Autonomous Cars

Jeep owner Stellantis is working on a system that adds autonomy to its iconic SUV — and we’re not talking about highway driving... this is for 4x4 adventures.

In a teaser video we see two Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe hybrids with camera-looking equipment. One moves sans a driver while the automaker’s head of AI holds an iPad like a real off-roader.

The British automaker issued a recall for 6,400 electric I-PACE vehicles due to fire risks from an over-heated battery. Included in that recall is an undisclosed number of driverless Waymo vehicles. A spokesperson for the company said it was working with Jaguar on a software update that should fix the issue.

The latest “San Francisco residents hate all these robotaxis” dispatch just dropped, and it’s starting to seem that the complaints largely stem from our collective wish that autonomous vehicles would bend the everyday traffic rules that we, as humans, do everyday. Drive a little faster than you’re supposed to. Barrel ahead through thick fog and low visibility. Rolling stops. Double and triple parking. Maybe if the robot cars weren’t such fussy rule-followers we would like them more. Just saying.

The autonomous vehicle boom is fizzling. According to a recent report from F-Prime Capital, AV investments have “significantly slowed” in 2022, declining nearly 60 percent as compared to the previous year. That reflects an overall decline in robotics investment — $12 billion in 2022, down from $18 billion in 2021 — but it also speaks to the current reality facing many AV operators right now. They’re laying people off, struggling with regulators and a skeptical public, or shutting down altogether. In short, it’s tough out there for a robot car.

According to Bloomberg, the city of San Jose just approved a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in which pod-sized autonomous vehicles would travel on their own dedicated road back-and-forth between the airport and a nearby rail connection. It’s an incredibly dumb idea and a repudiation of proven high-capacity transportation systems like buses and trains. Nobody asked for this, and yet...

If you want to read about the fascinating history behind PRT, read my colleague Adi Robertson’s piece about the Alden staRR Car at West Virginia University. It’s still in operation!

Sure, human drivers do this too. But robotaxis are supposed to be better than humans, not perpetuate our worst behaviors. Wired got dashcam footage from eight incidents of autonomous vehicles from Waymo and Cruise blocking buses in San Francisco. How much were riders delayed?

Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show. 

Five months after it pulled the plug on its autonomous vehicle division Argo.ai, Ford is continuing to divest itself from fully driverless technology. Today, the company filed a notice with the feds that basically retreats from its former position of wanting to deploy vast numbers of robot vehicles. The reason?

We believe the road to fully autonomous vehicles, at scale, with a profitable business model, will be a long one.

Long car rides are the worst, right?

The autonomous car unit shares its parent company, Alphabet, with Google, which in January cut over 12,000 jobs or about six percent of its workforce. The Information reports that after a new round of layoffs affecting primarily engineers, Waymo has let go of about 8 percent of the people working there.

Like the other recent tech layoffs, it’s a sharp turn from a few years ago — in 2017, Bloomberg reported some Waymo staffers were quitting because the jobs paid so well.

Amazon’s driverless subsidiary Zoox claims that it doesn’t need an exemption from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to deploy vehicles without traditional controls like steering wheels (like GM’s Cruise) because it is using “self-certification” to ensure its vehicles are safe. That sounded kind of weird, so I reached out to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to see what they say. Here’s what they told me.

The agency is evaluating the basis for these self-certification claims and, as part of this effort, continues to review information provided by Zoox in response to questions previously posed by the agency.

If vehicles do not comply with all applicable FMVSS, they must generally receive an exemption from NHTSA to operate on public roads.

[Insert monocle emoji.]