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My friend and mentor Dan Sturges is one of the panelists. What do they talk about? :
In the last 1.0 hundred years mobility was largely about automobile ownership. The conversation now moves to the role of vehicles in a more complex mobility mix. How must automakers adapt?
This webcast was live at 9AM PST on December 9th.
Last week's widely publicized admission by Google that they have indeed a fleet of automatically driven vehicles goes beyond the anecdotal; it represents a small but very significant step towards clean mobility worthy of the XXI century.
I will not spend too much time on the details: seven cars, 140,000 miles, only one accident (caused by another driver rear-ending the Google car). Of those miles, at least 1,000 were covered without human intervention. Even more amazing, the vehicles were perfectly legal according to the California DMV, since a liable human was always behind the wheel ready to override any error (even if she was not necessarily holding that wheel at all times...)Of course self driven cars are not new. The Japanese and Europeans have been working on it for many years (Wikipedia has of course some details). In the US, Honda, Toyota and GM were working together at the the National Automotive Highway Consortium back in 1998 (campy Popular Mechanics page here).While working at GM Advanced Studio, we were a very close second at the 2007 California Design Challenge with our OnStar ANT. Two years later, we also participated on the Puma project, the self-balancing Segway two seater (which were intended to be shown as automatically driven at the Shanghai Expo, althought I am not sure if they accomplished the goal).
So if it's old news, why should we consider it significant?