Beyond the car: how tech firms are exploring the future of transport

LAS VEGAS - Carless commuting is cruising in the fast lane at the Consumer Electronics Show, with companies showing off electric bicycles, scooters, skateboards and more aimed at making the internal combustion engine a thing of the past.

As the ranks of people around the world living in cities has grown, so too has the cost of car ownership as well as traffic congestion.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the annual tech gathering in Las Vegas where some 170,000 conference goers jammed the streets.

"In a lot of big cities, cars aren't tenable anymore," said tech analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates.

An AFP reporter testing the car-free concept through the week at CES by relying on a freshly released GenZe electric bicycle consistently sailed past clogged traffic near the convention center and on the famed Las Vegas Strip.

Riders too tired or lazy to pedal meanwhile can twist a throttle to glide along at close to local street speed limits.

GenZe spokesman Tom Valasek, a former auto industry marketing executive, said that several car makers had come to check out the company's CES exhibit.

"There is a lot of curiosity right now about where things are heading," Valasek told AFP.

"I know a lot of people in the auto industry who are quite worried that car ownership is going away."

DRIVERLESS CARS 

The popularity of smartphone-summoned rides from services such as Uber and Lyft are playing into the trend, with technology giants investing heavily in self-driving capabilities that could soon see automated vehicles available on-demand.

"We believe car ownership makes no sense in the future," Lyft chief executive John Zimmer said at a CES dinner event.

Zimmer doubted that his daughter, now a young child, will want to own a car when she is of age. Instead, he said: "She'll want access to transportation."

A boom of autonomous cars would likely prompt vehicles to evolve to be more akin to rooms on wheels: sleeper cabins in trains, or private offices, Zimmer added.

A shift away from owning and relying on cars was also expected to result in traffic and parking becoming less of a priority in urban design.

GenZe, a US-based division of the Mahindra Group in India, this week announced its e-bikes will be added in April to a Ford GoBike ride-share program in San Francisco.

The e-bikes should "help to make San Francisco more livable and reduce congestion," Metropolitan Transportation Commission deputy executive Alix Bockelman said in a release.

Leading online social network Facebook has a fleet of 100 GenZe bikes for employees to get around its Silicon Valley campus, and they are also used by delivery services DoorDash and Postmates, according to Valasek.

SCOOT, SKATE, RIDE  

Despite negative publicity about hoverboards a few years ago -- centered on their tendency to explode -- the manufacturer Swagtron was at CES with some of those devices along with skateboards and bicycles boosted with electric motors.

"We are seeing with personal mobility that some people like to skate; some people like to scoot, and some people like to ride," Swagtron chief operating officer Andrew Koven told AFP.

Koven saw alternatives to cars as an "absolute necessity" that was part of a "systemic shift" toward getting around in ways that are economical as well as socially and environmentally responsible.

"If I am commuting a short distance to work, do I really need a car?" analyst Gold asked rhetorically.

Cities are already eyeing autonomous shuttle services.

A self-driving electric shuttle built by Navya was introduced here last year in a test that segued into a program providing rides on a route in downtown Las Vegas.

Swiss-based Rinspeed also showed its autonomous shuttle, and Toyota introduced a boxy concept vehicle which could be used for ridesharing, deliveries, medical services or as an extension of retail stores.

Plenty of new cars were shown at CES including a number of self-driving models. But some attendees said that the vehicle of the future may be something different.

Automakers "have been building cars from the driver's perspective," said Ankit Jain, head of the Ola Play software platform for the India-based rideshare group.

In future vehicles which may be autonomous, "the passenger is the one paying," Jain said. "You have to fundamentally rethink the car."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Uber suspends self-driving car program after Arizona crash

Uber Technologies Inc suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said.

The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles, caused no serious injuries, Uber said.

Even so, the company said it was grounding driverless cars involved in a pilot program in Arizona, Pittsburgh and San Francisco pending the outcome of investigation into the crash on Friday evening in Tempe.

"We are continuing to look into this incident," an Uber spokeswoman said in an email.

The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle "failed to yield" to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department.

"The vehicles collided, causing the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side," she said in an email. "There were no serious injuries."

Two 'safety' drivers were in the front seats of the Uber car, which was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, Uber said in an email, a standard requirement for its self-driving vehicles. The back seat was empty.

Photos and a video posted on Twitter by Fresco News, a service that sells content to news outlets, showed a Volvo SUV flipped on its side after an apparent collision involving two other, slightly damaged cars. Uber said the images appeared to be from the Tempe crash scene.

When Uber launched the pilot program in Pittsburgh last year, it said that driverless cars "require human intervention in many conditions, including bad weather." It also said the new technology had the potential to reduce the number of traffic accidents in the country.

The accident is not the first time a self-driving car has been involved in a collision. A driver of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car operating in autopilot mode was killed in a collision with a truck in Williston, Florida in 2016. A self-driving vehicle operated by Alphabet Inc's Google was involved in a crash last year in Mountain View, California, striking a bus while attempting to navigate around an obstacle.

The collision comes days after Uber's former president Jeff Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco-based company, the latest in a string of high-level executives who have departed in recent months.

In February, Alphabet's Waymo self-driving car unit sued Uber and its Otto autonomous trucking subsidiary, alleging theft of proprietary sensor technology.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty and Bill Rigby)

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Look, no hands! Test driving a Google car

EMBED: A Google self-driving car is seen in Mountain View, California, on May 13, 2014. Photo by Glenn Chapmen, Agence France-Presse

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The car stopped at stop signs. It glided around curves. It didn't lurch or jolt. The most remarkable thing about the drive was that it was utterly unremarkable.

This isn't damning with faint praise. It's actually high praise for the car in question: Google Inc.'s driverless car.

Most automotive test drives (of which I've done dozens while covering the car industry for nearly 30 years) are altogether different.

There's a high-horsepower car. A high-testosterone automotive engineer. And a high-speed race around a test track by a boy-racer journalist eager to prove that, with just a few more breaks, he really could have been, you know, a NASCAR driver.

This test drive, in contrast, took place on the placid streets of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town that houses Google's headquarters.

The engineers on hand weren't high-powered "car guys" but soft-spoken Alpha Geeks of the sort that have emerged as the Valley's dominant species. And there wasn't any speeding even though, ironically, Google's engineers have determined that speeding actually is safer than going the speed limit in some circumstances.

"Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year," said Dmitri Dolgov, the project's boyish Russian-born lead software engineer, who now is a U.S. citizen, describing his sense of mission. "This could change that."

Dolgov, who's 36 years old, confesses that he drives a Subaru instead of a high-horsepower beast. Not once during an hour-long conversation did he utter the words "performance," "horsepower," or "zero-to-60," which are mantras at every other new-car test drive. Instead Dolgov repeatedly invoked "autonomy," the techie term for cars capable of driving themselves.

Google publicly disclosed its driverless car program in 2010, though it began the previous year. It's part of the company's "Google X" division, overseen directly by co-founder Sergey Brin and devoted to "moon shot" projects by the Internet company, as Dolgov puts it, that might take years, if ever, to bear fruit.

So if there's a business plan for the driverless car, Google isn't disclosing it. Dolgov, who recently "drove" one of his autonomous creations the 450 miles (725 km) or so from Silicon Valley to Tahoe and back for a short holiday, simply says his mission is to perfect the technology, after which the business model will fall into place.

Not winning beauty contests, yet

Judging from my non-eventful autonomous trek through Mountain View, the technology easily handles routine driving. The car was a Lexus RX 450h, a gas-electric hybrid crossover vehicle -- with special modifications, of course.

There's a front-mounted radar sensor for collision avoidance. And more conspicuously, a revolving cylinder perched above the car's roof that's loaded with lasers, cameras, sensors and other detection and guidance gear. The cylinder is affixed with ugly metal struts, signaling that stylistic grace, like the business plan, has yet to emerge.

But function precedes form here, and that rotating cylinder is a reasonable replacement for the human brain (at least some human brains) behind the wheel of a car.

During the 25-minute test ride the "driver's seat" was occupied by Brian Torcellini, whose title, oddly, is "Lead Test Driver" for the driverless car project.

Before joining Google the 30-year-old Torcellini, who studied at San Diego State University, had hoped to become a "surf journalist." Really. Now he's riding a different kind of wave. He sat behind the test car's steering wheel just in case something went awry and he had to revert to manual control. But that wasn't necessary.

Dolgov, in the front passenger's seat, entered the desired destination to a laptop computer that was wired into the car. The car mapped the route and headed off. The only excitement, such as it was, occurred when an oncoming car seemed about to turn left across our path. The driverless car hit the brakes, and the driver of the oncoming car quickly corrected course.

I sat in the back seat, not my usual test-driving position, right behind Torcellini. The ride was so smooth and uneventful that, except for seeing his hands, I wouldn't known that the car was completely piloting itself - steering, stopping and starting - lock, stock and dipstick.

Google's driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant.

'Not a toy'

In addition to the model I tested - and other such adapted versions of conventional cars - Google also has built little bubble-shaped test cars that lack steering wheels, brakes and accelerator pedals. They run on electricity, seat two people and are limited to going 25 mph (40 kph.) In other words, self-driving golf carts.

Google's isn't the only driverless car in development. One of the others is just a few miles away at Stanford University (where Dolgov did post-doctoral study.) Getting the cars to recognize unusual objects and to react properly in abnormal situations remain significant research challenges, says professor J. Christian Gerdes, faculty director of Stanford's REVS Institute for Automotive Research.

Beyond that, there are "ethical issues," as he terms them. "Should a car try to protect its occupants at the expense of hitting pedestrians?" Gerdes asks. "And will we accept it when machines make mistakes, even if they make far fewer mistakes than humans? We can significantly reduce risk, but I don't think we can drive it to zero."

That issue, in turn, raises the question of who is liable when a driverless car is involved in a collision - the car's occupants, the automaker or the software company. Legal issues might be almost as vexing as technical ones, some experts believe.

Self-driving cars could appear on roads by the end of this decade, predicted a detailed report on the budding driverless industry issued late last year by investment bank Morgan Stanley. Other experts deem that forecast extremely optimistic.

But cars with "semi-autonomous" features, such as collision-avoidance radar that maintains a safe distance from the car ahead, are already on the market. And the potential advantages - improved safety, less traffic congestion and more - are winning converts to the autonomy cause.

"This is not a toy," declared the Morgan Stanley research report. "The social and economic implications are enormous."

(Paul Ingrassia, managing editor of Reuters, is the author of three books on automobiles, and has been covering the industry since 1985. The car he drives is ... a red one.)

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

With driverless cars, what will humans do on the road

EMBED: A model poses in the Rinspeed XchangE electric powered autonomous driving concept car is pictured during the media day ahead of the 84th Geneva Motor Show. Photo by Arnd Wiegmann, Reuters

GENEVA -- Brew an espresso, watch a movie on a large screen, surf the Internet or simply sit and chat with friends?

As automakers and technology firms steer towards a future of driverless cars, a Swiss think tank is at the Geneva Motor Show this week showing off its vision of what vehicles might look like on the inside when people no longer have to focus on the road.

"Once I can drive autonomously, would I want to watch while my steering wheel turns happily from left to right?" asked Rinspeed founder and chief executive Frank Rinderknecht.

"No. I would like to do anything else but drive and watch the traffic. Eat, sleep, work, whatever you can imagine," he told AFP at the show, which opens its doors to the public Thursday.

Google is famously working on fully autonomous cars, and traditional carmakers are rapidly developing a range of autonomous technologies as well.

With analysts expecting sales of self-driving, if not completely driverless, cars to begin taking off by the end of this decade, Rinderknecht insists it's time to consider how the experience of riding in a car will could be radically redefined.

Patting his shiny Xchange concept car, Rinderknecht says he envisages a future where car passengers will want to do the same kinds of things we today do to kill time on trains an airplanes.

So Rinspeed has revamped the interior of Tesla's Model S electric car to show carmakers how they might turn standard-sized vehicles into entertainment centres, offices and meeting spots wrapped into one.

The seats can slide, swivel, and tilt into more than 20 positions, allowing passengers to turn to face each other or a 32-inch screen in the back.

Up front too, an entertainment system lines the entire length of the dashboard, and the steering wheel can be shifted to allow passengers a better view of the screens.

Espresso anyone?

And of course there is an espresso machine.

While brewing coffee, video conferencing and keeping an eye on your email at 120 kilometers an hour may sound like a fantasy today, Rinderknecht is convinced it could happen in the not too distanced future.

"We think this is what things could look like in a few years time," he said.

Driving, he said, is on the cusp of being redefined, allowing people to take the wheel for pleasure, for instance while going over an Alpine pass, but handing over control of the car on tedious stretches.

"If I have to go three hours from Geneva to Zurich and it's congested, I'm not doing anything... I want to be doing something else," he said.

Carmakers at the Geneva Motor Show seemed to agree that vehicles that drive themselves, at least to a certain extent, are on the horizon.

"Autonomous driving is an inevitability that we are approaching very rapidly," Hyundai Europe COO Allan Rushforth told AFP. He stressed though that "full automation" was not a priority.

Ford Europe chief Stephen Odelle also said the technology was speeding forward, but added that he believed "the technology will be ready before legislation and consumers are."

"How comfortable will consumers be with fully automated cars?" he asked, adding that legislating for liability would be quite tricky with no driver behind the wheel.

Rinderknecht acknowledged there are obstacles, but insisted "they can be overcome."

He pointed out that accident reduction is actually a major argument for automation, since once the technology is finalized the machines should be far more reliable than humans.

And while it will be an upward battle to redefine liability legislation, "I think it can be done, because laws must adapt to life, and life as we all know changes," he said.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com