Jan 19, 2016

By Mike Spector and Mike Ramsey, Wall Street Journal Obama administration aims to remove hurdles to making autonomous cars more widespread The Obama administration is proposing to spend nearly $4 billion in a decade to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars on U.S. roads and curb traffic fatalities and travel delays. The proposal, which would require congressional approval, aims to have federal regulators work with auto makers and others to craft policies and rules for vehicles that can move without a driver at the wheel. It also would set up pilot programs for testing “connected vehicles” that talk to one another to avoid crashes under the $3.9 billion budget proposal. It isn’t clear whether or when any new regulations might be adopted. Regulators said they plan to issue guidance within six months on preferred performance characteristics and testing methods for driverless cars and collaborate with state officials on policies. A lack of clear guidance from regulators is among the barriers auto makers cite to allowing driverless cars to proliferate. Car makers prefer to have a clear national road map for approving autonomous vehicles rather than a state-by-state patchwork of rules. In Europe, the lack of a consensus has frustrated executives at Volvo Car Corp. and others developing the technologies. In Japan, industry officials are hoping for swift adoption by the government. U.S. regulators say they want to encourage technologies that can improve vehicle safety and reduce the nation’s more than 32,000 annual road fatalities. Driverless cars also hold out the hope of reducing pollution and more-efficient transportation, say government and industry officials. “Automated vehicles open up opportunities for saving time, saving lives and saving fuel,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said on Thursday at the North American International Auto Show, an annual auto industry get together in Detroit. In addition to improved safety, Mr. Foxx said driverless cars could ease the road-clogging effects of expected explosive population growth. “We are bullish on automated vehicles,” he said. Regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plan to exempt some autonomous vehicles from existing rules if they deem them to provide significant safety benefits. Car makers could be allowed to put 2,500 driverless cars on the road for...

Nov 19, 2015

By Jon Minnick, Manufacturing.net Automotive startup Local Motors has been teasing us with 3D printed vehicles for a while now. Earlier this year it showed off its Strati in Detroit with hopes of selling them this year. Now the company has pulled back the curtain on the LM3D swim, the first 3D-printed car designed for mass production. The all-electric LM3D Swim will contain about 75 percent 3D-printed parts, but the company plans to continue design development to increase that number to 90 percent as the technology advances. “In the past few months our engineers have moved from only a rendering to the car you see in front of you today,” Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers told the crowd at SEMA, where the car debuted. The company hopes to show off several variations of the LM3D that uses the same chassis throughout 2016 with plans to begin deliveries in 2017. Preorders will start in spring 2016 and come at an estimated retail prices of $53,000. That will be contingent on having a production facility and the chassis passing federal crash tests. Local Motors is currently building a factory in Knoxville, Tenn. slated to open this year. Take a look at the LM3D here:...

Nov 9, 2015

“Furtive Tesla Rival, Faraday Future, Announces $1 Billion Facility Investment” By Brooke Crothers, Forbes Faraday Future (FF), an electric vehicle startup, will invest $1 billion in a U.S. manufacturing facility, the company announced Thursday. Faraday — still very much a mystery because of a dearth of details about its vehicle and mission — describes itself as a “new electric vehicle and future mobility” company.  (Though the company may be less of a mystery if a report linking it to a China-based investor is accurate.) The $1 billion is a “phase one” investment, the Gardena, Calif. company said in a statement sent to the media.  The company is considering locations in California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Nevada for its “state-of-the-art facility.”  The decision about which location it will choose will be announced in the “coming weeks.”  On a smaller scale, this mirrors the investments in electric vehicle manufacturing that Tesla Motors TSLA -3.11% has made in the U.S.  Tesla has been aggressively investing in manufacturing at facilities in Fremont, Calif., a battery factory near Reno, Nevada, as well as smaller investments, including a stamping parts maker in Michigan. “We are very excited to make our $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing — and this is just phase one…Producing our forward-looking and fully-connected electric vehicles not only requires the latest technology, but the right community partner,” said Nick Sampson, senior vice president of Faraday Future, in a statement. Faraday reiterated that it expects to bring its first vehicle to market in 2017 and will explore “other aspects of the automotive and technology industries including unique ownership and usage models, in-vehicle content and autonomous driving,” the company said. Faraday, launched 18 months ago, now has more than 400 employees, according to the statement sent to the media.  The funding “is going to come from a different number of sources,” Sampsontold the Wall Street Journal, which said Faraday has started to order components already.  Sampson was the “lead chassis engineer” for Tesla’s Model S before leaving in early 2012, according to the Journal.  ”We are keeping our partners confidential,” he said. There are other recruits from Tesla as well as BMW and General Motors GM +0.00%.  See earlier story, “Faraday’s Electric Vehicle Future: A Factory And Tesla Talent.”...

Oct 29, 2015

By Charles Murray, Design News For autonomous cars to be successful, they can’t just think. They have to learn.  That’s a vexing problem for engineers. But it’s the reality facing the creators of tomorrow’s self-driving cars. Machine learning – in which software algorithms actually learn and make predictions based on sensor data – will play an important role in the development of those vehicles. “The autonomous car will have to have the ability to adapt, based on rules it learns by itself,” said Ian Chen, manager of marketing for systems, applications and software at Freescale Semiconductor Inc. For engineers, it will be a lot like raising children: Teach the vehicles how to learn; oversee their data-gathering process; then set up rules to help them make good decisions. The reason for doing it that way is obvious. No engineer can anticipate every eventuality. No one can imagine every on-road scenario. “A self-driving vehicle can always run well on a test track,” said Wensi Jin of  MathWorks, which makes data analysis and simulation software. “But once you release it to the world, you have to make sure it functions well in all kinds of road, weather, and traffic conditions. Dealing With Data Accomplishing that is at least a two-step process. The first step is to enable the car to deal with the massive amount of sensor data based on the eventualities that the engineers can foresee. That, too, is no easy task. To understand the complexity of it, consider a car with an autonomous braking system. The braking system must deal with a virtual blizzard of information. The first and most obvious data stream comes from the wheel speed sensors – the car must know how fast it’s going. But to operate autonomously, it needs more than that. It needs cameras to know what’s in front of it. It needs radar, LIDAR and infrared sensors to determine the nature and proximity of forward objects. It also needs data from tire pressure monitoring sensors (did a tire blow?), vehicle-to-vehicle communications sensors (is there a hazard ahead?), and gyroscopes (is the car yawing?). Experts say that future cars will even use audio microphones to help determine if they...

Oct 22, 2015

By Fox News Toyota, under ambitious environmental targets, is aiming to sell hardly any regular gasoline vehicles by 2050, only hybrids and fuel cells, to radically reduce emissions. The automaker promised to involve governments, affiliated companies and other “stakeholders” in its push to reduce average emissions from Toyota cars by 90 percent by about 2050, compared with 2010 levels. Electric cars weren’t part of their vision, outlined by top Toyota Motor Corp. officials at a Tokyo museum on Wednesday, striking a contrast with rivals such as Nissan Motor Co., which has banked on that zero-emissions technology. Toyota’s commitments come at a time when the auto industry has been shaken by a scandal at Germany’s Volkswagen AG, in which it admitted it cheated on diesel emissions tests covering millions of cars. Toyota projected its annual sales of fuel cell vehicles will reach more than 30,000 by about 2020, which is 10 times its projected figure for 2017. Fuel cells run on hydrogen and are zero-emissions. Toyota’s Mirai fuel cell went on sale late last year. Toyota has received 1,500 orders for the Mirai in Japan, and it just went on sale in the U.S. and Europe. Annual sales of hybrid vehicles will reach 1.5 million and by 2020 Toyota would have sold 15 million hybrids, nearly twice what it has sold so far around the world, it said. Hybrids switch back and forth between a gasoline engine and an electric motor to deliver an efficient ride. The Toyota Prius, which went on sale in 1997, is the top-selling hybrid, with about 4 million sold globally so far. Toyota is promising to develop a hybrid version in every category, including usually gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles, as well as luxury models. “You may think 35 years is a long time,” Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. “But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary.” Ise acknowledged some gasoline engine cars would remain in less developed markets, but only in small numbers. He and other Toyota officials insisted on the inevitability of their overall vision, stressing that the problems of global warming and environmental destruction made a move toward a hydrogen-based society...