We have been witnessing Samsung vs Apple in the smartphone industry for years now. That battle isn’t going away anywhere however, a new one is just beginning. Soon after reports of Apple testing its self-driving cars started appearing, it is being reported that Samsung has received permissions to test self-driving car.

South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has granted Samsung the required permissions to test its self-driving car. It is reported that Samsung will use South Korean carmaker Hyundai’s vehicles for the testing and the vehicles will be equipped with Samsung’s hardware and software. Hyundai itself is working in the same direction, or at least has plans to do so, and was the first one to obtain South Korean government’s approval to test self-driving vehicles. Samsung becomes the first tech company to do the same.

Samsung has previous tried its hands in the auto industry and with this development, there were speculations that Samsung might consider the same again. However, the tech giant quickly dismissed the rumours claiming that the test run approval is to run pilot for developing the software.

The company statement said, “The test run approval does not mean that Samsung is making a self-driving car. The pilot run is being carried out for software and solution development for an autonomous car, nothing more.”

The bankrupt Samsung Motors was sold to Renault in 2000 with Samsung holding 19.9 percent of the resulting Renault Samsung Motors. However, as auto industry begins its shift towards becoming transportation industry, an increasing number of tech companies are trying to be a part. Samsung recently acquired Harman, which has a range of in-car connectivity solutions, for USD 9 billion and has been registered presence across auto shows over the past few years.

For its self-driving endeavours, Samsung will use off the shelf laser and radar systems manufactured by other companies with its own software algorithms and AI. With this, Samsung joins the ever expanding list of companies working towards developing self-driving vehicles. What role the South Korean tech giant is looking to assume in the transportation ecosystem of future is something only time will tell.

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By now you must have heard of almost every major car maker doing something or the other in order to move faster towards a driverless future. Partnerships between tech companies and car companies give the promise of better urban transportation and Ford has taken another step in the same direction. The American carmaker announced that it will be investing USD 1 billion over the next five years in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company working on developing a virtual driver system for the autonomous vehicle targeted at 2021 launch.

Argo AI was founded by former Google and Uber executives and the team comprises of some of the most experienced roboticists and engineers working in this space. The team of experts in robotics and artificial intelligence is led by Argo AI founders Bryan Salesky, company CEO, and Peter Rander, company COO. Both are alumni of Carnegie Mellon National Robotics Engineering Center and former leaders on the self-driving car teams of Google and Uber, respectively.

“The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” said Ford President and CEO Mark Fields. “As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford’s leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.”

The current team developing Ford’s virtual driver system – the machine-learning software that acts as the brain of autonomous vehicles – will be combined with the robotics talent and expertise of Argo AI. This innovative partnership will work to deliver the virtual driver system for Ford’s SAE level 4 self-driving vehicles.

Ford will continue to lead on development of its purpose-built autonomous vehicle hardware platform, as well as on systems integration, manufacturing, exterior and interior design, and regulatory policy management.

Argo AI will join forces with Ford’s autonomous vehicle software development effort to strengthen the commercialization of self-driving vehicles. Argo AI’s agility and Ford’s scale uniquely combine the benefits of a technology startup with the experience and discipline of the automaker’s industry-leading autonomous vehicle development program.

“We are at an inflection point in using artificial intelligence in a wide range of applications, and the successful deployment of self-driving cars will fundamentally change how people and goods move,” said Salesky. “We are energized by Ford’s commitment and vision for the future of mobility, and we believe this partnership will enable self-driving cars to be commercialized and deployed at scale to extend affordable mobility to all.”

The collaboration supports Ford’s intent to have a fully autonomous, SAE level 4-capable vehicle for commercial application in mobility services in 2021.

“Working together with Argo AI gives Ford a distinct competitive advantage at the intersection of the automotive and technology industries,” said Raj Nair, Ford executive vice president, Global Product Development, and chief technical officer. “This open collaboration is unlike any other partnership – allowing us to benefit from combining the speed of a startup with Ford’s strengths in scaling technology, systems integration and vehicle design.”

Also complementing the relationship will be Ford Smart Mobility LLC, which will lead on the commercialization strategy for Ford’s self-driving vehicles. This includes choices for using autonomous vehicles to move goods and people, such as ride sharing, ride hailing or package delivery fleets.

Also read: Interested in a driverless future? 7 startups that you should be watching

Ford will be the majority stakeholder in Argo AI. Importantly, Argo AI has been structured to operate with substantial independence. Its employees will have significant equity participation in the company, enabling them to share in its success. Argo AI’s board will have five members: Nair; John Casesa, Ford group vice president, Global Strategy; Salesky; Rander; and an independent director.

The $1 billion investment in Argo AI will be made over five years and is consistent with the autonomous vehicle capital allocation plan shared last September as part of Ford Investor Day.

By the end of this year, Argo AI expects to have more than 200 team members, based in the company’s Pittsburgh headquarters and at major sites in Southeastern Michigan and the Bay Area of California.

Argo AI’s initial focus will be to support Ford’s autonomous vehicle development and production. In the future, Argo AI could license its technology to other companies and sectors looking for autonomous capability.

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CES has evolved from a technology show that would feature new laptops and quirky futuristic gadgets to an event that features lot of car companies. Our cars are getting brimmed with technology and it won’t be wrong to say that we should be looking at the automobile industry for the future of ground transportation. Driverless cars carry the promise of solving our urban as well as long distance transportation problems while potentially disrupting many other industries.

The driverless cars as seen until now are in no way close to their production form. The American carmaker Ford however seems to be moving forward at a brisk pace. They are calling 2021 as the year when they will bring out their high volume production fully autonomous vehicle. To stir things up even more, they are bringing their latest Fusion Hybrid autonomous development vehicle to the upcoming CES.

All the equipment added to the vehicle for its autonomous capabilities is neatly integrated. The LIDAR sensors sit on the A pillars and don’t look like KFC chicken buckets on top. Chris Brewer, Chief Program Engineer, Ford Autonomous Vehicle Development shares that the latest vehicle builds upon everything they have learned over the past three years. He speaks about what is needed to ship SAE Level 4 capable vehicles by 2021 and their virtual driver system is targeted towards the same.

Ford plans to put more autonomous cars on the road for testing and up the number to 90 cars from 30. The most critical aspect of Ford’s efforts in this space is their massive scale and strong expertise in automobile industry. While the tech companies can do a great job of building software solutions to power these vehicles, building cars that will deal with everyday situations is another level of challenge which a company like Ford can deal with experience. It will be interesting to watch how the developments and aggressive approach of carmakers shape up the future of autonomous vehicles. You can read about their upcoming vehicle here.

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With the plans to rebuild ground transportation from scratch, the race for autonomous vehicles is on. Tech brands are working overtime to make sure they are a stakeholder in this space while automobile companies are supporting the innovations to avoid being the Kodak of auto industry. Baidu has previously announced that it is working on its own version of autonomous vehicles and also recently introduced a platform in association with Nvidia to support the developments.

Baidu CFO Jennifer Li at a recent Bloomberg conference reiterated the company’s plans to bring driverless cars and shared that the company will have driverless vehicles by 2018 with mass production possible by 2020. This closely matches the timelines Elon Musk has shared for Tesla.

Li stressed on Baidu’s capabilities and investments in artificial intelligence which would allow for rapid progress in this space. China is a huge car market and some recent surveys indicate that the Chinese people are more open to the idea of these vehicles.

While the promises are bold and the company optimistic, it is going to be a steep climb, even for a brand like Baidu. They recently got permission to test their vehicles in California however Baidu barely exists outside of its home country. Autonomous vehicles will heavily rely on mapping data and Baidu hasn’t got anything outside its home turf. That is where Google has generated heaps of data and has invested billions in the self-driving car project.

Regulations will also define how the technology is introduced and adopted by the masses. The Chinese regulators have shown some positive signs to the developments until now but in most cases, they have been slow to adopt new technologies in other industries.

We are anxious to see if Baidu delivers on the promise of a new face of transportation in 2018.

Source: Bloomberg

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By now, YouTube is flooded with people sharing their experiences of being driven around by their Tesla cars. Until now, if you wanted to get this experience, your best bet was to buy a Tesla. However, Comma.ai, with technology built in a garage promised a low cost solution and at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this year, founder George Hotz unveiled the first official product called Comma One.

While the device won’t make the vehicle completely autonomous, Hotz shares that it will make it semi-autonomous, good for highway use, like Tesla. The device makes use of certain sensors like front radars that are already present in many cars so it won’t work with all cars at launch. However, Hotz hopes to expand the list of supported vehicles over time. The hardware will replace the rear view mirror in cars and will use the camera to identify what is around the vehicle.

He also used the opportunity to take a dig at many other companies working towards bringing autonomous vehicles to masses. According to him, many of them don’t even have a hardware, let alone a product that they can ship. While the product is squarely targeted at Tesla Autopilot, Hotz also appreciated how Tesla is constantly working to improve the system and that the widely talked about crash was an unfortunate incident that was a case of driver not paying attention like most accidents on the road.

Comma One will cost $999 to buy however there will be a monthly cost of $24 for the service. The device is likely to ship in limited quantities before the end of this year.

Source: TechCrunch

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Road travel is going to be much safer, or at least there is a promise, when fully autonomous vehicles arrive. You can go much longer without fatigue and with minimum risks. Even local commute would be much safer and less frustrating, probably making the whole world more efficient. But all that is still a while away. Google has been testing its self-driving car for years now and every month there is a report on the project.

During August, the Google vehicles travelled 126,000 miles in autonomous mode, close to what an average human driver drives in 10 years. The number of miles driven have been doubled over the last year to prepare the system with as much learning as possible. They are now being subjected to testing in new areas including dusty desert conditions.

But the most important thing to watch for are the collisions. Minor accidents are inevitable for any vehicle and with more time spent on road, it is more likely. We have been observing the accidents that Google shares in its monthly report and on almost all the occasions, it is the human driver at fault. Over all these years, there have been one or two incidents where the driverless vehicle failed to understand the situation and got involved in an accident. While the incidents involving human errors are just far too many. Even this month, there were two incidents of slow speed crashes, in both the cases the car was rear ended while standing. Another crash in manual mode involved a vehicle that ran a red light.

The Google self-driving vehicles are performing much better than an average driver in the region already. And this while also dealing with the different response the Google vehicles get from other road users. Earlier this year, Google highlighted how people are leapfrogging in front of these vehicles. Another crash that month was because a disoriented driver rear ended a Google vehicle.

These are all minor incidents and it is very likely that many of them would have gone unreported. However, this reinforces the idea all the self-driving car projects begun with. We really need them for a safer, better ground transport in future.

You can find the report for August here.

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Yes you can be excited about driverless cars now, especially if you live in Singapore. While Uber recently announced that it will start testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh starting this month, NuTonomy has officially launched driverless taxis in Singapore, probably beating Uber to it by few days. This will be the first ever public trial for autonomous vehicles and it will be held in One-North business district.

NuTonomy, a US based driverless vehicle R&D firm founded by MIT PhD graduates in 2013, has partnered with EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore Economic Development Board. NuTonomy will invite residents of Singapore to try out the service for free by booking a ride through its app. The driverless cars being used for testing are built upon Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV as base.

CEO and co-founder of nuTonomy, Karl Iagnemma, said, “nuTonomy’s first-in-the-world public trial is a direct reflection of the level of maturity that we have achieved with our AV software system. The trial represents an extraordinary opportunity to collect feedback from riders in a real-world setting, and this feedback will give nuTonomy a unique advantage as we work toward deployment of a self-driving vehicle fleet in 2018.”

In May of this year, nuTonomy completed a $16M Series A funding led by Highland Capital Partners that included participation from Fontinalis Partners, Signal Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and EDBI, the dedicated corporate investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Uber is working with Volvo to bring driverless cabs and similar to their plan, these public rides will have an engineer from the company to observe the vehicle behaviour and take control in case things don’t proceed how they are supposed to. The data collected through the testing program will help them improve the software for the future.

While NuTonomy is the first company to start public testing of driverless cabs, Uber isn’t far behind. There are many other startups working in different ways to achieve autonomy in vehicles and will be seen in public sooner or later.

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Only recently BMW announced its vision of the future of autonomous vehicles. While announcing a partnership with Intel and Mobileye, they announced a platform inviting automobile manufacturers and tech companies. Each one of them has made progress in some way or the other and if they collaborate to create common technology standards, the dream can be realised much sooner than expected. This will also help in advancing the safety aspect of it which is a very crucial element.

Taking another step in the same direction, Japanese government and the European Union plan to connect their global positioning systems. This would help speed up the developments with autonomous driving technologies. The outline of this development is that Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System and EU’s Galileo will be connected by 2018 by using a common digital language that the system will be using to transmit location data.

The advantage? Japanese are known to make some of the most technologically advanced vehicles and their cars are sold all over the world. With this new development, the manufacturers and component manufacturers will be able to ship the products developed for the local market to be used outside Japan. Discussions are launched on integrating the systems with Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi Zosen and NTT Data from Japan and Thales, an electronics company from France taking part. The group will create an outline of the plan by the end of this year.

The navigation systems we use have an uncertainty of few metres however that won’t cut it for driverless cars. QZSS used by Japan adjusts the information provided by GPS and has an accuracy up to a few centimetres. However it uses satellite that hovers directly above Japan and can’t be used outside the region. Galileo however has a network of 30 satellites but with lower accuracy. The collaboration would try to leverage the advantages of both standards to improve both coverage and accuracy to provide a suitable GPS network for driverless cars.

Source: Nikkei

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Silicon Valley based Management consulting firm Zinnov recently carried out a study on how the automotive industry is changing with the growth of new age mobility startups. The automobile industry has started changing with tech companies trying to take a piece of the pie to change how we travel. This has motivated the estabilished car companies to step out of their comfort zone and work with fast moving tech startups. Some of them are also setting up new divisions to offer ground transportation as a service rather than focussing just on products.

The report by Zinnov analysed over 60 automotive companies and highlights the disruption experienced across the spectrum. The product strategy of automobile companies is shifting from building discrete products to cognitive AI systems with IoT and connectivity technologies getting the prime focus.

Speaking about the report, Sidhant Rastogi, Partner, Zinnov said, “The automotive industry is witness to the highest disruption among all industries. New technologies such as Autonomous, AI, and Electric have reached application maturity. New OEMs such as Tesla, Next EV have changed the way cars are conceived, built and sold. Tech Mafia – Google, Apple have invested billions of dollars in user experience. Start-ups across driver assistance, autonomous, sharing have received over $14 billion in funding. The existing OEMs and Tier 1s are fighting back with their own massive investments – in house R&D + start-up collaboration / acquisitions. Of all locations, the Bay Area Silicon Valley is at pole position with 27 new R&D centres of auto companies and more than 50% of all auto start-up investments.”

In financial year 2015, around USD 6 billion were invested in automotive startups. Major brands are setting up new R&D centres in popular tech hubs. Honda recently announced a new upcoming R&D Innovation Lab in Tokyo to work on intelligent technologies like vehicle connectivity, robotics, brain research and visual recognition. Another major player, Toyota, invested around USD 1 billion in setting up its own Silicon Valley R&D unit to develop artificial intelligence and also formed a partnership with Uber to explore ride hailing opportunities. General Motors announced the acquisition of Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley startup developing technologies for driverless cars. According to Zinnov’s analysis, 9 out of 12 of the top automotive companies have venture arms in Bay Area to tap into the startup ecosystem.

The automobile giants have also set up 70+ startup accelerators across to globe with Bay Area being getting more attention again. They are also fostering academic partnerships with top universities across the globe including MIT, Stanford University, Imperial College London and many more to facilitate research on emerging technologies and drive the next big innovation in mobility sector.

The data is a clear indication of things that are about to come. Tech companies move faster than automobile companies and that is why, the car makers are either betting on young, agile startups to innovate or spinning off their research units as separate entities to face the potential disruption they are facing. (Also read: 9 industries that will be affected by the arrival of driverless cars)

You can find more information about Zinnov and their other research reports at zinnov.com/.

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