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Mercedes’ Electric Maybach SUV Comes With a Built-In Tea Kettle

Mercedes’ Electric Maybach SUV Comes With a Built-In Tea Kettle 0

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The future of the auto industry is China. It’s the world’s largest auto market, it’s growing quickly, and its emissions regulations—among the strictest on the planet—are even pushing the world’s automakers to abandon the internal combustion engine. Chinese customer preferences have also led designers to increase rear seat legroom and offer in-car perfume systems. And now, China has gifted the world an electric Maybach SUV.

At the Auto China 2018 car show in Beijing today, Mercedes-Benz showed off the Vision Mercedes-Maybach Ultimate Luxury, a vehicle so stuffed with goodies you might even decide to overlook the questionable exterior design. Mercedes, which owns the Maybach brand, says the crossover is inspired by both a sedan and an SUV. But that tension is not necessarily a good thing: The car starts with an overly long hood (despite the absence of an engine to put in it), and the rear two thirds look as if they have been contracted and converted into some extra height. More pleasing exterior details include turbine-style, 24-inch wheels, and door handles that lie flush against the body, and pop out when in use, like the ones on a Tesla.

The four electric motors (one for each wheel) combine to produce a gargantuan 750 horsepower, enough to hustle this behemoth of a car up to 155 mph. The range from the 80-kwh battery pack is a less impressive 200 miles. By comparison, the Tesla Model X with a 100-hwk pack, which starts at $96,000, goes nearly 300 miles between charges. Startup SF Motors promises 300 from its forthcoming SUV. You can expect 200 miles from Jaguar’s I-Pace.

Whatever, your chauffeur can figure out where and when to charge the thing. You should be focused on the interior. Maybach, you see, stupendous luxury doesn’t cut it around these parts. The Maybach name intimates something greater: opulence. To complement all the fine woods and half a feedlot’s worth of the finest white nappa leather, the backs of all four seats are coated in ultra shiny, rose gold-colored aluminum. The seats offer massages too, of course, and in the back, come with calf supports.

The driver gets a pair of 12.3-inch screens, and the fancier folk riding in back get a tea set. Yes, the Vision Mercedes-Maybach Ultimate Luxury comes with a built in, heated ebony tray that holds a teapot and cups. Per the press release, this setup allows “exquisite tea-drinking enjoyment.” (Note to butler: Enough Lipton’s, please start buying exquisite tea.) Just hope the ride quality is smooth enough to keep you from staining anything.

The car is just a concept for now, but expect Mercedes to follow up with a production version of the car in the next few years; the Maybach as shown wouldn’t require any major changes to make it meet regulations. The exploding market for SUVs and regulators’ insistence that automakers selling cars in China ramp up their electric offerings makes this luxo-barge nearly ready to set sail. As long as you’re ready to pay for it.

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Discombobulated Cities Wrestle With an Electric Scooter Influx

Discombobulated Cities Wrestle With an Electric Scooter Influx 0

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The line to speak wrapped around half the chamber, constantly replenishing itself, an inching microcosm of a constrained, complicated city. There were tech startup reps, disability advocates in motorized wheelchairs, a martial arts instructor making extra money through the gig economy, and plenty of concerned citizens.

“I think that these scooters run amok are actually a plot of the young people to kill off all us old farts so they can have our rent-controlled apartments,” community member Fran Taylor told the Board of Supervisors.

Maybe connecting ungainly electric scooters to a dastardly plot—even in jest, and to laughs—seems like nonsense. Or maybe you live in San Francisco, where a weekly meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee brought the disgruntled masses to City Hall on a Monday afternoon. The legislative body met to discuss a bill to give the city the authority to remove shared scooters without permits or parked in the public right-of-way, and penalize the companies that own them.

But the hearing felt like it was about something much bigger. These scooters are just the latest outgrowth of a growing conflict between cities and startups that have rushed to capitalize on a growing mobility marketplace. It started with Uber and Lyft. Then came the “microtransit” companies, like Chariot and Via. Then dockless, shared bikes from Jump, Ofo, Bluegogo, and Mobike. And now, it’s motorized scooters challenging the regulators who must determine how private companies can use their streets, and how they should go about it.

“I really want to send a message not only to these scooters,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who co-wrote the bill in question. “It would be very nice if the tech bros could come in and ask in a collaborative fashion for permission rather than after the fact forgiveness.”

Some background: In mid-March, three electric scooter-share companies launched San Francisco services into a bit of a municipal legal loophole. By law, Bird, LimeBike, and Spin do not need business licenses to operate this kind of service, even though their battery-powered scooters can hit 15 mph and are stored on the sidewalk. That's the public, shared space where people on foot and in wheelchairs usually travel.

On Monday, supervisors were especially frustrated that they did not receive more notice from the companies before they began operations in the city. Supervisor Jane Kim, who wrote the bill with Peskin, said Spin had used deceptive language to wrongly make it appear that she had given them permission to launch. Peskin complained that Bird had sent a misleading news alert to the media, saying the city had activated an emergency procedure to ban e-scooters usually only used for earthquakes.

The committee unanimously passed the bill, and the full board passed the legislation today. Meanwhile, the city’s transportation agency is working to finalize a permitting process for e-scooters by late spring.

The scooters have generated frustration beyond San Francisco. In San Diego, Austin, and Washington, DC, coalitions of neighborhood, senior, disability, and pedestrian groups have pushed back against the quick introduction of scooter shares in their midst. They say the e-scooters, which users often ride on the sidewalk, block critical access to curb space and could be dangerous tripping hazards. City governments, finally ready to encourage non-car modes of transit, are caught in the middle. They say they hope to want affordable, environmentally-friendly travel choices that doesn’t aggravate growing traffic problems—and keep their streets safe and comfortable for everyone.

In San Francisco, the solution has been mostly the stick. While Monday’s hearing unfolded in City Hall, the City Attorney’s office dispatched a sheaf of cease and desist letters, telling the three scooter companies that they had broken California law by allowing customers to ride their motorized scooters on the sidewalks and without helmets, and by obstructing sidewalks without permission.

In statements, representatives for Bird, Spin, and LimeBike said they would continue to engage with public officials, but did not commit to halting service. Bird and LimeBike also said San Francisco users would now have to take and upload photos of their parked vehicles after riding, to ensure they are out of the way.1 The City Attorney’s office gave the companies until April 30 to rejigger their operations and explain how they no longer violate the law.

The city of Santa Monica, California, too, took a hard line, charging Bird for failing to procure the proper business license. The company eventually paid $300,000 in fines.

Others have been a bit more flexible. After initially impounding the e-scoots, Austin’s transportation chief has now proposed a fast-tracked permitting process for the companies, with a hard cap for the number of vehicles in operation and bonuses for those in areas underserved by transit. DC’s e-scooters fall under its broader dockless pilot program, which has allowed a number of companies to operate services in the city while authorities determine what sort of rules they should have to follow.

If the whole situation seems vaguely familiar, it’s because Uber’s “launch first, ask questions later” approach to municipal regulations left a foul taste in local politicians’ mouths. And after a year of the company’s spectacular, highly public conflagration, it feels more politically viable to oppose tech companies that even vaguely imitate the ride-hail company's strategies.

So in the midst of an opening statement calling the e-scooter share companies’ tactics “offensive and arrogant,” Peskin paused to do some hating.

“We’re told somehow that Uber is a public transit alternative that has decongested our streets even as we have hard data prepared by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that shows at peak in some parts of the city they are adding 26 percent of the congestion,” Peskin said. (The study, which used scraped Uber and Lyft data, estimates that transportation network companies are responsible for 20 to 26 percent of trips in the city’s downtown and South of Market neighborhood during rush hours.)

No surprise that the e-scooter folks are out to prove they are the anti-Uber. During the hearing, residents of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, one of the most underserved by transit in the city, pointed out that LimeBike had engaged local community groups and hired locals. Bird “chargers,” who make $5 for each scooter they charge and then put back on the street, said the extra income helps in one of America’s most most expensive cities.

And on the other side, a mostly gray-haired group spoke of the challenges of getting around a place often not built for walking, or easy wheelchair access. The question, then, remains: Can San Franciscans—and urbanites everywhere—share not just their cars and bikes and scooters, but their space?

1 Updated 4/17/18, 9:25 PM EDT: This story has been updated to include comments from a LimeBike spokesperson.

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Intel tested its self-driving car software on fatal Uber crash footage and says it would’ve had 1-second warning

Intel tested its self-driving car software on fatal Uber crash footage and says it would’ve had 1-second warning 0

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Intel's Mobileye shows how its response system would have evaluated the moment right before the Uber crash, detecting different shapes and distances.
Image: intel

After a self-driving Uber crashed and killed a woman walking her bike across a Tempe, Arizona, road last week, the technology behind autonomous vehicles has been questioned and scrutinized.

Intel, the company behind the driver-assistance software Mobileye — which is used in certain autonomous cars, but not in Uber — took the footage Tempe police released from the crash and ran their software through the fatal incident. 

Mobileye CEO and CFO Amnon Shashua wrote in a editorial Monday that “despite the suboptimal conditions, where much of the high dynamic range data that would be present in the actual scene was likely lost, clear detection was achieved approximately one second before impact.” 

How the system would have classified the scene with the pedestrian and bicycle in the road is shown above, based on the exterior video police released last week.

SEE ALSO: Here’s the math that Intel claims proves self-driving cars are safe

So Intel, which also announced this year it was working on autonomous cars with BMW, Nissan, and Volkswagen, claims it would have detected and classified the situation accurately. But even if the vehicle had a one-second warning about 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in the road, would that have done anything to spare her life? Shashua, who has written about the safety of autonomous vehicles before, doesn’t go so far as to say his technology would have saved Herzberg, but he does point out that the sensors and software they used on the low-quality video is a “basic build block” for autonomous driving.

“It is the high-accuracy sensing systems inside [advanced driver assistance systems] that are saving lives today, proven over billions of miles driven. It is this same technology that is required, before tackling even tougher challenges, as a foundational element of fully autonomous vehicles of the future,” he wrote. “The video released by the police seems to demonstrate that even the most basic building block of an autonomous vehicle system, the ability to detect and classify objects, is a challenging task.”

An Intel spokesperson responded to further questions about the post asking, “If you don’t have the basics to understand the environment with high accuracy, how can you make driving decisions such as to stop, swerve, or speed up?”

This seems to question the technology used in Uber’s self-driving program and how it works, for example, in a situation with a pedestrian suddenly in the roadway. A New York Times report from last week revealed problems within Uber’s self-driving operation and its struggle to keep up with competitors.

Uber didn’t respond to request for comment about Intel’s post and its software analysis of the crash.

UPDATE: March 27, 2018, 1:05 p.m. PDT Uber said it wasn’t able to comment on Intel’s post.

WATCH: The future of self-driving taxis may be closer than you think

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/26/intel-mobileye-uber-fatal-crash/

New video shows self-driving Uber seconds before fatally crashing into pedestrian

New video shows self-driving Uber seconds before fatally crashing into pedestrian 0

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Warning: The video below contains footage which some readers may find disturbing.

Police released a video Wednesday of the self-driving Uber vehicle that struck and killed a woman Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona.

The video, below, shows Uber’s self-driving vehicle’s exterior view right before the crash. A quick glimpse of the woman killed, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, walking her bike can be seen. The moment she was hit is not shown because of what Tempe police called “the graphic nature of the impact.”

SEE ALSO: Uber suspends self-driving program after driverless car hits and kills pedestrian

The video then shows an inside view of the operator — identified as 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez — sitting behind the driver’s seat, looking around and down, and then abruptly opening his mouth and eyes wide in what looks like surprise and shock as the car hits the woman.

Police said the Volvo XC90 was in autonomous mode while traveling close to 40 mph in a 35 mph zone. The woman, who is believed to have been homeless, was apparently walking outside the crosswalk mid-block when she was struck.

Uber is cooperating with the police and National Transportation Safety Board investigations. Its self-driving car programs in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto, and the Phoenix area remain suspended. After the crash, a company spokesperson said, “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with authorities in their investigation of this incident.”

Police said they plan to submit the case to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Mashable has reached out to Uber for comment on the video, and we’ll update if and when we hear back.

WATCH: Japan is testing out self-driving cars and new ‘Uber’ app

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/21/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash-video/

Uber Autonomous Accident Video Shows Car Just Before Collision

Uber Autonomous Accident Video Shows Car Just Before Collision 0

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Video of the fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber car shows the critical moments just before the vehicle makes contact with a pedestrian walking her bike across a dimly lit road. The release from Tempe, Arizona, police provides a startling piece of evidence in a case that could shape laws and public perceptions around driverless vehicles.

In the video, a woman carries her bike into the middle of a dark street. The vehicle, a Volvo from Uber Technologies Inc. operated in autonomous mode, doesn’t appear to slow down. The video freezes as the car is about to collide with the woman, a 49-year-old named Elaine Herzberg.

The video also shows the view from the inside the vehicle. Uber’s safety driver, Rafael Vasquez, appears to look down at something off-camera in the moments before the collision. Police said they’re reviewing this detail as part of the investigation.

“The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine’s loved ones,” Uber said in an emailed statement. “Our cars remain grounded, and we’re assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can.”

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Tempe this week to collect evidence on the fatal incident. Tempe police are also investigating and plan to submit the case to the county attorney’s office, which will determine if anyone was at fault.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/police-release-video-of-fatal-uber-autonomous-car-collision

Tesla’s Model 3 Is the Best Electric Car You Can’t BuyYet

Tesla’s Model 3 Is the Best Electric Car You Can’t BuyYet 0

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The Model 3 is supposed to be Tesla’s humdrum car, the everyday, cut-price offering to the masses. Not the sort of thing that impresses Angelenos, so blasé about celebrities and rich kids valeting their supercars at restaurants. In LA, it takes a special vehicle to stand out.

Yet, as I’m driving around town in a (bright red) Model 3, I feel unusually conspicuous, attracting the eyes of passers-by, some of them walking into traffic for a closer look. Friends want a ride. Other Tesla owners come up to me to chat while charging. Surely, some of them are among the 450,000 people who have already put down a $1,000 deposit for the right to buy this car. And it turns out that driving one of the most anticipated vehicles, ever, is enough to shake these seen-it-all Angelenos to attention.

The real question is whether it lives up to the hype, to Elon Musk’s promise that this is the car for everyone. That’s what I wanted to find out, using the Model 3 to tool around LA, to hit freeways and winding roads, to traverse the desert and climb snow-covered mountains.

City Slicker

The car Tesla lent me to test is one of the first-production versions, and costs $57,000 when loaded with the currently non-optional options, including the premium package and long range battery. The first thing I did was look for misaligned panels, and try some speed humps to check for the squeaks and rattles that have plagued Model 3 buyers. I found none, but figure Tesla has given this loaner some extra scrutiny.

The automaker had similar quality control issues with early Model S and X production, and has mostly ironed those out. It’s fair to expect Musk & Co. will do the same here. So maybe driving this Model 3 is a bit like living in the future—this neatly finished model is the car Tesla wants to build for everyone. Eventually.

Heading to work in LA traffic means plenty of switching lanes to weave around the slow pokes, and that’s easy in the Model 3, which feels nimble. The steering takes just one full turn, center to lock, and feels super responsive. And it is very much a Tesla, with body-smooshing acceleration. It can’t out-sprint the top-end Model S, but its 5.1-second 0 to 60 mph time makes it quicker than cars like the VW Golf GTi and BMW’s 330i.

A space to stop is also never easy to find in LA, but Tesla’s Autopark system helps. I drive slowly past a gap, tap a pop-up icon on the touchscreen, and watch the car fold itself into a tight parallel space. It’s scary at first—“watch the wheels”, I found myself yelling at the touchscreen—but, much as it pains me to admit it, it’s probably better at parking than I am.

Tesla

Extreme Minimalism

If your friends are anything like mine, they’ll be most interested in the Model 3’s interior, whose minimal design would make Patrick Bateman’s New York apartment look cluttered. Tesla chucked out all the buttons, along with the instrument panel, traditional home of things like the speedometer. Every function in the Model 3 is controlled via, or displayed on, a centrally mounted 15-inch touchscreen.

I’m typically a fan of physical buttons, which are easy to find with minimal eyes-off-the-road time, and was apprehensive about Tesla’s extremist approach. But some modern cars have so many buttons across the dash and the steering wheel they look like a Yamaha synthesizer threw up, often with information split across several little screens. If designers insist on a screen, it should be like the Model 3’s: huge, high resolution, easy to read in sunlight, and smoothly responsive to touch, supporting gestures like pinch to zoom on the map. I found that most virtual buttons I needed (adjusting Autopilot speed, or the interior temperature) fell easily under hand, with my elbow on the center armrest for stability.

Glancing to the right to read the speed is a little odd, but I got used to it. Stranger is the blackness in front of the steering wheel at night. Everything on the left-hand side of the screen is easy to read, including the speedometer and Autopilot info. The stuff on the far right, like the turn-by-turn directions, requires a long glance away from the road, and is harder to see. Tesla is working on over-the-air software improvements to the interface, so that issue might be addressed in an update. It has already responded to complaints about the windshield wiper controls being hard to find, and made them more prominent.

Tesla

Charging is easy if you have a 220-volt outlet, the type you might use for a clothes dryer, in your garage. The car comes with an extension cord and mobile charger. That means I could leave every morning, with a full battery and the advertised 310 miles of range. The cheaper battery, when it’s available, will be good for 220 miles. If you live in an apartment, or park on the street, you’re going to have to plan more carefully. Same deal if you want to take a road trip—which I did.

Road Trippin'

On Saturday morning, after a couple of days of LA life with the Model 3, I use the Tesla app on my phone to pop open the frunk (Tesla’s regrettable term for the place other automakers put their engines) and stow my suitcase. I type “Palm Springs, California” into the navigation system. Based on Google Maps, with Tesla’s guidance on top, it’s one of the easiest to use I’ve seen in any car. I only got annoyed when, thanks to a bug, it showed the road conditions on one part of my journey as green, then jumped to a more realistic deep red when I was already trapped in traffic and zoomed in to check more closely.

On the 10 freeway, it’s time to try Autopilot, a $5,000 option, that I’m willing to bet every owner takes. The stalk on the right hand of the steering wheel that shifts between drive, reverse, and park, also turns on the semi-autonomous features, with a double tap down. Autopilot keeps the car in its lane, and a fixed distance from the car in front. It’ll brake to a full stop, and then set off again, which makes it super-convenient in this inexplicable weekend traffic. It handles straight roads well, but is less confident in corners, even gentle ones on the freeway. It’ll change lanes automatically, if rather abruptly, after I check that the coast is clear and press on indicator stalk in the direction I want to go. (As I returned the Model 3, I discovered Model S and X cars just started getting an update to their Autopilot software which drivers report improves it dramatically. The 3 is likely to get that too.)

Tesla stresses Autopilot is a driver aid, not replacement, and requires that you keep your hands on the wheel. Let go for too long and the screen starts flashing to tell you to get a grip. I found the warning triggered even when I had my hands resting gently on the wheel. Cadillac’s Super Cruise system, which tracks the position of the driver's head, is smarter.

LA to Palm Springs a 112-mile trip, so, technically, I can make it there and back on a single charge. But I want the option of driving around when I get there, and I’m turning up the AC up notch by notch as the temperature outside rises, which uses battery. (Even the front air vent flow is moved around by the touchscreen.)

So I decide to stop at one of Tesla’s Supercharger sites. Tesla is expanding its fast charger network to include more urban locations, instead of just having them spaced along freeways for long-distance travel. Even more than Autopilot and super-sized screens, this is Tesla’s top selling point. No other electric vehicle has such easy access to high-speed charging. I identify one of these newly opened stations in Riverside, California, a little over half-way to Palm Springs.

Urban Exploring

Charging an electric car, even at a Supercharger, takes a lot longer than filling a tank with gas. (Tesla says you can add 170 miles of range in 30 minutes.) To put a positive spin on my stop, I decide to be play the tourist. For 10 years I’ve sped past Riverside on the freeway, never giving it a second thought. On this trip, I pick up a walking guide, and discover a beautiful, historic, downtown. Fun the first time, but it could get boring on future trips. (City planners take note: Installing chargers will attract visitors.)

Unlike the Model S and Model X, which still typically come with at least some free supercharging, for the 3, Tesla now charges for the right to plug in. For me, in California, it's $0.26 per kWh. That means a charge from empty to full costs $19.50. If you charge at home, overnight, it's likely cheaper. And it's still a lot less than you pay to put gas in the tank.

Leaving Riverside with 300 miles of range means I arrive in Palm Springs with 250 to spare. That’s more than the range the Chevrolet Bolt has when full. It might cost $9K, but the battery capacity in this more expensive Model 3 is a revelation. It means I quickly have more confidence to go farther without worrying about where the nearest charger is. In other electrics, I keep one eye on the range meter.

And it means I’m brave enough to throw in a 60-mile detour on the way home, with a 6,000 feet elevation climb, on a high-speed twisty (and fun!) route. The Model 3 keeps up with a Porsche Cayman whose driver was enjoying the same roads, and felt planted through the corners thanks to the low center of gravity created by the battery under the floor. Zooming through the mountain roads is so quiet and effortless I find myself wishing for some paddle-shifters so I could blip my engine and downshift into corners too, just to add some drama. (Hey Elon, can we get some sound effects with the next software update?)

California’s Palms to Pines highway leads me from the desert into areas of the San Jacinto mountains that had a light dusting of snow. The Model 3, even in its current rear-drive configuration handles it well, cutting power to save traction. The upcoming dual motor, all-wheel drive version will likely be even better. Now the temperature is dropping, but the seat heaters get super warm, super fast … as long as you’re in the front. Tesla hasn’t yet designed a button for the touchscreen to turn on the heaters in the rear seats. (That’s coming soon, with a software update.)

Future Gazing

The Model 3 is the vehicle Tesla designed for the future, and for fully autonomous driving, with a suite of cameras around the outside and a small supercomputer onboard. Whether that's possible without the addition of lidar laser sensors is still up in the air (Elon Musk says yes, most everyone else says no). But if it is, then the clever touches like using your phone to unlock the car, the lack of physical controls, and even the artificially intelligent auto wipers, start to make sense. They all mean a computer could assume control easily, drive autonomously, and possibly pick up paying passengers.

The physical car is well engineered, styled, and has great performance. I get an average of four miles out of every kWh of battery, including high-speed freeway and mountain road driving. That makes this also one of the most efficient electrics, beating Tesla’s other machines.

The virtual side is less solid. If you’re bored of me mentioning software updates, the Model 3 isn’t a car for you. Accepting you’re driving a work-in-progress is part of Tesla ownership, as is patience. The company initially said it would build 5,000 cars a week by the end of last year, but in its last update, revised that target to June 2018.

The backlog of pre-orders is years long, even if Musk hits his most ambitious production goals (he rarely does). But in this case, waiting may be a good thing. It'll give Tesla some time to iron out early production bugs, and to introduce more options, so the Model 3 can live up to its potential as the best, affordable, electric car that you can’t buy. Not yet, anyway.

An Electric Future

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The End of <em>Waymo v. Uber</em> Marks a New Era for Self-Driving Cars: Reality

The End of Waymo v. Uber Marks a New Era for Self-Driving Cars: Reality

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The sun had only just come up Friday, but the young self-driving car industry had already moved into a new era. From the bench, federal Judge William Alsup, recovering from a sore throat, called it: “This case is now ancient history.”

Waymo v. Uber, the first great legal fight over autonomous vehicles, ended in a peace treaty Friday morning: Uber gave Google’s sister company a 0.34 percent stake in its business (worth $245 million or $163 million, depending on how you count Uber’s worth), and pledged not to use any of Waymo’s software or hardware in its vehicles. “I want to express regret for the actions that have caused me to write this letter,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a statement posted on the ride-hailing company's website.

Waymo had alleged that when longtime Google engineer Anthony Levandowski resigned to start his own company, he took thousands of vital technical documents with him, including blueprints for the lidar laser sensor he had helped develop. Uber bought Levandowski’s startup a few months later for almost $600 million in equity and put Levandowski in charge of its struggling self-driving R&D effort. In Waymo’s telling, Levandowski and Uber used Waymo trade secrets to accelerate their efforts.

In large part, the lawsuit encapsulated the stakes in the early days of an industry that’s now booming. Back then, a good lidar system was so rare and coveted that it might be worth stealing. A single engineer like Levandowski, who helped found Google’s self-driving car team a decade ago, could merit a palace coup. And just two companies—Google, the progenitor of self-driving tech, and Uber, the virile challenger eager to convert its millions of human-operated cars into much more profitable robots—command nearly all the headlines and attention of anyone eager for a world where human drivers are a lol-worthy memory.

That world looks different now. More than 20 companies are currently developing lidar, making the sensor more necessary commodity than secret sauce. A pedigree like Levandowski’s loses its luster as a new generation of engineers, trained in robotics and machine learning, emerges. At least half a dozen companies not involved in this brouhaha have proven they can make cars drive about without human help. Waymo v. Uber was a fight over a once jealously guarded technology that today verges on commonplace. And now that the suit is settled, everyone can turn to the next chapter in the textbook, the one where all the companies grow up and figure out how to deploy the thing they’ve all created.

“This is evidence that the autonomous driving problem is not going to be solved by a single silver bullet,” says Shahin Farshchi, a partner at the venture capital firm Lux. “It’s a matter of building many things and getting many things to work together.”

As any good historian will tell you, a moment like the Visigoth-induced fall of Rome in 476 or Judge Alsup’s decree that “there’s nothing more for me to do here” doesn’t really trigger an epochal shift. It’s just a convenient marker. The transition from developing self-driving technology to actually deploying it happened independent of this case. Even before Waymo filed its lawsuit, others were turning a horse race into a stampede: General Motors acquired self-driving startup Cruise. The mysterious startup Zoox started testing in San Francisco. Waymo alum Bryan Salesky decamped for Argo AI and partnered with Ford. Former Google self-driving chief Chris Urmson founded Aurora and is now working with Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Chinese automaker Byton.

Of course, the settlement has tangible effects. First, Uber lives. The threat of a billion-dollar penalty or an injunction that could shut down its entire self-driving program has evaporated. As Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick testified, the company sees autonomous vehicle tech as vital to its existence. If someone else figures out how to run a taxi service without a driver before Uber does, then Uber loses.

Uber wins that second life pretty cheaply, too. No money changes hands as part of this deal; Waymo receives a mere 0.34 percent stake in the ride-hailing company. Each party in the lawsuit will pay its own lawyers. And with that, Khosrowshahi ticks another box off his lengthy Fix Uber list, which also included a house cleaning after the company revealed it had paid off hackers following a 54-million-account security breach and an apology tour in London for safety infractions.

Waymo, meanwhile, maintains its position at the head of the self-driving pack, and shows competitors it’s willing to bleed a bit to stay there. “It was great from Waymo’s perspective to put everyone on notice: ‘We take our leadership position seriously and we will go hammer and tong after anyone who will upset that,”’ says Reilly Brennan, cofounder of the transportation-focused venture capital firm Trucks.

That goes for its own engineers, too. Pierre-Yves Droz, Waymo’s current lidar technical head, testified Thursday that, OK, yes, he had taken an outdated version of one lidar setup to Burning Man. And yes, he had taken two other versions home (with his bosses’ permission). Uber lawyers seemed prepared to argue that this wanton toting-about of self-driving tech proved that Waymo’s lidar wasn’t a trade secret after all. You have to hide stuff for it to be a secret.

So expect no more lidar shows at Burning Man, and no more carelessly protected servers. It’s time for the self-driving space, Waymo included, to grow up and be diligent about keeping their tech in-house. This is a real industry now. The money is still theoretical, but the autonomous vehicle market could be worth $7 trillion by 2050, according to a 2017 Intel report.

Protecting intellectual property means telling employees what is and what isn’t secret—especially if they’re about to leave. “The critical juncture to reinforce those expectations is in the exit interview,” says John Marsh, a lawyer with the firm Bailey Cavalieri. “The employer says, “Hey, by the way, you signed this agreement about trade secrets when you started here; if you have questions, come see me. I expect you’re going to abide by this.’”

In the abridged trial, an Uber lawyer asked Waymo hardware engineer Sasha Zbrozek whether anyone at Google looked for activity that signaled someone was downloading huge numbers of files.

“No,” Zbrozek responded. “But nobody monitors when you get water from the fridge either.”

The time for such freedom could be ending. As autonomous driving technology approaches reality—the you give someone money to ride in this thing kind of reality—expect better defined policies and lots more rules. And maybe a camera watching the water dispenser, too.

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Duterte to Shift Thousands of Government Workers to New City

Duterte to Shift Thousands of Government Workers to New City

by • Cars • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Thousands of government workers will be moved from Manila to a new city that’s being built in a former U.S. military base, as President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration seeks to ease a traffic gridlock in the capital.

The government and private companies are investing more than 50 billion pesos ($1 billion) to build an administrative center in New Clark City. Within five years, the area is expected to have at least eight mid-rise government towers, 8,000 housing units and a train connecting it to Manila, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) away.

“The vision is to build a new thriving city outside metro Manila that’s well-planned, future proof,” said Vince Dizon, president of the state-run Bases Conversion Development Authority which is overseeing the 9,450 hectare development. “We will slowly move some government activities to Clark to pump-prime the city.”

The project is part of Duterte’s plan to decentralize state offices away from Manila’s gridlocked streets. The capital, home to 13 million people and accounting for about one-third of the nation’s economy, will become a “dead city” within 25 years, Duterte said in a speech last month supporting the development of the city, whose name is derived from the former Clark Air Force Base that was closed in 1991.

About 1 million people in the capital region work for the government, adding to traffic congestion that a 2014 Japan International Cooperation Agency study said costs the economy about 2.5 billion pesos a day in lost productivity. That’s expected to climb to 6 billion pesos a day by 2030.

Gridlock

Philippine drivers are the most dissatisfied in the world

Source: Waze Inc.

Index ranks driver experience on a scale of 1-10, with 1 the least satisfying. Factors include traffic density, road quality and infrastructure.

Bases Conversion will start moving to Clark this year. The Department of Transportation transferred its office to Clark in 2017.

The first phase of the 200-hectare administrative center also involves the development of back-up offices for government agencies to ensure continuity in case of disaster. An aquatics and athletics center that will serve as the venue for the 30th SEA Games in late 2019, is also planned, Dizon said.

An expansion of Clark Airport is scheduled to be completed by the first half of 2020, enabling it to handle 12 million passengers a year and double the number of domestic flights from about 240 weekly. Bases Conversion, the manager of former military properties, will publish the bidding terms for the contract to operate Clark Airport this week.

At least 12 billion pesos of roads and bridges will be built in the next two years, while an industrial park planned by Filinvest Land Inc. may have an initial investment of at least 10 billion pesos, Dizon said.

To help fund the Clark City development, Dizon said Bases Conversion will sell up to 60 hectares of real estate in Taguig City near the financial district of Makati, where land prices are at a record high.

    Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-29/duterte-to-build-a-1-billion-new-city-for-thousands-of-workers

    People Keep Confusing Their Teslas for Self-Driving Cars

    People Keep Confusing Their Teslas for Self-Driving Cars

    by • Cars • Tags: , , ,

    We are entering a dangerous period in the development of self-driving cars. Today, you can buy a Cadillac, Volvo, Tesla, Audi, and even a Nissan that will do some of your driving for you, as long as you stay on top of things. It's all part of the steady trek toward the fully autonomous vehicles that will let you fully check out, and catch an in-car movie or two on your way to wherever you're going.

    But we’re not there yet, and a growing body of evidence shows that these partially autonomous systems are lulling drivers into a false sense of security. In one example after another, it's clear too many people don’t get, or ignore the limitations of these robocars-in-training. They zone out, look away, even fall asleep. And they cause crashes.

    Automakers anticipated such problems, and have tried to respond with systems that keep drivers focused and aware of their responsibilities, even when their hands are off the wheel and feet are nowhere near the pedals. But two recent incidents, each involving a Tesla, have thrown the problem back into the headlines, and those solutions into doubt.

    On Monday, a Tesla Model S smashed into a stopped firetruck that had responded to an accident on the freeway in Culver City, California. The car buried itself under the rear of the truck, crumpling the hood to less than a third of its original length and folding it over the windshield. Nobody was hurt. According to the fire department, the driver claimed that the car was “on autopilot”. The National Transportation Safety Board is now reportedly considering an investigation into the crash.

    Over the weekend, a driver in another Tesla Model S sedan was arrested and charged with a DUI when he was found passed out behind the wheel on San Francisco's Bay Bridge. His blood alcohol content was two times the legal limit. He told the California Highway Patrol officers it was OK: The car was on autopilot.

    Tesla’s response to both hiccups is to reiterate what the car tells drivers before they can engage Autopilot for the first time: It is their job to stay fully attentive, and to keep their hands on the wheel, at all times. A spokesperson pointed out that the owner's manual reads, “Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model S around objects partially or completely in the driving lane,” which may explain why the car hit the firetruck. As for the drunk guy, if the car detects your hands aren't on the wheel, it will beep at you. If you still don't touch the wheel, the car will put on its hazards and slow to a stop, figuring that's better than rolling along with no human supervisor. (Most of these systems do the same thing.) Great if you have a heart attack. Not great if you're trying to get away with driving over the limit.

    Both drivers seemed to expect more from their cars than they can actually deliver. And that's understandable, since they give the impression of being self-driving for mile after mile of uneventful highway driving. And the better they work, the more drivers will trust them, to the point where it's easy to forget that they're not infallible. That's a serious problem, because these controls are not meant to be relied on.

    “I think there’s a broad misunderstanding about semi-autonomous versus autonomous,” says Aaron Ames, an engineering professor at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies. “This will only grow over time.”

    That's because lots of automakers are boarding the semi-self-driving train, eager to offer customers the chance to pay extra for a swanky new feature. There's Tesla's Autopilot, Cadillac's Super Cruise, Audi’s Traffic Jam Pilot, Nissan’s ProPilot Assist. Mercedes and Infiniti have similar systems. They all work by combining existing safety features—mostly adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, and automatic emergency braking—and use cameras and radars to stay in their lane and a safe distance from other vehicles.

    You can see why manufacturers are tempted to slap simple, catchy names on these collections of kit: They're a lot easier to sell that way. And you can understand why drivers buying a car with a function called "pilot" think the robot can do all the work. But it can't. All these systems rely on the human paying attention, ready to jump in in case the car encounters something it can't handle on its own, like the sudden disappearance of lane lines.

    They have different ways of checking for that attention. Tesla requires the driver touch the wheel occasionally, to prove they’re there and awake. Cadillac allows drivers to go hands free, but uses an infrared camera to make sure they keep their face pointed at the road. And they have different ways of getting the driver to focus: They beep and flash warnings mostly. Audi's system will tighten your seat belt and tap the brakes, just to get your attention.

    All of this is not to say these systems don’t work. They do, and they increase safety significantly. The Volvo XC60 SUV was awarded first place in the UK’s What Car? safety awards on Tuesday night. Not only did it ace the crash test, said judge Matthew Avery, of Thatcham Research. "It is also bursting at the seams with safety technology to avoid the crash happening at all."

    Thatcham says automatic emergency braking alone cuts rear-end crashes by 38 percent. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s report into a fatal crash between a Tesla with Autopilot engaged and a truck, in Florida in 2016, concluded that crash rates dropped 40 percent after the Autosteer funtion was added.

    Yet a National Transportation Safety Board report into the same crash was less forgiving, putting some of the blame on Tesla, for selling a system that allowed the driver, Joshua Brown, to ignore warnings and abuse the system to let the car effectively drive itself.

    The answer to this growing problem is twofold. First, people must learn to be better drivers, and not abuse these fledgling technologies. “Anytime people are given a system, they’ll try to exploit it. Then the car companies will say ‘That isn’t what it was designed for,’ and then we’re at an impasse,” says Ames.

    And automakers need better ways to teach their customers that lesson. Better yet, they need to design a system that can't be so easily abused. Because, as Elon Musk once said, "Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."

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    Why Tesla’s Autopilot Can’t See a Stopped Firetruck

    Why Tesla’s Autopilot Can’t See a Stopped Firetruck

    by • Cars • Tags: , ,

    On Monday, a Tesla Model S slammed into the back of a stopped firetruck on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles County. The driver apparently told the fire department the car was in Autopilot mode at the time. The crash highlighted the shortcomings of the increasingly common semi-autonomous systems that let cars drive themselves in limited conditions.

    This surprisingly non-deadly debacle also raises a technical question: How is it possible that one of the most advanced driving systems on the planet doesn't see a freaking fire truck, dead ahead?

    Tesla didn't confirm the car was running Autopilot at the time of the crash, but its manual does warn that the system is ill-equipped to handle this exact sort of situation: “Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and may not brake/decelerate for stationary vehicles, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h) and a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary vehicle or object is in front of you instead.”

    Volvo's semi-autonomous system, Pilot Assist, has the same shortcoming. Say the car in front of the Volvo changes lanes or turns off the road, leaving nothing between the Volvo and a stopped car. "Pilot Assist will ignore the stationary vehicle and instead accelerate to the stored speed," Volvo's manual reads, meaning the cruise speed the driver punched in. "The driver must then intervene and apply the brakes.” In other words, your Volvo won't brake to avoid hitting a stopped car that suddenly appears up ahead. It might even accelerate towards it.

    The same is true for any car currently equipped with adaptive cruise control, or automated emergency braking. It sounds like a glaring flaw, the kind of horrible mistake engineers race to eliminate. Nope. These systems are designed to ignore static obstacles because otherwise, they couldn't work at all.

    “You always have to make a balance between braking when it’s not really needed, and not braking when it is needed,” says Erik Coelingh, head of new technologies at Zenuity, a partnership between Volvo and Autoliv formed to develop driver assistance technologies and self-driving cars. He's talking about false positives. On the highway, slamming the brakes for no reason can be as dangerous as not stopping when you need to.

    “The only safe scenario would be don’t move,” says Aaron Ames, from Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies. That doesn't exactly work for driving. “You have to make reasonable assumptions about what you care about and what you don’t.”

    Raj Rajkumar, who researches autonomous driving at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks those assumptions concern one of Tesla's key sensors. “The radars they use are apparently meant for detecting moving objects (as typically used in adaptive cruise control systems), and seem to be not very good in detecting stationary objects," he says.

    That's not nearly as crazy as it may seem. Radar knows the speed of any object it sees, and is also simple, cheap, robust, and easy to build into a front bumper. But it also detects lots of things a car rolling down the highway needn't worry about, like overhead highway signs, loose hubcaps, or speed limit signs. So engineers make a choice, telling the car to ignore these things and keep its eyes on the other cars on the road: They program the system to focus on the stuff that's moving.

    This unsettling compromise may be better than nothing, given evidence that these systems prevent other kinds of crashes and save lives. And it's not much of a problem if every human in a semi-autonomous vehicle followed the automakers' explicit, insistent instructions to pay attention at all times, and take back control if they see a stationary vehicle up ahead.

    The long term solution is to combine a several sensors, with different abilities, with more computing power. Key amongst them is lidar. These sensors use lasers to build a precise, detailed map of the world around the car, and can easily distinguish between a hub cap and a cop car. The problem is that compared to radar, lidar is a young technology. It's still very expensive, and isn't robust enough to survive a life of hitting potholes and getting pelted with rain and snow. Just about everybody working on a fully self-driving system—the kind that doesn't depend on lazy, inattentive humans for support—plans to use lidar, along with radar and cameras.

    Except for Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO insists he can make his cars fully autonomous—no supervision necessary—with just radars and cameras. He hasn't proven his claim just yet, and no one knows if he ever will. Lidar's price and reliability problems are less of an issue when it comes to a taxi-like service, where a provider can amortize the cost over time and perform regular maintenance. But in today's cars, meant for average or modestly wealthy consumers, it's a no-go.

    In the meantime, we're stuck with a flawed system, the result of a compromise made to navigate the world at speed. And when even the best systems available can't see a big red big firetruck, it's a stark reminder of how long and winding the path to autonomy actually is.

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