The Verge - Self-driving cars: Google and others map the road to automated vehicles

Michigan governor urges 'automotive capital of the world' to welcome self-driving cars

2013-04-17T01:37:06Z

Self-driving cars may soon hit the roads of Michigan — home of US automakers Chrysler, Ford, and GM — as Governor Rick Snyder continues a push for his state to join California, Florida, and Nevada in allowing driverless vehicle testing. Snyder said yesterday that autonomous vehicles will eventually increase road capacity and improve driver safety throughout the state — but the governor is also looking to pit Detroit against Silicon Valley. Industry around autonomous driving technology has continued to grow in the California tech hub, where Google, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen have all located nearby research facilities, and Snyder has previously called out Michigan's need to act as the industry develops elsewhere. "They’re...

Nissan shifts self-driving car R&D to Silicon Valley

2013-02-19T04:20:07Z

Nissan has opened a new advanced research center in Sunnyvale, California that will specialize in self-driving and connected cars. Speaking to Bloomberg, the company's senior vice president for North American R&D Carla Bailo said that the facility will have over 60 engineers and technicians in the next three years, and that the move from Japan to Silicon Valley is about shifting Nissan's work "to the heart of the industry." The company opened a Mountain View research office in 2011, but the new center indicates that the company plans to make significant investments in automated vehicle technology.

Inexpensive alternative to Google's self-driving cars uses lasers and cameras to navigate

2013-02-17T05:28:06Z

Oxford University has unveiled a new autonomous car system that takes a different approach to Google's self-driving vehicles. RobotCar UK uses front-mounted 3D laser scanners and cameras on the vehicle to compare the environment to stored map data; if the car feels confident in its ability to take the wheel, it will notify the driver via software running on a dashboard-mounted iPad. Currently the system runs on a modified Nissan Leaf and has been tested at up to 40mph.

"It's not total autonomy for the car," says Professor Paul Newman, speaking to the Guardian. "It knows when things are good, and when the risks are reasonable, and then it will offer to take over." Unlike Google's system, RobotCar UK doesn't use GPS, and is restricted...

Google expects its self-driving cars to be ready in three to five years

2013-02-11T15:06:31Z

Speaking at a Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) conference last week, product manager for autonomous driving Anthony Levandowski said that Google expects to release its self-driving car technology in the next three to five years. According to Bloomberg, however, Levandowski cautioned that "what form it gets released is still to be determined." Even if Google has its technology polished and road-ready in that time frame, it's highly unlikely that they'll be for sale due to a slew of complex legal issues surrounding autonomous vehicles. Currently, only three states — California, Florida, and Nevada — allow Google's self-driving cars on the roadways, but only for testing purposes and if a human driver is present.

"It's a legal...

At CES, self-driving cars dance with believers, skeptics, and governments

2013-01-10T21:52:05Z

"Sensing what's around you versus understanding it [are] vastly different," said Lexus VP Mark Templin, waxing philosophical about the company's so-called advanced active safety research vehicle — "AASRV" for short — at a dimly-lit CES event early this week.

From the unapproachable, awkward name, you'd probably never guess that the AASRV is actually a self-driving car, every bit as autonomous, advanced, and buzzworthy as the ones Google has been driving around California for the past several years. And that's just the way Lexus wants it: as the legal and ethical challenges of these vehicles cast an ever-growing pall on the research arm of the auto industry, carmakers are quick to play down the capabilities of the self-driving car...

The Batmobile is real: Audi's self-driving car picks you up on command

2013-01-09T06:43:26Z

There are self-driving cars, then there are self-driving cars. Today at CES, Audi showed me the former.

The A7 parked in the cul-de-sac of Las Vegas' luxurious Mandarin Oriental hotel looked no different than any other that you might see on the street, but this was a special demonstrator of Audi's "piloted driving" system for automated parking. It works like this: you walk out of the mall, you want your car. You open an app on your smartphone, press a button, and the car drives out to you. Pretty awesome — and it works the opposite way, too.

The reality is far more complex, though. One of the reasons this car looks completely normal — as opposed to, say, a Google-modified Prius — is because it's being guided by an array of...

Audi working on making self-driving cars look like normal cars

2013-01-08T19:45:47Z

At CES 2013 today, Audi talked about its ambitions in autonomous driving. No dates or models were given for a production car that can pilot itself — that's still years away, even by ambitious estimates — but company executive Ricky Hudi mentioned that they're currently in the prototyping stages of a single circuitboard that contains all of the electronics that currently occupy the trunks of self-driving cars on the roads today (in fact, a Lexus spokesperson just mentioned to us yesterday that its AASRV vehicle has a trunk full of gear to support real-time processing). Just as important, it's working on smaller laser scanners that should dispense of the giant rack of equipment and sensors mounted on self-driving cars' roofs. Hudi...

Toyota and Lexus show off autonomous — but not self-driving — car at CES

2013-01-08T19:33:55Z

Self-driving cars have long been the pet project of Google, but mainstream automotive companies have started edging their automatic safety and assistance tools towards that end of the scale as well. At CES, Toyota and its subsidiary Lexus recently unveiled the "advanced active safety research vehicle," whose Aperture Science-worthy name belies its somewhat more modest short-term ambitions. Lexus insists it's not meant to replace the driver, acting instead as a co-pilot and a new step in existing safety systems, and we've taken a close look at what kind of hardware that entails. For Lexus' explanation of just what "autonomous" means here, take a quick look back at our coverage from yesterday.