Re: Autonomous Vehicles News & Discussions
Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2021 1:28 pm
FSD 10.0.1. Dirty Tesla has tried the underground parking-lot with numerous FSD versions. Now, for the first time, the car didn't go straight into the wall..
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(KITV) The brightly-colored robotic boats made by Saildrone seem to have a death wish.
Saildrone makes autonomous ocean vessels to study the environment. This summer, the Silicon Valley startup sent five of its vessels directly into the path of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. While airplanes can fly through hurricanes, the screaming winds kick up such huge waves that attempting to sail boats right into them is something best to be avoided.
Saildrone's vessels are uncrewed, and built to survive hurricane winds and huge waves. Scientists are excited that the vessels could improve our understanding of how storms intensify.
"If you're in the center of a hurricane at those type of wind speeds, the ocean is just this big, frothy mess right there where the water begins and the air ends," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration director of engineering Chris Meinig told CNN Business. "I cannot imagine purposely flying a plane or a ship into a hurricane. I'd much rather send these robots in there and have them do their work."
(TechCrunch) General Motors has now joined a slew of other major automakers, including Toyota, Chinese state-backed SAIC Motor, and Mercedes-Benz AG in putting its chips behind Chinese autonomous driving startup Momenta.
GM, the largest automaker in the U.S. in terms of vehicle sales, said Tuesday it will invest $300 million in Momenta to accelerate the development of AV tech for future GM vehicles in China. Julian Blissett, executive VP of GM and president of GM China, said in a statement that the investment will help the automaker bring “solutions tailor-made for [GM’s] consumers in China.”
The news comes less than six months after Momenta closed a nearly $500 million funding round, which saw participation from SAIC, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz AG and Bosch. As TechCrunch’s Rita Liao notes, “mega-fundraising has become common in the capital-intensive autonomous vehicle world.” But it appears that the startup is moving closer to commercialization as it aims to mass-produce cars equipped with its software by the end of this year.
This is just the latest aggressive investment into next-gen technology from GM, which said in June it had earmarked $35 billion for electric and AV ventures through 2025. Here in the U.S., GM’s interest in autonomous technology is best-known via its self-driving subsidiary, Cruise, which recently tapped a $5 billion line of credit from the automaker’s financial firm.
(TechCrunch) Autonomous vehicle company Motional is expanding its operations and employee headcount in Las Vegas, including tripling the size of its testing facility, in the run up to its planned 2023 commercial deployment of robotaxis.
The company, the product of a $4 billion joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai, has been in Las Vegas for nearly four years. Motional first began testing it autonomous vehicle in Las Vegas through a partnership with Lyft. The two companies kicked off with what was supposed to be a weeklong pilot program to offer rides in autonomous vehicles on the Lyft network in Las Vegas during the 2018 CES tech trade show.
The partnership predates the joint venture with Hyundai. At the time, Motional was known as Aptiv Autonomous Mobility Group. That temporary experiment, which has always included a human safety driver, was extended and still exists today. As of February 2020, the program had given more than 100,000 paid self-driving rides in Aptiv’s — now Motional’s — self-driving vehicles, per the Lyft app. Motional has not provided an updated number on the number of paid rides taken through the Lyft app.
https://newatlas.com/automotive/gm-ultra-cruise/
General Motors is officially dialing its self-driving program up from "Super" to "Ultra." Set to launch in model year 2023, the all-new Ultra Cruise system promises a full hands-free driving experience in 95 percent of driving scenarios. At launch, it will cover more than 2 million miles of pavement in the US and Canada, with plans to expand coverage to every paved road in both countries. It'll be another step toward handing the reins over completely to the machine-chauffeur.
When GM first introduced Super Cruise on the 2018 Cadillac CT6, the system was an impressive step forward for the company in terms of hands-free capability, but it was limited to 130,000 miles of US and Canadian highway mapped in GM's database. Even after adding about 50 percent more highway to the network for a total of 200,000 miles, Super Cruise works only on a small percentage of the millions of miles of paved public roads across the two nations.
With Ultra Cruise, GM is pushing to expand the utility of its hands-free tech across all US and Canadian paved roads, starting at launch with 2 million miles of pavement, 10 times the number it currently advertises for Super Cruise. The system will work not only on major highways but also paved rural roads, city streets and even subdivisions, GM says. In time, that coverage will grow to the roughly 3.4 million miles of paved roads that stretch across the two countries.
(Clean Technica) It’s been a couple of years since many of us first expected our cars would be getting “feature complete” Full Self-Driving. In 2018 when I bought my Model 3 and the first half of 2019, the plan was by the end of 2019. After several hurdles, code rewrites, and changes in what hardware to use (“vision only” is now the plan), we’re getting closer. However, we’ve got more cases of Tesla “pulling back the football” like Lucy always used to do to Charlie Brown. Let’s catch up on a few of these.
- Tesla: Everyone who bought Full Self Driving (FSD) will get a button to download FSD Beta.
(Several months later …) Here’s the button, but, actually, we’re going to score your driving first to make sure you are a safe driver.
- Tesla: We will release feature-complete software next Friday.
No, actually, we really meant a week from Friday.
- Tesla: Everyone who got a perfect score will get to download the ‘Feature Complete’ software.
Me: Wait, really?How can you play a game when you don’t know the rules? Learn as you play.
- Tesla: A score of 99 or 98 is not good enough!
Me: Really? Anyone who has taken a college test knows that 99 or 98 is an A+. I’m not good enough for FSD Beta just because Autopilot was too aggressive, I touched the brake pedal a couple of times, and another driver cut in front of me?
After one day, I figured out how to get a score of 100...