Tag: lidar

• US mandates new higher-speed automatic braking for passenger vehicles

  The US Department of Transportation has just finalized a new vehicle safety standard that will require all light-duty vehicles to be equipped with a more advanced form of automatic emergency braking (AEB) by 2029. (Light-duty vehicle = pretty much all passenger vehicles, including SUVs and trucks.)

  Now, most light-duty vehicles on the road today already have some form of emergency braking. What’s noteworthy about this ruling is that it requires a more robust version. Some might say one that works. Specifically, it will need to work at much higher speeds and at night.

  Most of the AEB systems in operation today don’t really work at night — basically at all — and many have shown to be ineffective when it comes to stopping for humans.

  This new standard will require vehicles to automatically brake at up to 90 mph when a possible collision with a car is detected and up to 45 mph when a possible collision with a pedestrian is detected.

  This seems like a very good thing, especially given the persistent problem we are having with cars killing too many people. But how do we do it?

  From what I have read, this new standard will be pretty challenging to meet without the use of long-range LiDAR, especially since night vision is a requirement. I find this interesting because, even though autonomy is taking a lot longer to arrive than most people anticipated, there’s still meaningful progress being made.

  Here’s to hoping it saves a lot of lives.

  2024.05.07

• Self-driving cars, plugs, and electrical grids

  This is going to be old news to many of you, but this past week I experienced Tesla’s self-driving capabilities for the first time. And I must say that I was very impressed. It did everything from navigate stop-and-go city traffic to navigate lane changes on the highway. Overall, it makes my five-year old car feel pretty quaint. The software is that much more sophisticated and one has to assume that all of this autonomy stuff will only get significantly better as LIDAR becomes common place in production vehicles.

  In other car news, North America appears to be narrowing in on an EV charging plug standard. It is Tesla’s plug, but it is now appropriately called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. And last week, Electrify America — which is the largest non-Tesla, fast-charging network in the US — announced that it would be adding the plug to its network. The company also happens to be owned by Volkswagen. So big and important companies seem to be coalescing around this plug type.

  Lastly for today, here’s a post by Fred Wilson talking about (1) bi-directional EV charging, (2) the apartment buildings he and his wife are developing, and (3) our ongoing transformation away from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized one. What he talks about in his post is something that we are actually piloting in a few of Slate’s office buildings right now. It’s still early days, but I think it’s really exciting. Tech seems to be enabling a broader shift toward decentralization. And in the case of our electrical grid, it’s going to lead to a more resilient one.

  2023.07.03

• Waymo and Uber announce autonomous vehicle partnership, starting in Phoenix

  Last month, Waymo (Alphabet) and Uber announced a new multi-year partnership that will bring Waymo’s autonomous vehicles to Uber in the Phoenix area later this year. Already, Waymo operates across 180 square miles of the city, making it the largest fully autonomous service area in the world. But now, or I guess later this year, people will be able to order a Waymo AV through the Uber app.

  Not a lot of people seem to care about autonomous vehicles anymore. For a while, every conference had people talking about how they were going to reshape our cities. But then the technology didn’t arrive quite as quickly as people were hoping, and so everyone lost interest and move on to other more exciting things. But clearly things are still happening. And this announcement strikes me as being an important one.

  2023.06.07

• The Derek Zoolander autonomous vehicle problem

  According to McKinsey, something like $100 billion has been invested in trying to get autonomous vehicles to work and yet the industry remains stuck with problems like this one here:

  State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”

  The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues.

  Right now certainly feels like an autonomous vehicle winter (we have many winters going on at the moment). The industry has spent a lot of time and money getting maybe 90% of the way there, but this last bit has proven to be a lot more challenging than I think most people anticipated.

  This has a lot of people thinking that it’s going to be many decades before we finally get full autonomy (if ever) and that, in the interim, all we will have are very specific use cases: trucks on highways, mining machines (the above article writes about this), and so on.

  This may very well be the case. Frankly, I don’t know. But it’s perhaps important to remember two things: (1) pessimists aren’t usually the ones who change the world and (2) there is something known as the Gartner hype cycle, which is a graphical representation of how new innovations typically get adopted.

  The Gartner hype cycle has five phases. The important ones for this discussion are the first three. First there is a technology trigger. Second there is an inflation of expectations (until it hits a peak). And then third, there is a trough of disillusionment. This is the moment where interest wanes and people begin to think it’ll never happen (until it does happen).

  That might be what we’re living through right now, or it might not be. But my gut tells me that it’s the former.

  2022.10.25

• Autonomous trucks are coming

  I hate driving. So I’m looking forward to the day when autonomous vehicles will be able to take me where I need to go, such as out for a late-night poutine.

  But as we all know, autonomy has proven to be a trickier problem to solve than most people initially anticipated. Though I do believe that we’re getting there, especially for certain use cases.

  The WSJ recently published an interesting article talking about why autonomy is likely to reach the trucking industry well before it reaches general consumers. And that feels right to me:

  Here’s the promise of robot trucks: While full self-driving in all conditions is still a pipe dream, engineers seem to be close to achieving it in limited circumstances, such as on highways on clear days. And highway driving, in good weather, happens to be exactly the context in which long-haul trucks operate for a substantial portion of the time.

  The article also gets into some of the economic benefits of figuring this all out:

  Adding even $20,000 of hardware, in the form of additional sensors and powerful computers, to a long-haul truck is quickly offset by the elimination of labor costs, which typically represent 15% to 20% of the cost of operating a truck. Another big economic impact is that by law a human driving a truck must stop and rest. That means every truck, which can cost between $100,000 and $200,000, is only being used about 30% to 40% of the time. Just running them 24 hours, stopping only for fuel and maintenance, increases their utilization by a factor of two or more.

  For the full article, click here (paywall).

  2022.06.21

• The new mobility landscape

  McKinsey published a report last month on the future of electric vehicles and what that will mean for the industry. Many countries, cities, and companies have set some sort of electrification target for 2030. The US is targeting 50% EVs by 2030. Several countries have announced a flat-out end to ICE sales by 2030. And a number of OEMs have committed to the same.

  But there are already cities, such as Oslo, which have reached EV majority. In July of this year, its passenger EV adoption figure was 66%, making Norway a global leader. What is clear is that the electrification of personal transport is well underway. Anecdotally, we are seeing that play out with the number of people now inquiring about electric charging infrastructure in our buildings (here in Toronto).

  This move to electric will have many repercussions, including a major shift in the entire supply chain (which McKinsey outlines in their report). While ICE vehicles and EVs still both have things like tires, EVs require a whole slew of new and now growing components:

  

  It is also going to force new public infrastructure:

  

  But in parallel to the electrification of personal vehicles, we are also seeing a number of other trends and shifts. The electrification of public transport (Shenzhen has already electrified its entire bus and taxi fleets). The rise of micro-mobility (things like e-scooters). The ongoing push to discourage driving in urban centers. And the continuing goal of autonomous vehicles.

  What all of this suggests to me is that the electrification of personal vehicles is only part of the story. The entire mobility landscape in our cities is changing and it will probably look a lot different by 2030.

  2021.10.10

• Optimistic and excited

  With seemingly so much happening in the world these days — everything from COVID to climate change — it is perhaps easy to feel a little discouraged about the current state of affairs. But I am an optimist. And as I mentioned on Twitter a few weeks ago, I haven’t been this excited about the future of tech and the internet in a long time.

  We are seeing the auto industry quickly transition to electric vehicles (though, in my opinion, not driving at all is still better for our cities than driving something that is electric). Norway has created the world’s first ever zero emission, autonomous cargo ship. And LIDAR vision systems are looking pretty promising as one of the technologies that will ultimately power fully autonomous vehicles.

  I believe in the resiliency of cities and, as I have been arguing on this blog all throughout COVID, I think the claims about the demise of our cities have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, I think this pandemic has forced us rethink a lot of things about our urban environments, including how we allocate and use our public spaces (think patios). Some of these changes have been for the better and they’re not going to go away.

  I think the benefits of working in close proximity to others are too great to have everyone working remotely. Yes, we have learned that decentralization is possible. But there’s an overwhelming amount of research telling us that we’re all more innovative and productive when we cluster together in cities and in offices.

  I have been back in the office almost 100% of the time since it has been possible to do that. And I am much happier and more productive as a result. There’s also research suggesting that there are psychological benefits to a reasonable commute. It creates a break in our day, allows us to detach from our work, and gives us time to process stuff in our mind.

  I think things like digital fashion and augmented reality are going to have profound impact on the way we consume things. You could also argue that there’s a sustainability angle to more digital and less physical. And of course, I am excited about the transformations that I believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will continue to bring to many different industries (if not most).

  This morning I was reading a Financial Times article about cryptocurrencies in the developing world. It it perhaps no surprise that many of these countries are providing to be early adopters. People are leapfrogging over to cryptocurrencies because their existing currencies and financial systems aren’t effective enough. That has lead to adoption and penetration that looks something like this according to FT:

  

  There is, of course, many other things to be optimistic and excited about. But I’ll leave that for the comment section below. What are you excited about these days?

  2021.09.05

• The future of self-driving cars (and LIDAR)

  Here is an interesting podcast with Austin Russell, who is CEO of Luminar Technologies. Luminar specializes in LIDAR vision systems for autonomous vehicles and has already cut deals with carmakers such as a Volvo. Starting as early as next year, Volvo hopes to start rolling out “fully autonomous highway driving” using LIDAR. And, supposedly, Luminar makes the best kind of LIDAR with ranges of up to 250m. But not everyone believes that LIDAR will be a necessary component of autonomy going forward. Tesla instead relies on vision (lots of cameras and fancy AI software), and Elon Musk has famously said that anyone relying on LIDAR will ultimately be doomed. Time will tell, though I am in the LIDAR camp because of the recency bias that this podcast has created. And in the interim, Luminar going public at the end of last year has made Austin Russell the youngest self-made billionaire in America.

  2021.03.16