We all are afflicted by the one-action bias which means we will buy a hybrid car
Study co-leader Phillip van Mantgem of the Western Ecological Research center in Arcata California explains the mortality increase in financial terms:
About a year ago, the leading artificial-insemination organizations in the United states and Canada funded a US$1-million research project directed by Curtis Van Tassell
Working with Illumina Inc. of San diego, California, Van Tassell's team created a microarray chip containing 54,000 genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms,
says Van Tassell, The others become hamburger. Previously, DNA tests allowed a typical breeder to select the best bull some 35%of the time,
and Helene Muller-Landau of the University of Minnesota in St paul suggested that tropical extinctions may not be as dire as predicted.
with its luxury shops, roaming BMWS and Mercedes, and European-style villas in the suburbs.
To feed its booming automobile and tyre industry China plans to increase its natural-rubber production by 30%from 2007 levels to 780,000 tonnes per year by 2010
There were 13 buses at the launch. A lot of people contributed to this. Scientists say they need this kind of in depth information to answer a particularly vexing question:
That decision focused on automobile emissions but opened the doors to broader regulations. Only one thing was required of the EPA:
Although the network has detected not yet the new virus in pigs, its coordinator Kristien Van Reeth,
what scientists know about both forest carbon and the drivers of deforestation. It makes perfect sense,
Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Los angeles, who specializes on the evolution of feeding,
Van Valkenburgh says.
Mystery of missing carbon cracked: Nature Newsmysteriously, Earth has much less carbon in its rocks than would be expected from the amounts of carbon available in the planet-forming regions of our Galaxy.
and has signed a deal with US car manufacturer Chrysler. The company, based in Waterford, Massachusetts, was founded in 2001 by materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang and his colleagues from the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge.
'which says that petrol for conventional automobiles can contain no more than 10%ethanol by volume.
and General motors estimated that cellulosic ethanol could compete with petrol in 2030 only if oil was $90 a barrel or higher.
which General motors has undisclosed an stake, relies on gasification to turn biomass into hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
and harvest it carefully, says company founder Ruud van Eck. Some 5, 000 farmers are involved,
2007) has been used in test cars belonging to the project and in collaboration with General motors. Ghosh's team has been working to improve the genetic stock of their jatropha,
and is about to embark on a life-cycle analysis of how much biodiesel jatropha can generate from a 50-hectare plot.
Nature Newsthe Obama administration released new automobile standards on Tuesday, proposing regulations that would curb greenhouse-gas emissions and ratchet up fuel-efficiency standards beginning in 2012.
Greenhouse-gas emissions for an automobile company's entire fleet would be limited to an average of 250 grams of carbon dioxide per mile,
Administration officials announced the broad outlines of the deal with automakers in May, at a time when the industry was seeking government aid to stay afloat.
Both General motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC ended up filing for bankruptcy leaving Ford motor Co. as the only major US automaker standing.
Speaking at a General motors Co. plant in Lordstown, Ohio, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama asserted that the regulations will give companies long-overdue clarity,
stability and predictability as they struggle to pull out of a financial tailspin. Michael Stanton, president of the Association of International Automobile manufacturers, called the new regulations a welcome step toward a single, national programme.
The regulations are rooted in a 2007 Supreme court finding that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
But by 2016, automakers will have to comply with the more stringent of the two, which effectively means that the greenhouse gas standards take over,
In addition to increasing overall fuel efficiency, automakers could improve their air-conditioning systems and opt for new chemical refrigerants that contribute less to global warming.
Despite the materials'present reliance on the mixed fortunes of the automobile industry, the market for carbon nanotubes as raw materials looks set to grow rapidly.
3. The greatest health gains would result from fewer cars and increased walking in Delhi, reducing DALYS by 13,000
Automobile emissions are likely to be the first to be regulated. Appeal lost: Italian scientists have lost a final appeal against a government research call that explicitly excludes human embryonic stem cells,
when Dutch astronomer Piet van de Kamp used astrometry to claim that two planets were orbiting Barnard's Star a finding disproved a decade later.
Leo Bottrill, who is mapping drivers of deforestation in the region for the conservation group WWF in WASHINGTON DC (see'Model predicts future deforestation),
That'endangerment finding'was spurred by a 2007 Supreme court ruling that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and, by extension, from power plants and other sources.
particularly if coupled with separate greenhouse-gas regulations that the administration is developing for automobiles,
they are talking about apples and oranges and Porsches and whales and moons, he says.
The drivers today are different, Caldeira warns. Wahl agrees, but notes that Cook's data still give climate modellers a wealth of new information.
Illegal loggers range from small,'artisanal'groups with one truck and a couple of employees to multimillion-dollar companies who build roads and sawmills.
The basic underlying driver is the agriculture and illegal logging is associated with deforestation that is happening anyway,
A123, meanwhile, says that it has ended a deal with Chrysler to provide batteries for the firm's electric cars
although it promised a new deal with an unnamed car manufacturer. Ranbaxy resignation: The chief executive of India's biggest drug maker, Ranbaxy, resigned unexpectedly last week,
and fallen off a truck during transport. Sagers agrees that feral populations could have become established after trucks carrying cultivated GM seeds spilled some of their load during transportation.
She notes that the frequency and population density of GM canola that they found may be biased as they only sampled along roadsides.
Andersen says an additional boost to the proposal to include HFCS in the Montreal Protocol has come from the global automobile industry,
Delaware, and Honeywell of Morristown, New jersey, in response to a 2006 European union law requiring car makers to reduce the greenhouse-gas potential of their refrigerants,
we have to resort to concepts like odds, rolls of the dice, roulette wheels. And because climate is complex,
had torched his car last year. I will not feel fear in response to your increasingly desperate and puerile attempts to frighten,
says Marc Van Ranst, a virologist at the Dutch-speaking Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
when it comes to conservation, according to a study by Philip Hulme, a weed specialist at Lincoln University in New Zealand1.
But Darwin eventually made peace with the peacock's train, and its plumage has become the poster child for his theory of sexual selection, in
however, a furious debate has emerged among behavioural ecologists over whether the train of the male peafowl,
Plucking feathers from a male's train ruined his chances2. Later, French scientists found that males with lots of eyespots had stronger immune systems than less showy males
We propose that the peacock's train is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been lost
before plucking, males typically had between 165 and 170 eyespots on their trains, and on average, those with the most eyespots didn't mate any more than males with less extravagant tails.
females don't pick mates on the basis of the number of eyespots on their trains,
Other characteristics, including the colour and pattern of a train, may still entice females, she says.
Money set aside for conservation could be used to target the underlying drivers of deforestation-such as local people's need for food
you should do it in a way that addresses the drivers inherently, says Brendan Fisher, an environmental economist at Princeton university in New jersey and lead author on the study,
and other countries will almost certainly have different drivers of deforestation that need to be met.
that REDD+funds should target those drivers to achieve the programme's goals. It might be possible to increase safe carbon
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, joined with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo alto, California,
says Paul Telfer, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Congo programme in Brazzaville. The Amazon basin in South america, the Congo Basin in Central africa and the Borneo-Mekong Basin in Southeast asia are home to about 80%of the world's rainforests and two-thirds of global terrestrial biodiversity.
says Telfer. Before leaving for the Republic of congo, Gustavsson called the conference organization chaotic and confusing.
says Telfer.
German E coli outbreak caused by previously unknown strain: Nature Newsthe bacterium responsible for the current outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) infections in Germany is a strain that has never before been isolated in humans.
As drivers of change in ecosystem services, climate change and invasive species will become more and more important over the next 50 years,
The 22-23 Â September meeting, hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase,
NASA/JPL-CALTECHEVENTSCURIOSITY bound for Mars NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity, is on its way to Gale crater on Mars. The 900-kilogram rover (pictured,
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASUEVENTS Fresh clue to ancient Mars water NASA's Opportunity rover has discovered veins of hydrothermally deposited minerals at the edge of Endeavour crater on Mars. The bright
Gypsum deposits can form in water that is much less acidic than required by the water-altered sulphate minerals previously discovered on Mars meaning that the site could have been more habitable than others explored by the rover.
) Although it is accepted widely that overusing antibiotics can be a major driver of resistance in microbes,
Now a consortium of scientists, environmentalists and industries is expanding the focus from preserving forests to tackling the main driver of deforestation:
says Allen Van Deynze, a molecular geneticist at the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California,
says Van Deynze. Giovanni Giuliano, from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development in Rome,
Canadian biofuel plans deraileda leading biofuels company whose products have powered Formula 1 racing cars has hit a major bump in the road.
Iogen Corporationiogen's cellulosic ethanol has powered Formula 1 race cars. Fluctuations in the price of oil also pose a challenge for the industry,
and organizations including the World bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now, mechanical diggers and dump trucks are much more common. Peru is the sixth-largest producer of gold in the world,
according to the US Drought Monitor service, run by the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.
says Martin van Ittersum, an agricultural modeller at Wageningen University in The netherlands. For example, the study failed to show a significant effect of soils which can vary dramatically in ph and organic-matter content,
Van Ittersum and his colleagues are creating a'Global Yield Gap Atlas'using simulation-based models to capture data on agronomic conditions, water usage and crop yield.
adds van Ittersum. Mueller and Foley plan to tackle the trade-offs associated with increasing irrigation next."
China s largest maker of automobile parts, based in Zhejiang. Formed in 2001, A123 is a spin-off from work at the Massachusetts institute of technology, Cambridge.
and US President Barack Obama unveiled an aid package for stricken farmers on 13 Â August 17-23 august NASA s Mars rover Curiosity will attempt its first drive on the red planet next week
Mars landing NASA announced on 6 Â August that its Mars rover, Curiosity, had landed successfully in Gale Crater after an 8-month journey
In May, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Elelyso (taliglucerase alfa) a drug for the lysosomal storage disorder Gaucher disease which is produced in cultured carrot cells.
Politics holds back animal engineerswhen she saw the trailer for the documentary Genetic Roulette, Alison Van Eenennaam wanted to laugh, then cry.
The film touts the risks of genetically engineered (GE) organisms, calling them"the most dangerous thing facing human beings in our generation.
For Van Eenennaam, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, the scientifically unfounded assertions that transgenic foods are increased responsible for incidence of autism,
But the film reflects attitudes that have thwarted Van Eenennaam s research into the genetic modification of animals to reduce food costs
Van Eenennaam once hoped to engineer a cow that produced milk rich in omega-3 fats,
Van Eenennaam says that she might do better by disrupting the genes that lead to horns,
On 27 september, Van Eenennaam was a panellist at a meeting in WASHINGTON DC, where advocates of GE animal research aired their frustrations with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
says Van Eenennaam, who was on the advisory panel.""We will never have investment in this field
with collaborative efforts and'big data'coming to the fore. www. sfn. org/am201214-19 october New results from the Curiosity rover on Mars,
The price of pure ethanol at the pump is so high that in most states it is cheaper to fill up flexible-fuel cars with petrol blends that contain about 20%ethanol.
The shift back to fossil fuels, combined with rapid growth in the number of cars on the roads (see Fuelling Brazil s transport boom),
Meanwhile, the government has tried to stimulate the economy with tax breaks on the sale of new cars.
He expects to reduce that uncertainty to 20%by incorporating data from the towers in a high-resolution emissions model developed by atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney,
Gurney s model incorporates real data about energy use: industrial activities at the level of individual buildings together with traffic patterns.
Gurney foresees a day when the combined results of the greenhouse-gas measurements and modelling will enable cities to pinpoint methane emissions from natural-gas leaks, for example,
says Gurney, who has applied already the model to Phoenix in Arizona and is now adapting it to Los angeles."
Gurney adds, "you need to know where to do it. This is why Los angeles has bought into the monitoring programme.
Humans are not the only copycatsa team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St andrews,
Map supplied by T. P. Robinson, G r. W. Wint, G. Conchedda, T. P. Van Boeckel, V. Ercoli, E. Palamara, G. Cinardi, L. D
or to maintain a road for the large trucks that would deliver the gas. So daunting are the challenges that the team plans to ask the engineering arm of the Brazilian military for help.
Cruising around the eastern United states with his car window open, he slows down or stops every few hundred metres,
These loud, red-eyed insects have spent the past 17 Â years maturing underground, only to emerge this month by the billions for a few weeks of singing
and trucks as they move between barns. And researchers still hope that they can elucidate the virus s international and domestic path by looking for subtle evolutionary changes in viral genome sequences of samples from Asia and different US states.
Red rover NASA s next Mars explorer will be a leaner meaner version of the Curiosity rover, with one major upgrade:
the ability to store rock and soil samples for return to Earth, the agency said on 9 july.
acknowledges Rene Van Acker, a weed scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
Van Acker and Zemetra carried out separate field trials of the wheat over a decade ago
"We had to account for pretty much every seed in and every seed out, down to the gram, recalls Van Acker.
says Cornell University professor of crop and soil sciences Harold Mathijs van Es, who was involved not in the study."
says Brian Ford-Lloyd, a plant geneticist at the University of Birmingham, UK.""This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects of GM CROPS on the environment.
The Subaru Telescope on Mauna kea Hawaii, took pictures of the exoplanet GJ 504b at near-infrared wavelengths with the help of adaptive optics.
in Barrow, Alaska. The results suggest that the amplitude of the annual CO2 swing has increased over time
what kind of conclusions could be drawn from the Barrow data, which are collected at sea level rather than at a higher altitude where atmospheric currents are mixed well.
ITER Organizationroad test for experimental reactor A 352-wheel, 800-tonne trailer last week carried a test load (pictured) along the 104-kilometre route through France by
) The trailer 10.4 metres high, 9 metres wide and 33 metres long mimics the size of the largest components.
agricultural land is responsible for about 14%of the world s greenhouse-gas emissions, slightly more than the global contribution from planes, trains and automobiles.
Rabbit rescue China s moon rover has run into major trouble, according to a report on 25 january from state-run news agency Xinhua.
The Yutu (Jade Rabbit) rover experienced a"mechanical control abnormality as it prepared to hibernate over its second lunar night (roughly equivalent to 14 days On earth)
But those criticisms are rejected by Frank van Manen, a wildlife biologist with the US Geological Survey in Bozeman, Montana, who led the diet study.
van Manen says that the new number is better. That is in part because the revision takes into account a 2011 demographic study of bear survival rates based on radio-collar tracking data the first such study
which are the size of a van and weigh tonnes, cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build
Xinhua/Xinhua Press/Corbisrover resurrected China s first Moon rover, Yutu (Jade Rabbit, pictured), may yet be saved.
The Chinese space agency initially said on 12 Â February that efforts to rouse the rover had failed after it experienced mechanical problems in late January before going into hibernation ahead of a two-week lunar night.
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico is holding a conference to discuss the state of research on wheat. go. nature. com/hrne9g26-28 march Physicists debate a suitable landing site for the Exomars rover at a meeting
The mission plans to land a rover on the red planet in 2018. go. nature. com/i5n5r2
and there is growing interest in alternatives such as battery-powered cars. Cellulosic ethanol may now be arriving,
perhaps spooked by car-industry studies claiming that the fuel damages engines. Another way over the wall might be exports to the European union,
I left my car and I ran the whole way. about twenty minutes afet leaving the howling started. it lasted at least thirty more minutes before it just stopped.
Twenty minutes after that I made it to my car just as the wolves bolted out of the trees.
but my car started after sitting four days in minus 20 degees or colder weather and
and chasing people on bicycles. I have sat also with a rancher and watched as a pack of wolves calmly traveled through the middle of his heard without the slightest bit of trouble.
and New mexico got into the trucks they were brought in on? More magic? Sorry I donã¢Â#Â#t believe in magic
Bracing for the five hour drive from Edinburgh through steeply rising rocky hills we rent the largest car our transatlantic cousins have on offer.
Frosttty If you walk behind your car then see the exhaust you could be told YOU are polluting the world.
UN FAO official Henning Steinfeld stated that it was LIVESTOCK not cars that should be taking the blame.
but the mobile home parked there is) and I doubt there will be lot of demand for outdoor space...at firstfrom the movie RIDICK YOU CAN KEEP
Everything on the moon the rovers the flag the mirror could have been placed there by probes.
and folds his six-foot-six-inch frame into the driver's seat of his white Lexus.
He's got a chauffeur and it's a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
By the time he points his car down the street it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world.
Levandowski's car and those around him are represented by little white squares. The graphics are reminiscent of Pong.
And with that Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car's computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form
or another since the 1970s but three DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 2005 and 2007 jump-started the field.
It's not just Google that's developing the technology but also most of the major car manufacturers:
Audi Volkswagen Toyota GM Volvo BMW Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder.
It's the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski's car and it's used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.
and mandates for car-borne beacons that will broadcast location information to other vehicles on the road.
The beacons will warn drivers when a collision seems imminent when the car ahead breaks hard for example or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic.
Automakers may then use this information to take the next step: program automated responses. Automatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself. when
I arrive at work I'm ready. Levandoswki's commute is 45 miles long and if Chauffeur were perfect he might use the time napping in the backseat.
In reality Levandowski has to stay awake and behind the wheel because when Chauffeur encounters a situation in
which it's slightly unsure of itself it asks him to retake control. Following Google policy Levandowski drives through residential roads
and surface streets himself while Chauffeur drives the freeways. Still it's a lot better than driving the whole way.
Automatic driving is a fundamentally different experience than driving myself he told automotive engineers attending the 2012 SAE International conference.
He's the business lead of Google's self-driving-car project an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars easily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof an average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year where Governor Jerry brown signed California's self-driving-car bill into law Google cofounder Sergey Brin said you can count on one hand
the number of years until ordinary people can experience this. In other words a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a click here to download button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit a litigious society
and a host of technical catch-22's. Right now Chauffeur is undergoing what's known in Silicon valley as a closed beta test.
In the language particular to Google the researchers are dogfooding the car driving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
It's not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
The company also wants to prove in a statistical actuarial sense that the auto-drive function is safe:
not perfect not crash-proof but safer than a competent human driver. We have a saying here at Google says Levandowski.
In God we trust all others must bring data. Currently the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will on average travel 36000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention.
A mistake doesn't mean a crash it just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees.
For example it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road.
It's scary but it's not the same thing as an accident. The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second.
This spring Chris Urmson the director of Google's self-driving-car project told a government audience in Washington D c. that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about.
So far Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google.
A self-driving car near Google's headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago the Stone age in the foreshortened timelines of software development
and according to Google spokespeople the car was not in self-driving mode at the time so the accident wasn't Chauffeur's fault.
Considering that the Google self-driving program has clocked already half a million miles the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009 the company first announced the project in a blog post a year later.
The attack came from Chrysler the smallest of Detroit's Big Three automakers in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
Hands-free driving cars that park themselves an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company.
A year after the Dodge commercial aired Levandowski showed up in Detroit as the keynote speaker at the SAE's annual shindig.
Google wants to make available to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use he said
and then ticked off the goodies the Android operating system search voice social maps navigation even Chauffeur.
Instead of rebuilding a whole operating system from scratch he said automakers should focus on making the user experience their own.
For the car companies the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
But at $75000 to $85000 each Google's lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined including the car itself.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration. Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask
whether he could make a next-generation lidar a ruggedized standardized automotive component. The company wanted a design that it could hide (perhaps behind the windshield) that would wholesale for no more than $1000
Self-driving cars should be achievable in five years. It takes more than five years to engineer a new car from the ground up.
If Detroit started designing self-driving cars now around components that actually exist there's no way the technology could get to the showroom by 2017.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one Levandowski says. So what's the plan?
I don't think we need to wait 10 years for the next model or body style to come out to build the technology he told the SAE audience.
However without reinventing Chauffeur and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it Hall doesn't see the point.
It too is filled with catch-22's. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker's analysis of self-driving-car technology.
'âÂ#ÂDETROIT doesn't want to start making self-driving cars without legal clarity. And legal clarity will not arrive until self-driving cars test the law.
In Smith's analysis the legal concept of driver goes back to an international agreement called the Geneva convention on Road Traffic ratified by Congress in 1950.
In those days many of the world's drivers still had reins and a whip instead of a wheel and pedals.
They drove teams of horses herds of goats drifts of sheep. Animals Smith argues are autonomous.
And under the Geneva convention a basic legal requirement for drivers whether of animals or of cars is the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
the person in the driver's seat. The Google car doesn't work without one as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10 20 or maybe even 30 seconds'notice.
In Smith's analysis the person behind the wheel satisfies the legal requirement of control
And even if self-driving cars do not violate an international treaty myriad state laws imply that the driver must be human.
and looking to get ahead of the curve have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person
either in the driver's seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
Nevada was the first to adapt the principle into state law: Its DMV even designed special license plates for the vehicles (they have an infinity sign.
What's going to happen no matter what the law says is people are going to get sued Urmson the director of Google's self-driving-car project allows.
There's one last hazard to engineer out of the modern car: human error which according to NHTSA is the certain cause of 81 percent of all car crashes.
Cars kill roughly 32000 people a year in the U s . and in 2010 Levandowski's life partner Stefanie Olsen was one of the 2. 2 million per year injured.
She was nine months pregnant at the time. My son's name is Alex and Alex almost was born never says Levandowski.
He credits the safety features engineered into the car a Prius for saving Alex's life.
Technology he says should prevent oblivious drivers from causing harm. Self-driving-car boosters talk about a virtuous circle that starts
when human hands leave the wheel. It's not just safety that improves. Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another
so they travel as a virtual unit. Volvo has perfected a simple auto-drive system called platooning in
which its cars autonomously follow a professional driver. It uses technology that's already built into every high-end Volvo sold today plus a communications system.
The vehicle-to-vehicle communications standard soon to be announced by NHSTA would at least in theory enable all makes
and models to platoon. And lidar could eliminate even the need for a lead driver.
In our self-driving future not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past every stoplight would also be green.
In Volvo's real-world platooning tests drafting resulted in average fuel savings of 10 to 15 percent
Wayne Gerdes the father of hypermiling can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Volvo's goal is to eliminate fatalities in models manufactured after 2020 and its newest cars already start driving themselves
if they sense imminent danger either by steering back onto the roadway or braking in anticipation of a crash.
-and-steel variety and automakers could eliminate roll cages returning the consequent weight savings as even better mileage.
The EPA has a new mileage mandate for car manufacturers: They must achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025;
Mercedes offers Distronic Plus with Steering Assist as an option on the 2014 S-class luxury sedans.
and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of it. But the real engineering challenge is making sure the driver stays alert.
All kinds of problems crop up in real-world testing says auto-drive consultant Brad Templeton who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.
People start doing all kinds of things they shouldn't digging around in the backseat for example.
the car must be able to hand back control with no warning. But the temptation for drivers is to simply zone out.
So engineers have begun to design countermeasures. Mercedes for example requires two hands on the steering wheel at all times.
Everyone's looking for ways to keep the driver engaged says Dan Flores a spokesman for GM.
As the car gets more and more capable we want the driver to maintain driving expertise. Advocates like to say that there is no technical reason the new Mercedes needs hands on the wheel to steer through a turn.
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.
Obviously 99 percent just isn't good enough; we need 99.99999 says Templeton. And what people don't seem to realize is that the difference between those two numbers is huge.
Google is betting that established car manufacturers working with low-cost radar and camera components will never adequately bridge that gap.
It believes its level-three system will make cars safe enough for people to daydream
NHTSA's former deputy director Ron Medford has signed just on as Google's director of safety for the self-driving-car project.
I'm not sure it will be that much fun to drive behind a self-driving car that just dropped off the human driver
and is now looking for a parking space. It may drive very cautiously. If I see a parking space in the other aisle I'm having my wife jump out
and run over there and stand in it until the self-driving car stops. Then I'll drive around
and take the parking space. After all you can't be rude to a machine can you?
or 4 of the Microsoft Kinect devices put in various parts of the car to determine a 3d area?
if it was the person at fault or the car. I guess the car company would take fault
The first wave of the attack of the machines will be these autonomous cars running people down(:
The only way to get a Leap Forward with this technology is fully self driving to the point a 13 year old can jump in the car
or build a complete small town and engineer it for completely autonomous cars from the the ground up.
Design all the streets and topology as you would assuming that your cars were never going to be driven by people
and with a legally blind driver as the article at the link explains cheers.>>we need 99.99999
My concept car ecologically friendly and low CO2 footprint will be an external combustion CNG fueled car made almost exclusively of wood
Historically it has taken 30 years in the automobile industry for a a new technology to become a production available technology.
For the self driving car it may take much longer because it is complicated much more and litigious.
Self driving cars are getting a lot of press right now but there is something existing that will do everything a self driving car will ever do and a great deal more.
It is a form of duel mode transportation which is powered by electricity from the road bed in 2 protected automated lanes and an access and exit lane
Any vehicle that will fit into a standard parking space and with very minor modifications can be carried by the system.
Shipping containers can be transported from one terminal to another automatically without a tractor or driver.
All units move at exactly the same speed and form a train. No units can be hit by another unit or anything within or outside the system.
This can happen quickly without having to replace most of the cars being driven. Why doesn't Popular Science cover this kind of development
or anyone for that matter would be required to have a lot of practical driving experience prior to being permitted drive one of these robo-cars.
It would be nice to be able to just call your car to come pick you up
Please don't make us all car sick with jerky steering. Traffic light timing is another good project.
and reduce the number of stops than to put a regenerative braking system on every car
Thanks-Tonythis pipe dream of self-driving cars is very nice & all kind of romantic in an early 20th century sci fi way but for all practical purposes it will not happen.
but unless the concept of liability changes significantly we will never see public streets filled with robo-cars.
and the now pilotless vehicle causes a multi-car pileup? So create them so that the driver can take over you say?
HA! Not gonna happen because in order for the driver to assess the situation and gain control of the vehicle he/she would have been having to pay attention to/what the car is doing at all times/(like you do
when you're actually driving) which kinda negates the main point of having a self-driving car
i e. being able to focus on something other than driving. So who is responsible for the payout when the inevitable does happen?
Is it the car manufacturer? Perhaps the company that wrote the self-drive software? You certainly can't hold the owner responsible...
oh which also means that the business model for vehicle insurance would have to entirely change as well.
Auto manufacturers are not going to assume that responsibility . when the car ahead breaks hard??I'll trust a self-driving car
when you can get spell-check right. bike/train/bike commute beats any self driving car option. yes that would be bad short term for an economy based on consumption
but changing the infrastructure to make a mesh of high speed trains should ease transition from 1-ton-metal-can (2
if you're in US) for 1 person to 20 tonnes for+100 people..3-4 years ago I saw a Nissan Altima driving itself with the driver snoozing in a reclined seat;
I watched it in I-405 southbound through Seattle all the way from I-520 to I-90 (several miles) in traffic running from stop
and go to a full 60 mph. One of the times that we were stopped I even took t
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