Does your robocar come home after it takes you to work?
Submitted by brad on Thu, 2019-02-14 13:34
This week we've looked at two issues regarding robocars in the city:
The future of computer-driven cars and deliverbots

This week we've looked at two issues regarding robocars in the city:
California has released the disengagement reports the law requires companies to file and it's a lot of data. Also worth noting is Waymo's own blog post on their report where they report their miles per disengagement has improved from 5,600 to 11,000.

The discussion on cars circling to avoid parking fees (short-answer, they won't) leads to a few other interesting issues I want to cover.
For many years, people have wondered if people might tell their robocars to just drive continuously around the block rather than pay for parking. I've written before about how that doesn't make sense, but a recent paper from Adam Millard-Ball of UC Santa Cruz tries to make a real case that it could make economic sense, even if it's antisocial.
I have started doing some of my posts on forbes.com. They invited me to contribute and I felt it is worth finding out if it extends my reach. For now, I will link to posts here, and eventually I will perhaps build a special RSS feed to combine the posts I do there with the ones here to make it easy for readers.



Various announcements and rumors suggest the major German automakers, including VW/Audi, Daimler and BMW might be planning a real alliance on robocars.


We continue to see lots of reports of a "pull back" on robocars, a "winter" of sorts. It is often presented as "the problem was harder than people expected" I discussed some of this in the prelude to my 2018 year in review.

My feet are aching, as usual, after 3 days on the CES show floor, and the question people always ask others there is "what have you seen that was interesting?"
I'm on my way to CES tonight, and am surprised to have not seen much robocar news yet from there. I'll publish some reports of what I see. The first modest announcement is the creation of a public education collective called PAVE which is the first consortium to have almost all the major players.

As I posted earlier I purchased a Tesla Model 3, the mid-range version with one motor and autopilot.
There are many reviews of this car out there, so I will go quickly over the common issues to get to areas I can give a special perspective on.


A frequent theme of mine has been my identification of "proving you have done it" as the greatest challenge in producing a safe robocar.

By coincidence we see two significant announcements today from people who were former leaders on the Google car project, now in their own companies.

Some news items, and then some analysis of the energy needed to reposition and charge all the dockless scooters from Lime and Bird.

Waymo announced today they will begin commercial operations in the Phoenix area under the name "Waymo One." Waymo has promised that it would happen this year, and it is a huge milestone, but I can't avoid a small bit of disappointment.
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