Paul Gluckman

General Motors' self-driving subsidiary Cruise “continues to make progress” with launch of the Origin shared-ride autonomous vehicle, said CEO Mary Barra on a Q3 call Thursday. The Origin will be built at GM’s “Factory Zero” in Hamtramck, Michigan, she said. GM began testing the Origin’s Ultium battery system at its Milford, Michigan, “proving ground,” and "pre-production” Origin vehicles are expected next year, she said. Cruise AVs will be tested in San Francisco by the end of 2021 “without backup drivers” after California regulators give GM gets the “go-ahead,” she said. “Cruise will be the first company to test autonomous vehicles with no backup driver in a dense and complex urban driving environment.” GM and Cruise in "coming months” plan to file an “exemption petition” with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “to deploy Origin vehicles without steering wheels or pedals,” said Barra. Cruise is working with an epidemiologist and using health research “to identify measures that may help maintain a healthy ride environment,” free from risks of COVID-19, she said.

Vehicles with “some degree” of autonomy will be the majority of those produced by 2024, reported IDC Monday. Fully autonomous vehicles will remain the “aspirational, revolutionary goal that has fueled the billions of dollars in investment by new and traditional automotive ecosystem companies,” it said. Their development and deployment “will require significant advances in technology, customer readiness and trust,” plus government regulation, it said. IDC expects no Level 5 vehicles with full autonomy will be available globally within the next four years, it said. Fully manual, driver-operated Level 0 vehicles remain the majority of those manufactured worldwide, but it's “the only autonomy level that will decline over the forecast period,” said IDC. Vehicles with Level 1 and 2 autonomy will have the largest autonomous growth through 2024, it said: “Because drivers must remain vigilant and in full operational control when these technologies are enabled, their introduction represents a more acceptable level of risk and liability for both vehicle manufacturers and government regulators."

NCTA disputed Alliance for Automotive Innovation comments on risk to 5.9 GHz safety applications from unlicensed use (see 2009170033). “The substantial technical record -- based on testing, risk-informed interference analysis, and a city-scale simulation -- decisively concludes that unlicensed use in 5.9 GHz will not cause [such] harmful interference,” a cable spokesperson emailed. “In-home wireless connectivity is more important to more Americans than ever before. The FCC should move forward and unleash the 5.9 GHz band, which will deliver gigabit Wi-Fi and much-needed unlicensed capacity to consumers by the end of this year.”

Democrats should have included a “much-needed federal framework” for autonomous vehicle deployment in the latest highway policy bill, House Commerce Committee Republicans said Tuesday. The office for ranking member Greg Walden, R-Ore., described HR-2 as a “partisan messaging exercise that has no chance of becoming law.” An AV framework would “boost auto safety for American consumers and allow our nation to lead in this emerging technology that has proven itself beneficial yet again during COVID-19,” Republicans said. The office for Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., didn’t comment.

The House Commerce Committee is committed to advancing bipartisan legislation for regulating autonomous vehicles, Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said at a hearing Tuesday. Ranking member Greg Walden, R-Ore., asked why a bipartisan plan that passed the House in 2017 but stalled in the Senate (see 2001100042) isn’t enough. Certain protections are needed to ensure self-driving cars operate safely, Pallone said. The legislation should “facilitate the collection and reporting of vital crash and incident data, and protect Americans’ rights to access the courts for the inevitable incidents related to self-driving cars,” he said. Bipartisan legislation can be advanced without compromising safety, said Walden. If Congress fails to pass a bill, “investment in this transformative technology will go abroad,” said House Consumer Protection Subcommittee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. “If we fail, the safety, less congestion, and mobility benefits that come with this technology will go elsewhere.” CTA CEO Gary Shapiro, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety President Cathy Chase and Alliance for Automotive Innovation CEO John Bozzella urged passage of legislation, with elements from the existing bills. A law is needed to ensure the federal government is responsible for regulation, which will make the U.S. more competitive, Shapiro said. “The worst outcome would be for Congress to delay the enactment of meaningful legislation that would establish the needed federal framework to realize these safety and mobility solutions,” Bozzella said.

Tesla should build backup driver monitoring tools to ensure autopilot drivers don’t fall asleep, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., wrote Friday. He recommended the automaker rebrand and remarket its autopilot system to “make it clear from the beginning that its driver assistance system is not fully autonomous and cannot replace drivers." The company didn’t comment.

Quest Global will demonstrate at CES a pedestrian detection system said to achieve a higher safety level than existing systems by incorporating artificial intelligence and a deep learning neural network approach. Current pedestrian detection systems identify and avoid pedestrians in 0-20 percent of cases when vehicles travel at 30 mph, it said, citing a recent AAA study. Quest’s approach overcomes shortage of data challenges experienced by other advanced driver assistance systems by generating simulations and accumulating large amounts of synthetic data that mirror real-world scenarios, said the company.

The Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium launched Tuesday to bring together industry leaders from automotive, automotive supply, semiconductor and computing to help solve challenges of deploying self-driving vehicles at scale. Founding AVCC members are Arm, Bosch, Continental, Denso, General Motors, Nvidia, NXP Semiconductors and Toyota. The first goal is recommendations for a system architecture and computing platform that reconciles autonomous performance requirements with vehicle-specific requirements and limitations in size, temperature range, power consumption and safety.

Automotive tech supplier Aptiv and Hyundai agreed to form a 50/50 joint venture valued at $4 billion to speed the design, development and commercialization of autonomous vehicles, said the companies Monday. The JV will begin testing “fully driverless” systems next year, and commercialize vehicles with Levels 4 and 5 autonomy starting in 2022, they said. Targeted markets will include “robotaxi” providers, fleet operators and automotive manufacturers, they said. The transaction is expected to close early in Q2 2020. The JV will be headquartered in Boston under the direction of Aptiv Autonomous Mobility President Karl Iagnemma, they said.

A “common verification methodology” is needed in autonomous-driving development, blogged Strategy Analytics Monday. Current technologies are “barely” meeting the challenge, it said. “Technical model methods provide an effective paradigm for validation since they can provide a mathematical model as a guarantee of correctness,” it said. But that “could be totally different when one is trying to verify a whole autonomous driving platform including sensor fusion, data fusion, sensor calibration and autonomous driving scenario simulation verification,” it said. The announcement from Israeli startup Foretellix opening its “measurable scenario description language” verification protocol to the autonomous-driving “ecosystem” and promoting it as a global standard was a positive step, said SA. The initiatives will help top-tier automakers “use a common, human readable, high level language to simplify the capture, reuse and sharing of scenarios,” it said. It also will enable them to “easily specify any mix of scenarios and operating conditions to identify previously unknown hazardous edge cases,” it said.