A power company in Sacramento becomes a founding member of the California Mobility Center.
The electricity supplier of Sacramento in the US state California has planned a major investment in autonomous e-driving.
The SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District) is planning to invest up to $ 15 million in the California Mobility Center (CMC), which is working on e-mobility and autonomous driving. First, $ 5 million will be made available, the remaining $ 10 million will be released, if other partners have also released their funds.
The CMC is an initiative of SMUD in collaboration with local and regional institutions, including Community College in the Los Rios district, California State University in Sacramento, the University of California (UC) Davis, the city of Valley Vision, and the Great Economic Council counting the city of Sacramento. Other partners, especially from industry, are to be added.
Prototypes of e-mobility and autonomous driving will be developed on the site of the CMC. In this way one hopes for an upswing of the region in the area of modern mobility. Specifically, they are planning research into clean transport there. That too Autonomous driving should contribute to this mite. In addition one wants here the commercialization of the e-mobility, the development of Open source standards in the field of Autonomous and Connected Driving and you want to set up a mobility network that attracts companies and investors.
In addition to the development, the establishment of the CMC is also about research and provision of demonstration projects. The CMC will also cooperate with the ATOS (Autonomous Transportation Open Standards) laboratory. The ATOS lab was founded by the City of Sacramento and is dedicated to standardizing the rules for autonomous driving. Their cooperation partners include, for example, the German engineering office PEM Motion, which in Aachen built a prototyping facility and EnerTech Capital.
With the help of PEM Motion, commercialization is twice as fast as traditional practices and only costs one-tenth of the cost.
SMUD already financed two feasibility studies for the development of the CMC and campaigned for this with potential investors.
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About David Fluhr
I’ve been writing about the topic of Autonomous & Connected Driving since 2011 and also talk about it on other sites like the Smart Mobility Hub. I studied social sciences at the HU Berlin and since 2012 I am a freelance journalist. Contact: mail@autonomes-fahren.de