I'm sure, like me, you have lots of electronic gadgets that have status LEDs on them. Some of these just show the thing is on, some blink when it's doing things. Of late, as blue LEDs have gotten cheap, it has been very common to put disturbingly bright blue LEDs on items.
Robocar news continues after CES with announcements from the Detroit Auto Show (and a tiny amount from the TRB meeting.)
Google doesn't talk a lot about their car, so address by Chris Urmson at the Detroit Auto Show generated a lot of press. Notable statements from Chris included:
Day 3 at CES started with a visit to BMW's demo. They were mostly test driving new cars like the i3 and M series cars, but for a demo, they made the i3 deliver itself along a planned corridor. It was a mostly stock i3 electric car with ultrasonic sensors -- and the traffic jam assist disabled. When one test driver dropped off the car, they scanned it, and then a BMW staffer at the other end of a walled course used a watch interface to summon that car.
After a short Day 1 at CES a more full day was full of the usual equipment -- cameras, TVs, audio and the like and visits to several car booths.
I've expanded my gallery of notable things with captions with cars and other technology.
A reasonable volume of robocar related stuff here at CES. I just had a few hours today, and went to see the much touted Mercedes F015 "Luxury in Motion." This is a concept and not a planned vehicle, but it draws together a variety of ideas -- most of which we've seen before -- with some new explorations.
When Southwest started using tablets for in-flight entertainment, I lauded it. Everybody has been baffled by just how incredibly poor most in-flight video systems are. They tend to be very slow, with poor interfaces and low resolution screens. Even today it's common to face a small widescreen that takes a widescreen film, letterboxes it and then pillarboxes it, with only an option to stretch it and make it look wrong. All this driven by a very large box in somebody's footwell.
One of air travel's great curses is that you have to leave for the airport a long time before your flight. Airlines routinely "recommend" you be there 2 or 3 hours ahead, and airport ride companies often take it to heart and want to pick you up many hours before even short flights. The curse is strongest on short flights, where you can easily spend as much as twice the time getting to the flight as you spend in the air.
Yesterday's note on Here's maps brought up the question of the wisdom of map-based driving. While I addressed this a bit earlier let me add a bit more detail.
I see new articles on robocars in the press every day now, though most don't say a lot new. Here, however, are some of the recent meaningful stories from the last month or two while I've been on the road. There are other sites, like the LinkedIn self-driving car group and others, if you want to see all the stories.
Uber is spreading fast, and running into protests from the industries it threatens, and in many places, the law has responded and banned, fined or restricted the service. I'm curious what its battles might teach us about the future battles of robocars.
Taxi service has a history of very heavy regulation, including government control of fares, and quota/monopolies on the number of cabs. Often these regulations apply mostly to "official taxis" which are the only vehicles allowed to pick up somebody hailing a cab on the street, but they can also apply to "car services" which you phone for a pick-up. In addition, there's lots of regulation at airports, including requirements to pay extra fees or get a special licence to pick people up, or even drop them off at the airport.
The heavy regulation had a few justifications:
Most of these needs are eliminated when you summon from an app on your phone. You can choose from several competing companies, and even among their drivers, with no market failure. Cabs don't cruise looking for fares so they won't cause much congestion. Drivers and companies can have reputations and safety records that you can look up, as well as safety certifications. The only remaining public interest is the question of a living wage.
Taxi regulations sometimes get stranger. In New York (the world's #1 taxi city) you must have one of the 12,000 "medallions" to operate a taxi. These medallions over time grew to cost well north of $1 million each, and were owned by cab companies and rich investors. Ordinary cabbies just rented the medallions by the hour. To avoid this, San Francisco made rules insisting a large fraction of the cabs be owned by their drivers, and that no contractual relationship could exist between the driver and any taxi company.
This created the situation which led to Uber. In San Francisco, the "no contract" rule meant if you phoned a dispatcher for a cab, they had no legal power to make it happen. They could just pass along your desire to the cabbie. If the driver saw somebody else with their arm up on the way to get you, well, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and 50% of the time you called for a cab, nobody showed up!
Uber came into that situation using limos, and if you summoned one you were sure to get one, even if it was more expensive than a cab. Today, that's only part of the value around the world but crazy regulations prompted its birth.
I'm going to call all these services (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and to some extent Hail-O) "Online Ride" services.
Copyright © 2026, Brad Ideas
Designed by Zymphonies