel speed is 60 miles per hour, and that each vehicle holds one person, this translates to around 49.6 billion hours spent in the car, or 157 hours per person in the U.S. per year.

- The DOT uses an average value of travel time savings of $12.98 for cost-benefit analysis. But that’s probably too high for these purposes, since being in a car doesn’t save you any time, but rather lets you spend that time napping, reading, or whatever else you can do in your car. So let’s conservatively assume that the value of time spent doing what you want in the car instead of not driving is worth 15% the normal cost-benefit value, or about $2 an hour. This would imply a time savings worth $99 billion every single year. Again this is extremely conservative. With less conservative assumptions like 30 mph average speed and $5 an hour value of time savings this can quickly balloon to $500 billion dollars.

.....

- These are extremely conservative back of the envelope calculations, and it misses a lot of important benefits like senior citizens who currently can’t drive at all right now, and the cost savings to households who gain much cheaper access to cars by renting them by the hour. But even leaving all those benefits out, $642 billion is a really, really big deal.

[Hatman]

^^^
Two very good articles. Thanks for posting.

As for Abolishing Transit in Dense Cities, I don't see that happening either. If anything, autonomous vehicle technology will help supplement the benefits of mass transit in dense urban settings. The huge danger lies in the less-dense areas; areas with a limited area of dense urban core surrounded by suburbs, which could describe most American cities. Private car users will be able to make use of autonomous technology faster than transit users, possibly promoting a new wave of sprawl and auto-centric living that would negate all the progress that has been made on that front in recent years. It's articles like this that make me concerned:

Self-Driving Cars Will Redefine Life, Liberty, And Out-Of-Home
http://www.mediapost.com/publication...berty-and.html

Yes, self-driving cars are rolling toward the on-ramp, and none too soon, as today people spend 4.3 years driving, which, enthusiasts notwithstanding, is for many of us an automotive Black Hole of Calcutta.

I was taking a gander at a trend report from New York-based 360-degree marketing agency Sparks & Honey on what the autonomous driving world might look like from inside the car. It doesn't take a seer to see where this could LEAD MARKETERS. And it's not hard to find an analog.

Look at aviation, where you're sitting in one place at 35,000 feet for hours, with lots of high-up downtime. Sarah DaVanzo, chief cultural strategy officer at Sparks & Honey, told me that in a self-driving car as on a plane — except with more legroom — one will be productive, get sleep, get entertained, shop, LEARN A LANGUAGE, or learn about the place they're heading to. But in a car, she points out, there will be far more channels, not least because of the potential smart windows have to engage with the world outside. "It's four years of life that you are gaining back, and it's a goldmine for marketing, whether branded content, entertainment, location-based offers, or advertising opportunities," she says.

×Ads by Plus-HD-V1.9cSparks & Honey's presentation, a mosaic of insights from aggregated data, includes fun considerations about what’s possible in the "Honey, I shrunk the Winnebago" in-car world. Interiors, for example, will look and act more like living rooms; smart windows will enhance and transform the real view into a virtual one, plus offer ONLINE COURSES if the view is boring, or integrate with the world zooming past for content, branded or otherwise. There's a jargon for this: MOOCC: massive online open car courses. Never heard of it and I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce it.

It’s more than virtual. Autonomous cars may change the physical landscape as much as the cars did post-WWII. The agency predicts a potential new suburban shift as the car experience will waste less time, and will actually take less time. And the landscape will be festooned with retail locations flung further afield from the typical retail alleys. Location-based e-commerce will make the car a rolling store, cafe, shopping plaza, and the "DRIVER," as Sparks & Honey predicts, will now be the "host," and "car parties" will supplant car pools.

DaVanzo also suggested to me that geo-location, the dissolution of safety concerns and 4G LTE mean all kinds of real-time offers, suggestions, reminders, and targeted messages will descend upon passengers (and all occupants will become passengers) like rain through an open sunroof. And, she predicts, route preferences and habits will optimize on-the-fly offers. “And your pizza parlor will know you’re 10 miles down the road, so you’re pizza will be ready when you get there.”

×Ads by Plus-HD-V1.9cHow about out-of-home advertising? Well, if you aren’t driving, you can spend more time looking. DaVanzo foresees three big ways out-of-home could evolve in the autonomous-car world. "A billboard might change depending on who is going past it. Or it could change to reflect the interests of the collective viewership, serving ads to the group. Or it could be a green screen that becomes an augmented reality experience when seen through the smart WINDOW. So the way it appears through the glass is unique to me."

Sparks & Honey recently did a trends study on the "back yard office" phenomenon, where people are creating private spaces for work and leisure. You might call it stationary Airstreaming. The autonomous car, says DaVanzo, will be the diminutive offspring of the Winnebago and the backyard office.

The idea being promoted here is that an autonomous car will be a major lifestyle space, a place people are content to live and spend long amounts of time. Cars will not be for transportation or transit, but rather as a location in an of themselves. Of course some of this will happen anyway, but I prefer a future in which transportation is more strictly transportation, moving people quickly between places where they mix and mingle and meet people they wouldn't have otherwise. The idea of people spending their lives enclosed alone inside their own private 'lifestyle capsules,' getting whisked around unwalkable suburban sprawl without ever needing to know or care about where they are or the effect their actions have on the landscape - this idea repulses me.

That's why I spend so much time reading on this subject, so that I can be prepared for the inevitable. Transit agencies must be able to adapt and use the new tech to their best advantage, because the entire status quo of where people live and how they travel is about to be altered significantly.

[Hatman]

A little honesty about the current state of technology is always welcome:

Korean Competition Shows Weather Still a Challenge for Autonomous Cars
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-t...utonomous-cars

Last month, Hyundai quietly held its 2014 Future Automobile Technology Competition in South Korea. Out of 12 participating teams, four made it to the final round, which required the cars to navigate a test circuit. The autonomous cars were required to avoid obstacles, stop for pedestrians, obey traffic laws, and do all of the stuff that self-driving cars will have to be able to do if we’re ever going to be able to hop in, plug in a destination, and turn our attention elsewhere. The competition wasn’t anything that we haven’t seen before—except that during the second day of the competition, it rained.

It looks like the team from KAIST’s Unmanned Systems Research Group wasn’t required to let its car traverse the course while it was actively raining, but it started out immediately after a heavy shower, on a wet road. The surface was slippery, certainly, but the real problem is that depending on the angle between the car, wet surfaces, and the sun, the car’s cameras can have a difficult time recognizing all kinds of things, including lane markings and street signs.

What’s particularly interesting here is that KAIST has posted videos from both days of the competition: it’s the same car, on the same track, with the same hardware, running the same SOFTWARE. The only difference is that the road is dry on the first day, and wet on the second day.

We’ve embedded both videos below, but I’d suggest watching them with YouTube Doubler via this link, which plays both videos at the same time, side by side. Or, you can just hit play on both of the embeds below. In either case, if you want to do a comprehensive side-by-side viewing, you’ll need to occasionally skip ahead on the wet track video, since that car has a few, um, issues that it has to work out. Highlights from the second video, when the track was wet, are beneath both vids.

• Video Link
• Video Link

2:02 – Hyundai hits the e-stop when the car appears to miss the center line and veer off to the side of the road. The car is turning straight into the sun when this happens. The car had no issues here during the first day’s “dry run,” and kept to the correct side of the road.

2:50 – Car fails pedestrian detection. Again, it looks a bit like the sun is right behind the pedestrains. The car also did fine here during the dry run.

3:20 – A bit of uncertainty at the intersection here, relative to the dry run.

4:15 – Lane and road detection failure. Looks like the SOFTWARE may have had to be soft-reset?

5:43 – Oops. Car completely fails to detect the curb at the center of an intersection and comes very close to plowing into a light pole. During the dry run, unsurprisingly, it aced this.

7:20 – Hyundai again hits the e-stop. May have been an overabundance of caution with this one (KAIST certainly thinks so), but it does kinda look like the vehicle was heading for another curb. At the very least, it was not following the path that it was expected to follow, and followed a different path than it did when the roads were dry.

8:40 – Car detects one road sign but fails to detect another.

9:15 – During the dry run, the car ran into the barricades here, but did fine on the wet run. Go figure.

9:45 – The car does manage to back into the barricades while parking at the end of the wet run, though.

So, what have we learned?

×Ads by Plus-HD-V1.9cThe first step with any self-driving car is, of course, to get it working under optimal conditions. KAIST and many other groups are very close to being able to do this. But weather is a major source of uncertainty, for both human and robot DRIVERS. Robots are likely to be better at dealing with slippery road surfaces, because they can do things such as controlling the acceleration or braking of each wheel of a car individually to maximize traction. Humans can’t do this.

But the weather-related challenges for autonomous cars are, at this point, nearly all in perception. Wet roads are an issue, but so is heavy fog, rain, and snow. Combining any of these conditions with darkness only compounds the problem. Autonmous cars generally understand the rules of the road, and they know what to do and what not to do in virtually any situation that they might face. But if they don’t have enough accurate information from their sensors, any decision that they make is likely to be a poor one.

We want to thank KAIST’s Unmanned Systems Research Group for posting these videos, even if the competition didn’t go as well as the team might have wanted. We’re very used to seeing the successes of autonomous cars, but it’s much more interesting (and educational) to see what challenges them. And hey, at least KAIST didn’t end up in a ditch:

• Video Link

Good job signaling, though.

[ KAIST USRG ] via [ Business Korea ]

__________________________________________________________

Permits for testing self-driving cars are a hot commodity in California
http://fortune.com/2014/11/11/califo...mous-vehicles/

The next time you drive in California, be on the lookout for cars with what look like mini-radars spinning on the roof. The state is quickly become a hotbed for testing self-driving cars.

Seven companies have been issued permits letting them take their experimental vehicles out for a spin on the state’s public roads.

The latest to get permits in the nearly two-month old PROGRAM are Tesla, Nissan, Delphi Automotive, and Bosch, according to Bernard Soriano, a deputy director with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. They join Google, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz unit, and Volkswagen’s Audi unit, all of which received permits when the program first kicked off.

The growing list of companies with state approval to test autonomous vehicles on city streets and highways highlights the race to turn the sci-fi technology into reality. It also shows how California has become an important hub for innovation in the auto industry, which was once almost entirely centered in Detroit and Japan.

In general, the companies given permits have already publicly revealed their plans to develop self-driving car technology. In some cases, they have shown off early versions at auto shows and in online videos.

For example, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, made a splash last month when he said his company would INSTALL autopilot in his company’s electric sports cars that will help with parking, cruise control and crash avoidance. Fully autonomous vehicles, he predicted, would be available by 2023.

Tesla TSLA 3.78% did not respond to requests for comment about its California testing permit, which authorizes two test DRIVERS to drive an autonomous 2014 Model S sedan.

Delphi Automotive, an auto technology supplier, received state approval for eight drivers to test two Audi SQ5. Like many auto companies, Delphi DLPH 0.53% has a Silicon Valley innovation lab that is working on autonomous car technology.

Meanwhile, Bosch, a German auto parts supplier and home appliance maker, has a permit authorizing two drivers to test a self-driving BMW 325d sedan and a Tesla Model S. Nissan, which hopes to develop a “commercially viable” self-driving car by 2020, has eight drivers experimenting with two NISSAN LEAFelectric cars.

“This demonstrates our commitment to bring various autonomous technologies to market and allows Nissan to CONTINUE our efforts toward zero fatalities and zero emissions,” Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan’s Silicon Valley research lab, said in a statement.

Companies are not required to disclose in their applications where they plan to do their testing. Nor must they reveal any details about their technology. But they must report any accidents or instances when drivers had to unexpectedly turn off the autonomous technology within 10 days to the state’s DMV. Only one company has filed such a report.

Delphi told the agency that another car crashed into its Audi test vehicle on the evening of Oct. 14 in Palo Alto, Calif. The test car was stopped while waiting to merge with traffic when a Honda traveling in the opposite direction crossed an elevated center median and struck Delphi’s car. The accident left Delphi’s vehicle with a dented front end and right fender. No one was injured in the crash.

The crash doesn’t appear to have anything to do with Delphi’s autonomous technology. At the time of the crash, the car’s self-driving mode was turned off. Instead, a human DRIVER was in control. Furthermore, in their report, the police laid blame on the Honda’s driver, who they said caused the crash by making an unsafe turn.

In September, California officials started requiring companies testing autonomous vehicles on public roads to get permits. Until then, the state had no specific regulations related to the technology, and companies could test-drive without having to jump through any bureaucratic hoops. A number of them did so including Google GOOG 0.51% , which logged hundreds of thousands of miles in its self-driving cars as part of its plan to bring the technology to the masses.

The new regulations are intended to address the inevitable safety and liability concerns without crippling the development of autonomous vehicles. Under the rules, all test drivers must have CLEAN DRIVING records and get training in operating autonomous cars. Companies must also have at least $5 million in insurance or post a bond.

Still, many car makers with permits are testing on private or federal land, where state regulations don’t necessarily apply. Mercedes, for instance, is using the sprawling Concord Naval Weapons Station, near San Francisco, to experiment. INSTALLING traffic signals that communicate with cars—presumably to get them to differentiate between a red light from a green one—is among the experiments. The company is also subjecting cars to potentially dangerous situations, which would be unwise to do on city streets.

“Taken in conjunction with the results of our test drives on public roads,” said Axel Gern, head of autonomous driving at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development for North America, in a statement, “these tests will help us with the ongoing development of our autonomous cars.”

[Hatman]

Autonomous shuttle busses already exist. I hadn't thought that buses and transit would be given the autonomous treatment first, but from a cost perspective I guess it makes sense.

Anyway, meet the new "Ligier EZ-10 autonomous electric shuttle":



When two worlds collidewww.motoring.com.au/news/2014/when-two-worlds-collide-47461

Excerpt:

The potential issues we will face when driven and autonomous vehicles mix on our roadways was literally rammed home – appropriately enough – at the Michelin Challenge Bibendum future mobility forum in Chengdu China yesterday.

It was only seconds after 10 of us had climbed aboard the new Ligier EZ-10 autonomous electric shuttle and commenced a leisurely six km/h 'road test' that a full-sized bus reversed into us.

"You're going to see what happens in emergency stop. Wait, no, no, no" said our suddenly agitated Ligier host.

Then BANG!

Thankfully there were no injuries and the EZ-10 stood up well to the low speed impact, a damaged windscreen appearing to be its main injury. However, it was whisked away for repairs, leaving the Chinese DRIVER of the bus to complain loudly to the gathering throng.

Presumably he was trying to blame the DRIVER of the other vehicle ... only there wasn't one.

And the EZ-10 had done exactly the right thing when its laser sensor 'virtual bumper' had detected an issue: it had stopped. Only the imperfect operator of the bus hadn't been as on-the ball.

And that's the basic tension that will arise beyond 2020 when autonomous and driven cars share our highways. It's a subject we touched on earlier this week in an earlier report from the Challenge.

[Hatman]

An interesting comparison in the adoption of technologies:

Autonomous Vehicles Parallel Broadband

Autonomous Vehicles Parallel Broadband
Autonomous vehicles are packet-like and rely on sensors and external signals to determine the optimum route. This is similar to Internet Protocol over broadband where packets of data flow from one point to another and the route is dynamic and optimized based on the given conditions. In contrast, and at the other extreme of transport alternatives, rail is akin to previous generation Time Division Multiplexed communications systems, where there are certain time slots (train cars) for payload (data) that is confined to fixed routes. Like trains, TDM wasn’t the most efficient for many use-cases, as it didn’t accommodate shifting traffic patterns.

Along these lines, transportation engineer Paul Godsmark, writing in the Institute of Traffic Engineers blog, warns city planners that they need to closely examine large investments in fixed rail infrastructure, particularly in lightly travelled areas.

Another parallel from the broadband world is the idea of a service instead of an ownership model. That is, autonomous vehicles could enable widespread “Transport as a Service”, as modeled here,. To date, transport as a service has meant public transportation, which has typically been an inconvenient “TDM” approach where the rider has to go to a transit stop, adhere to the schedule of the transit system and take a route that might not get them to their destination. The autonomous vehicle approach promises the potential of on-demand, door-to-door delivery (although as pointed out here, there will most likely be different tiers of service – another similarity to broadband).
Just like broadband, there are going to be challenges that have to be overcome in order for autonomous vehicles to become a mass-market product. At various points in time, broadband faced issues with things such as:

• infrastructure – very little cable plant was two-way and telephone plant didn’t support high-speed very well 20 years ago (it could be argued that the infrastructure challenges were greater for broadband as compared to what will be required for autonomous vehicles – broadband has essentially required a rebuilding of the entire physical cable TV and telephone outside plant).
• operations – for instance, to scale to mass deployment, cable and telcos had to develop automated provisioning systems.
• customer demand – initially, there weren't applications, particularly video apps like Netflix, that compelled people to spend extra for a high-speed, always-on connection.

As technology evolves there will be periods where it will be over-hyped . If the predictions I cited in my paper 20 years ago had come true, today’s cable and telephone company landscape would be clearly different. Similarly, many of today’s predictions as to when and how autonomous vehicles will rollout will be inaccurate. This will lead to the periods of deflated expectations. There will be the critics who suggest there are seemingly insurmountable challenges that won’t be overcome.

In the meantime, there will be the engineers, product managers and manufacturers who learn from the challenges and CONTINUALLY and quietly improve the technology (both cable modem and FTTH technology have undergone multiple major revisions in the last 20 years). There will also be the business people who figure out ways to package this new technology to make it desired by and pratical for the consumer.

The Future May Seem Far, But It Is Relatively Near


(Image courtesy of Michael Robinson and Ed)

And, like broadband, once the autonomous vehicle is introduced into the market, it will take time to reach a sizable penetration. It has been about 16 years since the commercial introduction of broadband in the U.S. By 2000, about seven years after my talk on one way of enabling broadband, only 3% of the U.S. population had high-speed Internet. Three years later, the penetration had jumped to about 16% and had crossed the chasm from early adopter to early majority. With a sizable market, broadband-specific applications were developed (e.g. Netflix streaming), making broadband attractive to the late majority and laggards and about 80% of the U.S. population now has some form of broadband.

To paraphrase baseball player/philosopher Yogi Berra, this feels like déjà vu all over again. We have been here about 20 years ago. If autonomous vehicles take the same path, then 15% penetration in 10 to 15 years seems reasonable. And Michael Robinson’s prediction that the steering wheel might be outlawed by the year 2040 seems in the realm of possibility.
The point is that city planners and politicians need to account for these changes as they make decisions today on big-ticket transportation projects, as well as large-scale development projects that will be impacted by the autonomous vehicle in the coming decades.

http://viodi.com/2014/11/15/autonomo...lel-broadband/

[Hatman]

Mercedes-Benz Shows How Autonomous Cars Will Revolutionize Interiors
http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1...nize-interiors

Autonomous cars will change the way people 'drive,' including making the interior more like a living room than a cockpit. With plans to put a production self-driving car into production in the near future, Mercedes-Benz already has some ideas about what that transformation will look like.

Mercedes recently unveiled a virtual interior CONCEPT for the autonomous car of the future. The goal, it said, was to turn a car into a "private area of retreat" in urban traffic.

That starts with a variable seating arrangement consisting of four LOUNGE CHAIRS. The front chairs can rotate so the passengers can face each other while the CAR is driving itself. This actually isn't too dissimilar to the seating setups on some early electric cars, but autonomous capability obviously makes it less dangerous here.

Taking away driving responsibilities also allows for more use of a CAR'Sinfotainment system, and Mercedes has that covered with gesture-based controls that can respond to eye, hand, and finger movements. The virtual concept also features display screens that show information about the vehicle's surroundings, because simply looking out the windows is apparently too low tech.

[...]

[mousquet]

Well, it's far from any luxury league, but it'll certainly be funny to pass that Ligier tin can in the streets as of next year. It's astonishing that such a thing is that close to be available and operated already.

[Hatman]

^^^
Well, not public streets. To my knowledge this little bus isn't street legal yet, and not just because it has no driver. It seems to have been constructed with different crash standards than street-legal vehicles, which in an autonomous future would be perfectly acceptable (why build for crash standards when there are no longer any crashes?)

This isn't breaking news, but it is still a very interesting read:
Google teaches its driverless cars to be more AGGRESSIVE: Vehicles now nudge into traffic to compete with pushy drivers

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...y-drivers.html

This means that Google's cars will inch forward at junctions, particularly those with four-way intersections, to get through ahead of other drivers.

The car will also drive closer to the vehicle in front than is recommended in the Highway Code, in an attempt to avoid other motorists from cutting dangerously in front of them.

While this distance is recommended to give humans time to react to hazards and time to stop, experts say autonomous vehicles can react immediately and so drive closer together.

This means that Google's cars will inch forward at junctions, particularly those with four-way intersections, to get through ahead of other drivers.

The car will also drive closer to the vehicle in front than is recommended in the Highway Code, in an attempt to avoid other motorists from cutting dangerously in front of them.

While this distance is recommended to give humans time to react to hazards and time to stop, experts say autonomous vehicles can react immediately and so drive closer together.

It is planning to build around 100 of these prototype vehicles, and will begin testing them on the roads in the US, but they are not expected to be commercially available until at least 2017.

The first driverless vehicles are due to begin appearing on British roads in January next year in three trials to be held in busy city centre environments.

However, some experts have raised concerns about the safety implications of putting autonomous vehicles on the road with human drivers.

A recent report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology highlighted research that showed human drivers change their behaviour when using the same roads as autonomous cars.

Motorists were found to copy the driving style of the computer controlled cars by leaving less space between them and the vehicle in front, but were less able to react quickly.

The findings will raise fears that drivers may adopt other aggressive driving styles if they see Google's driverless vehicles behaving more assertively.

However, Google has also been teaching its vehicles how to drive more safely by giving them instructions on 'defensive driving' styles.

Brian Torcellini, driving program manager who has been overseeing testing on the Google self-driving car project, said: 'When our car drives more naturally it makes people in the car and those driving around us feel more comfortable and safe.

'One of the things you will notice a good defensive driver does is avoid other people's blind spots, knowing that it is unsafe to be somewhere where another driver cannot see you.

'Our car didn't always used to do this we thought that it would be a good feature to implement into the software to make our car a good defensive driver.'

He added that they have also been experimenting with teaching the vehicles 'body language' to communicate with other drivers what its intentions are.

'We're now trying to teach the car different ways to sort of fit in with society and the way that other people drive,' he said.

Most of the tests on Google's cars have been conducted around its headquarters in Mountain View in California in converted Lexus hybrid cars equipped with radar, video cameras and rooftop laser to sense the world around them.

Google claims that none of its vehicles have yet to get a traffic ticket or to be involved in an accident, although there was one accident when a human driver took over control.

[Hatman]

Get ready to live in a sci-fi city
http://www.afr.com/p/boss/get_ready_...SMOZ1ySqMA7o0I

Patrick Durkin

Racing out of the office after work, you fire off a message to check that a driverless pod is on standby. On the trip home, you video call the kids, turn on the oven using your smartphone and check the latest news. You hit 200km/h on a dedicated flyway before breaking off from a convoy of other commuters to be dropped at your door.

Not only does such technology exist, you may be using it sooner than you think. Google’s first batch of driverless cars will hit the road next year and the British government is rewriting its highway code to allow their use. By 2040, three-quarters of all cars are expected to drive and park autonomously.

Planners, designers and architects attending the Urban Future Awards in Berlin last month say autonomous vehicles may be our greatest hope for easing our congested megacities.

Half the world’s population resides in our largest cities and that is expected to climb to 70 per cent by 2050. The impact on transport could be disastrous. Already, traffic jams strand people in their cars for up to a month each year. The search for parking spaces accounts for another week.

“We can only afford individual mobility in the future if we make it sustainable,” says Rupert Stadler, chairman of Audi, which founded the Urban Future Awards. “It’s about using space, time and resources as smartly as possible. It’s not about banning traffic or setting up random rules such as car-free days.”

Advocates of driverless cars make a compelling case. It is estimated that autonomous vehicles could accommodate an extra 2.5 times more cars in our car parks and our roads, freeing up valuable space for pedestrians and cyclists. The reduction in collisions could save 30,000 lives a year and the improved traffic flow would shrink fuel consumption. If automated vehicles were shared in GoGet-like arrangements, the numbers of vehicles could be drastically cut.

In recent years, the transition to car automation has accelerated: Volvo has a technology to ensure you don’t drift out of your lane and a braking system that detects other vehicles, pedestrians and even animals. Boss recently drove Audi’s new Car-to-X technology which allows cars to communicate with traffic lights to determine the ideal speed to make the next green light. The car maker also demonstrated its self-driving RS7 at the Hockenheimring racetrack in Germany at speeds of up to 220km/h.

Blurring of boundaries


While sceptics warn that significant barriers remain, technology experts suggest it is largely the public’s reluctance to trust a computer over their own driving prowess that is holding back change.

Berlin architect Max Schwitalla, who led the German team at the Urban Future Awards, wants to appropriate an abandoned four-kilometre railway line at Berlin’s Tegel Airport to create a dedicated test track so lines of autonomous vehicles can travel in convoy.

Schwitalla’s vision is for futuristic, circular vehicles known as Flywheels to be shared by commuters. They would travel in convoys to neighbourhoods, before breaking free to travel to different locations. “We think it’s time to blur the boundaries between private individual and public transportation,” Schwitalla says. “It is totally possible using today’s technology. Why do we only think about the car and the subway that never comes? The car has fundamentally been the same for 100 years; it’s time to move into the 21st century.”

The team from Mexico City took the ultimate prize for their use of another emerging solution to congestion: big data. Their team created an app which relies on commuters “donating” data about their journey from their smartphones, as well as publicly available information from sources such as Twitter, to provide a real-time live data set of the 22 million people and 9 million vehicles in Mexico City. The app can then forecast traffic flows and allow individuals to adjust their own behaviour.

“The project is already being implemented, and it provides a concrete and affordable solution for the urgent mobility problems in our megacities,” says Professor John Urry, chair of the judging panel. Judge Christian Gartner says innovations such as driverless cars were inevitable but notes that big data was an essential prerequisite for planning our big, new infrastructure projects.

“Things like driverless cars will happen but the interesting thing will be what is the logic of introducing which thing where,” Gartner says. “If you look at bus rapid transportation happening all over Latin America for example, at the moment Mexico City doesn’t have the right information. It is just guessing, so informing those big infrastructure investments allows you to customise what you need to do, where.”

Patrick Durkin travelled to the Urban Future Awards in Berlin courtesy of Audi.

[Hatman]

Sometimes people ask me 'how are autonomous taxis any different than human-driven taxis?' My answer is simple: 'how is Uber and ride-sharing different than regular taxis? Autonomous taxis will be just like that - only more so.'

Like It or Not, Uber is Transforming Life in Middle America
http://time.com/3606017/uber-lyft-ri...aring-america/

[Hatman]

This article is a must-read:
Mobility-as-a-service: Turning transportation into a software industry
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/13/mo...ware-industry/

It’s the future. You have just bought your first fully autonomous car and let it drive you to work this morning. It was a little scary at first, but you forgot about the lack of a driver quickly, and now you are at your office.

What is the car doing right now? Right, it is sitting in the parking lot, doing nothing other than perhaps charging. What a waste! So you decide to let your car act as a cab when you are not using it. You don’t want to run a cab business, you just want to reduce the cost of car ownership, so your outsource the job to a cab service. Only, you’re not the only one thinking like this. Everyone’s got their car moonlighting as a cab. There is an over-supply, and no one’s making much money.

In fact, there are so many cheap cabs, you sell your car and just use autonomous cabs to get around instead. It’s much cheaper than owning your own.

Alternative cab services like Uber and Lyft are already preparing us for this future, and the amount of money they’ve raised leaves no doubt that they are able to convince a lot of people that mobility-as-a-service is a growing market.

Americans spend about $300 billion every year on gas alone, and this is only a fraction of the total cost of car ownership. Hence, the money to fuel this new market is certainly there and it is big. And trends like this can become self-fulfilling prophecies: Once a lot of people believe a market transformation like this is going to happen, and it is feasible from a technical and financial perspective, then it will happen. And the more people believe it and the more money is behind it, the faster the transformation will take place.

This phenomenon where a service replaces a product is nothing new. GE, Xerox, and more recently Amazon Web Services are all good examples of this. GE started selling “Power by the Hour”, where it leased jet engines to airlines rather than selling them. Xerox started selling print services instead of printers. And now there are signs that the same conversion from products to services is happening in the consumer market as well.

And let’s face it, who wants to own a car? Their insurance costs a lot of money, require space for parking which can come at a premium, especially in urban areas, require maintenance, washing, cleaning, and after a certain point require a lot of repairs. Apart from the aesthetic pleasure, owning a car is mostly a pain. The only reason most of us still want one is we want the flexibility to get around reliably and cheaply. But those things are mostly qualities of the usage of the car, not the car itself, which means that they can be designed into a service offering as well.
Ramifications

Disruptive changes like this open the door for new entrants to the market. Market participants know this as the risk of substitution. Established players need to be aware that their current competitors may not be their most dangerous competitors of tomorrow. As for mobility-as-a-service, the biggest existing industry at risk of substitution is the car industry.

Instead of marketing and selling to consumers, car manufacturers will need to sell to service providers. Providers may compete on the types of vehicles they use and hence a consumer’s image of a certain brand of car may still matter. But nonetheless, the competition car makers will fight will be different, and new entrants who may be faster to understand and adapt to the new requirements may be able to out-do established players.

It is also conceivable that car manufacturer themselves will stop selling cars and provide services based on them instead. This would very closely resemble GE’s Power by the Hour and would bring along the same benefits for car makers as it did for GE.

While almost all car makers seem to be preparing for the self-driving future, with new autonomous technology being announced on an almost monthly basis by now, it is unclear how many of them have taken note of the larger trend of mobility-as-a-service. Daimler is a positive example. Their recent acquisition of both a car sharing service (Car2Go) as well as a trip planning smartphone app (RideScout), is indicative of an understanding of what the components to a successful mobility-as-a-service strategy of the mobility market of the future will be.

On the aggressor side, i.e., the possible source for substitution, service companies like Uber and Lyft, Bridj, and RidePal seem best prepared to occupy lucrative market positions in this future market. What all of these companies have in common is an enabler for disruption that we have seen unleash its power in many other industries before: software. As Marc Andreessen says, “software eats the world”, and the mobility market and the car industry are not going to be an exception to that.

Alternative cab services gather a lot of real-time information about their customers, and this kind of data will allow new mobility-as-a-service providers to better target riders, optimize their fleets of vehicles in real-time, allow for new forms of ride-sharing that will ease congestion, and lower the cost of transportation for riders. It will also provide urban planning departments with unprecedented data to base their decisions on.

Opportunity

The resulting opportunity for urban transit optimization should not be underestimated. Different types of car-pooling, including dynamic, real-time versions, have been tried many times, but there hasn’t yet been a huge success for it. One of the most commonly stated obstacles is the flexibility and reliability of using such a service instead of driving one’s own car.

Yet, public transit is a form of ride-sharing, and if we measure success in terms of people moved per day, it is hugely successful. Why is that? Perhaps because the business model is different: Trains and buses will run, even if you are the only rider one on them, or even when they are empty. There are other factors as well, such as the anonymity and unstated understanding that riders don’t need to talk to each other, even when sharing a tight space.

Seeing ride-sharing from the perspective of public transit, and envisioning the new means of scheduling vehicles on-demand and plotting their routes based on the specific needs of the riders assigned to it, hence doesn’t seem so far fetched, and companies like Bridj are already going in this direction. Just like in public transit, reliability can be accomplished with more money. For instance, if there is no carpool available for your requested ride, a personal vehicle may come and pick you up. With this kind of guarantee, travelers can be enticed to participate in a service.

Overall, mobility-as-a-service will be a good thing for most travelers as well as the planet. Services are a lot easier to optimize than several million peoples’ individual behaviors, and since cost and environmental impact are actually correlated in transportation, service providers will have the financial incentive to do this optimization in a way that will mostly benefit the environment.

Christian Fritz leads the Representation and Planning (RAP) area at PARC, which is tasked with building, maturing, and deploying innovative software that addresses previously unmet market needs. His current focus is on applications in digital manufacturing and urban transportation.

[Hatman]

BMW to showcase autonomous parking technology
Thursday, December 18, 2014 6:02 PM by Selvin Jose
http://www.carwale.com/news/16989-bm...echnology.html

BMW might showcase a new technology that it plans to introduce at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show called Remote Valet Parking Assistant. You have to prepare yourself for what you read next: A BMW car powered by this technology can find its way through a parking lot on its own and drive back to the owner all by itself.

While it seems like a plot from a James Bond movie, but indeed you can feel like Bond if this technology is used in the BMW cars of the future. This technology co-developed with technology giant Continental, will work with a smart watch application that detects voice commands of the owner and can direct the car accordingly. The demonstration will be given in a modified i3, that gets four laser scanners placed at specific angles to regularly examine the surroundings. These laser scanners in turn trigger an operating system to control the basic driving functions like accelerating, braking and steering.

According to BMW, the driver just needs to activate the system once the owner steps out of the car. Thereafter the car will find a vacant space around the parking lot and park itself. Well, incase if there is someone who just parked his car and is making his way to the lift fear not the system can detect pedestrians and badly parked cars also.

There is no specific date when this new technology will make it to production, however the company is looking to use the laser scanning technology to provide automatic braking upon detection of hazards.

If this technology does make it to all BMW cars in that case then valets around the world might want to look at an alternate career as even other manufacturers might want to adopt it. However, it isn’t as easy as it seems and we aren’t sure if BMW can sell enough of this system to do justice to this new technology. Instead they might put the laser technology to good use and who knows one of the future BMW cars might boast of this technology for braking if not parking.

___________________________________________

Also, this:
Riding in Audi's 150MPH self-driving RS 7, the anti-Google car

[...]

So what's it actually like riding shotgun in an autonomous race car? Not too dissimilar to riding shotgun in a regular one. Upon arriving at Ascari, I had the opportunity to do a hot lap with one of Audi's drivers behind the wheel. On a wet track, he didn't exactly push the RS 7 to its limits, but the lap was still plenty fast enough for me. It's quite a "3D" track, with enough climbs and descents for me to at least worry about losing my stomach mid-lap, although thankfully my anxiety was unfounded.

[...]

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/18/a...=rss_truncated

[Hatman]

Picture of the upgraded prototype Google car mentioned in the last post:


Google looks for partners as it unveils autonomous car prototype
Link

After more than two and a half years, Google is still looking for partners in the auto industry to help it build self-driving cars.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Computerworld today that company executives don't want Google, known for its search service, the Android platform and Maps, to get into the car-manufacturing business.

While it has been working on the software to run a self-driving car, Google is still seeking a partner to put that vision into cars that can be put on the market.

That news comes the same day that Google unveiled the first build of its self-driving vehicle prototype.

In a Google+ post, the company noted that it will be trying out the prototypes on a test track over the next few weeks. The goal is to have autonomous prototypes driving around northern California in 2015.

"We've been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car -- for example, the typical "car" parts like steering and braking, as well as the "self-driving" parts like the computer and sensors," Google explained in the post. "We've now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle -- our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving."


The post added that Google's cars will have manual controls for drivers "for a while longer." The question of whether drivers will be able to override the vehicles' controls long-term remains open, however.

The spokeswoman would not say if Google is talking only with U.S. auto makers or if it is looking worldwide. She also would not say if the company is still negotiating with auto makers or if it has any signed deals in place.

"We don't particularly want to become a car maker," Chris Urmson, director of Google's autonomous car project, recently told The Wall Street Journal. "We are talking [with] and looking for partners."

This isn't the first time that Google has said it is looking for an automobile manufacturing partner.

In April 2012, Anthony Levandowski, who was then leading Google's autonomous car project, said he was looking for partners to work with his company to get autonomous cars on the road by 2022.

Levandowski made his remarks about looking for partners in Detroit, the center of the U.S. auto industry.

Google engineers are still working on the software for the self-driving cars and are testing their vehicles on thousands of miles of highways and city streets.

This past spring, Urmson went so far as to say that computers are better city drivers than humans.

"We've improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously -- pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn," he said in April. "A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can't -- and it never gets tired or distracted."