To keep clients, Nippon Steel is developing super-strong metal
Cars must get lighter to meet new emissions rules or electrify.
Imagine the weight of 24 elephants bearing down on a tiny spot the size a postage stamp.
That’s how much pressure Nippon Steel Corp.’s strongest metal can withstand. The Japanese company is pushing the envelope in order to stay relevant as the auto industry, its most important customer, goes through major changes.
Driverless cars compete during the 3rd World Intelligent Driving Challenge in Tianjin.
China’s annual driving challenge attracts dozens of hopefuls.
China’s road to mastering driverless-car technology is bumpy and full of surprises — literally. Just ask those attending the country’s top autonomous-vehicle race .
In hot and windy conditions this week in the eastern city of Tianjin, dozens of self-driving cars raced for glory. On a circuit covering an area of 10 soccer fields, they navigated through bumps, sudden turns and artificial fog. Even fake cows and sheep suddenly crossed their paths for good measure. Some teams wreaked less havoc than others.
Potholes and roadway decay, it’s messy and dangerous, among other infrastructure crumblings.
There are emerging discussions that perhaps Congress and the White House might agree to a rather significant spend on America’s infrastructure. Some say it could be on the order of $2 trillion potentially allocated. Whether or not you favor such an expenditure, most would likely agree that our infrastructure does seem to be progressively crumbling, as evidenced by everything from dams that break without apparent warning to a plethora of tire-bashing potholes permeating our roadways from coast-to-coast.
According to the most recent Report Card on our infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), we all need to be seemingly ashamed of what we’ve allowed our country to become since the United States infrastructure earned a paltry and embarrassing D+ grade.
The autonomous Lincoln MKZ started turning left at a Beijing intersection when a speeding truck aggressively cut in front of it. Sensors in the car detected the approach and instantly froze it in place.
But that put the Lincoln directly in the truck’s path, so Baidu Inc. engineer Sun Lei grabbed the steering wheel, spun it to the right and floored the accelerator to get out of harm’s way. The truck zoomed by as Sun’s colleague in the passenger seat calmly took notes on a tablet computer—just another learning exercise for the self-driving fleet being tested around the nation.
“We hope to see more interventions during the road tests so that we can improve our technology,” said Calvin Shang, general manager of strategy and operations for Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group. “It won’t help if you only run the cars on simple routes even for 10,000 or even 100 million miles.”
Though disaster was averted, the incident shows how China’s push into autonomous vehicles is barely out of first gear, with only a handful of cities allowing limited trials by search-engine giant Baidu, startup Pony.ai, trucker TuSimple Inc. and others since last year. Domestic and foreign testers are putting cars, buses, trucks and delivery vans through self-driving trials to teach them how to navigate the notoriously congested streets of the world’s biggest auto market.
While the look and feel of our cars has changed in the past 100 years, the way we drive them hasn’t. But fundamental change is coming. In the next decade, not only will the way they’re powered and wired have shifted dramatically, but we won’t be the ones driving them anymore.
Some cars already have basic automation features, but the automotive experiments currently being undertaken by the likes of Uber and Google make up a minuscule proportion of the vehicles on our roads. By 2030, the standard car will evolve from merely assisting the driver to taking full control of all aspects of driving in most driving conditions.
This widespread automation, together with the electrification and increased connectivity of both the car and society, are set to shake up the car industry in a big way, affecting everything from the way cars look and feel, to how we spend our time inside them, and how they get us from A to B.
The government is testing driverless trucks on the A14 highway
Self-driving trucks that could help to speed up roadworks are being tested on Britain’s highways for the first time.
A 25-tonne autonomous truck, capable of moving huge amounts of earth without human supervision will take to the roads on a stretch of the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon as part of a trial by Highways England.
The trucks, capable of carrying a load of 40 tonnes, can be programmed remotely to follow a pre-determined route along road work sites and can detect and avoid obstacles, like other vehicles, along the route as they drive.
Motorists entering Manhattan will soon be paying for the privilege. How should the city administer their tolls?
As cities like New York move ahead with plans to charge motorists to enter certain urban areas, we need to think about the best ways to manage road tolling.
Now that New York City has adopted congestion pricing in an effort to rein in traffic and raise revenue desperately needed to upgrade public transportation, other American cities are taking a closer look at this often-contentious technique. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle have all recently released requests-for-proposals to begin studying the possibilities and implications of congestion pricing. As cities study the ins and outs of charging motorists to enter central districts, there hasn’t been much attention devoted to one critical part of congestion pricing package: the technology. How will tolls be collected? How will cities insure compliance in the charging zone? And how will our data privacy be addressed and protected?
Waymo CEO John Krafcik speaks on stage during the annual Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, May 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Waymo said on Tuesday it had chosen a factory in Detroit to mass produce self-driving cars, looking to the historical heart of the auto industry to build the vehicles of the future.
The company’s chief executive, John Krafcik, said in a blog post that Waymo would partner with American Axle & Manufacturing to lease and repurpose an existing Detroit facility that will be operational by mid-2019.
Waymo said in January it had chosen Michigan for its first production facility, adding it would receive incentives from the public-private partnership agency, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and create up to 400 jobs over time exclusively related to self driving.
Ford thinks there will be limits on what first self-driving cars can do.
Ford CEO Jim Hackett scaled back hopes about the company’s plans for self-driving cars this week, admitting that the first vehicles will have limits. “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” said Hackett, who once headed the company’s autonomous vehicle division, at a Detroit Economic Club event on Tuesday. While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that “its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.”
Self-driving cars were just s sci-fi-like idea 10 years back, but today it is a reality. They have caused a commotion in the market, affecting a great number of industries with the revolutionary AV technology. It is said that with this technology driverless cars will save more than half million of lives between 2035 and 2045.
Still restricted in many parts of the world, driverless cars are being tested in California as the regulations allowing the testing of self-driving cars on the streets of California is contributing to the growth and development of companies and manufacturers such as Tesla and Alphabet.
In the meanwhile, Uber, a rideshare provider preparing to g public with the forthcoming IPO, is also working with AV.
Domino’s has partnered with Xevo, which provides in-vehicle commerce and services for automakers, to provide an AnyWare pizza ordering platform, according to a press release.
Customers can order via Easy Order and track it using the Domino’s Tracker. They also can find their local stores and call in an order from the in-car interface.
The ordering feature will be automatically loaded into millions of cars with the Xevo platform starting later this year.
In the not-too-distant future, Americans will be sharing the road with self-driving cars. Companies are pouring billions of dollars into developing self-driving vehicles. Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving-car project, says that its self-driving cars have already driven millions of miles on the open road.
In the not-too-distant past, beer has already been delivered by a robot truck in Colorado, so this shouldn’t seem so far fetched.
