Tech Disrupts Transportation – Page 3

Narrative: Tech Disrupts Transportation

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Waymo CEO Says Ride Sharing and Trucking Likely First Uses of Autonomy (Sep 13, 2017)

This isn’t huge news, and I think people who follow the transportation industry and autonomous driving technology closely would probably know this already, but it’s worth noting these comments from Alphabet subsidiary Waymo’s CEO on the timing of various applications of self-driving technology. He said at an event today that he sees trucking and ride sharing being the first applications for autonomy, and that either one might be the first to be commercialized at this point. That’s very much in keeping with the conclusions I’ve reached and what I’ve heard from various other industry players – the fact that trucking largely involves long distances and highways dramatically simplifies the driving task there and enables platooning of vehicles, all of which means it has a much clearer near-term return on the investment in autonomous technology than most other applications. Ride sharing, meanwhile, typically involves cars which have very high utilization rates versus private vehicles, and is often limited to a well defined geographic area, making the training and gathering of mapping data a more manageable task too. Of course, we still don’t know quite what the business model for either of these applications will be – whether a licensing of the technology, a direct participation or revenue sharing agreement for the ride sharing market, or something else.

via Bloomberg

Tech Disrupts Transportation

US Transportation Secretary Introduced Revised Guidance for Self-Driving Cars (Sep 12, 2017)

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Tech Disrupts Transportation

NTSB Finds That Tesla Autopilot Was Partly to Blame for Fatal 2016 Crash (Sep 12, 2017)

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Tech Disrupts Transportation

GM and Cruise Start Using Mass Market Manufacturing on Early Autonomous Cars (Sep 11, 2017)

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Tech Disrupts Transportation

Tesla Announces Plans for Superchargers in Cities to Assist Urban Owners (Sep 11, 2017)

Tesla has just announced plans to add Superchargers (its rapid car chargers) in dense, urban locations in order to assist owners of its cars who live in cities and in many cases don’t have places to plug in their cars at home. Tesla’s own blog post does a good job of explaining the various charging options available today to owners both at home and away from home, but the post from Jalopnik linked below does a fantastic job of explaining the significance of the move. Essentially, if you’re an urban Tesla owner you have to explicitly go find somewhere to charge your car from time to time, which might well be inconvenient, especially because even the Superchargers take 45-50 minutes to charge the car. What Tesla is offering now is Superchargers sited in locations where those customers might already be spending time – e.g. at supermarkets, malls, or shopping or office areas within cities – so that their cars can charge while they’re busy doing other things. That potentially solves one of the biggest challenges for would-be urban owners of Tesla cars, and reinforces the challenge that still faces pretty much all of the other electric carmakers: the lack of widespread charging infrastructure. Though Tesla’s total scale in terms of car production remains tiny relative to the bigger manufacturers, the one area where it has a massive lead is in building out that infrastructure to enable charging while traveling and elsewhere, and adding Superchargers in cities will give it a further lead.

via Jalopnik