Last Friday, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann announced Cruise for Good, a commitment to allocate 1% of Cruise’s resources to serving the community. This is part of the larger Pledge 1% initiative, that many companies have joined.

Cruise for Good has three mandates:

• Partner with nonprofits and organizations that know their communities the best
• Serve people who are the most vulnerable
• Go where the need is greatest

Today, we join the @PledgeOne movement, meaning our commitment to our communities will grow and scale with us. We’re taking advantage of the opportunity to weave social impact into our company early on, while our industry is taking shape.https://t.co/q8GR0mcQGP

— cruise (@Cruise) April 23, 2021

I wasn’t at all involved in this project, but it strikes me as aligned with Cruise’s larger commitment to the city of San Francisco, which is both one of the wealthiest cities in America, and also home to one of America’s largest homeless populations. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of good that can be done.

The commitment is not limited to San Francisco, however. Ammann’s Medium post states, “We pledge 1% of our fleet to serving local communities in need — not just in San Francisco, but everywhere Cruise goes.”

Here’s a video, featuring former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, explaining Cruise for Good in more detail.

Local Motors has just launched a pilot self-driving shuttle program at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, the base which was the setting for the original Top Gun Movie (the actual TOPGUN military program has since moved to Nevada, but base remains a Marine Corps Air Station). The vehicle model, which has previously deployed in other environments, is called Olli.

Before Cruise acquired Voyage, we focused on self-driving robotaxis for senior citizen retirement communities. The idea was that these were slower, simpler environments that would lend themselves to faster deployment of autonomous technology. Military bases are very similar in that regard.

In a few minutes, I bet you can think of other environments that share similar characteristics: theme parks, airports, university campuses, warehouses, protected self-driving vehicle lanes.

Years ago, Integrated Roadways CEO Tim Sylvester was a regular reader and commenter on my Medium articles. I think Tim has moved on, at least from commenting, but he is still pushing forward smart infrastruture in the US, almost by force of will.

I was excited to read this local news story about Integrated Roadways Smart Pavement being deployed in Lenexa, Kansas.

“It’s like big Lego blocks for roadways,’ Tim Sylvester, Integrated Roadways founder, said. “And then inside we put sensors and communication tech and what we call expansion ports, so you can add new technology in the future time.” Lenexa plans to open public swimming pools this summer, with COVID-19 protocols

Video from Integrated Roadways out of Kansas City shows how they make these blocks of roadway. The material used is sturdy, expected to last 35-to-50 years, which is much longer than asphalt.

“What we basically do is build the road as sections in a factory and then deliver them to the site, install them,” Sylvester said. “When it’s done, it’s totally invisible. You’d never notice that it’s there.”

Smart Pavement has already been deployed in Denver and Colorado Highway 285. The company is based in Kansas City.

I love to see autonomous vehicle progress in all these different places in America!

AutoX deploys its autonomy software and hardware to more vehicle platforms than any other company of which I am aware. In my latest Forbes.com article, I spoke with AutoX COO Jewel Li about how and why they’ve developed this capability.

“The Chinese auto market is more diverse than anywhere else,” according to AutoX COO Jewel Li. “Every manufacturer from the US, Germany, Japan, and Korea sells vehicles in China. On top of that, there are about 200 Chinese auto manufacturers. That’s why we work with so many different partners, whereas in other parts of the world, you tend to see autonomy startups align themselves with a single manufacturer.”

AutoX streamlines engineering work by deploying a consistent sensor and computational suite on all vehicle platforms. All vehicles in the AutoX fleet, whether passenger sedans, minivans, or box trucks, operate the same set of sensors and hardware.

We also discussed developments in their driverless robotaxi service in Shenzhen.

Mobileye and UDelv recently announced a partnership to create driverless last-mile delivery vehicles. When I first read the headlines, I thought this might be Mobileye’s first foray into fully driverless vehicles. Mobileye has for years been the leader in advanced driver assistance systems for cars, but has not yet released a driverless vehicle.

The TechCrunch coverage of the partnership, however, notes that Mobileye has been talking about driverless deployments for quite a while:

“More than two years ago, Mobileye announced plans to launch a kit that includes visual perception, sensor fusion, its REM mapping system and software algorithms. And in 2018, the company made an unlikely turn and announced plans to become a robotaxi operator, not just a supplier. Mobileye also plans to deploy autonomous shuttles with Transdev ATS and Lohr Group beginning in Europe. Mobileye also plans to begin operating an autonomous ride-hailing service in Israel in early 2022.”

That means that, in theory, the UDelv Transports won’t even be the first driverless Mobileye vehicles to market, since the Transports will hit the road in 2023.

An interesting aspect of the Mobileye-UDelv partnership is the presence of Donlen, a Canadian fleet management company that has ordered the first 1,000 UDelv Transports. The roles seem to be that Mobileye will supply the intelligence, UDelv will supply the vehicle platform and teleoperations, and Donlen will manage the vehicles.

Argo is an especially communicative AV company. CEO Brian Salesky hosts the No Parking podcast with journalist-turned-Argo-executive Alex Roy. They also publish Ground Truth, a high-quality online magazine that dives into the details of autonomy.

Particularly to Argo’s credit, they pair this communication with an absence of hype.

Argo’s recently-released Safety Report is of a piece with this communication style. The report clocks in at 55 pages and 22,000 (!) words. Argo’s view is that if you want to understand whether their vehicles are safe, you have to understand the entire company. “Safety isn’t a dial or a switch — it is the foundation on which our company is built.”

The report covers the entirety of how the company organizes and operates. If you want to understand the systems, structures, and processes that govern autonomous vehicle companies, this is the most thorough public guide I’ve seen.

Click to access ArgoSafetyReport.pdf

Two people died in a horrific Tesla inferno in Houston today, according to the city’s NBC affiliate, KPRC. Officials responding to the scene are quite confident nobody was driving – one of the deceased was in the passenger seat and the other in the back.

The car was on a quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac, and the vehicle occupants were 59 and 69 years-old, so this wasn’t a case of 20 year-olds screaming down the highway at 90 miles per hour.

Nonetheless, the most likely scenario is that the occupants were trying out Tesla AutoPilot (very much against the system’s guidelines and requirements, which specify that a driver must be in command of the vehicle at all times). The vehicle probably got confused and accelerated into a tree, although we won’t know the details for sure until a full investigation concludes.

The other issue here is that the car burst into flames so intense the fire department called Tesla, in hopes of figuring out how to douse the fire. The scale of the fire was driven by the ignition of the vehicle’s batteries, which has been a problem in previous collisions.

I am really disappointed in folks who abuse AutoPilot. While it’s tragic that vehicle occupants die, I suppose people should be able to make their own risk assessments. What’s really problematic is that pretty soon this won’t be a tree the vehicle crashes into, it will be a minivan full of kids.

I want so much for people would be responsible and not risk the lives of their neighbors and fellow citizens with these types of stunts.

The case for requiring a driver monitoring system in Teslas just gets stronger.

My friends and former colleagues at Ford have been running behind Tesla and GM on advanced-driver assistance systems. While Tesla AutoPilot and GM Super Cruise have been in market for years (albeit on a limited number of vehicles, in GM’s case) Ford’s ADAS offering, Co-Pilot 360, only made it to market in the last year and is so far much more limited than the competition.

Ford aims to change that, especially on its new flagship platform, the Mustang Mach-E.

To that end, Ford just completed and publicized MOART: The Mother Of All Roadtrips.

MOART completed 110,000 miles of nationwide (and Canada!) driving on BlueCruise, its upcoming ADAS offering. BlueCruise offers hands-free driving on “pre-qualified sections of divided highway”, much like GM Super Cruise. The functionality will be installed via over-the-air updates on both Mustang Mach-E vehicles and Ford F-150s, provided they have the right driver assistance packages pre-installed.

To top it off, Ford published this nifty video, commemorating the experience.

My former Udacity colleague, Ben Hommerding, is writing a running series on Medium about his new Tesla Model 3 and the 500,000 miles he intends to drive it.

Ben has lots of good tips for scouting and purchasing a Tesla, especially related to trading in your old vehicle, which is one of the few parts of the process that he found negotiable.

“After adding my trade-in and images, it took almost 3 days before receiving my confirmation back about the final value. Someone reviews the photos you took to verify the final value, and when that is done, you get the final value. “

I enjoy that Ben writes about the Tesla experience through a product lens, and has lots of little suggestions for how Tesla could make an already great purchase experience even better.

1. 500,000 Mile Electric Car Journey: The Starting Line
2. Road to 500,000 Electric Miles: Tesla Test Drive Experience
3. 5 Things to Know When Buying Your Tesla

Follow Ben on Medium so you can read his upcoming posts!

I haven’t done one of these in a while!

• DJI might be expanding from drones to cars. Huawei, too.
• Estonian delivery company Cleveron builds their own autonomous delivery vehicle.
• SAE offers twelve-week, virtual “self-driving bootcamp.” It’s geared toward recent college grads. Looks great, but I’m still partial to the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program.
• Xooglers raise $300 million for Groq, an AI chip startup with an interest in self-driving cars. The founder helped invent TPUs. They’re hiring!
• Udelv partners with Mobileye for autonomous delivery vehicles. I’ll look into this more and probably write up a post in a few days, because it seems to mark Mobileye’s first foray into completely driverless vehicles.