Paul Gluckman

The announcement Tuesday that Google has joined with Ford, Uber and others to form the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to promote the deployment of autonomous cars drew a predictably negative reaction from the consumer group that recently accused Google of trying to skirt an "open and accountable process" on driverless cars with an expedited one "that will favor the tech giant's business and marketing plans at the expense of consumers” (see 1604070013). Consumer Watchdog finds it “absolutely outrageous that this group would purport to be for safer streets, when some of its members just aren’t releasing the basic details about their testing activities on public roads,” John Simpson, the group’s privacy project director, told us Tuesday. “That’s very problematic.” He called the coalition “just a lobbying group that’s going to push their self-interests, using a catchy name to try to claim that they’re really for safety,” Simpson said. “They could do some real things to show that they’re really for safety,” such as releasing publicly the “technical data” they have compiled on the safety of driverless cars, he said. On the appointment of David Strickland, the former top official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as the coalition's counsel and spokesman, Simpson said: “I’m also really troubled by the fact that the guy who’s going to be their spokesman is a former administrator. That’s just an outrageous situation. Business as usual now seems to be the revolving door in Washington.” Coalition representatives didn’t comment. NHTSA Wednesday in California plans to hold the second of two public meetings to gather input for the development of operational guidelines on driverless cars the agency has said it hopes to release this summer (see 1604080037).

Consumer Watchdog wants transportation regulators to reject Google's proposal seeking federal help to fast track its self-driving car technology through regulatory hurdles so the company can go to market. "Though couched in euphemisms and poll-tested terminology, Google’s ploy is obvious. It plainly hopes to obtain a congressional bailout from the nation’s automobile safety laws," the group wrote in a 10-page letter Thursday to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Consumer Watchdog said Google's cars are "dangerous," citing several statistics, and "can't cope" in routine traffic situations, pointing to a February incident in which a Google driverless car and California public transit bus crashed into each other. No one was injured. In a March 11 letter to Foxx, Chris Urmson, who heads Google's self-driving cars project, outlined the company's proposal that supports new authority for the transportation secretary to allow implementation of innovative safety technologies in cars following public notice and comment. He said "current authority is insufficient to keep pace with safety technologies being developed," such as adaptive beam headlights, side mirror-replacing sensors, and new automated systems necessary for fully self-driving cars. Consumer Watchdog said Google wants to replace an "open and accountable process" with an expedited one "that will favor the tech giant's business and marketing plans at the expense of consumers and the marketplace by permitting the company to collude with DOT and NHTSA behind closed doors and out of sight of the public and the news media." While automotive safety laws have made roads safer, a Google spokesman emailed Thursday that more than "33,000 people still die on our roads each year and we believe that self-driving cars can make a difference. Today’s rules were written with yesterday’s cars in mind and that’s why there needs to be a way to allow life-saving innovations on the roads once that technology has been proven to provide a equal or higher level of safety than existing standards."

The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled an expected hearing on self-driving cars for 2:30 p.m. Tuesday in 253 Russell. “The hearing will explore advancements in autonomous vehicle technology and its anticipated benefits for Americans,” the committee said in a news release. “Witnesses have been asked to testify on their continued efforts to develop automated vehicles, their views on the appropriate role of government in promoting innovation including removing unnecessary hurdles, and their strategy to grow consumer adoption of this new technology.” Witnesses are Google X’s Chris Urmson, director-self-driving cars; General Motors Vice President Mike Ableson; Delphi Automotive Vice President Glen DeVos; Lyft Vice President Joseph Okpaku; and Mary Cummings, director-Humans and Autonomy Lab and Duke Robotics at Duke University.

A new consortium led by Ordnance Survey, Britain’s official mapping agency, secured 20 million pounds (about $27.9 million) in U.K. government funding to position the U.K. as a leader in connected and autonomous vehicles, the consortium said in a Wednesday announcement. The new consortium, code-named Atlas, officially opens for business in May and counts Sony Europe as one of its several members, the announcement said. Atlas will “study data critical to the efficient operation of autonomous vehicles” and “the feasibility of maintaining, processing and distributing this data is a core element of the project,” it said. “If Atlas is successful, we could see a more rapid take-up of connected and autonomous vehicles, consolidating the UK’s position as a global leader in driverless car technologies and innovation.” Autonomous vehicles “will need to find their way reliably and safely through a vast network of streets while interacting with driven and other autonomous vehicles,” it said. Self-driving cars “will combine the power of advanced sensors to detect road conditions, cutting edge, 5G communications technology to access a stream of data about the world around them, and geographical databases of routes, destinations and points of interest,” it said.

The work that Nvidia is doing in autonomous, “self-driving” vehicles “is really gaining traction” and has “captured the imagination of just about every car company around the world,” CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said on a Wednesday earnings call. Nvidia believes the self-driving car “is not a solved problem,” Huang said. “I don't think anybody would dispute it. I also believe that self-driving cars is a field that's going to require the technological muscle of a very, very large industry and that no one company with a few hundred employees is going to solve it all by themselves. So the idea that an unsolved problem of such incredible, daunting levels that an entire computer industry is in the process of trying to solve could possibly be a closed system tied around a chip seems illogical to me.” Huang thinks the “soul” of any car company is composed of ingredients like the “driving experience,” the “functionality” and the “safety record” of its vehicles, he said. Those ingredients in the future will be “largely software-defined,” he said. But Huang “just can’t imagine great companies like BMW and Mercedes and Audi” outsourcing “the soul of their car to a chip company,” he said. “And so what we've decided to do is to create an automotive autonomous car computing platform and all of the rich software that's necessary to enable this incredibly high-throughput computer to behave in a really energy-efficient way and cost-effective way, and to be able to apply our deep learning expertise so that these cars can benefit from artificial intelligence to solve these really complicated world problems.” Nvidia thinks that “by partnering with every single car company in the world,” together “we might be able to solve this incredibly daunting challenge and hopefully bring some society good,” he said. Over the long haul, Huang thinks autonomous vehicle development will be “an area of quite a significant industrial revolution,” bringing with it “arguably quite a gigantic society good in the long term,” he said.

The $500 million investment that General Motors made last month in the ride-sharing service Lyft (see 1601040068) “is very significant because we believe, together, we can work and put an autonomous fleet of sharing vehicles available for use quicker than anyone else,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a Wednesday earnings call. GM’s strategic alliance with Lyft will “in the short term” allow GM “to capitalize on providing and being a preferred provider for short-term-use vehicles for Lyft drivers that will support not only General Motors' performance, but also Lyft's performance,” Barra said. “We now are in the midst of an industry that is being disruptive and we are aggressively leveraging our technology leadership and our global resources to lead that disruption,” she said. “We'll continue to strengthen our core business and we'll also continue to invest in game changers that are necessary for GM to lead the future of personal mobility.”