Autonomous vehicles are already navigating the verdant hills of Pittsburgh and the pitched avenues of San Francisco. They may soon be tested by the chaos of Manhattan, where pedestrians, taxis, buses and bikes embark daily on an eternal quest to avoid impact.
Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based self-driving software company owned by General Motors, aims to begin testing in New York City early next year. GM and Cruise are applying to operate in New York under a new pilot program announced Tuesday last week by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
If approved, the tests will mark the first time a fully self-driving vehicle will be allowed to operate in New York state, Cuomo said in a statement. Volkswagen AG’s Audi brand and GMs’s Cadillac also have demonstrated semi-autonomous technology in Albany and New York City, but those systems weren’t as advanced as the one developed by Cruise, according to a spokeswoman for New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
The test vehicles will be electric Chevrolet Bolt cars equipped with cameras, radar, sensors and Cruise’s software. GM and Cruise currently have a registered fleet of 100 autonomous Bolts, according to GM spokesman Patrick Sullivan. They’re already operating in San Francisco, Phoenix and the Detroit area.
In New York, a small fleet of cars will operate in a 13km square area of lower Manhattan. They will always have an engineer behind the wheel and an observer in the front passenger seat. Sullivan said testing will start with a small fleet that will grow incrementally to ensure safety and legal compliance.
“Bringing this lifesaving technology to New Yorkers safely and quickly is our number one priority,” Sullivan said.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt says the densely populated city of more than 8 million people will give the company more unusual situations to test software and accelerate the development of the technology.
In a blog post earlier this month, Vogt said every minute of testing in a complicated urban environment like San Francisco is the equivalent of an hour of testing in suburbs. For example, he said, test cars in San Francisco encountered 270 emergency vehicles every 1,609 kilometers; in the Phoenix suburbs, they only encountered six.
“Testing in the hardest places first means we’ll get to scale faster than starting with the easier ones,” Vogt wrote.
Cruise also plans to set up an office in New York as part of its testing.
Vogt hasn’t said when Cruise and GM plan to expand beyond testing and actually sell autonomous vehicles. But rival companies have said they could be on the road in about four years.
New York is a relative latecomer to autonomous vehicle testing. Boston-based startup nuTonomy began testing autonomous taxis in Singapore last year and is now testing them in Boston. Uber and Volvo began testing self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh last fall. Forty-two companies were authorized to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in California as of September. Las Vegas has tested an autonomous shuttle.
Manhattan is easier for autonomous vehicles to navigate than Boston or Los Angeles because it’s laid out in a grid and cars generally go at low speeds, said Art Wheaton, an auto industry expert and director of Western New York Labor and Environmental Programs for the Worker Institute at Cornell University. But it’s harder to navigate because of the volume of traffic.
“If you can handle the pedestrian and bicycle and vehicle traffic in an area as congested as New York City, that’s a pretty big test,” Wheaton said.
Wheaton also said New York is the kind of place that could see the first applications of autonomous shuttles or shared vehicle fleets because of its dense population. If a delivery company or a taxi service has a fleet of 50 or 100 autonomous vehicles that need constant service, maintenance and parking, the cars need to get enough use to make that economically viable.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless