Paul Gluckman

The California Public Utilities Commission authorized self-driving car company Zoox to participate in California’s first pilot providing “drivered” autonomous vehicle (AV) passenger service to the public, the CPUC said Friday. Passengers will be able to ride in a vehicle that operates autonomously, but Zoox has to have a trained test driver present in the driver’s seat ready to take over if needed, the commission said. The ride-hailing company isn't allowed to charge passengers for rides in test AVs. Zoox, which has the required AV testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, is the first entrant into the CPUC pilot program. Companies participating in the pilot will submit data and reports to the CPUC on incidents, passenger miles traveled in test AVs, emissions, execution of passenger safety protocols and other elements of passenger safety and consumer protection, it said. Zoox also obtained the testing permit required from CPUC for carriers wanting to transport citizens in AVs.

The Senate last week failed to pass autonomous vehicle legislation (see 1812060041). Failure to pass the AV Start Act, from Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., threatens U.S. efforts to “be the leader in the advancement and development of this potentially life-saving technology,” House Commerce Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said.

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration final rule streamlines application and review processes for self-driving vehicles. Manufacturers must petition to apply for temporary exemption if a proposed new vehicle doesn’t comply with federal motor vehicle safety standards, it announced. The rule eliminates a provision the agency deem a petition complete before publishing summary notices for comment. It's effective 30 days after Federal Register publication. Also Tuesday, the Department of Transportation sought comment on integration of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications technologies into transportation. It wants feedback, also 30 days after FR publication, on “issues ranging from the use of alternative and emerging communications technologies to support V2X, to the challenges associated with achieving interoperability while accommodating technological change.”

Baidu is collaborating with 3D developer Unity Technologies for a real-time simulation product with virtual environments for testing autonomous vehicles, said the companies Tuesday. The ability to conduct autonomous testing in a simulated environment allows “millions of simulations to simultaneously occur,” reducing testing costs, said Tim McDonough, Unity general manager-industrial.

Attaching autonomous vehicle legislation to a must-pass spending bill remains an option, a Senate Commerce Committee aide said Thursday. Sponsors of the AV Start Act (S-1885) (see 1811280069 and 1805180066) Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., previously said they want to attach the legislation to a spending vehicle, despite concerns from Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Conn.; Ed Markey, Mass.; and Dianne Feinstein, Calif. The bill would foster innovation and create a path for safety standards, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers said Wednesday. Attaching the bill to a spending bill would circumvent the hold by Feinstein and others, Consumer Watchdog said Thursday, writing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. : “We ask you to stop this reckless and craven power grab by the auto makers in its tracks.”

The market for semi-autonomous driving functionality is “growing, albeit slowly,” said a Monday Canalys report, saying just 3 percent of new passenger cars sold in the U.S. in Q3 had the feature. The combination of adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist has been available for a few years, but adoption is low due to limited availability as an expensive add-on in select versions of luxury vehicles, said analyst Chris Jones. The feature works only under certain road, speed and weather conditions and requires a driver’s full attention, Jones said, noting many systems “do not deliver a smooth drive,” making it less likely drivers will use or recommend it. Tesla had a third of the semi-autonomous passenger car market in Q3, due largely to success of the Model 3 with autopilot, and Nissan offers it in new Altima, Leaf and Rogue vehicles, Jones said, predicting uptake will continue to increase steadily over the next two years. Canalys forecasts 10 percent penetration in new passenger cars sold in the U.S. in 2021, ramping as the cost of lidar and other key components falls, enabling more OEMs to design in the feature.

Autonomous vehicle legislation fails to address known safety problems revealed by deadly crashes, more than 75 consumer groups wrote senators about the AV START Act (S-1885) (see 1810050035). Consumer Watchdog, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and Public Citizen signed in opposition to the bill. Lawmakers “should take immediate action to require proven advanced safety technologies in all new cars, not rush forward with unproven technologies that put automakers’ interests ahead of public safety,” they wrote.

General Motors is on track to commercialize next year, through its partnership with Honda, a “purpose-built” autonomous "ride-sharing" vehicle “in a dense urban environment, with safety as our gating metric,” said CEO Mary Barra on a Wednesday earnings call. Doing its AV development in downtown San Francisco “gives us probably the most exposure” to high-risk street and road “situations,” said Barra, when asked how GM measures AV safety. “We have done extensive work to understand how we will measure through actual road performance, simulation. We've gone back and looked at historical patterns as it relates to safety and we have a very well-defined plan of what we have to demonstrate to demonstrate that the AV is safer than a human driver.” Launching AVs in one city next year is "the first step in what will be a multiyear -- probably over decades -- transformation of how people move,” she said. A mile “is not a mile when you're doing AV testing,” Barra said. “The most complex miles that we're gaining experience in in San Francisco are very valuable, and so we're being efficient in driving the miles that we need to drive, getting the maximum learning.”

The Aerospace Industries Association supported a Boeing petition to streamline FCC equipment certification rules for industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) devices, used in aircraft and other vehicles for operations and monitoring. “Boeing’s Petition is fully consistent with the goals of its members,” the group said, posted Monday in RM-11814. "Wireless sensors and other devices that generate low levels of RF emissions are increasingly being used as components in aircraft for a range of purposes," AIA said. "These devices monitor environmental conditions and the status of countless operational and safety systems, including fuel systems, engines, flight control, airframe, and landing systems." Boeing said in an Aug. 6 petition the change is important as autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles are launched. “Perhaps the single greatest technological challenge of this generation is the use of wireless systems, digital processing, and sensors to further heighten the operational safety and efficiency ... with the ultimate goal of autonomous operations,” Boeing said.

Machine vision technology, riding on deep learning (DL), is advancing and driving mass adoption in automotive, retail, consumer, industrial and surveillance sectors, ABI Research reported Wednesday. It forecasts machine vision technology will grow at a 53 percent annual compound growth rate through 2023 to $193.8 billion generated from services and hardware. Machine vision vendors previously relied on hard-coded feature detection techniques applied in highly controlled environments, such as detecting a particular object on a production line, ABI said, but DL-based systems are more flexible, capable of recognizing many object types and deployable in a range of circumstances. The researcher gave as examples cashier-less stores such as Amazon Go, where cameras track movements of both customers and items in the store, or in autonomous driving where systems can make distinctions between multiple types of vehicles and drivers. Roughly 37.8 million vehicles shipped in 2023 will contain between level 2 to 5 advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). More than half of the 34.4 million level 2 ADAS systems shipped that year will use DL-based machine vision, and level 3-5 vehicles will all use the approach, it said.