[msb-alumni] Delphi may help put self-driving cars on road next year
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 16:05:58 -0400
BlankDelphi may help put self-driving cars on road next year Tom Krisher and
Dee-Ann Durbin
Autonomous vehicles with no human backup will be put to the test
on publicly traveled roads as early as next year in what may be the first
attempt at unassisted autonomous piloting. Automotive electronics and parts
maker
Delphi and French transport company Transdev plan to use autonomous taxis and a
shuttle van to carry passengers on roadways in France. The companies on
Wednesday said they plan to combine Delphi's self-driving technology with
Transdev's knowledge of mobility operations. Transdev operates trains, buses,
ferries and other transportation services in 19 countries, including the U.S.
Two on-demand Renault Zoe autonomous taxis will be deployed in Rouen, Normandy,
and a shuttle van will run between a rail station and campus in the university
district of Paris-Saclay. Both will start with humans on board later this
year, with the intent of going fully autonomous sometime in 2018. From the
start, the shuttle van won't have a steering wheel or pedals, and humans will
be inside solely to communicate with passengers, said Leriche, chief
performance
officer at Transdev Group. But humans at a central dispatch center would
still be able to take control of the vehicles, said Glen De Vos, Delphi Corp.'s
chief technology officer. 'We're confident that in the event they would
need to intervene, they can,' he said. The companies also plan a similar test
in
North America and are scouting locations, De Vos said. He believes they'll
go through several iterations of self-driving software and systems before the
French vehicles are fully operational sometime in 2019. Transdev plans to
gradually spread the technology throughout Paris and other cities that it
serves, so the autonomous vehicles will be on roads along with human drivers.
It may take a while for people to trust the vehicles enough to use them, but
Leriche said acceptance may not be that hard to get. Transdev has surveyed
users in autonomous shuttle tests about the service and quality, and more than
90%'were excited about the service. 'They were not afraid of the fact that
there was no driver,' he said. Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the
University of South Carolina who tracks self-driving cars, said the
Delphi-Transdev
project would be among the first to carry passengers on roads without human
backup drivers. Similar projects are ramping up in California and the
Netherlands,
he said. The partnership comes less than a month after U.K. -based Delphi
joined
with BMW, Intel and Mobileye to develop autonomous vehicles. Delphi, which
has U.S. operations just outside of Detroit, makes the computing platform that
brings together information from the car's sensors, cameras and computers.
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