Google Spent $1.1 BB on Waymo So Far: In light of Mobileye, Cruise, Otto, and Argo AI, this seems like a steal.
Ford Faked a Self-Driving Car to Test out Human-Machine Interaction: It’s not clear to me that they really needed to fake the absence of a driver.
New Robotics Grads in Pittsburgh are Making $200,000 per Year: Carnegie-Mellon University basically caused this single-handedly. The returns to city from hosting a top-flight research university are looking pretty good.
With surprisingly little fanfare, Sunnyvale, California, appears to be experimenting with connected cars.
According to auto connected car news, Sunnyvale and Nissan just teamed up to deploy connected infrastructure to 130 square miles of roadway.
The article uses a new-to-me term: V2X. This stands for “vehicle-to-X (communication)”. More concretely, V2I=”vehicle-to-infrastructure”, V2V=”vehicle-to-vehicle”, and so forth.
The article is jargon-laden and a little hard to follow, but it appears that Nissan, Sunnyvale, and UC-Berkeley jointly set this up last summer as a test bed for connected infrastructure.
I mentioned earlier that Nissan has been fairly quiet on the autonomous vehicle front until recently, when it made a bold claim that it will launch lots of different autonomous vehicle models by 2020. This is further evidence that they’re serious.
David Silver 