Behind Toyota’s Late Shift Into Self-Driving Cars

 

plans to make cars that drive themselves on highways by 2020

Source: www.wsj.com

One of those roads will likely be the streets of Tokyo during the 2020 Olympics. If Toyota had not changed course now, they may have been the only one without a car during the procession, that would be embarrassing.

Ford, Toyota ally to counter Silicon Valley in dashboard war

 

Ford said France’s Peugeot SA and Japanese automakers Honda Motor Co , Subaru and Mazda Motor Corp are also investigating adopting SDL as a standard

Source: www.reuters.com

This may be the largest segment of the industry, collectively these automakers represent 58% of the US auto market (http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html) a formidable competitor (not including global market) to Google and Apple control over the dashboard. Now we need an interoperability standard for SDL to make it universal.

CES: Volvo to use NVIDIA processor for autonomous driving

 

Volvo will be the first automaker to deploy DRIVE PX 2.

Source: safecarnews.com

Will this be a trend? I saw the nVidia offering as a sole source solution most automakers will resist. At the same time I applaud their efforts to take a leadership position in software, however closed it really is. GPU based autonomous tries to mimic the human eye, but may limit the brain functions needed as well.

Wi-Fi for the Internet of Things gets a name: ‘Wi-Fi HaLow’

 

IEEE finalization of 802.11ah is far along and already into what’s known as the technical phase

Source: www.computerworld.com

It’s really sad that 802.11p (5.9 Ghz DSRC for Connected Vehicles) never got this much attention and rapid pace toward deployment – whose fault was that? There was plenty of money thrown at it. Since cars are part of IoT I suppose they will need to support HaLow also. This will fall on innovators, not government (BTW it seems NHTSA decided not to issue a DSRC mandate so far).