Automobiles – Page 17

Automobiles, Human Behavior, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News

Volvo’s next step in car safety: Intervening in dangerous driving

March 29, 2019

Volvo hopes to tackle speeding, distraction and intoxication with tech. Jake Holmes mugshot BY JAKE HOLMES MARCH 20, 2019 5:20 PM PDT 0 Twelve years ago, Volvo senior technical advisor for safety Jan Ivarsson announced Vision 2020. The bold plan dreamed of a world where, by 2020, nobody would be killed or seriously hurt in a new Volvo. Where do things stand today, with 2020 less than 12 months away? At a presentation in Gothenberg, Sweden, on Wednesday, Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson said the limiting factor in any car maker reaching that ambitious dream is bad human behavior.

“We have done a lot with technical means, passive and active [safety] features in the car,” he said. “But really to come down to zero [deaths] you have to tackle some issues that are much more human-related.”

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Automation, Automobiles, Science & Technology News, Self-driving Cars

Driverless cars ‘don’t make business sense’

March 26, 2019

The Waymo car (above), formerly the Google self-driving car project, at the Las Vegas Convention Center during the annual trade show CES earlier this year. Companies such as Google and Uber have spent billions of dollars developing driverless vehicles.

Developing fully autonomous cars will take another five years and is an expensive undertaking with no clear returns, says Volkswagen’s head of commercial vehicles.

GENEVA • Fully autonomous vehicles will take at least another five years to perfect, with the cost and complexity of rolling out the technology globally serving to undermine the business case, Volkswagen’s head of commercial vehicles said.

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Automation, Automobiles, Robots, Science & Technology News

This robot can park your car for you

March 22, 2019

French startup Stanley Robotics showed off its self-driving parking robot at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport today. While I couldn’t be there in person, the service is going live by the end of March 2019. And here’s what it looks like.

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Automobiles, Aviation, Breakthrough Thinking, Science & Technology News

Goodyear’s new Aero concept tire transforms into a propellor for flying cars

March 14, 2019

Flying cars and flying taxis are closer than you think. So how will these airborne vehicles make the transition from land to air? Goodyear thinks it knows, and is showing off the Aero — a tire than will be able to both run vertically as a tire and horizontally as a propeller — at the Geneva International Auto Show this week.

The propeller blades serve a dual purpose; as the necessary support for the weight of the car, and as a source of lift for the car when the driver wishes to go airborne.

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Automobiles, Driverless cars, Driverless vehicles, Insurance, Science & Technology News, Tesla

Self-driving cars might kill auto insurance as we know it

February 27, 2019

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Without humans to cause accidents, 90% of risk is removed. Insurers are scrambling to prepare.

Dan Peate, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Southern California, was thinking of buying a Tesla Model X a few years ago—until he called his insurance company and found out how much his premiums would rise.

“They quoted me $10,000 a year,” Peate recalled.

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Analysis, Automobiles, City Planning, Transportation

These are the 20 most congested cities in the world

February 18, 2019

The transportation data firm INRIX Research released on Tuesday its annual rankings of the most congested cities in the world.
Cities were ranked based on delays caused by congestion, adjusted for each city’s population.
Moscow was named the most congested city in the world for the second year in a row, and Europe had more cities in the top 20 than any other continent.

The transportation data firm INRIX Research released on Tuesday its annual rankings of the most congested cities in the world.

The company measured the amount of time lost per capita in 2018 due to the difference between traffic at the busiest and least busy commuting times each day. Cities were ranked based on delays caused by congestion, adjusted for each city’s population.

Moscow was named the most congested city in the world for the second year in a row, and Europe had more cities in the top-20 than any other continent.

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Automobiles, Electric Automobile, Electric Vehicles, Human Behavior, Transportation

The 4 lingering obstacles to electric vehicle adoption (and what might overcome them)

February 8, 2019

Electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity, though not as quickly as electricity providers would like. EVs represented only 2.4 percent of sales in the U.S. in August, according to Auto Alliance, and a Chinese study published that month found that only 18 percent of motorists in China are willing to consider an EV.

So one of Exelon’s internal startups has set out to identify and hurdle the barriers to EV adoption.

“We’ve done a lot of testing and experimentation in this space,” said Caroline Quazzo, a manager for EZ-EV, an Exelon subsidiary that offers software and services to utilities to help them promote EV adoption. The utilities stand to gain from supplying the fuel.

As with the 5 obstacles to selling a solar home, most of Quazzo’s obstacles are rooted in ignorance (my word, not hers). At the Smart Cities Symposium in Chicago last week, Quazzo described the following obstacles:

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Automobiles, Big Problems, Transportation

L.A. may charge drivers by the mile, adding freeway tolls to cut congestion

February 8, 2019

Morning commuters face heavy traffic on the express lanes on the 10 Freeway. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s focus on congestion pricing could lead to similar lanes on other freeways across Los Angeles County. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

For years, Southern California lawmakers have tried to steer clear of decisions that make driving more expensive or miserable, afraid of angering one of their largest groups of constituents.

But now, transportation officials say, congestion has grown so bad in Los Angeles County that politicians have no choice but to contemplate charging motorists more to drive — a strategy that has stirred controversy but helped cities in other parts of the world tame their own traffic.

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Automation, Automobiles, Driverless cars, Driverless vehicles

The road to seamless urban mobility

February 8, 2019

Will the coming mobility revolution make urban traffic better, or worse?

The age of modern transit began in 1863, when the first underground railway began rolling in central London. The line was short and smoky, and nothing like it had ever been seen before. But it worked, and cities around the world began to follow London’s lead. Over time, city authorities came to see providing transportation as one of their core responsibilities; governments often owned and ran transit systems themselves.

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Alternative Transportation, Automobiles, Aviation, Boeing, Science & Technology News, Transportation, Uber

12 awesome flying cars and taxis currently in development

January 31, 2019

These flying cars want to take your commute to new heights

We were promised that the future would bring flying cars, right? We were. And the good news is that tech entrepreneurs around the world are finally getting started on creating what are commonly known as VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing, pronounced vee-toll) vehicles designed at car size.

Of course, no one is ready for flying cars quite yet. There’s no infrastructure to support them, and a whole new set of auto laws would have to be drawn up to regulate them (like personal drones, but a thousand times worse). The first commercial VTOLs we will see won’t be hanging out at the local auto dealer—they’ll be taxi services built to shuttle people from part of a city to another.

Here’s all the current projects that want to put you in the seat of a flying car.

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Analysis, Automobiles, Driverless cars, Driverless vehicles

A study on driverless car ethics offers a troubling look into our values

January 31, 2019

To figure out how autonomous vehicles should respond during potentially fatal collisions, a group of scientists set out to learn what decisions human drivers would make.

The first time Azim Shariff met Iyad Rahwan—the first real time, after communicating with him by phone and e-mail—was in a driverless car. It was November, 2012, and Rahwan, a thirty-four-year-old professor of computing and information science, was researching artificial intelligence at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a university in Abu Dhabi. He was eager to explore how concepts within psychology—including social networks and collective reasoning—might inform machine learning, but there were few psychologists working in the U.A.E. Shariff, a thirty-one-year-old with wild hair and expressive eyebrows, was teaching psychology at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi; he guesses that he was one of four research psychologists in the region at the time, an estimate that Rahwan told me “doesn’t sound like an exaggeration.” Rahwan cold-e-mailed Shariff and invited him to visit his research group.

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Alternative Transportation, Automobiles, Aviation, Transportation

Japan is getting serious about flying cars

January 31, 2019

The country’s once-envied government skunk works has set its sights on speeding up the arrival of aerial taxis and trucks.

Japan often appears stuck in yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. Flip phones are common enough that they’re cited as the exemplar of a phenomenon called Galapagos Syndrome, referring to the country’s tendency to stick with technologies endemic only to its islands. Another anachronism, Yahoo, remains wildly popular. Tokyo of the 1980s may have inspired the futuristic cityscape of Blade Runner, complete with flying cars, but the fax machines that were cutting-edge when the film came out remain ubiquitous tools today.

Ensuring Japan doesn’t fall behind the technological curve has for decades been the job of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, a powerful agency housed in a squat modern office block in Tokyo’s orderly government quarter, a few blocks south of the jagged moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. The building is orthogonal in every respect, a uniform stack of concrete threaded with long, featureless corridors. The bureaucrats here guided Japan’s postwar economic miracle, a boom that gave the world the transistor radio, the Walkman, and the Prius—and almost no transformative innovations since. None of the automakers championed by METI are today on the leading edge of robotic driving. For the most part, Japan’s faded tech companies can’t lay claim to either smartphone or internet greatness.

Continue reading… “Japan is getting serious about flying cars”