New California law allows autonomous shuttle test without driver

By Bruce Brown Published September 30, 2016

It only applies to testing and the crossing of one public road, but a new bill signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown allows the deployment of testing self-driving shuttles with no driver, according to Reuters.

French firm EasyMile has partnered with the Contra Costa Transportation Authority on a pilot project at the 585-acre Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon. The company’s EZ10 shuttles, which are also called Shared Driverless Vehicles (SDVs), are used in controlled locations in Finland, France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Applications in Europe include amusement park shuttles and a parking lot shuttle near a beach. In addition to internal mapping software, the EZ10s have sensors to avoid vehicles, pedestrians, and other obstacles.

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The vehicles in Europe have no brakes, accelerators, or steering wheels. The California office park vehicles were going to require modification to provide those mechanical control elements, but the new California law rules out that requirement as well as the need for human drivers.

Fifteen self-driving vehicle projects are already under way in California from car makers and tech companies, but those test vehicles must have brakes and a steering wheel as well as a human in the driver’s seat. With that in mind, the Bishop Ranch office park test is breaking new ground.

The two EZ10 office park test vehicles, which are limited to less than 25 mph, won’t carry human passengers until as much as six months of testing has passed without drivers or passengers. The law change was required because the office park transportation loop crosses a public road at one point. But that may be all it takes, as more similar projects can follow, although conditions will likely still be tight.

California has extremely restrictive laws for testing self-driving vehicles, to the point that Google and some other companies have taken testing to other states. When the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued guidelines for autonomous vehicles last week, a point was made was to clarify which elements of regulation and policy were matters for states to decide and which should be controlled by the federal government.

It was clear in the NHTSA guidelines that the DOT wants regulations for use of public roads to be consistent from state to state, and therefore fall under federal policy and oversight.

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Contributing Editor

Bruce Brown Contributing Editor As a Contributing Editor to the Auto teams at Digital Trends and TheManual.com, Bruce…

Cars

Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues

Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

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Audi halts vehicle deliveries to the U.S. as it mulls impact of tariffs

2021 Audi Q5

If you’d been thinking of buying an Audi, now might be the time. The German brand, owned by the Volkswagen Group, has announced it would halt shipments to the U.S. in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on all imported vehicles.
Audi is currently holding cars that arrived after the tariffs took effect, on April 3, in U.S. ports. But it still has around 37,000 vehicles in its U.S. inventory, which should be able to meet demand for about two months, according to Reuters.
Automakers on average hold enough cars to meet U.S. demand for about three months, according to Cox Automotive.
Audi should be particularly affected by the tariffs: The Q5, its best-selling model in the U.S., is produced in Mexico, while other models, such as the A3, A4, and A6 are produced in Germany.
Holding shipments is obviously a temporary measure to buy time for Audi and parent company Volkswagen. If tariffs stay in place, vehicle prices would likely have to go up accordingly, unless some production is shifted to the U.S. Volkswagen already has a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is planning a new plant in South Carolina. That latter plant, however, isn’t expected to be operational until 2027 and is currently dedicated to building electric vehicles for VW’s Scout Motors brand.
Other global automakers have also taken drastic measures in response to Trump’s tariffs. Jaguar Land Rover on April 5 said it is pausing shipments of its its UK-made cars to the United States this month. The British sports-luxury vehicle maker noted that the U.S. market accounts for nearly a quarter of its global sales, led by the likes of Range Rover Sports, Defenders, and Jaguar F-PACE.
And on April 3, Nissan, the biggest Japanese vehicle exporter to the United States, announced it will stop taking new U.S. orders for two Mexican-built Infiniti SUVs, the QX50 and QX55.

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Waymo faces questions about its use of onboard cameras for AI training, ads targeting

Two people exit a Waymo taxi.

In an iconic scene from the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report, on-the-run Agent John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, struggles to walk through a mall as he’s targeted by a multitude of personalized ads from the likes of Lexus, Guinness and American Express, everytime hidden detectors identify his eyes.
It was clearly meant as a warning about a not-so-desirable dystopian future.
Yet, 23 years later that future is at least partlially here in the online world and threatens to spread to other areas of daily life which are increasingly ‘connected’, such as the inside of cars. And the new testing grounds, according to online security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, might very well be automated-driving vehicles, such as Waymo’s robotaxis.
On X, Wong unveiled an unreleased version of Waymo’s privacy policy that suggests the California-based company is preparing to use data from its robotaxis, including interior cameras, to train generative AI models and to offer targetted ads.
“Waymo may share data to improve and analyze its functionality and to tailor products, services, ads, and offers to your interests,” the Waymo’s unreleased privacy statement reads. “You can opt out of sharing your information with third parties, unless it’s necessary to the functioning of the service.”
Asked for comments about the unreleased app update, Waymo told The Verge that it contained “placeholder text that doesn’t accurately reflect the feature’s purpose”.
Waymo’s AI-models “are not designed to use this data to identify individual people, and there are no plans to use this data for targeted ads,” spokesperson Julia Ilina said.
Waymo’s robotaxis, which are operating on the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, do contain onboard cameras that monitor riders. But Ilina says these are mainly used to train AI models for safety, finding lost items, check that in-car rules are followed, and to improve the service.
The new feature is still under development and offers riders an opportunity to opt out of data collection, Ilina says.
But as we all get used to ads targeting based on everything that’s somehow connected to the web, it seems a once-distant vision of the future may be just around the corner.