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Will the autonomous vehicle revolution ever come? - Marketplace
Earlier in April, Tesla announced the expansion of its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston. During the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk said he hoped to have robotaxis and driverless vehicles in “a dozen or so” states by the end of the year. And just last week, Tesla added five more “unsupervised” robotaxis to its Texas markets.That timeline is a bit more modest than some of Musk’s earlier predictions about Tesla’s Robotaxi program. In the past, he’s suggested that coverage could expand to half the population of the U.S. by the end of 2025. For more on this, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor at TechCrunch. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Sabri Ben-Achour: How widespread are Tesla's driverless vehicles right now?Kirsten Korosec: Not widespread at all. They are in Austin, and there are a little bit more than a dozen that are considered to be actively in service. And they did just roll out in Dallas and Houston. But those two, you really need to put a little asterisk next to because — as far as I can see on my end — it's incredibly limited. Just a couple of vehicles in both of these cities.Ben-Achour: What has made the general rollout of driverless taxis slower than some people might have expected or hoped?Korosec: There is a number of reasons why. There's the technical reasons, right? And then there's the regulatory hoops that all of these companies have had to jump through. And then there's the hard part of just operating these things.Ben-Achour: What is the biggest technical hurdle still remaining, do you think?Korosec: When I've talked to engineers, they sort of sum it up as, “We've solved 99.999% of ‘full self-driving.’ And it's that very last fraction in which sometimes the vehicle doesn't operate as it should. There's also, I think, just this interesting phenomenon about how we accept, as a society, people dying in car crashes — around 45,000 or so a year. But I think that the level of acceptance of a single autonomous vehicle, potentially killing someone or being involved in a fatal car crash or even injuring someone, is very, very low. And so, the bar is high.Ben-Achour: How big is the regulatory hurdle facing these companies? Korosec: It's dependent on the state. So, if you're in the state of California and you want to operate a robotaxi service, you have to go through two agencies and have multiple different permits. You want to do tha...
The pioneers of self-driving cars: Meet Ernst Dickmanns, the nearly 90 ...
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The race to develop driverless cars long predates Silicon Valley and the high-profile tech companies that dominate the industry today.Decades before autonomous vehicles competed in high-speed desert challenges, a small group of engineers in Germany and the United States were quietly building the foundations of self-driving technology.A DRIVERLESS TOMORROW: Explore the triumphs, setbacks and innovations shaping the driverless futureMany credit figures, such as Karl Benz, Henry Ford, and Enzo Ferrari, have shaped the modern automobile.But when it comes to self-driving vehicles, a different set of names emerges, including Ernst Dickmanns, Red Whittaker, Sebastian Thrun, Chris Urmson and Anthony Levandowski.Several of these innovators first gained widespread attention during the DARPA Grand Challenges, a series of autonomous-vehicle races launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2004 to accelerate progress in self-driving technology.Years before those competitions, however, Dickmanns and his team were already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads."I'm Ernst Dickmanns, and I was the first who put a self-driving car on the road in the early 1980s," he said.Now nearly 90, Dickmanns lives in a small town near Munich, far from the technology centers of the United States. He rarely speaks publicly about his work, but his contributions helped shape how autonomous vehicles "see" the world.Dickmanns pioneered dynamic computer vision, the technology that allows machines to interpret moving images in real time.In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked with the German Aerospace Research Establishment, analyzing rocket trajectories, applying image-processing techniques at a time when computer power was severely limited."Well, in Oberpfaffenhofen, I've been the acting director of the Centre in 1974/75," Dickmanns said, describing his early exposure to image evaluation from satellites and aircraft. As microprocessor performance rapidly improved, he concluded that real-time image analysis for vehicles would become possible within his lifetime.By the mid-1980s, Dickmanns and a small engineering team south of Munich converted a Mercedes-Benz van into a self-driving vehicle. Using early Intel processors and multiple cameras, the van could evaluate images 10 to 12 times per second."And we were the first to really run these vehicle controls in real time in 1986," Dickmanns said. His team later demonstrated autonomous driving at highway speeds of up to 96 ...
The Trucking Revolution: Why Driverless Big Rigs Are Outpacing Self ...
While flashy headlines about self-driving cars dominate public discourse, autonomous trucks are quietly but rapidly reshaping the transportation and logistics landscape. This shift is driven by a perfect storm of technological innovation, economic necessity, and the persistent challenges faced by the trucking industry, such as driver shortages.
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