Waymo engineers have driven down the cost of LiDAR dramatically even as we’ve improved the quality and reliability of its performance. The configuration and specifications of our LiDAR sensors are unique to Waymo. Misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company.

Read the full article at: medium.com

Nobody would question if Coca-Cola sued Pepsi for any attempt to steal their recipe, why question Waymo’s right to sue Otto and Uber? 9GB of documentation copied is not likely a mistake.

Automakers have argued that the rules could result in the loss of up to 1 million jobs because consumers could be less willing to buy the more fuel efficient vehicles since their engineering will result in higher price tags.
The EPA had until April 2018 to decide whether the 2025 standards were feasible but in November moved up its decision to Jan. 13, just before Obama left office.

Read the full article at wardsauto.com (registration or login required)

This one must be fun for Trump’s team, given the determination by the prior administration to seal the EPA in a battle with automotive. If only we could build whole cars from carbon fiber like we do bicycles.

This approach comprises, amongst others, the cooperation with HERE as well as the cooperation with Intel and Mobileye on bringing highly automated driving to the streets by 2021 with the BMW iNEXT.

Read the full article at telematicswire.net

What I read is that if you buy a 2018 BMW, you’ll get the nextgen Mobileye technology that allows the vehicle sensors to upload to HERE live maps and tell other BMW’s what is in your area lately. By 2021 BMW will put some highly automated driving cars on the road which may rely on this new mapping tech to eventually self-drive. What part does Intel play? Money.

The struggle to prevent snoozing-while-cruising has yielded a radical decision: Ford will venture to take the human out of the loop by removing the steering wheel, brake and gas pedals from its driverless cars debuting in 2021

Read the full article at: safecarnews.com

A bold decision for sure, unless the cars are driving in a controlled (referred to as geofenced) area. Then the cars will be better off without override by a human. So far this has not worked in real life situations, like flying.

GM has no immediate plans to sell the Bolt AV to individual customers, according to the source

Read the full article at: safecarnews.com

Why sell a car when you can sell it’s usage, this was the idea behind GMC leasing. I suppose the business model here is that Lyft still collects money for rides and the drivers (I think there are two) get some money from passengers. In the long run does it make sense?

This calls for not just a clearer understanding of how humans make such choices, but also a clearer understanding of how humans perceive machine intelligence making such choices.

Read the full article at: moralmachine.mit.edu

This ends up looking silly, that machines are going to learn morals from people that choose to play a game. Morality is something that does not transfer by bits. https://youtu.be/XCO8ET66xE4

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“OCF believes in technology partnerships that will help drive our vision of ensuring secure interoperability for consumers and business, across multiple industry verticals,” said Joonho Park, executive director of OCF.

Read the full article at telematicswire.net

Now that the question over Linux in the car is YES, GENIVI is moving on to big data for cars and IoT!

What original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are overlooking is that Silicon Valley might know how to develop technology solutions quickly, but sometimes at the expense of reliability.

Read the full article at: embedded-computing.com

Cars are proven to be much more capital intensive and complex to produce in volumes than phones and PC’s. Both industries can learn from each other with great respect for the challenges.

These acquihires led former Google Self-Driving Car Project lead Sebastian Thrun to comment that the going rate for self-driving talent is $10 million per person.

Read the full article at: www.driverless.id

Please don’t tell me all this excitement about self-driving cars is based on a few bright souls making millions on their brains! Could the whole auto industry be fooled?

In fact, it’s a time-frame so firmly emblazoned on the minds of tech people, no reporter dares even question it. And yet, there is cursory evidence to suggest the real hurdle to fully autonomous vehicle penetration isn’t technical as much as it is social, economic and political.

Read the full article at: ftalphaville.ft.com

2020 will come and go, but will cars be any safer?