Paul Gluckman

Consumer Watchdog wants Uber to divulge more details about its plan to test self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh (see 1608180059), including whether it will agree not to sell collected data and whether it has used adequate cybersecurity. In a Wednesday letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, John Simpson, the consumer group's privacy project director, said the ride-hailing service needs to be "completely transparent" when it tests modified autonomous Volvos, which will have safety drivers behind the wheel to take control if needed, in the next few weeks. The group asked 10 questions, including whether Uber would "agree not to store, market, sell, or transfer the data gathered by the self-driving car robot car, or utilize it for any purpose other than navigating the vehicle?" And whether the company has technology to prevent hackers from taking control of the cars or any of its systems? Several other questions dealt with safety, such as if Uber will publish data from crashes or other "anomalous situations." Simpson said the company should publicly report all crashes involving test vehicles, release technical data and videos of crashes, issue monthly testing reports with miles traveled by the "cars in self-driving robot mode," and release "disengagement reports" detailing when and why human drivers needed to intervene. Uber didn't comment.

Autonomous cars are "no longer a thing of the distant future, and that future is happening now,” Pam Fletcher, General Motors executive chief engineer, told the Citi 2016 Global Technology Conference Tuesday in New York. “Autonomy will fundamentally change the way our customers interact with our vehicles,” and will provide “many potential benefits,” Fletcher said. For example, customers “enjoy and desire the convenience of car-based transportation,” but not everyone “can operate a car, so autonomous vehicles provide them with an option,” she said. But “absolutely safety" is the most important benefit GM sees from driverless cars, she said. More than 35,000 people die every year on U.S. roads, and more than 90 percent “of those deaths are caused by human error, so autonomous vehicles can have a real impact on saving lives,” she said. GM’s $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation in March (see 1607220003) “provides us with a team of talented software engineers who are creating the algorithms and the code to bring full autonomy to life and deliver autonomous technology in an on-demand ride-sharing service,” Fletcher said. What really attracted GM to Cruise was not only its autonomous-driving capabilities, but also that they were being developed “literally on the downtown streets of San Francisco,” she said. As an autonomous-driving test bed, San Francisco is “one of the most complex environments to try to build and deploy new technology,” she said. GM thinks “the right answer for deployment of autonomous vehicles is in a ride-shared network,” Fletcher said. GM’s $500 million January investment in Lyft included a “long-term” alliance on autonomous vehicles (see 1601040068). The strategy “provides a great opportunity to have a very orderly rollout” of driverless cars because “it gives an opportunity for consumers to experience the vehicle without a commitment for purchase,” and getting “all their questions answered,” she said.

Qualcomm pushed back at various technical assertions made by critics of rechannelization as a means for sharing the 5.9 GHz band. The resistance came in an FCC filing posted Wednesday in docket 13-49 in response to automaker complaints that rechannelization could slow the deployment of dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) systems designed to curb traffic accidents (see 1607250013). "Enabling such DSRC operations while opening up a portion of the 5.9 GHz DSRC band to Wi-Fi is the essence of the rechannelization plan," Qualcomm said, saying rechannelization wouldn't require all-new DSRC performance testing. Qualcomm also said software changes can allow for rechannelization, obviating any need to redesign DSRC equipment. Rival detect-and-avoid proposal would need extensive testing, and it wouldn't open up wide swaths of spectrum for Wi-Fi operations indoors since DSRC roadside infrastructure and vehicles will prevent Wi-Fi from having meaningful access to the U-NII-4 band inside vehicles, homes and businesses within a several hundred meter radius of those DSRC transmissions, Qualcomm said. It said it agreed simultaneous detection of multiple 10 MHz DSRC channels is feasible, but it also brings "an onerous device and system implementation cost" that would affect rollout of U-NII-4 Wi-Fi devices.

Public Knowledge hopes an Office of Management and Budget review of a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NPRM on vehicle-to-vehicle systems (see 1609010077) won’t slow FCC work toward allowing Wi-Fi in the 5.9 GHz band, Senior Vice President Harold Feld told us. “It's true that if OMB rejects the NHTSA proposed mandate, it makes life a lot easier for the FCC,” Feld emailed us Tuesday. “That would be a clear and unambiguous statement. ... But even if OMB approves NHTSA's proposal, it doesn't change the basic equation that we ought to have sharing where possible without causing harmful interference to life & safety services.”

Mobileye and Delphi Automotive extended their collaboration to develop what they said will be the first turnkey Society of Automotive Engineers Level 4/5 automated driving system. The companies will demonstrate the technology at CES in urban and highway driving, they said in a Tuesday announcement. The program will result in an “end-to-end production-intent fully automated vehicle solution” by 2019 for customers worldwide, said the companies. Mobileye will provide computer vision systems, mapping, localization and machine learning, and Delphi will supply driving software, sensors and systems integration, they said. Teams from both companies will develop the next generation of sensor fusion technology and the next-generation human-like "driving policy," they said. The module combines Ottomatika's driving behavior modeling with Mobileye's reinforcement learning to produce driving capabilities necessary for negotiating with other human drivers and pedestrians in complex urban scenes, they said. Building on an advanced driver assistance systems relationship that began in 2002, the most recent partnership "will accelerate the time to market and enable customers to adopt Level 4/5 automation without the need for huge capital investments,” said Mobileye Chief Technology Officer Amnon Shashua.

Intel’s collaboration with Mobileye to bring “highly and fully automated driving” to BMW vehicles within five years (see 1607010052) is “a significant strategic relationship” among the companies, Doug Davis, senior vice president-general manager of Intel’s IoT Group, told the Intel Developer Forum Thursday in San Francisco. In that three-company alliance, Intel plays “a significant role in the compute capability” of autonomous vehicles, and Mobileye “obviously plays an important role in all of that camera and sensor data” for self-driving cars, “and then we fuse it all together to create that solution,” Davis said. What’s also important in the collaboration is “the focus on creating an open standard for interfaces within the industry,” he said. “We see that this technology needs to move very rapidly and we share that vision” promoting an “open platform that can be built upon by others” and commercialized in short order, he said. “At the network level, Intel’s leadership in accelerating 5G is critical” to the future of autonomous vehicles, Davis said. “This is really important, because 5G is the only network technology capable of delivering a latency of a millisecond or less with speeds that can peak at 10 gigabits per second.”

Uber accelerated its autonomous-vehicle ambitions, partnering with Volvo and acquiring self-driving trucks startup Otto. In a news release Thursday, Volvo announced a partnership with Uber to develop base vehicles incorporating autonomous driving technologies, “up to and including fully autonomous driverless cars.” In a blog post, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick revealed the Otto acquisition, which will see Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski leading the combined company’s self-driving efforts in Pittsburgh, Palo Alto, California, and San Francisco, he said. The initiative will cover personal transportation, delivery and trucking, Kalanick said.

There’s no single “answer” among semiconductor competitors on how to resolve the challenges of autonomous driving “because nobody knows exactly how to get it done,” nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on a Thursday earnings call. “We all have intuitions and we all have beliefs about how we're going to be able to ultimately solve the long-term, fully autonomous vehicle,” Huang said. When “the automobile we step into is completely autonomous, and it has AI inside and out,” it will be “just an incredible experience,” he said of artificial intelligence. “But we're not there yet.” Many semiconductor companies “have slightly different visions of the future” of self-driving cars, Huang said. Some believe “the path to the future is fully autonomous right away, in a geofenced area that has been fully mapped in advance,” he said. Others see “highway autopilot as a first starting point,” with development work progressing quickly toward full autonomy, he said. “So you see a lot of different visions out there, and I think all of those visions are coming from smart people doing smart things.” That said, nVidia is “absolutely certain that AI is going to be involved in this endeavor,” and that “we have the secret sauce necessary to break these puzzles,” Huang said. The company also believes “unquestionably, that depending on the problem you want to solve, you need a different amount of computational capability,” he said. “We believe unambiguously this is a software problem.” Autonomous driving’s challenges are “massive,” he said. “Otherwise, we would have done it already.” But “we're working with some really, really amazing people to get this done,” he said.

Ford is “working very hard” on autonomous vehicles, CEO Mark Fields said in Q&A on a Thursday earnings call when asked if he thinks self-driving cars are being “overhyped” in the media and by automotive competitors. Whenever “something new and shiny and sexy” emerges like autonomous vehicles, “I think sometimes the media does tend to write about things maybe in flourishing ways,” Fields said. “I mean we're just going to stay very focused on our plan.” Fields agrees “there's a lot of announcements going on right now by a lot of competitors” on autonomous vehicles, “and I just want to be really clear,” he said. “We are not in a race to make announcements. We are in a race to do what's right and best for our customers and best for our business, period.” Following the General Motors $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation and its $500 million investment in Lyft to test self-driving cars, GM CEO Mary Barra said on GM’s earnings call that commercializing autonomous vehicles is “something I focus on every day” (see 1607220003). Earlier, BMW, Intel and Mobileye announced plans to bring autonomous vehicles to streets by 2021 (see 1607010052).

Writing rules of the road for autonomous vehicles is more akin to the Declaration of Independence than the Constitution, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Monday. Responding to a question about driverless cars during a live-streamed event, he said the agency needs more practical experience with driverless cars to ensure it isn't caught "flat footed." This also means thinking about the roles of state governments and industry in relation to the issue, he said. "We’re trying to write the equivalent of the Declaration of Independence with autonomous cars," Foxx responded. "We’re not trying to write the Constitution yet because we don’t know what we don’t know. So there will be more granularity over time. But we can build a basic framing around which that granularity comes into existence." Foxx, who spoke at the Department of Transportation's Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Volpe National Transportation Research Center, generally talked about the role of transportation in the U.S. and legacy of technology, including some comments about autonomous vehicles. Early in his speech, he asked whether drivers even need to be licensed since autonomous vehicles would be performing more of the driving. "So the question is who licenses this? Do we, in the course of approving the physical car, also approve the operational aspects of the software and does that take the place of what the states used to do? Do you need a driver's license to operate an autonomous car? These are questions that are coming faster ... than any of us know." He said the country needs to start making decisions about such transportation-related issues.