There are many reviews of the Tesla Autopilot, and when I reviewed the Model 3 I left off Autopilot for a more thorough review.

We all love open source. But the usual rules of open source break down if every vehicle deployed on the road has to have gone through a complex and expensive safety certification process. You can't just download, patch and go.

So we need other solutions to allow the world of the tinkerer/hacker and the innovation and superior function it can provide.

Since the famous Trolley Problem has come up again recently thanks to the MIT Moral Machine, it's time for what seems to be an annual debunking of the notion.

This time, to illustrate the pithy headline above, I tell the story of why the hypothetical situation is even rarer than people imagine because of the way braking and steering systems are designed on robocars, and how their driving patterns will be designed to minimize risk.

For years, the most common slide in a skeptical talk on robocars would show a cop directing traffic, and ask how the cars will ever handle that.

Here's a video from Waymo showing off that ability.

What is the incremental cost of operating a car? It's not very well understood and here I hope to, together with readers, come to some better understanding of it.

I have written often about the new economies in transportation that future technology like robocars provide. In my research I've learned something that seems to not be well known in the transportation world -- that often, smaller is better and more energy efficient.

This week we've looked at two issues regarding robocars in the city:

California has released the disengagement reports the law requires companies to file and it's a lot of data. Also worth noting is Waymo's own blog post on their report where they report their miles per disengagement has improved from 5,600 to 11,000.

The discussion on cars circling to avoid parking fees (short-answer, they won't) leads to a few other interesting issues I want to cover.

For many years, people have wondered if people might tell their robocars to just drive continuously around the block rather than pay for parking. I've written before about how that doesn't make sense, but a recent paper from Adam Millard-Ball of UC Santa Cruz tries to make a real case that it could make economic sense, even if it's antisocial.

I have started doing some of my posts on forbes.com. They invited me to contribute and I felt it is worth finding out if it extends my reach. For now, I will link to posts here, and eventually I will perhaps build a special RSS feed to combine the posts I do there with the ones here to make it easy for readers.

Various announcements and rumors suggest the major German automakers, including VW/Audi, Daimler and BMW might be planning a real alliance on robocars.

Here is my gallery of photos and notes of interesting or silly products from CES 2019.

We continue to see lots of reports of a "pull back" on robocars, a "winter" of sorts. It is often presented as "the problem was harder than people expected" I discussed some of this in the prelude to my 2018 year in review.

My feet are aching, as usual, after 3 days on the CES show floor, and the question people always ask others there is "what have you seen that was interesting?"

I'm on my way to CES tonight, and am surprised to have not seen much robocar news yet from there. I'll publish some reports of what I see. The first modest announcement is the creation of a public education collective called PAVE which is the first consortium to have almost all the major players.

As I posted earlier I purchased a Tesla Model 3, the mid-range version with one motor and autopilot.

There are many reviews of this car out there, so I will go quickly over the common issues to get to areas I can give a special perspective on.