Here's a few Robocar updates.

First of all, the TED talk given by Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Google self-driving car team (disclaimer: they are a consulting client) is up on the TED web site. This is one of the short TED talks, so he does not get to go into a lot of depth, but notable is one of the first public showings of video of the Google car in action on ordinary city streets. (The first was at PodCarCity, but video was not made available on the web.)

At TED the team also set up a demonstration course on the roof of a parking lot, and allowed some attendees to ride and shoot videos, many of which are up on the web. While the car does perform well zooming a slalom course, and people have a lot of fun, the real accomplishment is what you see video during the talk.

Another "City of the future" video has appeared featuring robocars prominently. This Shanghai 2030 video plays out a number of interesting robocar aspects, though their immense elevated road network reminds me more of retro futurism. A few things I think will be different:

• The people in the car sit side-by-side. I think face-to-face is much more useful. It's more pleasant for conversation, and it allows for a narrower car which has huge advantages in road footprint and drag. Some people can't stand facing backwards, and so there will still be side-by-side cars if you have two people like that, but I think a large fraction of cars will move to face-to-face, either narrow (for 2) or wide (for 3 or more.)
• The video shows cool displays projected onto the windscreen. This "heads up" sort of display makes sense if you have to keep your eyes on the road while using the screen, but in these cars, the people don't. On the other hand it's true that some people get motion sick looking down while riding, but you can also put an opaque screen in the middle of the window in a robocar.

It's National Robotics Week with lots of robot related events. In the Bay Area on Thursday, an all-day robotics demo day for kids and adults will take place at Stanford's robotic car lab, so people will get a chance to see Junior and other Stanford robocars there.

Fatalities drop

The trend continues -- last year U.S. road fatalities dropped again to 32,788. That's a steady decline since over 43,000 5 years ago. And this is in spite of total vehicle miles going up. As a result, the death rate per 100 million miles is now 1.09, the lowest it has been in 60 years.

That's very good news, though many forces fight for the credit. The leading contender seems to simply be that cars are getting safer in crashes, with better crumple zones and air bags, and more people wearing seatbelts. Medicine has also gotten better. Some will also be coming from better cars with safety systems like anti-lock brakes, crash-warnings and lane-departure warnings -- precursors to robocar technology -- but it would be wrong to assume these are a big component. Also worth noting that this happens in spite of the rise of people talking and texting while driving, though the secretary gives some credit to the recent laws banning this. But that doesn't explain why the drop began in 2005.

It's also odd that while fatalities drop almost everywhere, they're actually up in New England by 18% and by 4% around the midwestern Great Lakes, and generally up around the north-east.