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+28 +1
Tesla explains how its entire fleet is learning to be better self-driving cars together
Tesla announced yesterday (Sept. 11) that Autopilot, its self-driving feature, would soon be updated to a new version that uses a car’s radar system — in addition to its camera system — to make decisions while driving semi-autonomously. But perhaps the most interesting part of Tesla’s announcement is how the thousands of vehicles that make up its fleet are learning how to be better self-driving cars together. One of Tesla’s key advantages over incumbent carmakers is how much data it’s collecting — and that it’s actually going to use it.
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+26 +1
The Third Transportation Revolution
I remember when I first fell in love with cars. It started small with Hot Wheels when I was three and Micromachines when I was six. Everything about them was fast and exciting — even the commercials were narrated by the World’s Fastest Talker. I loved them. Then, when I turned 12, my dad and I began taking annual trips to see the real thing at the New York International Auto Show.
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http://qz.com/785509/scientists-from-mit-and-the-delft-university-of-technology-are-building-self-driving-boats-in-amsterdam/
Scientists in Amsterdam will test self-driving boats in the city’s canals
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+33 +1
These researchers think we’re nearing ‘peak car’ — and the consequences could be dramatic
On Thursday the Rocky Mountain Institute — an energy-focused think tank known for its boldness in predicting technological change — released a truly sweeping report on the future of vehicles. And if it’s right — something that, to be sure, can be questioned — then we would be on the verge of an energy and technology transformation to rival the sudden decline of the coal industry.
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+32 +1
Will driverless cars really save millions of lives? Lack of data makes it hard to know.
President Obama says automated vehicles could cut the yearly death toll on U.S. roads by tens of thousands. His highway safety chief talks about “a world where we could potentially prevent or mitigate 19 of every 20 crashes on the road.” Uber says self-driving cars “can help save millions of lives” worldwide. Their message is clear: Robots will be better drivers than we are.
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+34 +1
Parking Lots Are an Incredible Waste of Space. Here's How to End Them.
The main problem with cars in the city is that they spend 95 percent of their time parked on a valuable piece of land. Carsharing changes that ratio, which gives cities the opportunity to reclaim the parking lot. Sometimes the future arrives humbly in our everyday life, until one day we realize its implications. Carsharing is like that—I was ignoring it until I noticed car2go popping around Berlin:
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+35 +1
Uber’s Self-Driving Truck Makes Its First Delivery: 50,000 Budweisers
Walt Martin is kneeling, legs folded behind him, butt resting on his heels. “I’ve got to practice my yoga,” he says, clearly joking. Never mind that we’re in the cab of an 18-wheeler cruising through Colorado at 55 mph and Martin was, until a moment ago, the guy at the wheel. Maybe he was feeling cocky. After all the truck, outfitted with $30,000 worth of hardware and software from San Francisco startup Otto, had just hours before made the world’s first autonomous truck delivery.
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+22 +1
Forget self-driving car anxiety: In the early days human drivers were the fear
With all the anxiety around driverless cars lately, it’s worth remembering there was a time people worried about cars exactly because they had human drivers. In fact, it was the removal of the horses—the horseless carriage—that gave some people fits. In the 1890s, the prospect of a person driving without the aid of a second intelligence was a real concern. A horse, or team of horses, acted as a crude form of cruise control and collision aversion.
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+26 +1
Baidu’s self-driving cars begin public test in Wuzhen, China
Internet giant Baidu is fast-forwarding its own self-driving car tests with a new public trial of autonomous vehicles, including cars supplied by Chinese automakers BYD, Chery and BAIC. The public tests opened for passengers on Tuesday, and have ferried around 200 people, as of today, across a 3.16 km (around 2 miles) stretch of road in tourist destination Wuzhen, which has been “mapped with centimetre accuracy,” according to Baidu.
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+19 +1
Meet ALVINN, the self-driving car from 1989
In 1989, the Berlin Wall began to fall, the World Wide Web made its debut, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” topped the charts, and in Pittsburgh, a retrofitted Army ambulance called ALVINN was driving around Carnegie Mellon University without any human intervention. Self-driving cars may seem like a very recent technological phenomenon, but researchers and engineers have been building vehicles that can drive themselves for over three decades. Research on computer controlled vehicles began at Carnegie Mellon in 1984 and...
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+9 +1
How Delphi, Mobileye Are Fast-Tracking Driverless Car Tech
Everyone wants to know when fully self-driving cars will be ready for the road. The companies developing the technology usually give a timeline of several years to decades away. Automotive parts manufacturer Delphi and Mobileye are no different, and during a media roundtable this week in San Francisco, Delphi's VP of services, Glen DeVos, envisioned a long-term timeframe for the widespread use of the technology. He expects that fully autonomous driving will first be deployed on commercial vehicles since businesses will be able to save on the expense of drivers and the downtime they require.
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+35 +1
One autonomous car will use 4,000 GB of data per day
Autonomous cars will soon create significantly more data than people—3 billion people’s worth of data, according to Intel.
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+24 +1
Investors Get Ready for the Coming Electric Car Revolution
The car of the future will be electric, connected and, eventually, self-driving. But where does that leave the car industry of the future? In a series of articles this month, Heard on the Street takes a look at how investors should approach the biggest technological disruption the car industry has faced in decades.
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0 +1
How do you code a car to make the right decision, when we don’t know the right decision? | Self-Driving Cars
While the guys in Silicon Valley are joyfully cruising down the road, doing anything but driving their car, we’ve got a few hesitations about self-driving cars, and ‘driving, but not driving’ our cars. Before we can introduce self-driving cars onto our roads properly, there are a plethora of legislative as well as moral challenges that we must consider.
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+15 +1
Autonomous Cars: The Future of Uber, and the World
"95% of vehicle accidents are due to human error. When autonomous cars come out, it's going to reduce vehicle deaths by 95%. If you think about that on a worldwide scale, that impact is going to be more than curing certain diseases." The GM for Uber in Western Canada, Ramit Kar, discusses the company's plan for autonomous vehicles, and why Uber knew they had to jump on board once the market started heading towards autonomous.
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+20 +1
Self-Driving Cars Will Exacerbate Organ Shortages Unless We Start Preparing Now
Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless cars to change the way we live—remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and roads. They will also change the way we die. As technology takes the wheel, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ donation.
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+20 +1
Robotics Expert Predicts Kids Born Today Will Never Drive a Car
A robotics professor at UC San Diego predicts babies born today will never, ever get to drive a car.
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+27 +1
Nvidia and Audi aim to bring a self-driving AI car to market by 2020
Nvidia announced several new partners for its efforts to bring autonomous cars to public roads in a production capacity today, but the biggest by far was Audi. Nvidia is working with the carmaker to bring its AI driving tech, which is available thanks to its latest in-car autonomous computing hardware and software, to market by 2020.
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+26 +1
Volkswagen just unveiled a self-driving, electric microbus concept with a range of 270 miles
Volkswagen is putting a high-tech twist on its classic microbus. The German automaker unveiled an electric microbus concept at the Detroit Auto Show on Monday. But this isn't the first time Volkswagen has given its beloved microbus a futuristic facelift — Volkswagen also unveiled a microbus concept at last year's Consumer Electronics Show. Scroll down for a closer look at the microbus' evolution...
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+4 +1
Study: Uber Doesn’t Put Taxi Drivers Out of Work, But Does Drive Down Pay
Economic researchers from Oxford this week published an analysis of labor data evaluating the impact of Uber on professional drivers in markets it enters. The somewhat surprising conclusion is that the arrival of Uber on average increased employment for both waged taxi drivers and self-employed drivers. However, the study also confirmed critics’ fears about pay, finding that Uber drove down the earnings of traditionally-employed taxi drivers by as much as 10%. The authors argue that this decline was offset market-wide by the increased earnings of Uber drivers themselves, driven by the Uber app's efficient matching of drivers with customers.
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