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Self-driving car pioneers bring their smarts to trucking
One of the minds at the heart of Google's self-driving car project has decided that his future lies beyond the search engine. Anthony Levandowski has teamed up with other big names in the world of automotive intelligence to launch a new startup called Otto. Unlike his former initiative, Otto is an attempt to build a system for some of the largest trucks that haul freight up and down our highways. Rather than forcing truck makers to overhaul their vehicles, the Otto platform will be an aftermarket kit that can simply be installed on existing big rigs.
BMW's autonomous luxury car will launch in 2021
During a shareholder meeting, BMW CEO Harald Krueger dropped some news about an upcoming autonomous car based on the already futuristic i8. The electric vehicle will be called the i Next and will launch in 2021. That date is a good indicator that most us won't see the benefits of self-driving automobiles well into the 2020s.
China's LeEco teases its very own autonomous electric car
LeEco really wants the world to know it isn't just about TVs and smartphones. After the announcements of its investment in Faraday Future and Aston Martin earlier this year, today LeEco showed off its very first electric car that actually moves. The LeSEE vehicle was driven out of a container from one end of the stage, and later, CEO Jia Yueting did a live demo of its self-driving and self-parking capability using voice commands via a mobile app, albeit moving in low speed due to the limited space, as you can see in the video after the break. There's no mention of specs and the English subtitles suggest that this is more of a concept car at the moment, but it does appear to be a solid start.
Beverly Hills is creating its own fleet of self-driving cars
Picture the streets of Beverly Hills and you probably imagine seas of ultra-luxurious cars piloted by celebrities or their chauffeurs. However, you may have to get used to a new sight in the future: hordes of vehicles with no drivers at all. The city's council has voted to produce a fleet of self-driving cars that would provide on-demand shuttle service around town. The system would lean on a city-wide fiber optic network, already in the design stages, to keep these driverless rides talking to the neighborhood and each other. The first phase of the resolution would have Beverly Hills forming partnerships with autonomy-minded car brands like Google and Tesla, so this would be more of a collaboration than a from-scratch project.
NVIDIA will power the first-ever driverless race cars
NVIDIA made autonomous cars a major company focus a few years ago, but today it announced something a bit more daring at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose today. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang that NVIDIA technology would power the custom sports cars competing in the upcoming driverless racing series Roborace. Specifically, the company's Drive PX 2 liquid-cooled supercomputer (which was announced at CES) would make up the brains of these futuristic vehicles.
Kia plans to deliver semi-autonomous driving features by 2020
Autonomous driving is all the rage these days, but luxury automakers have generated most of the buzz so far. At CES 2016, though, Kia is showing off an update on what it has in store future of driving, and it's doing so with its Soul EV. The company has already outfitted one of the compact SUVs with its next-gen ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) tech, a vehicle that has already been approved for on-road testing by the state of Nevada just last month. Kia is calling this effort Drive Wise, and it's serious about bringing the fully-autonomous systems to market.
Self-driving buses will be a big part of the transit puzzle
While companies like Google and Tesla predict a future where fleets of vehicles pick up and drop off passengers, one glaring omission in this big city ride-sharing utopia is buses. You know, the things that already do what those companies are talking about.
Baidu's autonomous car completes full driverless testing
Baidu's working hard to catch up to Google's autonomous car tech, and just recently, its modified BMW 3 series has completed a rigorous, fully autonomous testing on mixed roads. The Chinese Google's autonomous car traveled an almost 19-mile route that began at its headquarters in Beijing without the intervention of a human driver. Wang Jing, its Autonomous Driving Unit's SVP, boasted: "Fully autonomous driving under mixed road conditions is universally challenging, with complexity further heightened by Beijing's road conditions and unpredictable driver behavior." The vehicle made right/left/U-turns, passed other cars and merged into traffic on its own while going at a top speed of 62 mph.
Yamaha's robot motorcycle rider could challenge real racers
Humans might not be the fastest things on two wheels before long. Yamaha has unveiled Motobot, a robot designed to ride superbikes much like you would -- it even has to twist the throttle to get moving. This initial version travels slowly and needs training wheels to avoid tipping over in a turn, so it's not about to compete on the MotoGP circuit just yet. However, Yamaha ultimately hopes to get Motobot blasting along at more than 120MPH on a race track. It goes so far as to put racing legend Valentino Rossi on notice, as you'll see in the promo video below.
Rinspeed's latest concept is a self-driving sports car
Most prototype self-driving cars are designed for comfort, not performance. After all, wouldn't you want to take the wheel if you really wanted a thrill? Rinspeed thinks there's a case to be made, though: it just teased the Σtos, an autonomous sports car concept. The vehicle still has a steering wheel for those hands-on moments, but the controller automatically retracts into the dashboard when you're content to let the car do all the hard work. Two curved widescreen displays also move closer into view in this mode, and there's even a drone (complete with a landing pad) that could deliver goods or record your adventures on camera.
Daimler tests a self-driving, mass-produced truck on real roads
Daimler's dreams of self-driving big rig trucks just took one step closer to reality. The automaker has conducted the first-ever test of its semi-autonomous Highway Pilot system in a production truck on a public road, driving an augmented Mercedes-Benz Actros down Germany's Autobahn 8. While the vehicle needed a crew to keep watch, it could steer itself down the highway using a combination of radar, a stereo camera array and off-the-shelf systems like adaptive cruise control. The dry run shows that the technology can work on just about any vehicle in the real world, not just one-off concepts.
Self-driving taxis will begin trials in Japan next year
Self-driving cars are a few years away from becoming a thing, right? Not in Japan, where the company Robot Taxi has announced that it'll start testing robotic taxis in 2016. A report by the Wall Street Journal reveals that the firm will begin by offering autonomous rides to 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just outside Tokyo. The limited trial will ferry the participants from their homes to local stores and back again, all the while with a human operator in the driving seat -- just to make sure that nothing goes wrong.
Self-driving trucks to be used for highway construction in Florida
Autonomous trucks will soon be used at highway construction sites in Florida, and unlike Daimler's big rig that still needs someone behind the wheel, these ones are completely driverless. The truck was developed by Pennsylvania company Royal Truck & Equipment under a Department of Transportation pilot program. According to the company, there are three ways to control it: via GPS Waypoint navigation, through a remote control and via leader/follower programming. Since it's pretty common for motorists to slam into trucks used for highway construction, the rigs will be equipped with a special crash barrier called attenuators, which you can see in the image above.
Audi's R8 e-tron electric supercar can now drive itself
Slowly but surely, Audi is getting closer to realizing Will Smith's wildly futuristic motor from I, Robot. At CES Asia, the company has revealed an updated version of its R8 e-tron electric supercar with self-driving capabilities. A bevy of sensors have been rigged up inside, including a laser scanner, video cameras, ultrasonic and radar sensors. All of the environmental data is then fed through Audi's "zFAS" driver assistance system, which ultimately dictates how the concept car behaves on the road. It's not the first time Audi has experimented with autonomous and electric vehicles, but it's still hard to ignore this beautiful combination of the two. If you need a reminder, Audi's R8 e-tron wields two 170 kW electric motors capable of pushing it from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds. With a top speed of 250 km/h and a two-hour charging time, it's certainly no Nissan Leaf.
The first self-driving big rig licensed to operate in the US
A Daimler-built autonomous truck can now legally operate on the highways of Nevada. Gov. Brian Sandoval has officially granted the "Freightliner Inspiration Truck" a license for road use in the state, making it the first of its kind to navigate public roads in the US. The Inspiration's "Highway Pilot system" is loaded with cameras, radars, other sensors and computer hardware like most autonomous vehicles. However, it's not completely self-driving -- it still needs a human driver behind the wheel.
Google unveils the first complete version of its self-driving car
Google had a (not very well-kept) secret when it unveiled its experimental self-driving car: that first example you saw was just a mockup that lacked many of the basics. At last, however, the internet giant has unveiled a complete prototype of the car that has everything it needs to hit the road, including the autonomous driving system and typical mechanical parts like braking, lighting and steering. Yes, it still looks like a koala on wheels, but this motorized marsupial is now ready to hit the test track. It'll also reach Northern California roads sometime next year, so don't be surprised if you see a cutesy driverless vehicle puttering around your local streets.
