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… Read More
Apple’s self-driving system and/or car project has been in the news again recently. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the company was hoping to start production by as early as 2024. But this week, projections were revised and we’re probably looking at least 5 years. The… Read More
The Information estimates that around $16 billion has been spent over the last few years on developing autonomous vehicles. This is across some 30 companies. But about half of this spending has come from just three companies: Waymo (Alphabet), Cruise (GM), and Uber. Waymo has… Read More
This past Monday, Tesla held an event for its investors called “Autonomy Day.” It was livestreamed, but if you missed it, here’s the video. It’s almost 4 hours long, though the first hour is just footage of Tesla vehicles driving around. I’m assuming it was… Read More
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was in Toronto today, where he announced that the company plans to invest more than $200 million over the next five years to expand the autonomous vehicle research lab that it already has here in the city. The Toronto outpost of… Read More
This is an interesting piece by Bloomberg summarizing the current state of autonomous vehicles and in particular the (supposed) dominance of Waymo (Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle arm). Many believe they will be the first real entrant into the market. The company is currently running an “Early… Read More
In my recent post about why I write about tech on this city building blog, I made a pithy comment about autonomous vehicles and why it is “largely a software challenge.” The argument I was trying to make was that the hardware, similar to smartphones today,… Read More
Designing a building for 5+ years into the future can be tricky. The pace of change in the world today is astounding. Last month Seth Miller published a Medium article called: This is how Big Oil will die. His argument is that the cost of running… Read More
I would like to pull out one more idea from Derek Thompson’s article, What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017? It is this prediction that self-driving cars could maybe become the new retail store: “Once autonomous vehicles are cheap, safe, and… Read More
The New York Times recently argued that self-driving cars can’t cure traffic, but that economics can. Here is the key soundbite: “Maybe autonomous cars will be different from other capacity expansions,” Mr. Turner said. “But of the things we have observed so far, the only… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 