Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

NHTSA is investigating 12 crashes by Teslas on Autopilot into emergency vehicles on the side of the road. It's also asking the other companies who make products like Autopilot for their statistics. What can be done to prevent these crashes, and are any number of them acceptable? Is Tesla doing things wrong or doing it better than anybody else? We may learn that and the issues are complex.

I discuss them in this new Forbes.com article:

Rounding out my 3 part series on doing a 5,000 mile international road trip in a Tesla, I talk about the times I used slower chargers. The world installed vast numbers of slow chargers at huge expense in a giant waste of money, but they do have virtues on a road trip, and eventually all hotels will have them. On a road trip charge and range become very important and sometimes they save the day.

On road trips many people like to have a cooler. For my most recent trip I graduated to getting a 12v compressor fridge, a real fridge that, in theory, needs no ice. I presumed that in an electric car, with a giant battery, running the fridge would be no problem (it uses up only about 2 miles worth of range electricity per day.)

That turned out not to be the case due to a bad way the Tesla 12v system is designed. I wrote up this story of the ins and outs of using a fridge in a car, and how to fix the 12v problem in this new story on Forbes.com

Companies are at the stage of announcing real pilot projects for robotaxi service. Now MobilEye announces they will start a robotaxi service in Munich and Tel Aviv by 2022. What are the new metrics of success for a team?

See more at MobilEye announces plans for robotaxis in Munich

The instinct of many transportation planners is to make "smart infrastructure," and to try to make plans for it going out 30 years. That's impossible, nobody knows what smart will mean in 5 years. The internet solve this problem, and grew by making the infrastructure as stupid as possible, and it revolutionized the world. The internet teaches lessons for how all infrastructure planning must go in the future -- keep the physical as simple as possible, do everything in the virtual, software layer.

Vehicle to Grid (v2g) to provide power from car batteries is tough. A new venture wants to do it with electric school buses, which follow a fixed schedule and have big batteries. I examine how that would work at:

Electric Schoolbuses and V2G

In the robocar world, everybody is safety-obsessed. But what if what's holding things up isn't that, but the fact that focus on safety had delayed the good road citizenship needed to operate a real service. Is good road citizenship even harder than safety? What ways might we measure it and get the trade-off right. I discuss this in a new Forbes site article seen in:

I got a chance to visit the Energy Observer, a French boat powered by solar and wind with hydrogen energy storage as it visited SF while sailing around the world.

Hydrogen doesn't work so well in cars, but it can make sense in other places like aircraft, trucks and grid. But what about on a boat?

Read my analysis at Aboard the Energy Observer, a French hydrogen/solar/wind powered boat

Updating a few stories reported before (including Monday) I note that Scale.AI has launched their mapping service, which helps people tag and label maps more efficiently. Pony.AI shows off they are doing taxi tests with no safety driver in China, where roads are more complex than in Fremont, California. And Waymo shows off its Pride.

Read about these in this Forbes.com article Scale Mapping; Pony.AI driving in China; Waymo Pride

Last week saw a flurry of robocar news. The most significant was the deployment of no-safety-driver testing by Pony.AI in Fremont, CA, but there's also big funding news for Waymo, Cruise and Kodiak, Deepmap is sold to Nvidia, new taxis for Baidu, deals for Nuro and a collision between a Waymo and a scooter in SF -- in manual mode. Read all about it in my round up at:

Robocar News Roundup

Two major virtual self-driving conferences scheduled themselves for June 9. So I went to both, of course. Interesting news tidbids came from Argo, Starship, Scale, Chinese robotaxi makers, Zoox and many others. I summarize it here:

Summary of interesting headlines from The Information and TechCrunch simultaneous conferences

Cruise has been granted a permit to begin unmanned robotaxi tests in California. But they aren't allowed to charge, which forbids a lot of useful research, and explains why Waymo hasn't bothered with that permit yet. I discuss why it's so useful to experiment with payment in this Forbes site article at:

Cruise gets vacant robotaxi test permit for California

8 years ago, I proposed that pool pumps really should be designed to make use of solar (or wind) power. We have now seen used solar panels show up at the ridiculous price of $50 for 250 peak watts.

New in Meet

Recently, Google showed off some new features for Google Meet. The key new feature, with the odd name of "companion mode" addresses a major problem of meetings which have a central meeting room with multiple people, and a variety of people outside "calling in."

For a long time, Tesla refused to implement driver gaze monitoring with Autopilot. Now, quietly, the new release does it, though with no other changes as yet.

But it's quite a shift in their actions.

See the details at this Forbes.com story at

Tesla activates driver watching camera

Some buzz has arisen due to photos of a Tesla with a LIDAR on it, and hints that Tesla is dropping radar from their cars in a hurry. Is this a major change of heart, par for the course, or a response to the chip shortage.

See analysis of that at this new Forbes site article:

Teslas with LIDARs and no radar -- it's not what you think.

Governor Inslee of Washington has refused to sign a bill he says he supports, which bans new fossil cars by 2030. He refused to sign it because it ties it to creating a road use tax system for EVs, which he says he also supports, but not in the same bill.

He might be right, but the reality is that having a road use tax system is a pretty trivial thing for the cars of 2030. In fact the Teslas of 2018 could do it with a software update.

A recently released video shows Waymo having some real problems when it encounters a construction zone it doesn't understand (that's expected) but then the remote ops team gives the wrong instructions and a comedy of errors follows. I discuss it here:

Waymo Peforms Embarrassingly In Construction Cone Situation

A VW executive suggested they might sell you a real self-driving function (when they have it) for around $8.50 per hour, as opposed to paying for it in a lump sum when you buy the car as Tesla plans.

What are the economics like of buying self-driving by the hour?

Read about that in my Forbes.com article at VW will sell you self-driving for $8.50/hour some day. Too high or too low?