Self-driving car tech became more accessible to the public this year. Uber launched its pilot program in Pittsburgh that allowed select users to get a ride in a self-driving car. Tesla also began producing its cars with the hardware necessary to be fully driverless. These moves show self-driving cars are no longer just a concept, but actual products we can see for ourselves. Here are the biggest moments for self-driving cars in 2016

24 big driverless car breakthroughs in 2016 - Business Insider

But there was also a reward. The company has collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles operating under diverse road and weather conditions around the world. And in the frantic race to roll out the first fully functional autonomous vehicle, that kind of mass, real-world intelligence can be invaluable. In that way, for now, the electric-car maker has a leg up on competitors including Google, General Motors Co. and Uber Technologies Inc.

The Tesla Advantage: 1.3 Billion Miles of Data - Bloomberg

data collected by University of Manitoba natural scientist Vaclav Smil shows that today it requires 20% less energy to produce a ton of steel than it did in 1900. For aluminum and cement, the energy reduction needed to produce a ton today versus 1900 is 70%. It takes 80% less energy than it did in 1900 to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer. The amount of energy used to heat a home in the United States is down 50% from the amount consumed in 1978. Lastly, it takes 90% less energy to desalinate a gallon of water today compared with 1970.

Could Self-Driving Vehicles Destroy The Oil Business? - Oilpro

“Over the past forty years, the United States made significant gains in energy productivity. U.S. economic output expanded more than three times since 1970 while demand for energy grew only 50%.”

Could Self-Driving Vehicles Destroy The Oil Business? - Oilpro

Researchers at the University of Texas have conducted a realistic simulation of vehicle use in cities that took into account traffic congestion and rush-hour use. They found that if our vehicle fleet was fully autonomous, every shared autonomous vehicle could replace 11 conventional vehicles. As their study showed, the world would only need 800 million vehicles to supply transportation services for nine billion people, or 200 million fewer cars than what already exists in the global vehicle fleet. That doesn’t sound like a bright future for either the automobile or petroleum industries.

Could Self-Driving Vehicles Destroy The Oil Business? - Oilpro

Aric Dromi, consultant for carmaker Volvo, has expressed massive skepticism about the future of autonomous driving. In an interview with German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Dromi predicted massive changes for urban life. Nevertheless, he said, he expects that cars that fly will be available earlier than those capable of driving autonomously. In the interview, Dromi said the concept of autonomous driving is a huge misunderstanding: Carmakers believe it is more or less an additional feature and a further development of existing driver assistances systems. This perception is wrong, Dromi explained. In reality, autonomous driving is a gigantic infrastructure project which will take much time to be implemented. Dromi expressed his opinion that cars should not use the same roads as pedestrians. Instead, they need a separate and dedicated system of roads exclusively for this type of vehicles

Cars will rather fly than drive autonomously, expert predicts | Smart2.0

Robotic cars are great at monitoring other cars, and they’re getting better at noticing pedestrians, squirrels, and birds. The main challenge, though, is posed by the lightest, quietest, swerviest vehicles on the road. “Bicycles are probably the most difficult detection problem that autonomous vehicle systems face,” says UC Berkeley research engineer Steven Shladover.

The Self-Driving Car's Bicycle Problem - IEEE Spectrum

A report by Bloomberg says Ford is going to skip a step and go straight to fully autonomous driving. The article says that is because engineers who are testing the company's self-driving vehicles are falling asleep at the wheel because there is so little for them to do. Ford tells me that only part of this story is true: "Reports that Ford engineers were falling asleep while testing autonomous vehicles are inaccurate." But it goes on to say that "high levels of automation without full autonomy capability could provide a false sense of security". That means it is difficult for the driver to suddenly take control if there is a situation where the technology is not up to it. And that's why it is going to head straight to what is known as SAE level four - "autonomous capability that will take the driver completely out of the driving process in defined areas". In January, at CES in Las Vegas, Ford's Ken Washington told me confidently that the company would have a fully autonomous car on the road by 2021: "The vehicles we are going to put in our 2021 fully autonomous ride service will not have a steering wheel, they won't have a brake pedal," he explained. "So this means there's no issue with drivers having to take over control because the vehicle will know how to handle all scenarios."

Driverless cars - no halfway house? - BBC News

From pulling up location coordinates to finding a free parking spot or opening the garage door, virtual assistants in cars are going to play a key role in powering the connected-car revolution. The voice-enabled virtual assistant space is becoming hotly contested among tech giants. Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), however, seems to be taking the lead in this market with its Alexa Automotive platform, which is powered by the Echo voice assistant. The company has lined up deals with some of the biggest automakers, and is also receiving support from third-party accessory manufacturers such as Logitech (NASDAQ:LOGI) that could give Alexa a major push. Alexa's already in the car The Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas last month showed that Alexa is finding favor among carmakers, as Ford (NYSE:F) and Volkswagen (NASDAQOTH:VLKAY) both said they had signed up to use the platform for services including weather updates and navigation. This is a big deal for Amazon; it needs to sign up big automakers for Alexa to steal a march on rivals such as Microsoft's Cortana and Alphabet's Google Assistant.

How Amazon's Alexa Could Drive the Connected Car Revolution -- The Motley Fool

MIT associate professor Iyad Rahwan has asked 3 million people to consider the “Trolley problem” when it comes to self-driving cars. The Trolley problem goes like this: a runaway trolley is barreling toward five people on a track who cannot move. But you have the option to pull a lever and send it to a side track where you see one person standing. What would you do? But as Rahwan puts it, the Trolley problem gets thornier when considering self-driving cars. The first scenario puts the ethical burden on a person. But if a self-driving car is in a lose-lose situation where it must make a choice, we’re asking a robot in our everyday environment to make the call. “The idea of a robot having an algorithm programmed by some faceless human in a manufacturing plant somewhere making decisions that has life-and-death consequence is very new to us as humans,” Rahwan told Business Insider.

Automakers' self-driving car problem - Business Insider

But Xiao isn't worried about getting run over by the giants, saying that his small team of academics possesses the kind of expertise in computer vision that big corporations just can't match. Exhibit A: after only six months on the job, Xiao says he's already developed a prototype vehicle that can do the same things as the cars made by his deep-pocketed rivals, at a fraction of the cost.  AutoX gave a first peek at its creation on Friday, with a debut video showing its prototype system in action. The car itself isn't anything special in terms of style (it's basically just a regular 2017 Lincoln MKZ that's been rigged with AutoX technology), but it deftly navigates residential streets near San Jose, seeming to handle driving situations such as cloudy days and night-time, historically a challenge for self-driving cars, with ease.

AutoX CEO Jianxiong Xiao interview - Business Insider

As noted in the video, AutoX's system doesn't rely on the LIDAR laser arrays or other expensive sensors that most self-driving cars, including Waymo's and Uber's, require to function. Instead, AutoX uses advanced artificial intelligence to "see" through cameras mounted on the car and steer the car accordingly.  Better yet, Xiao tells Business Insider that the cameras that power this AutoX prototype were purchased at Best Buy for $50 a pop. "It could not be cheaper than that," he says.  From Xiao's standpoint, that's a crucial point: While future iterations of AutoX technology will support ultrasonic sensors and LIDAR and all that stuff for the sake of enhancing driver safety, the startup is currently focused on building the cheapest and most accessible system for self-driving cars that it possibly can.

AutoX CEO Jianxiong Xiao interview - Business Insider

According to the World Health Organization, human error causes more than 90 percent of traffic accidents across the globe. Some 1.25 million people die in crashes, and 20 to 50 million people are injured each year. Automakers are scrambling to develop cars with advanced driver-assistance systems that are so good they’re “crash-proof,” or fully autonomous vehicles, each safer than the next. But the automakers are somewhat limited by the computational resources onboard their vehicles. Now, a startup out of Mountain View, Calif. called DeepScale has raised $3 million in seed funding to help automakers use industry-standard low-wattage processors to power more accurate perception. Alongside sensors, mapping, planning and control systems, perception, (sometimes referenced as “computer vision”) enables vehicles to make sense of what’s going on around them in real time.

DeepScale raises $3 million for perception AI to make self-driving cars safe | TechCrunch

A mysterious self-driving car company has been quietly expanding in recent years in the world’s largest country. Now, Moscow-based Cognitive Technologies has hired a slew of new recruits and is ready to move to the U.S. in the coming months. “The big R&D center will stay in Russia, but the main engineers and business guys will be sent to U.S. soil to set up a proper office,” Roman Tarasov, the company’s VP for global business, tells Inverse. “We’re thinking either California or Delaware.”

Russia's Self-Driving Car Company Is Coming For the World | Inverse

Level 0: This one is pretty basic. The driver (human) controls it all: steering, brakes, throttle, power. It's what you've been doing all along.

Level 1: This driver-assistance level means that most functions are still controlled by the driver, but a specific function (like steering or accelerating) can be done automatically by the car. Level 2: In

level 2, at least one driver assistance system of "both steering and acceleration/ deceleration using information about the driving environment" is automated, like cruise control and lane-centering. It means that the "driver is disengaged from physically operating the vehicle by having his or her hands off the steering wheel AND foot off pedal at the same time," according to the SAE. The driver must still always be ready to take control of the vehicle, however.

Level 3: Drivers are still necessary in level 3 cars, but are able to completely shift "safety-critical functions" to the vehicle, under certain traffic or environmental conditions. It means that the driver is still present and will intervene if necessary, but is not required to monitor the situation in the same way it does for the previous levels. Jim McBride, autonomous vehicles expert at Ford, said this is "the biggest demarcation is between Levels 3 and 4." He's focused on getting Ford straight to Level 4, since Level 3, which involves transferring control from car to human, can often pose difficulties. "We're not going to ask the driver to instantaneously intervene—that's not a fair proposition," McBride said. Level 4: This is what is meant by "fully autonomous."

Level 4 vehicles are "designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip." However, it's important to note that this is limited to the "operational design domain (ODD)" of the vehicle—meaning it does not cover every driving scenario.

Level 5: This refers to a fully-autonomous system that expects the vehicle's performance to equal that of a human driver, in every driving scenario—including extreme environments like dirt roads that are unlikely to be navigated by driverless vehicles in the near future.

Updated: Autonomous driving levels 0 to 5: Understanding the differences - TechRepublic