Paul Gluckman

General Motors envisions autonomous vehicles eliminating crashes, emissions and congestion, CEO Mary Barra wrote Friday, asking Congress to pass self-drive legislation. GM has been pushing the Department of Transportation to alter safety requirements to allow AV without steering wheels and other equipment (see 1810040043). The House passed the Self Drive Act, but the AV Start Act stalled in the Senate.

The Department of Transportation advanced plans to allow autonomous vehicles to operate on U.S. roads without features like steering wheels, pedals and mirrors. An 80-page report released Thursday details DOT’s "Automated Vehicles 3.0" policy, which emphasizes the department's authority to alter safety rules to accommodate the design request. General Motors in January filed for a design exemption for AVs. House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, applauded “DOT’s continued commitment to getting safe and innovative self-driving cars on America’s roadways, and share in the urgency for a unified safety framework across state lines.” DOT Secretary Elaine Chao’s commitment to balancing safety and innovation “will solidify our nation's global leadership in self-driving technologies at a time when other countries are trying to duplicate the United States' success,” CTA CEO Gary Shapiro said Thursday.

Analog Devices introduced for the autonomous vehicle market the Power by Linear LT8708-1 bidirectional switching regulator controller. The device operates between two batteries that have the same voltage, making it “ideal” for redundancy in self-driving cars, said the company. Efficiency is given as up to 98 percent.

"Pilot testing" will begin next year in Silicon Valley on the Daimler-Bosch “collaboration” using Nvidia’s Drive Pegasus artificial-intelligence “brain” for Level 4- and Level 5-scale autonomous vehicle “fleets,” said Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress on a Thursday-evening earnings call after quarterly results. Nvidia recently started shipping “development systems” for Drive Pegasus, an “AI supercomputer designed specifically for autonomous vehicles,” said Kress. Drive Pegasus is capable of 320 trillion operations a second, so it can handle “diverse and redundant algorithms” in self-driving cars, she said. Hardware and software “co-designed” around the Drive Pegasus AI brain creates a “platform” that meets the international ISO 26262 standard, “the industry’s highest level of automotive functional safety,” she said. “We have created a scalable AI car platform that spans the entire range of automated and autonomous driving, from traffic-jam pilots to Level-5 robotaxis.” More than 370 companies and research institutions are using the platform, she said: “With this growing momentum and accelerating revenue growth, we remain excited about the intermediate and long-term opportunities for the autonomous driving business.”

Consumer awareness of autonomous driving is on the rise, but so is the public's perception that it’s unsafe, a Cox Automotive study found. Cox canvassed 1,250 adults online in May and found 84 percent said they would be willing to ride in a self-driving vehicle, as long as they were given the option of taking control of the wheel, compared with only 16 percent who said they would feel comfortable riding without that option, it said Thursday. The proportion of respondents who said they think the roadways would be safer if all vehicles were fully autonomous decreased by 18 percentage points in the past two years, said Cox. Nearly half (49 percent) of those canvassed also now say they will “never” consider buying a vehicle with full Level 5 autonomy on the Society of Automotive Engineers scale, compared with 30 percent who expressed that sentiment two years ago, it said. “Recent high-profile accidents involving autonomous vehicles have cast a shadow on driverless appeal and software, but the accidents may only be slightly to blame for a change in consumer sentiment,” said Cox. Three-fourths of the survey respondents said they think fully autonomous vehicles need “real world testing to be perfected,” but more than half (54 percent) said they would prefer that testing take place far from where they live, it said. Consumers generally hold semi-autonomous vehicle-safety features in high esteem, it said. The survey found that more than half (54 percent) said they agree that features like collision-warning alert systems can make people become better, safer drivers, it said.

Federal government, not states, should establish clear rules of the road for autonomous vehicles, the House Digital Commerce Subcommittee blogged Wednesday, citing the Governors Highway Safety Association. States lack the resources and technical expertise to properly regulate self-driving cars, the post said. The subcommittee urged Senate passage of autonomous vehicle legislation (see 1805180066). The House passed the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research In Vehicle Evolution Act (HR-3388) in 2017, but the committee-approved American Vision for Safer Transportation Through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies Act (S-1885) is stalled in the Senate.

Though Tesla didn’t keep the promise CEO Elon Musk made a year ago to complete its first “coast-to-coast” autonomous drive from Los Angeles to New York using Autopilot by the end of 2017 (see 1708030004), the automaker has the capability to do so for demo purposes, said Musk on a Wednesday-evening earnings call. If Tesla were to “pick a specific route and then write code to really make that route work, we could do a coast-to-coast route drive, but that would be kind of gaming the system,” said Musk. He also doesn’t want to take the Autopilot team away from its task of building on the “fundamental safety of the existing features,” he said. In its advanced development role, the team is teaching Autopilot to “do things like recognize traffic lights and stop signs and make hard right turns and that kind of thing, but it's not at the safety level that's considered OK for release,” he said. “You want many lines of reliability for anything that's released to end customers. So I don't want to take the team off that until we feel like we've really got everything as best we can for the core functionality.” There’s “no question you can kind of build a demo around this stuff,” said Vice President-Engineering Stuart Bowers. “The challenge right now for the team is just increasing the safety and utility of Autopilot to over 250,000 cars we have today and pushing more out after that.” Tesla’s strategy for the next six months will be to deploy the tools the team is working on “in the form of active safety features,” using “this rich understanding of the environment to actually try to keep you safer, to either beep or brake,” said Bowers. One “huge advantage” for the team is that it “can understand what humans actually did in these vehicles and test our software to make sure that we would have made decisions that were similar, if not safer,” he said. “That's going to be a huge part of what we do over the next, probably, two quarters.” Musk said the team is focused on making “some significant advancements in autonomy, and then once that's out and stable, I think that could be a good time to work on the coast-to-coast drive.”

Ford is investing $4 billion in its autonomous vehicle business, including a $1 billion plug in Argo AI, through 2023, it said Tuesday, announcing a reorganization effective Aug. 1 (see the personals section of this issue). The automaker is consolidating its autonomous driving platform under Ford Autonomous Vehicles to include self-driving systems integration, autonomous vehicle research and advanced engineering, AV transportation-as-a-service network development, user experience, business strategy and business development teams. The limited-liability corporation, looking for third-party investment, will be based at Ford’s Corktown campus in Detroit and will hold Ford’s ownership stake in Argo AI, its Pittsburgh-based partner for self-driving system development, it said. Closer alignment of the self-driving platform and mobility solutions teams will allow faster development of businesses that can advance in the pre- and post-autonomous vehicle worlds, said the company. Ford’s electric vehicle strategy involves “rethinking the ownership experience,” including making charging “an effortless experience” at home and on the road, and offering full-vehicle over-the-air software updates for additional features, it said. Citing available computing power in cars and mobile devices, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said, “We can now harness this technology to unlock a new world of vehicle personalization, supply chain choreography and inventory leanness that rivals any industrial model in the world.”

The Senate shouldn't attach autonomous driving legislation to the FAA Reauthorization Act, some 70 safety and consumer groups wrote lawmakers Monday. Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., expressed interest in attaching the American Vision for Safer Transportation Through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies Act (S-1885) to must-pass legislation (see 1805180066). The bill “would establish driverless car policy for decades to come, but lacks even minimal safety protections,” the letter said. Attachment would be “extremely reckless,” given National Transportation Safety Board open investigations of crashes involving automated driving systems, said the Major Cities Chiefs Association, National Consumers League, Center for Auto Safety, Consumer Watchdog, Public Citizen and others.

Americans are missing out on “critical safety innovation,” with the Senate failing to advance autonomous driving legislation (see 1805180066), wrote the House Digital Commerce Subcommittee Wednesday. Without a national framework, the U.S. has to rely on a patchwork of state regulations, it said. The House unanimously passed the Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research in Vehicle Evolution Act (HR-3388), but Senate conversations over the Safer Transportation Through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies Act (S-1885) stalled.