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Waymo Partners With Jaguar for 20,000 Self-Driving Electric SUVs

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:15AM   
from the pronounced-jag-u-ar dept.

takyon writes:

Waymo and Jaguar will build up to 20,000 self-driving electric SUVs

Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover have inked a deal that will add tens of thousands of all-electric I-Pace SUVs to the Alphabet unit's growing lineup of self-driving taxis. The I-Pace, which made its global debut earlier this month, is not as much of a people-mover as Waymo's Chrysler Pacifica minivans, but it will serve as a more high-end ride for those willing to pay a premium for their driverless transportation.

The first prototype I-Pace with Waymo's self-driving technology will hit the road for public testing at the end of 2018, and officially become part of Waymo's commercial ride-hailing service starting in 2020. Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover's engineers will work in tandem to build these cars to be self-driving from the start, rather than retrofitting them after they come off the assembly line. Long-term, the companies say they plan to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production, with the goal of serving a potential 1 million trips a day. It's unclear how much money would be trading hands under the deal.

They're coming for Tesla!

Related: Waymo Orders Thousands More Chrysler Pacifica Minivans for Driverless Fleet
Google/Waymo Announces Testing of Self-Driving Trucks in Atlanta, Georgia

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Original Submission

• Re:Right... (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:45AM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:45AM (#659280) Journal

  Here's another one: Uber’s use of fewer safety sensors prompts questions after Arizona crash [reuters.com]

  When Uber decided in 2016 to retire its fleet of self-driving Ford Fusion cars in favor of Volvo sport utility vehicles, it also chose to scale back on one notable piece of technology: the safety sensors used to detect objects in the road.

  That decision resulted in a self-driving vehicle with more blind spots than its own earlier generation of autonomous cars, as well as those of its rivals, according to interviews with five former employees and four industry experts who spoke for the first time about Uber’s technology switch.

  Driverless cars are supposed to avoid accidents with lidar – which uses laser light pulses to detect hazards on the road - and other sensors such as radar and cameras. The new Uber driverless vehicle is armed with only one roof-mounted lidar sensor compared with seven lidar units on the older Ford Fusion models Uber employed, according to diagrams prepared by Uber.

  In scaling back to a single lidar on the Volvo, Uber introduced a blind zone around the perimeter of the SUV that cannot fully detect pedestrians, according to interviews with former employees and Raj Rajkumar, the head of Carnegie Mellon University’s transportation center who has been working on self-driving technology for over a decade.

  They dumbed down the LIDAR system. That could save a buck or two, but that's not worth it when LIDAR costs are falling an order of magnitude or more [soylentnews.org]. Use what works today, worry about cost as the (rushed, in Uber's case) rollout approaches.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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