Cars of the Future - Page 12 of 28

Kodiak CTO Andreas Wendel on latest self-driving truck test track success.

Video: Kodiak self-driving truck handles catastrophic tyre failure

US company Kodiak has posted amazing test track footage of a self-driving articulated lorry handling a massive tyre blowout.

Cars of the Future readers will recognise the name from our US truckers in vanguard of self-driving feature earlier this year.

Back then, we covered how Kodiak has been delivering freight daily between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, operating autonomously on the highway section of the route for over a year.

Self-driving truck puncture test

Now, they’ve published video addressing what Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Andreas Wendel describes as “probably the safety-related question we get the most”: a catastrophic tyre failure.

Kodiak self-driving truck handles catastrophic tyre puncture

“The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimates that tire problems were responsible for approximately 15% of truck-related crashes,” he said.

“As we develop our self-driving system, the KodiakDriver, we wanted to demonstrate that we can handle the bad things that can happen in real world driving, and tire blowouts are usually the first safety risk in mind.

“For all you non-Commercial Driver’s License-holders (CDL-holders), a tire blowout is a big deal, even when the vehicle you’re driving has 18 of them.

“On a big rig truck, the back 16 tires are paired dual tires, while all the steering is done by the two front single tires, called the steer tires.

“Steer tires are responsible for steering, handling, and ensuring a steady ride for humans and cargo alike. If one of the back 16 tires pops, a dual tire is able to compensate and carry some weight until the truck comes to a stop. If one of the single steer tires pops, it’s a whole different story.

“For all CDL-holders, you already know that the first step towards handling complex, catastrophic situations like tire blowouts is making a quick determination that a failure has occurred, then fighting to remain in control, and eventually safely pulling over to the side of the road.

“Trucks with popped tires travel erratically and unpredictably, with unexpected and unknown vehicle dynamics. Even if the tire just goes flat, you can’t maintain speed. This will potentially lead the truck to aggressively veering.

“The rubber may be stripped from the tire, forcing the vehicle to drive on a bare metal rim. In a worst-case scenario, the truck may swerve, jackknife, or even roll over. Once a truck suffers a steer tire blowout, it behaves like an entirely different truck.

Kodiak self-driving truck handles puncture

“That’s why we’re so excited to become the first self-driving trucking company to demonstrate that we can maintain complete control of the truck even after suffering a catastrophic tire blowout.

“As shown in the video, KodiakDriver can stay in control of a truck and bring it to a safe and complete stop even when rolling over a giant spike and instantaneously popping a steer tire.

“Once we incorporated the findings from our low-tire pressure tests into the KodiakDriver’s control algorithms, it was time to test with a completely deflated tire flopping off the rim. This test allowed us to confirm that the controller can still steer the truck with a completely deflated tire, laying the groundwork for a spontaneous blowout.

“After deliberate testing at different tire pressures, we were ready to demonstrate a sudden tire blowout. Executing this test is more complex than you’d think: the vehicle needs to race down the test track and squarely hit a puncture rig, which is a spike mounted to a metal plate.

“For a human, the precision needed to consistently hit the puncture rig is higher than you’d think. Thankfully, the KodiakDriver is a much more precise driver than a human, and remains dead center in a lane unless it needs to nudge over to one side or another.

“With this consistency our team was easily able to identify where the KodiakDriver would pass on specific sections of the test rack and place the puncture rig accordingly.

“Finally, we were ready to demonstrate a tire blowout with a full tractor and trailer. No holding back!”

For further info, visit the Kodiak website.

Supported by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund and Zenzic, Eloy’s multi-vehicle coordination is making parking and driving more efficient. Next, self-driving.

80% car parking timesaving? That’s intelligent CAM decision making

In this Cars of the Future exclusive, the co-founders of Hertfordshire-based Eloy, Anna Corp and Damian Horton, explain how their connected car services make parking, driving and self-driving safer and more efficient.

Congratulations on your Zenzic CAM Scale-Up success. How did you get into connected vehicle tech?

DH: “Our story goes back to 2004, when I was a maths undergrad at Oxford. I ended up doing a thesis on bifurcation theory in swarms, based on simulations like those seen in computer games – little army men running together, and how they interact with each other. It involved a lot of traffic modelling, but at the time there were no jobs in driverless cars, so I went into investment banking and started a couple of businesses. When I moved back to the UK from Australia, in 2018, I saw that the connected and autonomous (CAM) vehicle market was finally happening. I met Anna at a start-up in London and together with an old school friend of mine, Marcus Robbins, who’d done a lot of geospatial work, we decided to give it a crack.”

AC: “My background is in marketing, user experience and customer insights. One issue I’m very familiar with is companies not thinking about real-life human problems. At Eloy, we’re all about solving problems for all road users, not just car and lorry drivers – cyclists, pedestrians, horse riders, everybody. We take a much more holistic approach to making roads safer and more efficient. There’s a big push to move people on to active travel and public transport, but is that what people really want? Shared robotaxis are often presented as a utopia, but why would a mum use one when she has her own car with all the baby stuff already in the back? It’s hard to force behaviour change. A better way is to give people options and tools which they see value in, which make their lives better. Then they’ll adopt.”

Which brings us to your app…

DH: “We worked out early on that the best way to get into the connected car space was to provide a sat nav, before building in any new experiences to make roads flow better. On Boxing Day 2020, we got the email from Apple saying the sat nav component had been accepted for CarPlay.”

AC: “We joke that we’re the smallest sat nav company in the world, but it’s a prerequisite for all we plan to do. We had to get into existing vehicles.”

DH: “We’re obsessed with the situations you get into as a driver – sitting waiting to make a turn across a blocked carriageway, queuing at a mini-roundabout while everyone waits for each other. How can we make these small things better? The missing piece over and over again was multi-vehicle coordination (MVC). So we got super focused on niche use cases, like getting in and out of car parks and passing on country lanes.”

AC: “Smartphones are a good example of a product which has morphed into so much more. The best thing is we can offer connected vehicle solutions now, to provide good advice for human drivers, to prove high efficacy, and then apply them to higher level automated driving.”

And you’re already testing at UTAC’s Millbrook Proving Ground…

DH: “Yes. In October, we demonstrated our narrow road warning solution, which reduces the need for reversing to find a passing point, at The Transport Technology Forum at UTAC. That involved just two vehicles. The next phase is to get it working with 20 vehicles in a controlled environment, then up to 100, and scale from there. We’re looking for the right partners, ranging from ports and farms to construction traffic, freight and public transport – probably fleets initially.

“Early simulations indicate a 20% timesaving from MVC for country lane passing, and up to 80% for car park entry and exit. Internet connectivity is an issue (that’s for someone else to solve!), but we can deploy on sections of road where a good signal is almost guaranteed. Then it’s a question of making sure the intervention – the beeping or flashing or messaging – doesn’t outweigh the benefit. The big question is always: does it improve safety?”

Sorry, did you just say an 80% timesaving for car parking?

DH: “Yes, by using very similar modelling to how to fill an empty aeroplane. For years, it was a free for all, so the airlines tried to get organised by filling in order from row one. Mathematically, that turned out to be the slowest way, because everyone has to wait for the person in front of them. So they got clever and started filling from row 30 and working backwards. That’s actually the second slowest way, because you end up with the same problem of everyone waiting. Eventually they worked out that the best method is a structured filling pattern. You send in rows 30, 25 and 20, then rows 15, 10 and 5. They all have space to stow their luggage and what you have is a lot more manoeuvres per second. That gives you an 80% reduction in filling time.

“We looked at high density car parking in the same way. Think Silverstone on grand prix weekend, when there’s traffic chaos. If every car has an allotted parking bay and follows guidance from a sat nav, you can apply those same principles of more simultaneous manoeuvres. There are potentially further gains too, for example, by connecting live data to the local traffic lights to disperse the traffic more efficiently. The challenge is coordination, between the event organisers, the local authority, the car park operator and the attendees. The rationale is economic benefit, reduced journey times for everyone, which brings you to infrastructure investment decisions – the cost per mile benefits of these intelligent systems compared to building more roads.”

AC: “Once people see that the system works, they’ll quickly learn to trust it. I see huge opportunities in business parking for big employers. If they could save each employee 10 minutes a day, think of the extra productivity. Over a year, suddenly the business would have gained a lot of time and a lot of money.”

Eloy virtual sign: country lane solution

And you’re using artificial intelligence to optimise this?

DH: “Yes. Using SUMO simulation software, we’ve created full digital twins for car parks and certain road segments. Then we add a reward function. The AI basically tries to get the most points, a bit like the 1980’s computer game, Frogger. It’s a type of reinforcement learning that tells cars what to do in different circumstances. We’re training it for a road layout at Millbrook at the moment.

“The holy grail is getting 100% of cars using the software, transmitting and receiving your information and following the instructions. In the meantime, there’s questions around gaps in the data – how much knowledge you can you infer from modelling. Then there’s the dynamics of network effects. An interesting one, going back to our car park efficiency, is what happens if someone decides to break the rules, perhaps by stealing someone else’s slot. You can probably use a financial incentive to overcome that.”

AC: “One reason we really like the cars on a country lane solution is because it’s self-reinforcing. It’s a win-win without needing to use a monetary incentive. Both drivers benefit from additional information and overall traffic flow improves as a result.”

Sounds good to me. For further info, visit the Eloy website

Zenzic CAM Scale-Up winner Dromos says UK is currently best placed to become world leader in safe self-driving.

World leader in self-driving: why Dromos is a UK success story

In this Cars of the Future exclusive, we talk self-driving, Zenzic and the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro with Dr. Martin Dürr, co-founder of Dromos GmbH.

We first covered the innovative German autonomous network transit (ANT) specialist in November 2020, in our interview with award-winning designer, Paul Priestman, co-founder of Dromos partner, PriestmanGoode.

“The system is important, not just the vehicle,” said Priestman back then. “The car we designed is half the width of a normal car, with space for two or three people. It is elegant public transport designed around the passenger – the first autonomous system to deliver mass transit, and the infrastructure belongs to the city.”

Dromos 2022

Fast forward two years and this exciting concept is well on the way to becoming reality, excitingly, first, right here in the UK. As Dr. Dürr explains…

Dr. Martin Dürr, co-founder of Dromos GmbH — Dr. Martin Dürr, self-driving expert and co-founder of Dromos GmbH

MD: “Dromos was founded by myself and Dr. Antje Völker. We worked together 25 years ago at McKinsey and have both been in the transportation space ever since. We always wondered why no one seems to tackle the 400-pound gorilla in the corner of the room: that classical mass transit systems are extremely expensive, outdated and widely disliked.

“Transport for London came close to being bankrupt recently, contemplated shutting down lines due to operating costs. Paris subsidises its system by around €8bn annually. Many cities around the world don’t have that kind of money, so there is no public transport.

“Antje and I decided we had to do something. We agreed that any solution had to meet the needs of two key audiences. The first is, of course, the user. They want a quality of ride comparable to that of a taxi, but at the price of a bus ticket. Within quality of ride, privacy is an important topic, along with convenience and cleanliness.

The second key audience is the legal entity that contracts the building and running of the system – a city or national authority. Their current options, like railway or bus networks, have hardly changed in 150 years. The user experience often isn’t great, and the costs are astronomical.

“Our challenge was to devise a transportation service suitable for the 21st century: on-demand, with privacy, CO2 neutral and deliverable without the need for subsidies. That’s Dromos. We provide capacity at a much better cost per mile, with 50% lower construction costs, construction time and space consumption.”

NK: These megatrends often get conflated – are you saying that ridesharing is incompatible with self-driving?

MD: “Pretty much, yes. Autonomous ridesharing pilots have shown that passengers have very little – if any – desire to share a driverless vehicle with a stranger.

“We talked to people in Brazil about a system for Sao Paulo and they said rideshare was an absolute non-starter because of safety fears. Having cameras on board doesn’t really help, because the police will only be able to step in after a crime has been committed. Actually, people are willing to pay a premium not to share.”

Dromos Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro (CAM) proposal

NK: Tell us about your plans for the Cambridgeshire Autonomous Metro

MD: “Okay, so we refined our proposal and began talking to cities around the world about tendering, including Auckland, Hong Kong and Cambridge in the UK. To be precise, the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority. They issued a tender a year ago for a comprehensive 160km-long system.

“We proposed a solution that’s better for the customer in terms of the user experience, and better for the city in terms of value – connecting villages to the centres, on-demand, at low cost, with no intermittent stopping. Passengers travel directly to their destination.

“Along with our UK partners – PriestmanGoode, Buro Happold and Rider Levett Bucknall – we’ve been selected to provide a more detailed submission. It’s a huge opportunity to embrace a new transport paradigm.”

Indeed, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, James Palmer, said: “The CAM will bring the world-leading, innovative and transformational public transport network that this region needs to continue to thrive.

“This challenge is a test to the very best brains in the market to help pioneer what the CAM will look like and how it can best be delivered. I’m clear that we want the CAM to offer our region the kind of high-quality public transport normally reserved for the biggest cities.”

NK: Then, earlier this month, you were chosen for the Zenzic CAM Scale-Up Programme

MD: “Yes, another great achievement. As a German, it is incredibly encouraging that the UK is currently best placed to become a world leader in the safe adoption of autonomous travel.

“Britain is more willing to experiment and has a clear vision of what needs to be done – The Zenzic Roadmap to 2030. You’ve got a world class testing environment – including the Smart Mobility Living Lab in London – the legal infrastructure is coming, and there’s support from government via the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV). The package is complete, and ready to go; more so than the German government can offer today.

“As a result, following excellent discussions with the CCAV, we have shared data with them and moved a lot of our attention and our value chain to the UK. The environment here is best suited to us from a homologation point of view. It will enable us to build up to our first live installation right here in the UK.

“We were also able to invite several of our suppliers to do their testing in the UK, so that process is also on track now. We are in discussion with other authorities here – Manchester, the Ministry for Transport in Scotland and others. With a dedicated infrastructure, delivering safe and reliable transport is easy for us.”

For further info, visit the Dromos website.

French company Navya in self-driving shuttle trial at major US airport.

Video: NBC reports on cool Navya self-driving trial at JFK airport

NBC in New York has reported on a recent self-driving trial using Navya Autonom shuttles to take passengers to and from the long-term parking lot at John F. Kennedy Airport.

Self-driving news from NBC New York, October 2022

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a bi-state agency that builds, operates and maintains many of the most important transportation assets in the country, including the region’s three major airports – LaGuardia, Newark Liberty and JFK.

Self-driving comment

“If you have a bus running every 10 or 20 minutes, and we replaced that with four or five autonomous vehicles, maybe you’re only waiting two minutes,” said Seth Wainer, of The Port Authority.

Platooning on a predetermined route, the trial included the shuttle stopping “on a dime” when a pedestrian stepped out in front of it.

Johnathan Balon, MD of Navya, explained: “It’s changing the future. It’s fully electric, fully autonomous. It’s lowering their carbon footprint and it’s allowing people to understand the new technology that’s coming.”

Maintenance of Navya self-driving vehicle

Navya CEO, Sophie Desormière, added: “Navya’s shuttles are adapted to a large number of uses, and airports represent a good case in point. Not only do our shuttles offer a solution for the transportation of people, but our Tract also offers the same for the transportation of goods.

“The trial will also provide an opportunity to demonstrate once again the strength of our hypervision technology. Our mastery of remote and platooning fleet management is already established in France, and we will be taking a further step forward by introducing it in the US.”

Navya is listed on the Euronext regulated market in Paris. For more on EV and self-driving stocks, see our recent finance feature. For further info, visit the Navya website.

Oxbotica founder and CTO, Professor Paul Newman, addresses MPs on the Transport Committee about self-driving, October 2022.

Oxbotica CTO Newman tells MPs: explainability is foundation of trust in self-driving

Last week, Oxbotica founder and CTO, Professor Paul Newman, addressed MPs on the Transport Committee to explain how self-driving technologies will deliver value to people, businesses and the planet.

The company posted about it on Linkedin, including a short video.

In relation to commercialisation, he said: “I think there’s an ordering of these technologies, and there’s an ordering of the operational design domain. Burdens are rightly different in some domains – it’s different in a mine to Kensington High Street.

“I’ve never come across a city that asks for more single occupancy vehicles, ever. They’ve always said: fewer please. So, I don’t think personal, private transports are the future, because cities want to change the way transport works. They want to make it more accessible. The number of bus trips that Londoners take is absolutely extraordinary. Let’s support that.

“Technological complexity worries me far less than the regulatory complexity. That’s not just saying you should trust us. What’s great about some of the regulation that’s coming through is that there’s meaty technical requirements placed on the manufacturers of autonomy software. That allow the systems to be explainable, and explainability is the foundation of being trustworthy.”

For more on Oxbotica’s vision for universal autonomy, see this recent interview with its VP of Technology, Ben Upcroft.

Lidar sector thriving as established players and new start-ups push for safe self-driving.

Self-driving gives lidar billion dollar boost

Two new reports have highlighted assisted- and self-driving as key factors predicted to boost the global automotive light detection and ranging (lidar) market.

According to Polaris Market Research, it will reach US$4.14bn by 2026, increasing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of more than 35%.

The report summary noted: “The solid-state/flash lidar market is expected to grow at a very high pace during the forecast period. Solid state sensor being low-cost, robust, as well as compact in size makes it ideal for potential large-scale production of level 3 and 4 cars in coming years. Further, mechanical sensors and other sensors also capture decent market share.”

A separate report, by Markets And Markets, largely concurs, projecting a CAGR of 21.6% to reach US$3.4bn by 2026. However, it focuses more on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – drones – and 4D lidar, with the prospect of new entrants making a big impact.

Lidar in self-driving

In March, Aeva announced that its Aeries 4D lidar sensors are now supported on the Nvidia Drive autonomous vehicle platform. As well as measuring distance and plotting the position of objects in x, y and z, 4D plots velocity as a fourth dimension.

Aeva CEO Soroush Salehian on self-driving

Both CEO Soroush Salehian and co-founder Mina Rezk previously worked on Apple’s Special Projects Group. “Bringing Aeva’s next generation 4D lidar to the Nvidia Drive platform is a leap forward for OEMs building the next generation of level 3 and 4 autonomous vehicles,” said Salehian.

“We believe Aeva’s sensors deliver superior capabilities that allow for autonomy in a broader operational design domain (ODD), and our unique features like Ultra Resolution surpass the sensing and perception capabilities of legacy sensors to help accelerate the realization of safe autonomous driving.”

You can always tell when a sector is thriving because dedicated events spring up. The fifth annual Automotive Lidar conference took place in September, while Lidar Magazine has documented the increasing crossover from surveying into car tech.

Its recent interview with Luis Dussan, founder of California-based AEye is well worth a read. “While at Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, I was designing mission-critical targeting systems for our fighter jets and special ops units that searched for, identified and tracked incoming threats,” he said.

“I realized that a self-driving vehicle faces a similar challenge: it must be able to see, classify, and respond to an object – whether it’s a parked car or a child crossing the street – in real time and before it’s too late.”

Of course, the established players are also pouring money at lidar, and making huge strides. Polaris highlighted Bosch, Continental, Delphi, Denso and Velodyne, among others, with Bosch boasting “the first long-range lidar suitable for the automotive mass market”. It has a detection range of over 200m.

Dr. Mustafa Kamil of Bosch on self-driving

Dr. Mustafa Kamil, Bosch’s project manager for automated driving sensors, explained: “For automated driving to become a reality, the vehicle must perceive its surroundings more effectively than humans can, at all times. Alongside cameras, radar and ultrasonic, a further sensor principle is required in order to achieve this goal.

“For example, when the ambient light changes from bright to dark upon entering a tunnel, it can briefly pose a challenge for the camera. Meanwhile the lidar sensor remains majorly unimpeded by the change in light conditions, and can reliably recognize objects at the entrance to the tunnel in these critical milliseconds.”

He continued: “A former supervisor once told me that a lidar sensor is like a plate of spaghetti: As soon as you try to grab one piece, the others move as well. If you want to make the sensor smaller, this affects properties such as the visual field-of-view or detection range. Optimizing all components in such a way that they do not impede other variables is technically challenging.”

Please note: a version of this article was first published by the Institute of the Motor Industry’s MotorPro magazine.

Self-driving news from Autonomy’s London City Summit 2022

London City Summit 2022: preparing the capital for safe self-driving

Autonomy’s invitation-only London City Summit at the Southbank Centre featured a great line-up of speakers on subjects ranging from self-driving tech to last-mile logistics.

It was 12 October and, hands up, I could only spare a few hours (including lunch, of course), so apologies to those I missed.

The overriding theme was the UK as a showcase for the safe adoption of self-driving, with world-class testing facilities and sensible standards… and therefore a prime location for investment.

Bosch on self-driving

The event was sponsored by Bosch and my first session was a keynote by their head of autonomous transport solutions, Olaf Monz.

“It’s not about selling a vehicle anymore, it’s about shaping an ecosystem,” he said, talking of the partnership with British software company, Five AI, which Bosch acquired earlier this year.

He promised that Bosch’s approach would be “chip agnostic” and referred to “the magic moment when you can remove the driver”.

There followed a short video of Bosch’s self-driving car navigating around an 18km route in Stuttgart at speeds of up to 100km/h.

Next up was a panel moderated by Nick Reed, of Reed Mobility, and featuring Connor Champ, lawyer on the Automated Vehicles Project at the Law Commission of England and Wales, and Jakob Kammerer, senior product manager at Bosch.

London City Summit 2022: Nick Reed self-driving panel

Reflecting the candour which characterised the whole event, Reed expressed surprise that he was allowed to call the session “Are we sure we want AVs in cities?”

Champ detailed how the government had accepted virtually all of the Law Commission’s recommendations. Notably, encouraging “a no blame safety culture”, with a regulator similar to the Civil Aviation Authority, and an incident investigator similar to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

To facilitate public acceptance, he wants said authority to report on how implementation is going. However, when it came to measuring safety, “people disagreed with every suggested metric!”

Jakob Kammerer poetically referred to discovering “the beauty in software”, describing Bosch’s pioneering work on verification and validation.

“Our trials show that people are curious about self-driving,” he said. “Transparency always helps. We explain what we are doing and why – to make improved mobility for everyone. Once they see that a product is good, that it works and solves a problem, they will adopt it very quickly.”

Buro Happold on self-driving

The next panel was moderated by Federico Cassani, director of transport and mobility at Buro Happold, and featured Prof Bani Anvari, of University College London, Margarethe Theseira, head of UK consulting at Buro Happold, and designer Marco Mazzotta of Heatherwick Studio.

London City Summit 2022: Federico Cassani self-driving panel

Prof Anvari outlined the impressive facilities at UCL’s new Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) in East London, where they create all manner of life-sized surroundings and examine how people interact with them.

Theseira, an economist who advised on the new Elizabeth Line, looked at the costs and benefits of self-driving – the likelihood that “the real benefits will come when everything is fully automated”, but also her worry that “it will be a rich person’s toy”. She noted that car ownership is already much lower among lower income groups, resulting in restricted access to mobility and increased loneliness.

Cassani saw self-driving as “an opportunity for far more equitable mobility”, while Mazzotta mused on how cities might evolve architecturally with widespread AV adoption. He suggested that a huge amount of parking space could be freed up, asking: “What will we use the space for? Is it going to be public or private?”

Self-driving education

The last keynote before lunch was by Yasmine Fage, co-founder of Goggo Network, on her vision to provide all people with autonomous, electric and shared mobility. She described last mile delivery as “an increasing pain point for companies in cities”, and pointed to Goggo’s mobile lockers in Paris as one of many innovative solutions.

The networking lunch – a veritable banquet – was a chance to catch up with, among others, Lukas Nekermann (more of him in a moment), Patricia La Torre of Humanising Autonomy, Richard Barrington of Smart Cities and Land Mobility, Roland Meister of Five, Luigi Bisbiglia of SBD Automotive, Mark Cracknell of Zenzic, the CCAV’s Michael Talbot, and Dr Martin Dürr of Dromos.

London City Summit 2022: Lukas Nekermann on self-driving education

Immediately after lunch came a keynote by the aforementioned Mr Neckermann, of PAVE Europe. Cars of the Future readers will be familiar with PAVE’s origins in America and their mission to “inform the public about automated vehicles”. Despite a jibe from the audience about the required marketing budget (!), such educational initiatives must surely be welcomed.

Mobility super-apps

Next-up, the final session for me, was a panel on “mobility super-apps”, moderated by Suzanne Hoadley, of Polis, and featuring Duncan Robertson, of e-scooter and e-bike operator Dott, and David Koral of Free Now, “the app with the largest vehicle choice for consumers across Europe”.

Robertson argued that decision makers must limit the number of operators as “having too many doesn’t work for anyone, although consumers might benefit from a price war to start with.”

Koral highlighted the importance of offering “anywhere to anywhere” journeys within cities and beyond, while both were surprisingly open to sharing data with public authorities.

The stat of the day was the Transport for London target that, by 2041, 80% of journeys in the capital should be either by public transport or active travel.

My capsule review is that reassuring uncertainty abounded. There was general agreement that self-driving will be a gamechanger, but people freely admitted they didn’t have all the answers. How will AVs impact future mobility? How quickly?

Many of the big questions remain unanswered, and we in the UK are comfortable with that for now, because safety is our top priority.

For further info, visit the London City Summit page on the Autonomy website

Must-see video: October 2022 Bloomberg Quicktake interview with Anthony Levandowski on self-driving and safety

Anthony Levandowski on self-driving in 2022: The only metric is safety

In this October 2022 Bloomberg Quicktake report, we hear from one of the most controversial men in self-driving: Anthony Levandowski.

Anthony Levandowski on Bloomberg Quicktake

It covers Levandowski’s history with Google and Uber, trade secrets, being pardoned by Donald Trump, and his new role as co-founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle company, Pronto.

Self-driving safety

“Self-driving is defined as the occupant is not responsible for the movement of the vehicle,” he says. “I’m a firm believer in that. I think it’s gonna be transformational. It’s a trillion dollar a year business that everybody’s chasing.

“The only metric that determines when an autonomous vehicle is ready is safety. It doesn’t matter how much they cost. It doesn’t matter how bulky they are, how ugly they are. The only metric is safety. Are they safer than a person?”

Tantalisingly, the top half of the Pronto.ai homepage, “Offroad”, has an “Enter” button, while the bottom half, “Onroad”, says “Coming Soon”.

Pronto re self-driving offroad and onroad

Way back in 2019, in the early days of Cars of the Future, we covered a timelapse video posted by Pronto.ai showing a car travelling almost entirely self-driving from San Francisco to New York.

Set to poetry by Charles Bukowski, it was subject to much scrutiny and caused quite a stir at the time. We’ve come a long way in three years.

Level 5 already… and we’ve put a man on Mars, I’ve seen the film.

Level 5? VW concept claim goes largely unchallenged

In late September, at the glamorous Chantilly Arts & Elegance event, near Paris, Volkswagen Group unveiled the Gen.Travel, an all-electric Level 5 concept vehicle. Sorry, did you just spill your tea?

“The all-electric powered Innovation Experience Vehicle (IEV) is a real prototype that drives autonomously (Level 5) and gives a realistic outlook for the mobility of the coming decade,” said the VW blurb. Sounds amazing.

Dr. Nikolai Ardey, Head of Volkswagen Group Innovation, says: “With Gen.Travel, we can already experience today what will be possible in the near future with innovative technology. Door-to-door travel at a new level. Emission-free and stress-free.”

Are VW really claiming to have cracked Level 5? That’s certainly the impression given by some reports.

“Volkswagen is presenting a new way of traveling in luxury and relaxation, with its new vehicle prototype featuring Level 5 autonomy that takes the wheel all the way from departure to arrival,” said Tech Times.

A quick reminder, the SAE international standard describes Level 5 as: “Can drive everywhere in all conditions”. That’s quite an ask.

In our 2020 long-read, Kevin Vincent, Director at the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Automotive Research, mused: “Level 5 in terms of anytime anywhere automation is very difficult; I sometimes wonder if it will be possible, and whether people will even want it.”

Not a problem, apparently VW have sorted it!

EV to ADAS, Tesla has revolutionised the car industry at lightning speed

Tesla: With EV no longer a USP, ADAS is the new battleground

What company springs to mind when you think cutting-edge auto tech? Same here. Tesla. At the recent FT Future of the Car Summit, Elon Musk reminisced about the first Roadster.

“There were no start-ups doing electric cars, and the big car companies had really no electric car programmes,” he said. “Unless we tried, they were not going to be created. It wasn’t from a standpoint of thinking, hey, here’s a super lucrative idea.”

EV all the way: Tesla line-up — EV all the way: Tesla car line-up

20 years later, Tesla is the world’s most valuable car brand, and it’s not even close. In June 2022, Statista valued it at US$75.9 billion, up from a mere 40-odd billion in 2020, and substantially more than second-placed Toyota and third-placed Mercedes-Benz put together.

From drivetrains to marketing, it has shredded the vehicle manufacturing rulebook, and continues to do so. Consider just some of the key developments over the last six months.

Tesla to Twitter

In March, Musk entered into a Twitter spat with US president Joe Biden, after the latter praised Ford for investing $11billion to build EVs, creating 11,000 jobs, and GM for investing $7billion, creating 4,000 jobs. He retorted: “Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles and is investing more than double GM and Ford combined.”

Research by StockApps confirmed that Tesla spends miles more on R&D than rival carmakers, around $3,000 per vehicle produced. While Electrek highlighted that Tesla spends nothing on advertising, relying “almost entirely on word-of-mouth”.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. A court in Germany ordered Tesla to buy back a Model 3 from a customer who likened the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package to “a drunk first-time driver”. With EV no longer a USP, ADAS is the new battleground.

In May, a judge in California ruled that the driver of a Tesla operating in Autopilot must stand trial for a crash that killed two people. A Model S reportedly ran a red light and hit a Honda Civic at 74 mph. It could mark the first felony prosecution against a driver using a partially automated driving system.

More negative press followed when it emerged that hundreds of Tesla owners had complained about “phantom braking”, with cars stopping suddenly for no apparent reason.

Then, in June, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published the first of its new monthly reports into crashes involving vehicles with ADAS. Tesla had the most, followed by Honda and Subaru.

Cue the headlines, “Tesla Autopilot and Other Driver-Assist Systems Linked to Hundreds of Crashes” in The New York Times, and “Teslas running Autopilot involved in 273 crashes reported since last year” in The Washington Post.

Importantly, the US Public Interest Research Group clarified that: “Teslas are connected to the internet and automatically report if the car was in Autopilot. Honda asks its drivers if they were using ADAS, so it relies on hard-to-verify personal accounts. Everyone else leaves it up to the police report.”

Tesla went on the offensive, quoting some eye-catching statistics: “In 2021, we recorded 0.22 crashes for every million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded 0.77 crashes for every million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there are 1.81 automobile crashes for every million miles driven.”

Its Impact Report also noted that, “In 2021, the global fleet of Tesla vehicles, energy storage and solar panels enabled its customers to avoid emitting 8.4 million metric tons of CO2e”, compared to an ICE vehicle with a real-world fuel economy of 24mpg. A timely reminder of the extent of its achievement.

That’s a whirlwind six months, and we haven’t even mentioned the Gigafactory in Texas, the Cybertruck SUV, the plans to launch a steering wheel free robotaxi by 2024, June’s new car price hikes, or the off-the-chart used values.

The fact is Tesla has revolutionised the global motor industry at lightning speed, and shows no signs of slowing.

Please note: a version of this article was first published by the Institute of the Motor Industry’s MotorPro magazine.