California DMV Updates Rules

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has just posted its new rules for self-driving cars, and they are decidedly a win for Tesla and a loss for Google.

Google is not happy.

The rules state that a licensed driver must be at the wheel of a self-driving car in California at all times.

This is a fail for Google in a few ways.

One, Google’s goal is to transform mobility for millions of people who cannot become licensed drivers — the disabled, the young, the old. Requiring at least one autonomous vehicle passenger to also be a licensed driver completely defeats that goal.

Two, Google’s strategy is to bypass the phase of autonomous vehicle development in which the car must be able to pass control to the driver. That phase is tricky, and by taking all driving control away from the humans in the car, Google simplified its needs. Now the California DMV is forcing Google to tackle this specific problem.

Three, Tesla has been working on this human-machine interaction model for a long time, so it has a big head start over Google.

That said, Google has a lot of money, and thus a lot of political muscle. I don’t consider this to be the final word on self-driving regulations.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 17, 2015.

Baidu Self-Driving Cars

Baidu is entering the self-driving car race, although it is setting a more basic goal for itself and is hopes to reach that goal more quickly.

While many top self-driving car companies are targeting a 2020 launch date, Baidu is targeting 2018 for “vehicles that will operate on fixed routes or fixed areas in select cities”.

That seems like a reasonable engineering goal, but of course the question is whether anybody will want that product.

The product sounds an awful lot like a bus, so perhaps Baidu is setting itself up for competition with ride-sharing services like Uber.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 15, 2015.

Wanted: LIDAR Engineer

Business Insider reports that Google is hiring a LIDAR engineer.

Although BI reports this breathlessly as, “Google and parent company Alphabet are not leaving such a key ingredient in someone else’s hands,” it seems a little less earth-shattering than that. To be fair, BI eventually concedes that possibility, as well.

Any large organization that depends on suppliers for key parts is going to have internal specialists in those parts. When I worked at in AOL’s data center, years ago, we had all sorts of routing and switching engineers, despite the fact that AOL never had any desire to build its own routing a switching hardware.

I think the more intriguing, if less newsworthy conclusion here is that Google is gradually looking more and more like it’s going to have a real autonomous vehicle business, and not just a moon-shot lab project.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 14, 2015.

Ice Driving

A big challenge for self-driving cars (and for human drivers) is driving in sub-optimal conditions, especially snow. Everything looks different, the vehicles behave differently, and the mechanical components aren’t as reliable.

That’s part of why most autonomous vehicle testing has taken place in sunny coastal California. Mountain View has 260 sunny days per year, and 0 snowfall.

Of course, not everywhere has weather like Mountain View, and getting cars to work in the snow is important. And to build autonomous vehicles that work in the snow, developers want access to as much snow as possible. It’s unproductive to sit around for weeks on end waiting for snow to fall.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that Audi is planning to build a test track in Deadhorse, Alaska — the very northern end of the US road system.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 11, 2015.

Principal-Agent Problem

A Florida woman was recently reported to the authorities for a hit-and-run. The twist is that it was her own car that reported her.

The Ford car was outfitted with a program to automatically dial police in the event of an accident (the driver’s airbag deployed).

While this story has some bizarre twists to it — the driver committed the hit-and-run while fleeing a different, earlier accident — it’s representative of the world to come.

We’re used to thinking of computers as dumb machines that do what we want them to do. They’re turning into smarter machines that do what somebody else programmed them to do.

Generally speaking, that’s a good thing, but we’ll increasingly notice these kinds of principal-agent problems.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 10, 2015.

Will Autonomous Vehicles Disrupt Hotels?

A provocative article in Dezeen hypothesizes that self-driving cars will disrupt the hotel industry.

Cars will increasingly resemble mobile apartments, he said, and service stations along highways will evolve to support them, offering drivers facilities for washing, dining and shopping.

Hotels would change in response, Schuwirth added, with drivers using their facilities but returning to their cars to sleep. “Why should a hotel look like a hotel today?” he [Audi executive Sven Schuwirth] said.

An element of this is certainly true — some travelers will occasionally sleep in their cars. But I suspect this will be more like the way some travelers now sleep on red-eye plane flights. It happens, but it’s not that common (as a percentage of total nights spent on trips), and nobody likes it.

This does raise an interesting question about the ride-sharing industry, though. How much more specialized will vehicles become in the future?

In a world where people simply order up a ride, it’s possible to imagine specialty “overnight” vehicles that have beds instead of seats. And single-passenger pods. And a much wider range of delivery vehicle shapes.

Average will be over and specialized will begin.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 7, 2015.

Taxi Lenders: Another Disrupted Industry

Other medallion lenders that have acknowledged being blindsided by the rapid rise of San Francisco-based Uber in New York City include Valley National Bank of Wayne, which said it is “closely monitoring” a $159 million portfolio of medallion loans; New York City-based Signature Bank, which added $2.4 million to its loan-loss reserve in the third quarter, partly due to concerns about its $600 million medallion loan portfolio; and Citibank, which is suing a New York City taxi mogul over alleged defaults on medallion loans.

This is from “Uber rise blindsides lenders” by Richard Newman in NorthJersey.com.

This of course is due to Uber’s defeat of occupational licensing, not autonomous vehicles. But I think these lenders are an interesting example of the first- and second-derivative business that collapse when an industry gets disrupted.

What will the autonomous vehicle corollaries be? Auto insurance? Auto lending? Auto repair? Fast food might be an interesting example, if autonomous driving changes the cost/benefit economics of drive-through windows.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 6, 2015.

The Driverless Future of Los Angeles

I landed at Los Angeles International Airport this morning, on the way to a friend’s wedding in Rancho Palos Verdes.

As the LA Basin spread out underneath our approach, I was treated to a wonderful view of the LA sprawl, which really can look beautiful in the morning sun, from thousands of feet up.

The 405 stretched from Beverly Hills in the north to Long Beach in the south, and the 5 shot from Downtown LA to Anaheim and beyond.

Los Angeles is the ultimate car city. Most sprawl, worst traffic, best status cars, largest parking lots. Everything.

What will happen when drivers are no longer needed?

Parking will be a big change. More so than any other city (I think), LA devotes lots of valuable land to parking. That prime real estate will become a lot more productive once the parking demand subsides.

Traffic will be another change. There are mixed views about whether driverless cars will improve traffic (better, faster drivers), or worsen it (more miles traveled).

Sprawl may actually change LA more than other cities. Southern California has already maxed out its sprawl capacity. Hemmed in by mountains to the north and east, the ocean to the west, it has sprawled south into Orange County and San Diego, but even there minimal rural land is available for further expansion. Unlike, say Houston or Phoenix.

So, in the optimistic case, maybe driverless cars spur infill and bring forth a denser but also less congested Los Angeles.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on December 5, 2015.