Paul Gluckman

LG will partner with Here Technologies to offer a “next-generation telematics solution” for autonomous driving, said the companies Wednesday. The system combines LG's telematics technology with Here’s digital mapping and location services, and will support automakers globally “with a robust and secure data communications hub for highly automated and fully autonomous cars,” they said.

​Samsung filed three separate applications Friday to register trade names for its burgeoning business in vehicular advanced safety and driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving components, Patent and Trademark Office records show. One application was to register a stylized logo for the trade name “DRVLINE,” another for the generic use of the same term and a third for “SAMSUNG DRVLINE.” The logo and trade names would be eligible for use on a broad range of ADAS and autonomous driving commercial applications, including “sensors for use in the control of vehicle steering, braking, acceleration,” computer software “for autonomous driving of motor vehicles,” and hardware and software for “collecting and analyzing data generated by vehicle sensors and external sources,” the applications say. The filings follow Samsung’s mid-September announcement of a $300 million investment in its new Automotive Innovation Fund and subsidiary Harman’s formation of a strategic business unit to work with Samsung’s Strategy and Innovation Center on ADAS and autonomous cars (see 1709140053). Samsung didn’t comment Thursday on the new PTO applications.

“Cost is a challenge” in developing self-driving vehicles for mainsteam commercial deployment, said Hilary Cain, Toyota North America director-technology and innovation policy, on a CTA podcast Tuesday. “When you look at these test vehicles you see out on the road, the cost of the sensor suite is sometimes more, oftentimes more, than the cost of the vehicle itself,” said Cain. “So I do think that this cost factor is a major concern for a lot of companies in figuring out how to democratize the technology, so to speak, and not just have it be something that’s available to the top of the income scale.” Cain thinks there’s “a little bit of truth” in all consumer-attitude survey reports, whether they show consumers are excited about autonomous vehicles or are scared of them, she said. “The goal’s got to be for all of us in the developer community to meet each of those consumers where they are,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s talking about forcing this technology on somebody who’s terrified by it. But certainly we want to make the technology available to those folks who are excited by it.”

FEV North America will use CES to demo its smart vehicle technologies for the first time on the streets of Las Vegas, the vehicle engineering company said Tuesday. Its “demonstrator” vehicle will shuttle showgoers between its hospitality suite at the Bellagio and the Las Vegas Convention Center for the duration of CES, it said: “While capable of autonomous operation, the vehicle will be driven by an FEV representative who will explain and demonstrate the integrated technologies.” The vehicle is capable of fully autonomous Level 5 driving on the Society of Automotive Engineers scale, "but not in all weather conditions and environments, just like any other autonomous car at the moment," Stephan Tarnutzer, FEV North America vice president-electronics, told us Wednesday. The same vehicle was demonstrated in full Level 5 autonomy on a test track in Germany during the Aachen Colloquium technical symposium in September, said Tarnutzer. Based on SAE's scale, FEV would classify the vehicle as it will be showcased at CES as Level 3/4, meaning somewhere between conditional and high autonomy, he said. FEV hasn't applied for licenses in states to operate the vehicle in full Level 5 mode, he said.

Las Vegas will continue testing an autonomous shuttle in a 12-month pilot, despite a fender bender involving a delivery truck with a human driver, it blogged. The autonomous shuttle was in a test when it was nicked by a delivery truck downtown, it said. The shuttle "did what it was supposed to do," with its sensors registering the truck and stopping to avoid an accident, said the post. "Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle," it said, saying if the truck had the same type of sensing equipment as the shuttle, "the accident would have been avoided." The shuttle was taken out of service for the rest of the day, and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department issued the truck driver a citation, it said. The shuttle is the country’s first autonomous shuttle to be fully integrated with “smart-city” infrastructure, designed to communicate with traffic signals to improve safety and traffic flow, said the post. The shuttle is operated and maintained by Keolis, in partnership with the city and French autonomous driving company Navya.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is “quite confident” his company can achieve full “human-level autonomy” in self-driving cars with Autopilot “computing hardware,” he said on a Wednesday earnings call. The question is “what will be acceptable to regulators?” he said. “Regulators may require some significant margin above human capability in order for a full autonomy to be engaged,” said Musk. “They may say, ‘It needs to be 50 percent safer, 100 percent safer, 1,000 percent safer,’ I don't know. I'm not sure they know, either.” Tesla will have “more to say on the hardware front soon, we're just not ready to say anything now,” he said. “But I feel very optimistic on that front.” A truck driver’s failure to yield the right of way and the “inattention” of the Tesla Model S driver “due to overreliance on vehicle automation” in the car's Autopilot mode were the “probable cause” of a 2016 crash near Williston, Florida, that killed the Tesla driver, the National Transportation Safety Board reported (see 1709120050).

AT&T, Ford, Nokia and Qualcomm will begin cellular-V2X (C-V2X) trials in the U.S. later this year to test the potential of the platform for improved automotive safety, automated driving and traffic efficiency, said the companies Tuesday. C-V2X, designed to operate over the 5.9 GHz band without involvement of a cellular network or subscription, would enable vehicles to communicate directly with other vehicles, pedestrian devices and roadside infrastructure, such as traffic signs and construction zones, they said. The platform is complementary to other advanced driver assistance systems sensors, such as cameras, radar, and light detection and ranging (Lidar). It supports 360-degree non-line-of-sight awareness, extending a vehicle’s ability to sense the environment down the road, at blind intersections or in bad weather conditions, said Qualcomm. For the trial, C-V2X platforms will be installed in Ford vehicles using Qualcomm’s 9150 C-V2X communications solution and AT&T’s 4G LTE network communications and ITS platform using wireless base stations and multi-access edge computing technology from Nokia. Intelligent transportation solutions provider McCain will facilitate integration with existing and emerging traffic signal control infrastructure.

Mobileye CEO and Intel Senior Vice President Amnon Shashua presented a mathematical formula said to prove the safety of autonomous vehicles, at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, South Korea. The companies said Shashua and colleague Shai Shalev-Shwartz developed the formula in an effort to “bring certainty to the open questions of liability and blame in the event of an accident when a vehicle has no human driver.” Mobileye’s proposed “responsibility sensitive safety” model provides what Shashua said are specific and measurable parameters for the human concepts of responsibility and caution and defines a “safe state,” where the autonomous vehicle “cannot be the cause of an accident, no matter what action is taken by other vehicles.” In his presentation, Shashua urged industry and policymakers to “collaboratively construct standards that definitively assign accident fault” when human-driven and self-driving vehicles inevitably collide. He said rules and regulations today are framed around the idea of a driver in control of the car, and new parameters are needed for autonomous vehicles. “Just like the best human drivers in the world, self-driving cars cannot avoid accidents due to actions beyond their control,” said Shashua, “but the most responsible, aware and cautious driver is very unlikely to cause an accident of his or her own fault, particularly if they had 360-degree vision and lightning-fast reaction times like autonomous vehicles will.” The model would formalize a way to ensure self-driving cars operate only within the framework defined as “safe” according to clear definitions of fault that are agreed upon across the industry and by regulators, he said.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., agreed on text for a self-driving vehicle bill, which will be an item at a 10 a.m. Wednesday markup in 216 Hart. The American Vision for Safer Transportation Through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies Act (S-1885) requires manufacturers to submit safety evaluation reports, including information about crashworthiness, cybersecurity and safety, to the Department of Transportation before any vehicles are tested or deployed, said a Thursday news release. Similar to House legislation already passed (see 1709060035), the Senate bill would allow manufacturers to get exemptions from auto safety standards: up to 50,000 highly automated vehicles in the first year, 75,000 in the second and then 100,000 annually. They could request more exemptions in the fifth year. The Senate bill would give DOT primary responsibility of a vehicle's design, construction and performance, pre-empting laws enacted by state and local authorities, which would continue to have oversight over traffic laws and vehicle registration and licensing. DOT would work with manufacturers to adopt disclosure policies for cybersecurity vulnerabilities and require vehicle makers to develop a comprehensive written plan for identifying and reducing such risks. The bill would establish a panel to develop recommendations on data sharing and advance guidelines on consumer education and marketing. The bill would apply only to vehicles weighing 10,000 pounds or less. The Senate panel at a hearing two weeks ago discussed whether to include self-driving truck technology in the bill, which was a point of contention between Thune and Peters (see 1709130039). "While this Senate self-driving vehicle legislation still has room for further changes, it is a product of bipartisan cooperation we both stand behind," Thune and Peters said in a joint Wednesday statement.

That autonomous vehicles will make lives safer, more “affordable” and more “enjoyable” are three reasons to “get excited” about them, said CTA President Gary Shapiro in a Wednesday opinion piece. If 94 percent of U.S. traffic accidents are caused by human error, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates, “eliminating human error with self-driving technology will greatly increase the safety of our roads and save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries a year,” said Shapiro. Self-driving cars also “will cut the costs of insurance, licensing and repairs, and will free up time spent in traffic or searching for parking spaces,” he wrote for U.S. News & World Report. They’ll also “transform our concept of what a living room can be,” he said. “With these possibilities on the horizon, it's no surprise that three-quarters of consumers are getting increasingly excited about self-driving cars, and two-thirds are willing to trade out their current vehicle for a self-driving one.”