This is a very narrow announcement, but my wife forwarded me an email from an entity I’d never heard of called Peninsula Clean Energy. They will reimburse $200 toward electric car rentals for residents of San Mateo County, California, which we are. That’s enough for a 2-3 day rental.

They recommend Turo, although they’ll reimburse from any rental agency. Turo is a good place to start, because they have a healthy collection of EVs (at least in our area). Unlike traditional rental agencies, Turo specifies exactly which car you’re renting. So there’s no risk of renting an electric car, only to show up at the rental counter (Turo doesn’t even have rental counters, it’s more like Airbnb for cars) and learn you’ve been “upgraded” to tank.

The main caveat here is that I’m unfamiliar with Peninsula Clean Energy. They seem reputable, though. Apparently they’re “San Mateo County’s official electricity provider.” I would’ve guessed that was PG&E, but perhaps PG&E only wholesales the electricity and PCE delivers the electricity. I’m unsure.

And of course this isn’t relevant to you if you happen to live outside the very narrow boundaries of San Mateo County. But maybe there is a similar program where you live? Worth looking.

Would you like to manage me?

I am a dream to manage, I swear. You just need to be a little patient when my microphone doesn’t work on Google Meet or Zoom.

Cruise is hiring an Engineering Manager for the Architecture & Acceleration Team in the Motion Planning & Controls Group. That’s my team!

It’s small – currently there are only two of us. So you’d get to join and build your dream team, almost from the ground up. My colleague, Sean, is a much better engineer than me, but I’m better at using emojis than he is. Between the two of us you’d start with a rock solid foundation.

Not quite ready for that plunge?

How about you just come be our colleague?

We’re also hiring (you guessed it!) Senior Software Engineers for the Architecture & Acceleration Team. You’d get to pair program with me! We’ll program self-driving cars together!

Email your CV to me (david.silver@getcruise.com). I know people here who can make things happen.

• That Tesla crash in Houston might have been more nuanced than first reported. But the crash in Southern California, which injured a good samaritan, did involve Autopilot. The Tesla backseat driver went to jail for a night, but says he’s going to keep backseat driving. Also, the Tesla-Apple talent pipeline.
• German government subsidies weren’t enough to make hydrogen-powered cars viable.
• WeRide raises hundreds of millions of dollars at a $3.3 billion valuation, to compete with Pony, AutoX, and Apollo in the Chinese robotaxi market.
• Navy beat Army at AWS DeepRacer. The winning team was called DeepBlueSea.

Packt Publishing asked me to review Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python, by Sudharsan Ravichandiran. After spending a few hours with the book, I’m pleased to report that I like it!

The most important aspect of most programming books or courses is how well they support learners in writing the code themselves. As my old boss, Sebastian Thrun, says, “You don’t lose weight by watching other people exercise.”

Ravichandiran’s book cleverly utilizes tools provided by Open AI Gym, along with TensorFlow, to provide lots of short hands-on exercises. The code is provided in Jupyter notebooks, and also explained line-by-line in the text of the book. (Hint: it’s cheating to just hit “Run All Cells” in the notebook! You don’t learn unless you type the code in – and inevitably debug it – yourself.)

I found the book’s mathematical explanations a bit dense, and the typesetting of the mathematical formulas seems off.

But that’s all forgiveable because the book got me clear and effective hands-on experience. Within an hour of opening the book (I did skip around), I trained a deep Q network to play Pacman!

A Waymo went a little rogue in Phoenix recently, with JJRicks in the vehicle, video recording. The vehicle stopped, blocked traffic, and then occasionally took off for a burst while the human support team tried to arrive and wrangle it. It was a bit like watching a rancher try to herd uncooperative livestock.

Everything turned out okay in the end. I’m especially struck by how well the Waymo team, who are kind of a supporting cast in the video, handle the whole incident. The Waymo remote assistance representative stays with Ricks the whole time, and doesn’t appear flustered or panicked. Same thing with the support driver who eventually arrives to take over.

The vehicle never hits anything, or even appears at risk of a collision. It’s a pretty calm scenario, all things considered.

Bloomberg has a short update on Phantom Auto, a teleoperations startup that has recently partnered with Mitsubishi Logisnext to remotely operate warehouse forklifts.

Phantom Auto was founded by some of the earliest students in the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program that I led, so I’m excited to see them doing well.

Co-founder Elliot Katz tells Bloomberg that remote operation has “the potential to knock 30% or more off forklift operation costs.” The driver of cost-savings seems to the ability to move jobs to lower-cost areas, since the remote operator doesn’t have to be physically co-located with the equipment.

I imagine that what I’ve heard in agriculture also applies somewhat to logistics, which is that the big advantage of automation (to the extent remote operation counts as automation) is actually increased performance, rather than labor costs. In a field, an automated machine can plant seeds more accurately and squeeze more yield out of the same amount of land, compared to a farm hand. In a warehouse, you could imagine that removing humans from the floor could allow for reconfigurations that would save space, accelerate movement, or otherwise improve efficiency.

I’m also curious how far we can push the migration of in-person jobs into remote operation, and possibly eventual autonomy. Covid-19 has pushed diagnostic telemedicine pretty far in the US, but procedures still require the provider to be physically present. Perhaps in the future, my surgeon or dentist will be operating on me remotely, from another timezone.

Both The Verge and CNBC report that Volkswagen & Argo will begin testing self-driving cars in Europe this summer. That news comes courtesy of a press conference with Brian Salesky, Argo’s CEO, and Christian Senger, a Volkswagen executive.

Announcements about self-driving testing (as opposed to commercial services) have become a little ho-hum in the US, but this seems like a big deal for Europe. So far, Europe has had very little autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, and even less news about such efforts.

Volkwagen is a major investor in Argo, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, with offices in California and Munich, Germany. Although much of the self-driving software that Volkswagen will test this summer was presumably written in the US, just getting it on the road in Germany will be a meaningful step forward for the European automotive industry.

Cruise is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Maps. This job looks like a great fit for a cloud architect, even one who has no experience in robotics.

Here are the requirements:

• 8+ years as a developer
• Build, ship, debug, and operate full stack web services
• Distributed systems
• Microservices
• API design
• SOA
• Node.js (or equivalent)
• React or Redux
• PostgreSQL

Now does that list look like a cloud architect, or what?

If you’re a cloud architect, you should be building self-driving cars! They’re amazing!

Email me 🙏

My latest Forbes article analyzes SAE’s recent redefinition of its six-level autonomy taxonomy.

“…it’s basically consistent with how the SAE previously defined Level 3: the human passenger isn’t ‘driving’, but has to be ready to take control of the vehicle when the system asks.

That leaves a fair bit of ambiguity, especially about how quickly the human must ‘receive’ requests to intervene. That, in turn raises the quest of how broad the range of other tasks is in which the human can engage, while still allowing enough time to take control if the system requires.”

I think that ultimately vehicle manufacturers will define Level 3 differently in practice. Read the whole thing.

He amused me.

“Yeah, it’s a hustle.”