Alex Davies

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“It’s A Refrain Among GM Executives That In The Next Five To 10 Years, The Auto Industry Will Change As Much As It Has In The Past 50”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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In 2016, GM promises to begin selling the first affordable EV possessing a 200-mile range. That might merely be a short-term victory for Big Auto, though history seems to suggest otherwise. 3D Printers may ultimately disrupt the business of car manufacture, seriously lower the barrier to entry and allow for the extreme customization of cars, but that may very likely not be the case. If I had been around in the early days of Homebrew, I probably would have felt the same of personal computers or at the very least, software, but I would have been wrong. The same may hold true for the auto sector.

In a Wired cover story about GM seemingly outfoxing Tesla thus far in the EV market, an unlikely twist to be sure, Alex Davies writes about the urgency of the Chevy Bolt’s creation. An excerpt:

These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to 10 years, the auto industry will change as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electric cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infra­structure and develop clean ways to generate electricity. Cars will start speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line between driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.

The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the move from gasoline to electricity will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from owning cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the ability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech firm on a variety of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those new business models as it enters emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.

This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the changes of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley outfit.•

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“[GM] Will ‘Absolutely’ Make Cars For An Age When Human Driving Is Defunct”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Completing driverless cars isn’t exactly a self-fulfilling prophecy but the increasing time and money invested in autonomous will likely lead to a large victory at some indeterminate point in the future. Excerpts follow from two pieces on the topic, the first one about GM going all in on the technology at its Warren Technical Center and the other about automated trucks outperforming human workers in Australia.

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From Alex Davies at Wired:

It’s a fitting locale for this kind of testing: Since 1956, the Eero Saarinen-designed Warren campus has served as the automaker’s main research hub. Since 2009, it’s been the home of the country’s largest battery lab, where GM develops and tests the all-important lithium-ion batteries that power the Volt, and will power the Bolt, the affordable car with 200 miles of electric range it intends to introduce in 2017.

And the Volt is a fitting car for the project: an electrified system makes it easier for engineers to tap into the controls, but more importantly, it’s the most forward-looking car in the GM stable. There’s a reason nearly every autonomous prototype out there is electric: When you’re talking bout one technology of the future, it makes sense to pair it with another.

[CEO Mary] Barra adds a third category: connectivity. “You need embedded connectivity to make autonomous work. And that’s where General Motors has a lead,” with nearly two decades of OnStar-equipped vehicles on the market. It’s moving from there to vehicle to vehicle communication, starting with two Cadillac models next year.

Barra says GM isn’t going to rely on the traditional owner-driver model to keep its business going, and will “absolutely” make cars for an age when human driving is defunct. “We are disrupting ourselves.”•

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From Peter Klinger at Yahoo! News:

Rio Tinto says the use of automated trucks in the Pilbara is outperforming its traditional people-driven fleet by 12 per cent as it ramps up technology deployment in its iron ore business.

Addressing the Nikkei Asia Review Forum in Sydney today, Rio Tinto group executive of technology and information Greg Lilleyman said its Mine of the Future program and “pioneering” collaboration with Japanese manufacturer Komatsu “had helped lead the way in our industry”.

Tesla unveils autopilot cars

Mr Lilleyman, who ran Rio’s Pilbara mines before taking on the Brisbane-based technology role two years ago, credited a decision to seek the input of Japanese suppliers with his company’s ability to lower operating costs, cut capital expenditure and “seize growth opportunities in Asia”.

The Mine of the Future program, which had automated trucks as one of its first targets, has been extended to automated drills, drones and use of big data.•

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“What’s Important Here Is Google’s Commitment To Its All-Or-Nothing Approach”

May 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Logic and logistics suggest autonomy will be introduced gradually into cars as it has been thus far, allowing for regulatory bodies and human ones to gradually release the wheel over the next two or three decades. But Google isn’t interested in much of an intermediate stage, hoping to make driverless the way to ease on down the road in just five years. From Alex Davies at Wired:

What’s important here is Google’s commitment to its all-or-nothing approach, which contrasts with the steady-as-she-goes approach favored by automakers like Mercedes, Audi and Nissan.

Autonomous vehicles are coming. Make no mistake. But conventional automakers are rolling out features piecemeal, over the course of many years. Cars already have active safety features like automatic braking and lane departure warnings. In the next few years, expect cars to handle themselves on the highway, with more complicated urban driving to follow.

“We call it a revolution by evolution. We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system,” says Thomas Ruchatz, Audi’s head of driver assistance systems and integrated safety. Full autonomy is “not going to happen just like that,” where from one day to the next “we can travel from our doorstep to our work and we don’t have a steering wheel in the car.”

Google thinks that’s exactly what’s going to happen.•

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“Get Ready To Add $10,000 To The Price Tag”

April 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Driverless cars, when and if they’re perfected, won’t require as much protective weight since crashes would be greatly reduced. That will somewhat restrain the costs of this new machine, but there are other reasons why the hardware won’t be prohibitive once the software is a reality. It will cost more initially, but perhaps not as much as expected. From Alex Davies at Wired:

The cost of self-driving cars isn’t often discussed, mostly because we’re still years from commercial production, and because there are much tougher questions to answer before we can talk money. But a new report on the market for and development of self-driving cars, by the Boston Consulting Group, offers some estimates. And partly thanks to that affordable hardware, they’re not that high.

According to the group’s research, urban and autopilot will each add about $5,500 to a car’s price tag. You can have a car that parks itself for an extra $2,000. If you want full autonomy—the ability to drive anywhere, with no human input—get ready to add $10,000 to the price tag, at least in the first 10 years the technology’s on the market.

“The technology is already there,” says Xavier Mosquet, head of Boston Consulting Group’s North America automotive division.

Hardware falls into three categories: sensors, processors, and actuators. Given the high level of electronics in today’s car, actuators—the bits that allow a computer to physically do things like brake, change gears, and steer—don’t pose a problem.•

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“It Isn’t A Car Anyone Would Ever Want To Drive”

March 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two excerpts follow about driverless cars. The first is swooning review of a Mercedes robocar from Alex Davies of Wired, the second, from Google X’s Astro Teller at Backchannel, examines the more mundane problems of making autonomous a reality.

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From Davies:

There will come a time, within a few decades, when people simply will not drive anymore. This is a hard truth for automakers like Mercedes-Benz and Audi to acknowledge, given the time and money they spend portraying their cars as fun to drive. So they serve every shot of “Your car will drive itself!” with a chaser of “But you can always drive your car if you want to!” This will make sense as the transition to autonomous cars begins: You’ll take the wheel of your SL-Class when driving through the winding hills, it’ll take over on your boring commute.

But the day is coming when we won’t even do that. That explains why the steering wheel in the F 015 is largely vestigal.

I didn’t get behind the wheel of the F 015, and I had no desire to: It isn’t a car anyone would ever want to drive. For one thing, it’s huge. No amount of torque from the electric motors Mercedes happened to slap into this thing will ever make it an exhilarating performer. It’s also somewhat cumbersome; that epic wheelbase does nothing for its agility (Hutzenlaub says Mercedes would consider giving the car four-wheel steering if it ever considered production.)

But all of that is moot. As I nestled deeper into the leather seats, the idea of leaving the touch screens alone and taking the wheel seemed genuinely stupid. After all, you don’t leave first class to sit in the cockpit.

The F 015 one of the most thrilling cars I’ve ever seen. And I don’t want to drive it.•

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From Teller:

One of our projects is focused on building a fully self-driving car. If the technology could be made so that a car could drive all the places a person can drive with greater safety than when people drive in those same places, there are over a million lives a year that could be saved worldwide. Plus there’s over a trillion dollars of wasted time per year we could collectively get back if we didn’t have to pay attention while the car took us from one place to another.

When we started, we couldn’t make a list of the 10,000 things we’d have to do to make a car drive itself. We knew the top 100 things, of course. But pretty good, pretty safe, most of the time isn’t good enough. We had to go out and just find a way to learn what should be on that list of 10,000 things. We had to see what all of the unusual real world situations our cars would face were. There is a real sense in which the making of that list, the gathering of that data, is fully half of what is hard about solving the self driving car problem.

A few months ago, for example, our self-driving car encountered an unusual sight in the middle of a suburban side street. It was a woman in an electric wheelchair wielding a broom and working to shoo a duck out of the middle of the road. You can see in this picture what our car could see. I’m happy to say, by the way that while this was a surprising moment for the safety drivers in the car and for the car itself I imagine, the car did the right thing. It came autonomously to a stop, waited until the woman had shoo’d the duck off the road and left the street herself and then the car moved down the street again. That definitely wasn’t on any list of things we thought we’d have to teach a car to handle! But now, when we produce a new version of our software, before that software ends up on our actual cars, it has to prove itself in tens of thousands of situations just like this in our simulator, but using real world data. We show the new software moments like this and say “and what would you do now?” Then, if the software fails to make a good choice, we can fail in simulation rather than in the physical world. In this way, what one car learns or is challenged by in the real world can be transferred to all the other cars and to all future versions of the software we’ll make so we only have to learn each lesson once and every rider we have forever after can get the benefit from that one learning moment.•

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“It’s Not A Proof Of Concept, Or A Scale Model. It’s The Real Deal.”

February 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The first Hyperloop is slated to be built next year in California. It’s not to be a test track but a fully operational, though only five-mile version, of the nouveau transportation system designed by Elon Musk. From Alex Davies at Wired:

The Hyperloop, detailed by the SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO in a 57-page alpha white paper in August 2013, is a transportation network of above-ground tubes that would span hundreds of miles. Thanks to extremely low air pressure inside those tubes, capsules filled with people zip through them at near supersonic speeds.

The idea is to build a five-mile track in Quay Valley, a planned community (itself a grandiose idea) that will be built from scratch on 7,500 acres of land around Interstate 5, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Construction of the hyperloop will be paid for with $100 million Hyperloop Transportation Technologies expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year.

They’re serious about this, too. It’s not a proof of concept, or a scale model. It’s the real deal. “It’s not a test track,” CEO Dirk Ahlborn says, even if five miles is well short of the 400-mile stretch of tubes Musk envisions carrying people between northern and southern California in half an hour. Anyone can buy a ticket and climb aboard, but they won’t see anything approaching 800 mph. Getting up to that mark requires about 100 miles of track, Ahlborn says, and “speed is not really what we want to test here.”

Instead, this first prototype will test and tweak practical elements like station setup, boarding procedures, and pod design.•

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“All That Tech Recedes Into The Background”

January 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The future occasionally crash-lands into our lives, but usually it goes far easier on the brakes. The latter, more-prosaic scenario is what Alex Davies of Wired encountered when he took the wheel gave up the wheel of Audi’s highway-ready driverless vehicle. An excerpt:

“If this A7, nicknamed Jack, wasn’t advertising ‘Audi piloted driving’ on its side, you’d never know it wasn’t just another German sedan cruising down the 5. All the gadgetry that keeps it squarely centered in its lane at precisely the speed you select is discretely incorporated into the car. It’s top-end stuff, too: six radars, three cameras, and two light detection and ranging (LIDAR) units. The computers that allow the car to analyze the road, choose the optimal path and stick to it fit neatly in the trunk. It’s remarkably smooth, maintaining a safe following distance, making smooth lane changes, and politely moving to the left to pass slower vehicles controlled by carbon-based life forms. It’s so sophisticated that I never felt anything unusual, and in fact the car is designed to reassure you that you need only grab the wheel or tap the brake to immediately resume control.

And that’s the most remarkable thing about Audi’s robo-car: All that tech recedes into the background. Driving this car is mundane, almost boring.”

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“You’ll Charge Our Cars The Way You Charge Your Phone”

October 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While Elon Musk’s EV charging stations are impressive to look at, they may be redundant if the “gorging” paradigm of refueling can be transformed into a “grazing” one. From Alex Davies of Wired:

“Beyond the (significant) question of cost, Envision’s longterm plan for the EV ARC includes a fundamental change in how we think about refueling our cars. The idea of building a network of DC Fast Charging stations (like Tesla’s proprietary Superchargers) is ‘silly,’ [Envision Solar CEO Desmond] Wheatley says, because it’s based on the way we gas up engine-powered cars. It’s a ‘gorging’ mentality, when an electric vehicle calls for a ‘grazing’ mentality advocated often call ‘opportunistic charging.’ Eventually, you’ll charge our cars the way you charge your phone: while you sleep or work, and just about anytime you don’t need it in your hand. That has ‘become part of our cultural norm,’ Wheatley says.

‘The problem is we’ve got 100 years of cultural norm that says I must be able to pull over somewhere, and I must be able to fuel in three to five minutes. That’s what we’ve all be ingrained to think. I’m convinced that today’s children will think it’s hilarious that we ever pulled off the highway to charge.’ And, he argues, electric cars will eventually offer enough range to cover a distance anyone would want to drive without stopping to sleep, except the most energy drink-fueled college students. ‘Charging infrastructure will be ubiquitous. It’s my mission to make sure that it’s all renewably energized.'”

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