The Verge
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Policy & Law
Google and a number of automakers are spearheading the movement to get automated vehicles on America's roads. Self-driving cars are street legal in three states, and Google's fleet has collectively logged over 300,000 miles of time on the road. However, there are several obstacles in the path of widespread adoption, with legal and moral opposition to the concept coming from all corners. Follow this StoryStream to track the technology's progress as it transitions from experimental testing to consumer reality that could save thousands of lives.
29 updates and 1415 comments below.
Feb 18 11:20p
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...
Feb 17 12:28a
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...
Feb 11 10:06a
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...
Jan 10 4:52p
"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...
Jan 09 1:43a
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....
Jan 08 2:45p
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...
2:33p
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...
Jan 07 2:00p
At CES today, Toyota's Lexus division just took the wraps off its "advanced active safety research vehicle," a car based on the company's luxury LS sedan that combines troves of gadgets and technology to effectively drive itself.
Jan 03 8:14p
Google and Volvo aren't the only companies interested in autonomous, self-driving cars. Toyota is promising to show off the Lexus AASRV (Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle) at the show. The car is part of a larger program, based in North America, which doesn't look to be as far along as Google's efforts. Toyota has retrofitted a Lexus LS 600h with radar, cameras, and possibly a laser system to help it recognize its surroundings, the Wall Street Journal points out, and Toyota has posted a...
Dec 19 5:31p
Continental, a German auto supplier developing car automation technology, has just received a license to operate its "highly automated vehicle" from the state of Nevada. The company is the first to join Google, which has been working on a fully-automated vehicle in the state — in August, the company announced that it had logged over 300,000 miles on the road with its autonomous Toyota Prius and Lexus RX hybrid vehicles. But unlike Google's driverless car, Continental's modified Volkswagen...
Dec 14 1:26p
Nov 24 2:45p
Self-driving cars are barely on the road yet, but designers apparently think they'll be the future of police work. At the Los Angeles Car Show's annual design challenge, car companies were asked to envision the highway patrol vehicle of 2025. As The New York Times reports, several of the concepts were autonomous, designed either to be completely unmanned or to help officers monitor the area. BMW's E-Patrol "Human-Drone Pursuit Vehicle," for example, would include both "unicycle-like" robot...
Nov 19 10:08a
Ron Medford, deputy director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is leaving the US government to join Google's ongoing project on self-driving cars. As the Detroit News reports, Medford will officially join Google in January, where he will serve as director of safety for driverless vehicles. The executive announced the decision in an email to NHTSA staff last week, describing the decision as "bittersweet" after more than 40 years of work in the public sector. A...
Oct 23 11:15p
An Obama administration official has said that self-driving cars have the potential to save "thousands and thousands of lives." The AP reports that at an industry gathering David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, spoke of his optimism for the technology. The government is launching research into the safety of automatic driving, and has already spoken with automakers and Google about the path to consumer adoption.
Sep 29 4:19p
As self-driving cars inch closer to real-world use, car makers have the opportunity to incorporate new design factors that aren't constrained by the requirements of manual control. Brad Templeton, software architect and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has identified a number of attributes that can be unique to the new mode of transportation, from single-passenger cars and redesigned windshields to vehicles that re-fuel themselves between trips. Check out Templeton's...
Sep 25 5:39p
Google's self-driving car initiative gained momentum in California today with the signing of a bill that permits the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads in the company's home state. Governor Jerry Brown joined Google co-founder Sergey Brin (complete with his signature Google Glass eyewear) on stage in Mountain View to celebrate the occasion. Bill SB1298, which cleared legislative hurdles last month, establishes a number of safety and legal standards that will allow Google to test...
Aug 30 1:31p
A bill that would allow autonomous cars to be tested on California's roads easily passed the state's Assembly and Senate this week. The bill, which passed the Assembly on Tuesday with a vote of 74-2 and unanimously passed the Senate yesterday, will establish safety regulations for use of self-driving cars. However, autonomous cars will only be permitted for testing purposes and under the condition that the driver can manually take control of the vehicle. A provision to allow autonomous...
Aug 13 7:36p
As a number of states move forward with plans to get self-driving vehicles on the road, in Florida the issue is being used for political attack ads. A new ad from the Committee to Protect Florida takes issue with Representative Jeff Brandes' support for autonomous vehicle testing in Florida, not-so-subtly implying that said vehicles are dangerous to pedestrians. Brandes is an advocate of autonomous cars in the state, supporting House Bill 1207, which would allow for the operation of...
Aug 07 3:05p
Google has just released a new update on its self-driving car initiative, and the company has made a good deal of progress on the road over the summer. So far, Google's fleet of self-driving cars (about a dozen of which are on the road at any one time) have now logged more than 300,000 miles of test drives without a single accident in a "wide variety of traffic conditions." That's up from the 200,000 miles Google reported back in late April. It's a significant milestone — many more miles...
Jul 06 12:54p
Science fiction has prepared us for a plethora of transportation methods to look forward to in the future, and while flying cars are still a ways off, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism thinks that autonomous vehicles can hit the country's roads as early as the 2020s. The automobiles won't be completely self-driving but instead will have an "autopilot system" that engages when driven onto specially designed expressways reserved for similarly equipped...
May 29 1:02a
Project SARTRE (or Safe Road Trains for the Environment) has successfully completed a 125 mile test involving three autonomous cars on public roadways in Spain. What differentiates SARTRE from Google's driverless car is that SARTRE consists of a caravan of autonomous vehicles with a leading car driven by a professional driver. Each vehicle behind the leader follows the one in front of it using a wireless network accompanied by a litany of cameras, radar sensors, and laser guidance systems...
May 22 1:54a
The California State Senate this week passed new legislation that would establish safety standards and regulations for self-driving cars. The bill, SB 1298, passed with a unanimous vote of 37-0, and will now make its way to the State Assembly, which is expected to issue its seal of approval within the next month.
Monday's announcement comes a few months after Nevada's legislature ratified its own set of regulations on autonomous cars, though California seems to be taking a more cautious...
May 07 9:49p
Nevada has been making a name for itself lately, becoming the first state to put in place rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles last February. It's now moved on to the next step, approving the first testing license under the new rules, and it's going straight to Google. Under the new laws, the self-driving car will be fitted with a special red license plate featuring an infinity symbol for easy recognition. While this is an important step, we're still a long way off from an autonomous...
May 02 10:56a
Giving up driving can be a huge loss of independence for the elderly, but a team of researchers at Newcastle University is hoping to extend that freedom through technology. The team has outfitted a standard electric car with a number of monitoring tools — including an eye-tracking system and bio-monitors — in order to determine what elderly drivers might need in order to stay on the road a bit longer. One of the main problems, it turns out, is that current tech like GPS systems can be...
Apr 27 5:49a
Judging from what Google has been saying to automakers, self-driving cars are still millions of test miles away from actually making it to showrooms, but survey results indicate some American drivers are ready to pay for the technology today. A new survey from J.D. Power and Associates says that 20 percent of vehicle owners tested either "definitely would" or "probably would" spend $3,000 to add fully-autonomous self-driving technology to their next vehicle.
Predictably, there were...
Apr 25 4:25p
Today we've seen what might just be the first baby steps towards getting self-driving cars into dealerships and onto the roads. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google was in Detroit today gauging interest in partnering with automobile manufacturers to get self-driving cars out of the labs and into consumers' hands. Let's not get ahead of ourselves — there's nothing to announce yet — but Google is certainly taking what started in 2010 seriously. The company say it's done over 200,000...
Mar 29 1:01a
Sometimes it feels all too easy to succumb to cynicism when looking at the cutthroat competition in the tech world, but a new video from Google that demonstrates its self-driving car is more than enough to lead one's heart back to the optimism inherent in human technology. In the video, Google employees pick up Steve Mahan, a man who's lost 95 percent of his vision, and put him behind the wheel — and from the moment the car starts up to a gentle robotic voice that announces "auto driving,"...
Feb 17 5:27a
Nevada is becoming the first US state to approve and regulate rules for self-driving cars on its roadways. Nevada's Legislative Commission approved regulations on Wednesday that will allow for the testing of autonomous vehicles, with a red license plate, on the streets of Las Vegas and other cities. Nevada state was originally lobbied by Google last year to introduce the regulations, although it's not clear why the search giant is throwing money at automated cars throughout Nevada instead of...
Jan 23 4:47a
The notion of a self-driving car has been steadily foregrounded since Google's autonomous vehicles were noted by the New York Times in 2010. Wired's Tom Vanderbilt takes an extensive look at the technology as a logical extension of the features we already enjoy — and the potential it has to change the notions of driving and car ownership. Multiple manufacturers including BMW, Audi, and Toyota are all working on their own versions of computer-controlled driving systems, with Alan Taub, vice...
Apr 16 9:37p
Michigan governor urges 'automotive capital of the world' to welcome self-driving cars
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...
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