Volkswagen AG’s Audi will cease making the iconic TT coupe and replace it with a battery-powered model as the luxury brand accelerates an electric shift that may also see the next version of its flagship A8 sedan go emission-free.
Tag: Possible_Terrorism_Warfare
ROLLS-ROYCE UNVEILS WRAITH EAGLE VIII COLLECTION
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars will unveil its latest Collection Car, Wraith Eagle VIII, on the shores of Lake Como at this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, 24-26 May. Created by the Bespoke Collective at the House of Rolls-Royce, a Collection of just 50 Wraith Eagle VIII motor cars will tell the epic tale of one of… Continue reading ROLLS-ROYCE UNVEILS WRAITH EAGLE VIII COLLECTION
1 in 6 Uber, Lyft Vehicles Have Current Safety Recall, Study Finds
Consumer Reports could not determine if any customers have been injured due to safety defects. Photo via Lyft. A recent study by Consumer Reports found that one in six vehicles on the Uber and Lyft platforms have an open recall for an unaddressed safety issue. Consumer Reports based its findings on data collected from 94,000… Continue reading 1 in 6 Uber, Lyft Vehicles Have Current Safety Recall, Study Finds
120 Years of LCV production: Opel Combo & Co. continue rich tradition
Today: Opel Combo Cargo is “International Van of the Year 2019“ Pioneering years: First LCV version of Opel Patentmotorwagen in 1899 Modern times: New mobility with “System Darracq“, 4 PS and Blitz delivery van Economic miracle: Famous Schnelllieferwagen from Olympia to Rekord Recent past: High-roof estates started with the Kadett Combo in 1985 Rüsselsheim. Opel… Continue reading 120 Years of LCV production: Opel Combo & Co. continue rich tradition
A major Chinese automaker postpones its US launch as trade war drags on
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesGAC Motor, one of China's largest carmakers, has postponed its launch in the U.S. because of the ongoing trade war between the world's two-largest economies, a company executive said Tuesday.
The automaker, headquartered in Guangzhou in southern China, said its entrance into the U.S., which was anticipated for this year, will be postponed.
“The current relationship between the U.S. and China, the trade war, the relationship is uncertain” said Hebin Zeng, president of international at GAC Motor. “We postponed the plan to enter the North American market.”
Zeng declined to give a specific timeline on when GAC could enter the U.S.
“In terms of when we will go into the market, we will have further discussions depending on the changes of circumstances,” he said.
Geely is the only Chinese carmaker that sells in the U.S. through the Volvo Car brand that it owns.
GAC has been expanding into several international markets, particularly in the Middle East.
Tesla’s Trouble With Semi Trucks & Another Shakeup Of The Autopilot Team — Is There A Connection?
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Published on May 21st, 2019 |
by Steve Hanley
Tesla’s Trouble With Semi Trucks & Another Shakeup Of The Autopilot Team — Is There A Connection?
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May 21st, 2019 by Steve Hanley
Editor’s note: Context is always worth keeping in mind. The following story is interesting and important, but in the grand scheme of traffic safety, one should consider not only the two deaths mentioned here, but also how many lives Tesla Autopilot has saved — which is likely a much higher number than two.
On March 1, Jeremy Banner was killed on a Florida highway when his Tesla Model 3 slammed into a tractor trailer that was crossing the road. The National Transportation Safely Board sent a team of investigators to find out more about the crash. Last week, it released this preliminary report.
Credit: NTSB
“Preliminary data from the vehicle show that the Tesla’s Autopilot system — an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that provides both longitudinal and lateral control over vehicle motion — was active at the time of the crash. The driver engaged the Autopilot about 10 seconds before the collision. From less than 8 seconds before the crash to the time of impact, the vehicle did not detect the driver’s hands on the steering wheel. Neither the preliminary data nor the videos indicate that the driver or the ADAS executed evasive maneuvers.”
The circumstances surrounding this fatality and the crash that killed Joshua Brown when his Tesla Model S also collided with a tractor trailer crossing a Florida highway three years ago are troubling. Why does Tesla’s vaunted Autopilot system have such difficulty recognizing an 18 wheeler crossing the road in front of it?
The Verge reports that a spokesperson for Tesla phrased what happened slightly differently. Instead of saying “the vehicle did not detect the driver’s hands on the steering wheel,” that person said, “the driver immediately removed his hands from the wheel.” Tesla did not respond to a request from The Verge to explain what action it plans to take to address the problem of a semi truck crossing a car’s line of travel.
Why Can’t Computers Think Like Humans?
The issue is the same for all self-driving cars — how do you make them behave like human drivers when that should be the minimum (and better than humans at other times)? People in Phoenix report that they are sick to death of Waymo’s self-driving cars faltering at intersections, unsure what to do. Because they have been programmed to err on the side of caution at all times, they wait an inordinate amount of time at stop signs, checking to make sure there is a clear path ahead before moving forward. Drivers waiting behind get exasperated and start blowing their horns or zoom around the obstructionist vehicles, creating unsafe traffic situations for others. It’s kind of silly to blow your horn at a computer that has no auditory input, but there you are.
It’s not that the Tesla Autopilot system doesn’t see trucks crossing in front. The issue is that it has been programmed to ignore them. As we drive down the road, our brain easily distinguishes between a tractor trailer and an overpass, but that is difficult for a computer to do. If it decides to slam on the brakes every time it approaches a highway overpass, that’s not good. To a computer, a truck trailer and a highway overpass look too similar, so the program tells it to ignore both, with predictable results.
Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has some insight into this this situation. Other than Tesla itself, Carnegie Mellon is ground zero for autonomous driving development in the world. He tells The Verge that in most road situations, there are vehicles to the front, back, and to the side, but a perpendicular vehicle is much less common. The algorithms using the camera output need to be trained to detect trucks that are perpendicular to the direction of the vehicle.
“Essentially, the same incident repeats after three years,” Rajkumar says. “This seems to indicate that these two problems have still not been addressed.” Machine learning and artificial intelligence have inherent limitations, he explains. If sensors “see” what they have never or seldom seen before, they do not know how to handle those situations. “Tesla is not handling the well-known limitations of AI,” he added.
Some Input From The Real World
Twitter user GreenTheOnly has some interesting input on this situation which he posted on March 13, nearly two weeks after Jeremy Banner died.
He reports his Tesla is running firmware version 19.8.1, and 25 seconds of video show the truck crossing his path and what happened afterwards — available in a subsequent tweet.
Driver Overconfidence
In the past, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has blamed crashes involving Autopilot on driver overconfidence. “When there is a serious accident it is almost always, in fact maybe always, the case that it is an experienced user, and the issue is more one of complacency,” he said last year.
That may be true of the current generation of Autopilot-equipped cars but it is not nearly good enough for the level of autonomy Musk boasted about during the recent Autonomy Day event when he said every Tesla equipped with the latest-generation autonomous driving hardware and the company’s new self-driving computer would be able to operate with almost no input from a human driver soon. “A year from now, we’ll have over a million cars with Full Self Driving computer, hardware, everything.”
He went on to say, “We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around … in the second quarter of next year. And we expect to get regulatory approval, at least in some jurisdictions, for that towards the end of next year. That’s roughly the timeline that I expect things to go on.”
Skeptics Abound
There are plenty of skeptics. Writing in Forbes, Lance Eliot, a recognized authority in artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, says, “To some, it would be like running a marathon, which the best in the world can do in about 2 hours, and suddenly suggesting that you’ll be at the finish line in just thirty minutes, somehow skirting past all known laws of nature and physics. It’s a jaw dropping kind of declaration, especially if there isn’t any substantive evidence showcased to support a potential world-record-breaking projected achievement. At this point, it’s a wait-and-see status.”
The issue for Tesla and all self-driving systems is one of false positives. Radar outputs of detected objects are sometimes ignored by the vehicle’s software to deal with the generation of “false positives,” said Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Without these, the radar would “see” an overpass and report that as an obstacle, causing the vehicle to slam on the brakes.
On the computer vision side of the equation, the algorithms using the camera output need to be trained to detect trucks that are perpendicular to the direction of the vehicle, he added. In most road situations, there are vehicles to the front, back, and to the side, but a perpendicular vehicle is much less common.
“Essentially, the same incident repeats after three years,” Rajkumar said. “This seems to indicate that these two problems have still not been addressed.” Machine learning and artificial intelligence have inherent limitations. If sensors “see” what they have never or seldom seen before, they do not know how to handle those situations. “Tesla is not handling the well-known limitations of AI,” he added.
Autopilot Team Reshuffle?
We may never find out whether the death of Jeremy Banner is in any way connected to rumors on Reddit that Elon is reshuffling the Autopilot team and personally taking over its management. (Note: he has already led a weekly Autopilot team meeting for a few years.)
Remember what happened after the Joshua Brown fatality. Within months, Tesla and Mobileye went through a messy divorce, and Tesla had to spend a good chunk of time building its own Mobileye-like system. In this latest case, what will the ramifications be for Tesla, and the world?
Fatalities & Robotaxis
No firm conclusions can be drawn at this point, except to say that the final report from NTSB could put a crimp in Musk’s promise that Tesla robotaxis could make it into a $500 billion company in a few years. If regulators get cold feet about approving the use of self-driving Teslas for revenue service, that aspect of Musk’s long-term plans may get put on hold indefinitely.
Make no mistakes — the long knives are out and ready to stab Tesla in the back if the opportunity presents itself. With Tesla continuously leading it, the EV revolution could be set back years or even decades, especially in the US where fossil fuel interests with unlimited resources control the federal government and many states. We know one key component of any plan to reduce carbon emissions is to electrify everything, starting with the transportation sector. It is important, in my opinion, that the desire for self-driving cars not delay that process.
About the Author
Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. His motto is, “Life is not measured by how many breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away!” You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.
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Hyundai system purifies cabin air, raises awareness about pollution levels
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Hyundai Smart Air Purification system
As virtuous as one might be in choosing a vehicle that doesn’t produce tailpipe emissions, there’s a hazy reality to traveling by car: That you’re stuck breathing emissions from other gasoline or diesel vehicles—especially fine particulate emissions, which are some of the most concerning for health and tend to linger within a few hundred feet of major roadways.
Hyundai Motor Group appears to have the right idea for those who don’t want to sniff others’ exhaust quite as much. Last week it revealed an intelligent Smart Air Purification system that monitors air quality in the cabin and operates a filtration system accordingly.
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The system will even precondition your vehicle to clean up the cabin air before you enter, or automatically close the windows to speed up the purification process. “Combined with advanced filtering innovations, the technology can remove fine particulates before passengers enter the car, and purification of cabin air throughout a journey,” said the company, in a press release.
Hyundai Smart Air Purification system
It grades the air quality inside, from Poor, Fair, and Good to Excellent, and a display accessible through the infotainment screen shows a real-time 16-bar digital display. Quality is detected using a laser-based sensor that works independent of the fan or outside temperature, collecting 94 to 99 percent of fine particulates.
CHECK OUT: EPA panel questions health effects of air pollution
According to the EPA, exposure to fine particulates—those smaller than 2.5 micrometers (1/30th the width of a human hair)—are the main cause of visible air-pollution-related haze in the US, and they acidify lakes and streams, taint soil and groundwater, and contribute to acid rain. And according to the CDC, they can be inhaled deep into the lungs, where they can affect the hearts, lungs, and blood vessels, leading to higher rates of heart disease and heart attacks.
Larger particulate matter of less than 10 micrometers still might not be completely filtered out via a vehicle’s climate system and can aggravate asthma or cause other respiratory symptoms.
READ MORE: Why the future of electric cars depends on China's war on pollution
For example, four counties in California’s Los Angeles–South Coast Air Basin, with a combined population of 15.7 million, fall into the EPA’s Moderate risk category.
“Enabling our customers to breathe the cleanest air, even in highly-polluted areas, is a demonstration of how Hyundai Motor Group strives to care for its customers,” said YongSuk Shin, the lead of the Hyundai Motor Group engineering design team behind the feature.
Tesla Model X tested for fine particulates
The system, which hasn’t yet been announced for any of Hyundai’s vehicles—globally including the Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands—could be well received in China, where there’s growing concern over the health effects of pollution. Tesla has also offered a HEPA filtration system in the Model S and Model X [above], with the claimed capability to reduce pollution levels in the vehicle to “undetectable” levels and even to scrub the air immediately around the vehicle of fine particulates.
Trump administration will delay auto tariffs for up to six months
VIDEO1:1101:11Trump officially postpones auto tariffs for up to six monthsSquawk BoxThe Trump administration will delay tariffs on cars and auto part imports for up to six months as it negotiates trade deals with the European Union and Japan.
In a proclamation Friday, Trump said he directed U.S.Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to seek agreements to “address the threatened impairment” of national security from auto imports. Trump could choose to move forward with tariffs during the talks.
“United States defense and military superiority depend on the competitiveness of our automobile industry and the research and development that industry generates,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “The negotiation process will be led by United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and, if agreements are not reached within 180 days, the President will determine whether and what further action needs to be taken.”
In his proclamation, Trump argued in part that “domestic conditions of competition must be improved by reducing imports.”
Vehicles wait for shipment at Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, China.VCG | Visual China Group | Getty ImagesThe White House had to decide by Saturday whether to slap duties on autos. Earlier this year, the Commerce Department said Trump could justify the move on national security grounds. By law, the administration can push back its decision by up to six months if it is negotiating with trading partners.
In a statement Friday, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said “we completely reject the notion that our car exports are a national security threat.” She added that the trade bloc “is prepared to negotiate a limited trade agreement” including cars, but not so-called managed trade, in which the partners could set targets like quotas.
Malmstrom said EU officials will discuss the issue with Lighthizer next week in Paris.
Levying the auto tariffs threatened to open new fronts in a global trade war that could drag down the U.S. economy. The EU has already prepared a list of American goods to target with tariffs if Trump goes ahead with the car duties.
Automakers and some U.S. lawmakers opposed the potential tariffs. The American car industry said the duties would put jobs in jeopardy and raise prices for consumers.
The decision comes after the U.S. and China fired new shots in their trade war. The White House is working to salvage a deal with Beijing to address what the U.S. calls trade abuses amid the widening conflict.
Trump also used the national security justification last year to put tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, including metals coming from allies such as the EU, Canada and Mexico. Europe previously retaliated after those duties.
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Tesla Autopilot engaged during fatal crash
A preliminary report into a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model 3 in the US has found Autopilot had been engaged 10 seconds before the crash. The Tesla was travelling above the speed limit when it crashed into a truck towing a trailer in March 2019. The roof of the car was sheared off in… Continue reading Tesla Autopilot engaged during fatal crash