Autonomous

The automotive industry has "overestimated the arrival" of autonomous cars says Ford, as its global CEO joins growing chorus of car makers watering down self-driving car hype.

Uber's robo-taxi vision has so far failed to materialise, but recently unsealed court documents reveal the company has been spending almost $30m a month since 2016 trying to make it a reality.

Nissan is set to deploy NASA-developed technology that uses humans to help navigate its autonomous cars remotely, conceding that true Level Five autonomous vehicles are likely impossible.

In a world in which we no longer drive ourselves, where our cars are more like trains, will we need so many different brands to choose between? Can they all survive, or will the big marques fold into one another, leaving just a few giant players standing?It certainly seems possible when you consider that two titans of the industry, Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co. are well on the way to an agreement to join forces to build autonomous cars.Bloomberg has reported that talks between the two companies over the plan, after initially stalling, are now progressing well, with the breakthrough being a possible framework that would allow VW to work with and invest in Argo AI, the Ford-backed self-driving-car start-up.While the talks are high level and private, sources have been leaking the news that the two companies have discussed a valuation for the joint company of $US4 billion.Officially, a VW spokesman told Bloomberg his company is in “constructive talks” with Ford, while a spokeswoman for the American giant said discussions were ongoing and had been productive.The deal would build on an agreement signed between the two in January to build commercial vehicles together. What price an eventual merger?At the very least, a joint venture on autonomous tech between the world’s largest car company and Ford would create a seemingly unbeatable colossus in the race to dominate the self-driving market, dwarfing even Google/Alphabet’s Waymo, and GM’s Cruise unit.Ford CEO Jim Hackett has already said he believes the market will one day be worth $US10 trillion. This really could be the future of everything, and not every company will get there.“There’s not going to be 10 winners in this space when we look back,” Hackett has said. “There’s going to be a few, and we plan on being one of them.”While Ford would bring the self-driving software it has been developing to the table - which would then be equally owned by the two companies - VW will being its electric-vehicle technology to the bargain, creating a formidable combination of IP.“The fact is, nobody can go it alone,” said industry analyst Michelle Krebs.“These are very expensive ventures with tremendous technological challenges. And the business challenge is just as difficult.”

The idea of an Apple Car - beautifully designed, always connected, obviously autonomous and reassuringly expensive - seems like a surefire home run, yet it seems to be taking longer to come to market than the hover boards from Back to the Future II.This might lead you to think there’s little substance to the rumours, but the fact Apple is genuinely working on a self-self-driving car has been proven with the release yesterday of data from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that shows that Apple undertook exactly 128,337km of testing for its mysterious machine in 2018.Apple is famously super secretive and would never voluntarily admit to anything at all, but under Californian law all companies testing autonomous vehicles must log the miles its vehicles have done without a driver at the wheel, and the authorities then release those figures to the public.California regulators call these “disengagement reports”, which measure how often a human driver had to intervene to take control from an autonomous-driving system during testing on public roads.Because this is a pretty serious safety issue, as you can imagine. Apple, which wouldn’t comment beyond the documents it was forced to file publicly, only applied for a permit to conduct testing in California in 2017, and it lags well behind the leader in the autonomous-driving field, Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the cool arm of Google.Waymo has conducted 16 million kilometres of testing around the world for what used to be called the Google Car.Comparatively, though, Apple is ramping up its road-testing schedule, because last year’s 120,000km-plus figure compared to just 1348km in 2017.So, Google/Alphabet/Waymo might well beat Apple onto public roads with self-driving cars, or taxis, but make no mistake, the Apple Car is coming. And the queues at your local Apple Store/Garage will be huge. 

In the race to be the first company in the world to get a fully functioning autonomous car into showrooms and on to public roads, it looks like global giant Toyota might just beat the high-tech Germans, and sci-fi loving Tesla, with the company pledging to offer a self-driving, road-registrable car within the next year.Toyota knows how big a task this is, indeed it’s being described as the company’s “moonshot”, a reference to the US space program aiming for the impossible back in the 1960s, but believes it can be done by creating the “most powerful supercomputer on wheels."James Kuffner, CEO of Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development Inc, or TRI-AD, is the man faced with the task of finding and hiring people with the necessary skills and then getting them not only to develop the software and hardware necessary, but finding ways to vastly reduce the amount such technologies cost. The goal being to produce a car people not only want, but can afford.TRI-AD was established in March, 2018 to help Toyota bridge the gap between theory and showroom floor more quickly. While the program is branded and run by Toyota, you can bet the first vehicles it puts on the road will be wearing a more expensive Lexus badge.Its first goal is to have vehicles that can drive themselves, at least in highway conditions, on Japanese roads by 2020, using a system called 'Highway Teammate'. As futuristic as that date sounds, it’s now less than a year away."The prototypes and the pre-production vehicles that the team is building here at TRI-AD are going to be… the most intelligent supercomputer on wheels," Kuffner told Autonews.com."We've called it the moonshot of my generation to build this technology and bring it to market.”As the name Highway Teammate might suggest, Kuffner is an American and has made his way to Tokyo via Silicon Valley.He’s got quite the budget to play with, too, as Toyota Group suppliers Aisin Seiki and Denso have invested $US2.8 billion into this new division.While we’ve heard about test mules, and even driven, or been driven, in a few before, on Japanese roads and race tracks - an unsettling but fascinating experience - Kuffner is all about turning these experimental vehicles into reality.”If you think about building a research prototype, making a demonstration is pretty easy, but making a product is really hard," Kuffner said."Whenever we talk about our company, we often talk about being a bridge of the prototype to the product.”Advanced prototypes already exist, of course, and they are based on a Lexus LS sedan, which has been turned into a kind of mobile laboratory.Globally, Kuffner admits, there is huge competition to find the best people with the knowledge to create supercomputers on wheels."People actually respond well to our mission," Kuffner said. "I can tell a top-talented software engineer, 'Would you like to write software to sell ads, or would you like to write software to save lives?’ And they'll join us."

The autonomous car dream is actually more like a nightmare for the majority of Australians, with more than half of us saying we'd never feel safe in a driverless car, and 40 per cent describing the rush to autonomy as "not a priority at all".

Toyota's dipped its sizeable toe into the autonomous waters, unveiling its P4 self-driving car - equiped with new Guardian technology the brand says is inspired by fighter jets - at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.

The boss of a Google-funded self-driving car project has issued an autonomy reality check, saying the technology might never actually work.

Chinese start-up Byton has torn the covers of its production-ready M-byte electric SUV, revealing what might be the most out-there interior design of recent times.