Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, is moving beyond driverless taxis. The company announced on Friday that its self-driving trucks have begun hauling real cargo in the Atlanta area. A safety driver in the truck will take over if anything goes wrong.
Source: arstechnica.com
I’ve spent the past few months working on a 10,000-word special report on AVs for The Economist, which was published in this week’s issue. The focus of my report is mostly on the long-term implications of AVs, based on the assumption (a reasonable one, I think) that the technology can be made to work reliably in the next few years. Rather than focusing on the minutiae of things like the ever-changing industry alliances, or who is suing who, I concentrated instead on the impact on urban planning, the transformation of retailing and the broader social and political implications of cars that can drive themselves.
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Starsky Robotics engineers tested and developed the autonomous-driving system, which has been installed in the Freightliner Cascadia for more than a year, and had spent a full week conducting dry runs on the stretch of County Road 833 in southern Florida, just north of the Everglades. They had plotted every conceivable contingency and every imaginable edge-case scenario.
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