Autonomous Vehicle View – 09/19/14

This is a biweekly round-up of some of the articles on autonomous vehicles that elicited commentary from this author. Note, with all the buzz about autonomous vehicles, this list isn’t comprehensive.

• If the model for autonomous vehicle is a service model, however, where the car is owned by a service provider (e.g. Google), then more can be invested per car, since each car will effectively be serving more people. I have seen estimates of only 1/3 to 9/10 as many vehicles would be needed for a given population, if a service model is adopted. http://www.autonews.com/article/20140915/OEM10/309159961/sensor-cuts-self-driving-car-costs
• This limited test points to the idea that the autonomous vehicle will be introduced for specific use-cases, before going mainstream. As a test, it wouldn’t be surprising if some leading-edge city worked with Google to rid its downtown of human-driven cars and used a Google Vehicles as a Service to eliminate parking and make the downtown streets more pleasant for pedestrians and bicyclists. At a recent conference, I heard that a variation of this idea might happen soon in a locale near the shoreline. http://www.govtech.com/transportation/Google-to-Test-Cars-Without-a-Driver.html