#the desert is 100% based off of mojave because I actually have been there and the shrubs are cool

[cleocatrablossy]

“So, Armageddon, here we come/Who are the chosen ones?”

Lyrics from Saints & Sinners by Flogging Molly

[666prophet]

Fallout S1:E2 - The Target

More world building and starting the main storyline. To the general audience it might be a win. For the more knowledgeable and Fallout fans it’s a bit rough in my opinion. It’s zany and fun but over all light on moving along the story. Kinda feels more like a filler.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Spoilers and Deep Dive~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok so we meet presumably the Enclave. Interesting that they are heavy on laser weapons since historically/canonically they were more fans of plasma weapons. We got a blink-and-you-miss tease of a super mutant. Obligatory dog insertion, although it’s funny they went with a Belgian Malinois to avoid the Dogmeat call back. Dr. Wilzig, I hope, has nothing to do with the FEV or I’m gonna flip shit. Storm troopers have better aim than that turret from 6ft away.

How the fuck did Maximus attach himself to Titus’ armor? Also cool I guess the vertibird just fucked off back to base? So no one is gonna call it a yao guai? Ok cool. Titus has a flashlight on his helmet and refuses to turn it on when exploring a dark cave? Got it. Titus has to be the most baby-back bitch made knight in BoS history. You ran screaming from a yao guai while in power armor. Then apparently died?!?!? That wasn’t a plot death at all 🙄. Also that yao guai went blow for blow with Titus but then went down with two shots to the head? I mean I have to give them credit for bringing back the 10mm pistol from Fallout 1 &2, but I don’t remember it being that strong.

The moron guy scene is just stupid and pointless. Unless you are trying to make survivors out to be idiots. The writers seem to not be able to make up their minds to whether power armor is a hulking heavy suit or just cool lightweight semi tough thing you wear. Maximus either has no idea or no care about using too much power and needing a new core to power it. The chicken fucker scene is just…😐. It also shows more of this thing of Maximus trying to be the new fighter for justice of the Wasteland. McScuse me! When did Tony Stark work on T60s? There is a jetpack for T60s in Fallout 4 but that’s a big loud heavy thing that takes actual fuel. Not some wrist jet things.

So I have A LOT to say about Filly. First off wow it’s amazing how many old Fords, Chevys, and Lincoln’s were just all around this one area. Also who the fuck brought all these Cessnas and 747s? Not a single in universe version of car or motorcycle is present. Like you guys didn’t even try to make things seem canon. Another interesting thing of note is there are no animals/bugs. No wild dogs, bloat flies, bloodbugs, mole rats, radscorpions, giant ants, iguanas, radstags or even deathclaws. We saw one yao guai, one brahmin, one radroach and the dogs from the Enclave site(including CX404). There were the goats but canonically the only goat like things that survived were bighorners and they are in the Mojave. Another curious thing is that they are no other ghouls next to The Ghoul (Goggins), not even feral ghouls or glowing ones. Now Ma June says "your kind isn’t welcome here", perpetuating the canonically held dislike/distrust of ghouls. So wouldn’t that make a ghoul armed to the teeth sitting in the middle of Filly kinda conspicuous?

Now onto the shoot out and fight with “Knight Titus”. Time for nerdy gun shit. Someone aims their PPSh, how they got a Russian submachine gun who knows. The PPSh was the basis for the styling of the combat shotguns in Fallout 3 & 4, but it was never a full gun in those games. We see our first instance of a pipe weapon which is nice. Now The Ghouls’ shotgun has never been seen in canon and is based on an MTs255 a Russian revolver based shotgun. The pistol used by Maximus is some weird Desert Eagle that’s never been in canon. Which is funny because you could have just used a Desert Eagle which was already in Fallout 1

The robot foot things is 100% tv show fabricated. Which I’m amazed that Ma June can even move so easily after being shot…in the knee….on her dominant leg. The reviving of CX404 was a nice touch. Seeing as we can all agree killing a dog is a no-no. Although she did attack The Ghoul about 20min ago, so I don’t understand why she would be so keen on tagging along with him. The ripper vibroblade being foldable is new and kind of odd seeing as that would compromise its strength. Lucy also amazingly gets over her crisis of faith over cutting a man’s head off quite quickly. Seeing as two days ago she wasn’t too keen on violence.

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This one was definitely a miss for me. It wasn’t terrible and not one thing made it bad. It was a lot of little things that just kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Making it feel more like a wacky silly filler episode. Which doesn’t bode well seeing as this is the second episode in the series.

Final Score - 5/10

[beholdingslut]

hey mads! just wondering if you have any game recs? i've been super into dragon age and assassins creed lately but they're also like, the only games i've ever been even close to good at lol because generally i am. bad ajsdkfdj

hello my game recs are limited to the same six viddy games because i’m also not an amazing gaymer in terms of actually playing and getting through the game but i am passionate about the following recs

dishonored: one of my favourite games ever. it’s an action adventure game with a heavy focus on stealth but it has this advice of ‘play your own way’ where any given level will have multiple different methods you can complete it with — stealth, offensively fighting every enemy you come across, buying favours to avoid encounters, a mixture of all three. you are corvo attano, ex-protector of the empress and her kid until the empress died and yu got out in prison and to top it off, some god keeps summoning you to his realm to give you supernatural abilities and unwarranted advice. there’s the first game and two dlcs that take place at the same time, a second game takes place twenty years later where you can choose to play as either corvo or emily (and emily has different powers) and then a third standalone expansion with another character from the main games. i would recommend... playing on easy haha i just finished playing them for the third time on hard or brutal and it was hard and brutal, and the game is still challenging in a fun way on easy!

fallout new vegas: released in 2010 so it only exists on ps3, xbox 360 and pc which was less than ideal because i prefer to play games that have either been released or remastered for ps4. but i slogged through the older graphics and controls and was rewarded with one of the most interesting and complex stories i’ve encountered. you are a courier who has been shot in the head and when you wake up, you’re basically tasked with retrieving what you were transporting and making deals between the factions that control the mojave desert in a post-nuclear apocalypse world with a war that happened 200 years ago. lots of commentary on society here! choose to side with people such as: a capitalist that’s wrung everything good out of a community, the head of an imperial army named caesar, or a parasitic military group that came from california and will not leave the mojave despite the fact everyone hates you. you will not be able to play this game making 100% morally right decisions that keep everyone happy. you will get blood on your hands. it’s just how much and what style you want it to take that’s up to you. also play this game on easy, i found it incredibly difficult for the first 15 or so hours of playtime and then it got fun.

uncharted: a recommendation that comes with some clauses. these games were made in response to tomb raider so the premise is uh. looking for mythical objects in non-western societies. but they definitely become aware of why this might be considered Not Good and make adjustments in the final two games of the series. they’re probably the easiest to play of all the recs because they’re narrative driven — you can only go a specific way in the terrain (although your methods may vary based on the environment). lots of cutscenes, very cinematic, very very character based. main character is a roguish archetype named nate drake who has the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder for no reason which drives him to do stupid reckless things and thus, the game. and then there’s a slew of cool recurring characters that they’ll carry over into every game. main features of the game are climbing, puzzles (this is a big one, lots of carrying weights to set on pressure stones or turning wheels at the right time) and a ridiculous amount of fighting with an abundance of guns. again, game is still good on easy. the first three games are a bit... not as good as the last two, they have been remastered for ps4 at the very least but they’re definitely in a different league in terms of gameplay, graphics and even a little bit depths of story? or they took a more emotional turn when they released the fourth game five years after the third.

so yeah that’s on video games i play. the other major ones are dragon age and assassin’s creed which you’re already amongst! i hear bloodborne is cool but i would not for the life of me recommend it because i’ve watched someone play it and it looks like the most disgustingly hard game in the world.

[voyagesofshanghaibrown-blog]

Fake News hits the hi-desert!

Come on, admit it - it wouldn't be 2017 without some fake news in the mix.  And for our final fake news of the year, we turn to author Ivy Pochoda and the "failing" New York Times.

Yes, after all, why should our president have all the fun (we fully intend to tweet this story out as soon as it's done), blathering on about the fake news media all the time.  Those of us in the media know far more about how it gets manipulated and co-opted and bought and sold than any two-bit New York real estate developer, after all.  And since we now have a legion of mindless MAGAts who know literally nada about journalism all telling us that virtually anything and everything we write is "fake" news, we thought it's high time we just jump into the cesspool with them!

I hadn't intended our prime example of late 2017 fake news to be Pochoda's lovely travel piece for The New York Times, "In the California Desert: Vast Darkness, Vibrant Music, an Oasis," but the more I read, the more it seemed this travel piece had donned the fauxhemian garb of fiction (we stole that term "fauxhemian" from someone in New York, by the way, and we're not giving it back).

Plus, and I need to disclose this in the name of journalistic integrity, an ideal we've all heard about but have rarely seen, I'm jealous.  After all, Pochoda's a trendy, popular novelist, and I'm jealous, because I'm on the second chapter of my first novel, and you know what?  It's hard work writing these novels.  Add to that the New York Times just rejected me for some utter wet dream of a job where they pay you gobs of cash to travel the globe and write for a full year - a job that no doubt saw something near 2.3 million applicants - and hey, so much for objectivity.

Some of Pochoda's meandering desert travel epic rings true, even to these jaded hi-desert ears, though she did claim in her initial story (more about that later) that Joshua Tree was actually south of Palm Springs.  Uh, no.  You're thinking of perhaps, Borrego Springs, which is also an awesome place to go, and one of our favorite desert towns.

Her first paragraph about winding up in Wonder Valley mostly by accident, sounded like an authentic desert experience.  After all, quite a few folks in Wonder Valley have wound up there by accident.  Some will tell you they got there on purpose, but press them for details, and... poof!  They can't quite recall what that purpose was, can they?

Of course Pochoda blames this accident on mistakenly booking a vacation rental in Wonder Valley while thinking she was reserving a home in Joshua Tree.  This is a problem that has gotten worse since her first visit, not better.  Virtually all 3,417 Airbnbs in the hi-desert all proudly proclaim themselves to be "in" Joshua Tree.  Some are even (gasp!) in Landers.

But by her second paragraph, Pochoda gets down to serving up a hearty dish of misinformation - the kind of misinformation that can only be known as fake news.

First, she refers to our area as the "High Desert."  Wrong, wrong, wrong, you urban elitist snowflake.  Our area, the area also known as the Morongo Basin, is the hi-desert.  The people who actually settled this place purposefully chose that spelling because the Lancaster/Palmdale area has always traditionally been known in southern California, as the high desert.  Our wise hi-desert elders (they were wise, but judging by some of their offspring, they seem to have married close cousins, if you get my drift) wanted to make sure nobody mistook our area for Lancaster/Palmdale (good move!), and besides, hi-desert (always lower case, because we're a no-ties, informal kind of place, not at all like Manhattan), sounds welcoming and friendly (though sometimes our residents can be that kind of friendly where they'll drink all your booze, smoke all your dope, and then steal your car).

We see a lot of folks using the term "High Desert," because they're not from here and they want to make sure all of us backward folk get our spelling correct, and capitalize it like it's a proper pronoun, which it is.  Sort of.  Or not.  We often see this unwanted correction of our area's name done by sophisticated pseudo-intellectual urbanites from Los Angeles, or even New York, who also love to refer to Joshua Tree National Park as "the monument," despite the fact that they never lived here when it was a national monument.  They think it makes them sound like the fit in.  They don't.

But Pochoda's second paragraph contains a more egregious error - and one the editors of the Times should absolutely have caught - that is, if they weren't trying to pass off some of that fishy fake news on their unsuspecting readers.  Pochoda informs us that you can go to Joshua Tree National Park (at least she doesn't call it the monument - thanks Ivy!), and "get your mind blown by Martian red rock formations..."

Uh, no.  Joshua Tree National Park does not have red rock formations.  None.  Monzogranite?  Sure.  But while you can find some red rock up in the oddly named Red Rock Canyon State Park in the northwest of the Mojave Desert, and you can find it in the similarly named Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just outside Las Vegas, and in Valley of Fire State Park, also not far outside Las Vegas, or virtually just about everywhere in southeast Utah, we have no red rock in Joshua Tree (unless Mr. Andre went and painted another boulder or something).

Who paid the fact checker to look the other way on that whopper?

I'll overlook the fact Pochoda drops the "bohemian" bomb on us once again (the last time it was the LA Times that did it, and really, once was enough, thank you).  We get that we're different than the Coachella Valley, thank God, and yes, while much of the lo desert resembles a well manicured mausoleum, we are a little rougher and in need of a pedicure, or at least a bath.

Now, if Ms. Pochoda were to have submitted her story to this somewhat less than prestigious publication instead of the old grey lady, she would have had her red rocks dug out right away, along with the screaming windmills she had to drive through to get here (they do not scream, that's hyperbolic).

Never mind her brutish depiction of our fabulous Joshua trees with their "knifelike leaves reaching up toward the brutal sun," we all know they don't have leaves, they have spiky things that really hurt when you accidentally stab one into the side of your head, it's her epiphany about the desert that really strikes out:

“I get it,” I say, “it doesn’t look like much.”

In fact, Highway 62 doesn’t even look like desert.

Really?  So, Ms. I-saw-red-rocks-in-Joshua-Tree-desert-expert, the desert doesn't look like the desert?  Well, it damned sure doesn't look like lower Manhattan, now, does it?

OK, so then she utterly erased Morongo Valley from the map as the first town she passed on her oddessy (yes, it's misspelled, but more accurate this way), was Yucca Valley, where tattoo parlors and smoke shops rival the number of big box stores and fast food joints.  Well, she got that right, anyway.

Then, she arrived in Joshua Tree (town, not park), which she describes as "equally grim."  Yes, hipsters and fauxhemians, she just completely dissed your "village," in just two words, clearly not understanding that the cool people of Joshua Tree absolutely would, under normal circumstances, kill just about anyone who equated their town with Yucca Valley, let alone refer to it as grim.

Our intrepid explorer, enduring grimness after grimness, continued on to Twentyine Palms, a "town of barbershops advertising military haircuts, more tattoo parlors and smoke shops..." and she goes on to note two bars "too divey even for me," and a worrisome number of massage parlors.

That's hilarious.  Back in the early days of The Sun Runner Magazine, when it was still based in Twentynine Palms (before the good citizens of the city offered to firebomb my office, that is), not long after the magazine began publishing on January 1, 1995, Vickie Waite, the founding editor of the publication ran a quite funny piece that gently parodied Twentynine Palms in a similar manner, and it caused an uproar that resulted in quite a few canceled ads and outraged readers demanding an apology.  But, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I'd have to say that her portrayal, just like that of Deanne Stillman (another author whom to this day the mere mention of her name elicits an angry response in that scrappy town), is pretty much right on.

The only thing I'd add is that the dive bars are actually pretty friendly, and Pochoda doesn't understand much about the Marine Corps because the base commander will designate any bar that's too "divey" as off limits.  I fondly remember the Joshua Tree Saloon's days as being "off limits" because evidently it was too dangerous for Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to have a drink there.  This was before they started serving seared ahi tuna salads and putting on airs.

Oh, and I'd add that some folks in the city keep saying they can't do anything about the happy ending massage parlors that service, errr..... serve, the Marines in town.  Yes, yes you can do something about them.  The Coachella Valley has had licensing requirements that have fully regulated the massage businesses there for years.  If they can do it, so can you.

Soon, Pochoda passed the "sturdy" (she loves that word) adobes and emerged in Wonder Valley.  She drove by the famous "Next Services 100 Miles" sign (it's famous because artist Andrea Zittel once gave an interview to some big city paper with no fact checkers where she said she lived past that sign - yeah, going the other way, back in Joshua Tree).  She bravely drove on through the "savage terrain that seemed to stretch on for a nerve-racking distance."  Give her a medal!

Now, honestly, I love it that Pochoda does "get" a lot about the desert, and she appreciates what it has to offer.  But snuffling beneath the deck?  What desert animal with any self respect snuffles?  Was that just a literary device?  If so, why do literary devices snuffle?  Allergies, probably.

No, I think I've found the answer: wolves.  Wolves snuffle.  Especially the ones in the original version of her story (that has been edited since our first reading).  Apparently we weren't the only ones who caught the fact that wolves had been included in the story, despite the fact that there are zero wolves here.  Maybe when sloths roamed the countryside, munching slothfully on the tasty knifelike leaves of our Joshua trees, wolves may have howled, but not for quite some time.

Note to NYT editors who replaced "wolves" with "dogs" in this story: we do have a problem out here with people abandoning their dogs, and those dogs forming packs, and those packs occasionally bringing down a desert bighorn sheep, or threatening and attacking a human.  One pack had been really going after our local bighorn sheep, until, a national park ranger explained to me, "we took care of the problem."  No, they didn't round up the doggies and take them to the pound.

But while it appears the fact checkers may have awoken at the Times and realized that wolves are not included in our entertaining selection of wildlife, they missed the subtle clue that followed that tipped us off that Pochoda had engaged in time travel as well.

Time travel?  How could that be?

Simple.  Pochoda's description of the 29 Palms Inn gives it away.  She talked about her trip nearly a decade ago, and the wall around the Inn's pool area being painted in "gradients of purple" on the pool side of the wall, and gradients of orange on the exterior.  Well, they just painted the wall in those gradients in the past year, so clearly, Pochoda time traveled during her first visit.

But on a later visit to the Inn (which is well worth repeated visits, by the way - we go as often as possible), she understands that being at the Inn in the Mojave is somehow the equivalent of being in a U.S. consulate on a small island in the South Pacific.  Minus the South Pacific, of course, or the tall coconut palms replacing our squatter, native palm trees.  If you spend enough time at the Inn, you may find yourself thinking it's similar, however, to a consulate somewhere on Alderaan, before the planet's untimely demise.

Her depiction of a night at the Inn is hilarious, with its "rugged tourists" and "resident artists and musicians of a rougher cut."  I'm trying to visualize the Inn filled with "rugged" tourists.  Were they all wearing lumberjack clothes?  Big beards?  Those are hipsters!  The only thing rugged about them is their desire to make big bonfires during 45 mph winds when they're getting a craving for s'mores at some Hipcamp, doing their best to burn down our homes.

Pochoda's description of the Campbell House is about as shallow as it gets for travel writing, entirely ignoring, well, the Campbells, who really deserved more of a mention, especially in light of their contributions.  No.  We're not going to tell you more about them.  Go ask the New York Times.  They're the ones hiring people who don't know anything about the places they write about.

I can forgive Pochoda's hyperbole and odd adjectives to a point, especially since this is ostensibly a story about fake news, even the swallows carving the purple sky, our gritty flowers, and fields of cactuses, with our insistent hidden oases, but then she went to The Palms, which defies description anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love The Palms.  I just can't take my wife there any more because the first and last time I took her there some drunkass local woman tried to pick a fight with her. "Yoush look like onna dem LA womenth," the local woman who is actually from LA, said to my wife, who is from New Jersey.  It went downhill from there.  The woman, it turned out, made her living by taking pictures of people's auras every Thursday night at the Palm Springs VillageFest, with a special (ie: expensive) Polaroid camera.  What portion of the money the woman did not spend on driving back and forth to Palm Springs from Wonder Valley, she spent on cheap beer, knowing full well The Palms never 86es anyone.  Not even the shape-shifting reptililans who frequently drop by on Saturday nights.

I was ready to jump in to keep my wife from being clumsily assaulted as the woman got threateningly in her face, but luckily, my wife's hairdresser at the time, Jerry, walked through the door right then and quickly intervened.  Jerry lived in Wonder Valley and frequented The Palms, and had even survived a tornado that struck his home.  We do have some pretty interesting, and sometimes severe, weather out here.  Dick Dale, the surf guitar king, had a giant 2,000 gallon (don't quote me on this because I'm going on memory here) water tank that once was blown something like four miles away, and Jerry had his roof  - and his electric meter - blown off his house and off somewhere into the desert, never to be seen again.

What was funny, was that Southern California Edison sent Jerry an electric bill while he was waiting for them to come out to replace his meter.  He asked them how they knew how much to bill him.  "We read the meter," was the reply.  "Oh, you found it!" Jerry responded.

Virtually none of us who live here would be surprised to find out that SCE lies.  Some of that might come from the fact that another agency in the line of plying power, LA Department of Water and Power, told some really big whoppers to us a while back.  But that's another story.

Pochoda wrapped things up saying "big city artists and artisans and a rumored hipster hotel chain are coming," conjuring up images of change sweeping across our little wolf-riddled red rock part of the Mojave, snuffling through the knifelike leaves of the Joshua trees, and, well, changing things.  But we already have lots of big city artists and artisans, and some get me called a pornographer for printing their ads in the magazine (another story, but tied to that mention of people wanting to firebomb my office), and others make me really nice stuff that I love and use, and are as sweet as can be.  The hipster hotel "chain," is really just a couple remodeling (slowly) Govinda's old Circle C Lodge.  Not exactly Ace Hotel Twentynine Palms or anything.

Pochoda's story in the New York Times isn't a happenstance kind of thing.  She has a novel that's just come out called "Wonder Valley."  I'm glad she finds inspiration for her storytelling in our sturdy, rugged part of the desert.

Oh, and this notice has appeared at the bottom of her travel story in the New York Times:

Correction: December 20, 2017

An earlier edition of this article described incorrectly the location of Joshua Tree. It is north of Palm Springs and other resort towns, not south. The article also misidentified the source of sounds in the desert. They were coyotes, not wolves.

Ivy Pochoda's New York Times story

[componentplanet]

CES 2020: Highlights in Photos

With a nearly unimaginable array of products and concepts on display spread across all of Las Vegas, it is hard to pick out a final few each year for our wrap-up. But here are those we found of particular interest.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 “Many-in-1” Foldable

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is the world’s first folding display tablet. (There are obviously several designs that have separate displays on each section, but not a single folding display.) I got to demo one this week and I’m really impressed with the design. The display is protected front and back by an integrated leather cover. That prevents a lot of the issues that arose with the original Samsung Fold. You can’t get under the screen — neither can your sandwich crumbs — and the back of the hinge is solidly protected. I saw no evidence of a crease when folding and unfolding it. Lenovo rates the display for 3-4 years of life, as tested by their industrious robots. For the full specs, you can read our coverage of the announcement here.

Given concerns over the plastic screen scratching, I asked Lenovo about that. They said it is actually harder to scratch, and have been testing it in pockets with keys and other sharp objects. With the keyboard tucked inside, there really isn’t any room for something to get in once it is folded, but without the keyboard, there is a tiny gap. I offered to trade them my Surface Pro for one on the spot, but Lenovo was not amused. It looks like a great ultra-portable if you can afford the $2,499+ price when it ships later this year. Not everyone wants a Windows tablet, but it worked quite nicely as a 13-inch display with the optional Bluetooth keyboard that you can fold into the tablet.

On the lighter folding side, Lenovo’s new Razr features a fully functional retro mode that works exactly the way the original Razr phone did.

ShiftCam Aims To Put Another Nail in Camera Company Coffins

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of clip-on lenses and filters for smartphones. But unless they are specced very tightly for a particular model phone, they are hard to align. The problem is worsened if you need to swap between them for different effects. ShiftCam has come up with an ingenious solution: The company puts a number of lens and filter modules into a phone case that has a sliding section. So you can simply slide the correct lens or filter over your phone’s camera. Right now it is understandably iPhone-only, as the bewildering variety of form factors for Android phones makes building something like this for them difficult.

Living Packets Sustainable e-Commerce

Our modern lives full of “1-click ordering” come with many costs. One is the huge amount of packaging required. Some, like cardboard boxes, are at least fairly easy to recycle. Others, like many foam peanuts or other petroleum-based packing materials, aren’t. Living Packets aims to totally up-end both the physical reality of product shipping and its economics. I can’t do the company’s aspirations justice in these few sentences, but they’ve constructed an easy-to-fold, reusable box that in the shipping version will be equipped with GPS, cellular connectivity, an inward-facing camera for inspecting package contents, an e-Ink display for addressing, and even temperature and humidity sensors for quality tracking.

Customers who get a product in one of the company’s boxes can use the box to return products, or donate or sell other items they own in a user-friendly way. Or they can return them to a participating retailer for a small credit. There is a lot more to the vision of Living Packets, but overall the team describes a utopian vision of how product shipments and returns almost certainly should work in a perfect world. So I’m happy to wish them every success, but making this vision a reality will be a long and challenging enterprise. The company has been doing testing with a French retailer, and is planning a broader European launch later this year. The US isn’t on their radar until next year.

The Massive Black Multi-Rotor Copters Are Now Friendlier-Looking

Last year, the Bell multi-rotor passenger helicopter prototype looked like it belonged in a dystopian science fiction movie: sheer black, accented with blue neon. Apparently the company got the message, as this year it was dolled up in much more reasonable garb. Hyundai also showed a massive prototype this year. The color is fine, but unlike the Bell that has shrouds around its props, the props on the Hyundai look like they could double as killing machines. Of course, they are quite high up, but the effect is still a little disconcerting.

Far From the Madding Crowds: Outside Las Vegas

It’s easy to forget that the neon and concrete of Las Vegas sits in the middle of one of the most beautiful areas anywhere. The immediate area is desert (the Mojave), but there are plenty of mountains. This is a view coming down from Sequoia National Forest past Lake Isabella on our drive to the show.

Finally: An Ultra-Short-Throw Projector for Consumers

Whether it is because you like the relative softness and easy-on-the-eye feel of a projected image, or because you can’t afford a zillion-dollar, super-big-screen TV, projectors are an obvious solution. Until now, though, they have required a large area and fancy mounting. Or, like the Sony ultra-short-throw on display a couple of years ago, cost as much as a low-end Tesla. Vava, better known for lower-end consumer electronics, has introduced a really impressive 4K (pixel-shifted using a TI DLP) UST that can project a 150-inch display. The model I demoed was projecting 100 inches onto a special UST-friendly ALR (Ambient Light Rejecting) screen. While it doesn’t have quite the color gamut of a similarly priced home cinema projector, it is a lot more convenient.

F1: The World’s Highest-Tech Sport

Top Formula 1 teams employ well over 1,000 people and spend as much as $400 million a year to field just two cars in about 20 races (21 last year, 22 this year). So, of course, F1 had an exhibit to hype the massive amount of data produced, transmitted, and consumed by the cars. Each race venue has to be fitted with about 60 km of fiber optic cables, for example. For show and tell, you could play F1 2019 in a really nice cockpit (review samples were unfortunately not available) and see Sebastian Vettel’s 2011 title-winning Red Bull car redecorated in the team’s 2019 livery.

GaN: The Secret to Fast Charging

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how EPC’s GaN semiconductor technology was the secret sauce to most high-speed lidar units. It turns out that GaN is also the secret to super-fast, high-power, compact USB-C chargers. If like me, you’d never heard of Navitas, you may still have used a charger powered by its chips. Well over a dozen brands use the company for its high-end USB-C chargers, including Aukey, Ravpower, Anker, and ASUS. The photo shows the size reduction possible by going from a traditional to GaN approach for a 300-watt power supply.

Jeep Combined VR With the Real World in This Ride

Finally, on the fun side, Jeep offered show-goers a turn in this hydraulically-lifted Jeep Rubicon as they traversed an off-road course in virtual reality — competing for the best time.

[Image Credit: David Cardinal]

Now Read:

CES 2020: A Breakthrough Year for Digital Health Wearables

For Self-Driving Cars, Lidar Amps Up at CES 2020

Intel at CES 2020: 10nm++ Tiger Lake, Comet Lake-H, and an Upgradeable NUC on Tap

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/304155-ces-2020-highlights-in-photos from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/01/ces-2020-highlights-in-photos.html

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Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe

For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.

The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.

The Promise. And the Pizza.

“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”

Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.

Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)

Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.

Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.

“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”

78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier

CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”

Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”

Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”

Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”

Obstacles of Course

The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”

The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)

Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”

Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”

Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”

Grounds for Improvement

“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.

Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.

“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”

In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”

Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.

Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”

Bot Wheels

Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”

Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”

A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.

Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”

Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”

The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe

For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.

The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.

The Promise. And the Pizza.

“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”

Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.

Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)

Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.

Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.

“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”

78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier

CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”

Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”

Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”

Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”

Obstacles of Course

The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”

The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)

Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”

Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”

Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”

Grounds for Improvement

“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.

Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.

“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”

In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”

Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.

Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”

Bot Wheels

Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”

Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”

A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.

Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”

Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”

The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe

For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.

The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.

The Promise. And the Pizza.

“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”

Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.

Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)

Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.

Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.

“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”

78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier

CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”

Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”

Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”

Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”

Obstacles of Course

The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”

The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)

Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”

Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”

Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”

Grounds for Improvement

“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.

Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.

“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”

In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”

Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.

Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”

Bot Wheels

Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”

Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”

A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.

Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”

Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”

The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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