Category: transportation

Since last month’s low-speed crash, which resulted in no injuries, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said the company chose to conduct a voluntary recall, and the software update assured such a rare incident “would not recur….” As for the March bus collision, Vogt said the software fix was uploaded to Cruise’s entire fleet of 300 cars within two days. He said the company’s probe found the crash scenario “exceptionally rare” with no other similar collisions.

“Although we determined that the issue was rare, we felt the performance of this version of software in this situation was not good enough,” Vogt wrote in a blog post. “We took the proactive step of notifying NHTSA that we would be filing a voluntary recall of previous versions of our software that were impacted by the issue.” The CEO said such voluntary recalls will probably become “commonplace.”

“We believe this is one of the great benefits of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs is able to rapidly improve, and we are able to carefully monitor that progress over time,” he said.

The Cruise car was traveling about 10 miles per hour, and the collision caused only minor damage to its front fender, Vogt’s blog post explained. San Francisco’s buses have front and back coaches connected by articulated rubber, and when the Cruise taxi lost sight of the front half, it made the assumption that it was still moving (rather than recognizing that the back coach had stopped). Or, as Cruise told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, their vehicle “”inaccurately predicted the movement” of the bus.

It was not the first San Francisco incident involving Cruise since June, when it became the first company in a major city to win the right to taxi passengers in driverless vehicles — in this case Chevrolet Bolts. The city’s Municipal Transportation Agency and County Transportation Authority recorded at least 92 incidents from May to December 2022 in which autonomous ride-hailing vehicles caused problems on city streets, disrupting traffic, Muni transit and emergency responders, according to letters sent to the California Public Utilities Commission….

Just two days before the Cruise crash in March, the company had more problems with Muni during one of San Francisco’s intense spring storms. A falling tree brought down a Muni line near Clay and Jones streets on March 21, and a witness reported on social media that two Cruise cars drove through caution tape into the downed wire. A company representative said neither car had passengers and teams were immediately dispatched to remove the vehicles.

On Jan. 22, a driverless Cruise car entered an active firefighting scene and nearly ran over hoses. Fire crews broke a car window to try to stop it.

“We have the ability to address range and charging anxiety in a way that no one else can in this country,” Vishal Kapadia, Walmart’s recently appointed senior vice president of Energy Transformation, said in an interview. Owning its chargers, instead of partnering with a network operator, will help Walmart address reliability and cost issues, Kapadia said. Kapadia said he expects the new charge points to be direct-current fast chargers, with about four chargers on average installed per store.

“We are transitioning from AM radio for most new and updated 2024 models,” Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told the Free Press. “A majority of U.S. AM stations, as well as a number of countries and automakers globally, are modernizing radio by offering internet streaming through mobile apps, FM, digital and satellite radio options. Ford will continue to offer these alternatives for customers to hear their favorite AM radio music, news and podcasts as we remove amplitude modulation — the definition of AM in this case — from most new and updated models we bring to market.” Commercial vehicles will continue to offer AM radio because of longstanding contract language, Sherwood said….

“In essence, EV motors generate a lot of electromagnetic interference that affects the frequencies of AM radio and make it difficult to get a clear signal,” said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Research Group, which specializes in digital transformation and innovation. “It could be shielded, but given the diminishing listening habits to AM, the automakers haven’t chosen to do it. Most of the content there is available through other means, including podcast and internet streaming. In my view, this isn’t that different from automakers discontinuing 8-track players, cassette players and CD players. Technology has advanced. The idea that it is a critical safety channel is a bit suspect given that almost all critical communication now is sent through mobile phones….”

Veteran analyst John McEloy, host of “Autoline After Hours” webcast and podcast said automakers don’t need to get rid of AM radio. “It’s happening because automakers would love to get rid of the cost of an AM radio,” he told the Free Press. “Some of them, like Ford, are using EVs as an excuse to get rid of it. GM shields its AM radios in its electric cars to they don’t get any interference.”
But the article also quotes a spokesperson for GM saying they’re “evaluating AM radio on future vehicles and not providing any further details at this time.”

Last month U.S. Senator Markey noted that seven more top automakers have already removed AM radio from their electric vehicles — BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

The technology is also meant to scale elegantly. It’s relatively easy to add new pad locations as usage grows, and the drones can double as scouts that expand the network. The drones can even make sure they’re allowed to fly in a given area. Wing expects “elements” of the Delivery Network to deploy over the next year, with demonstrations taking place worldwide in 2023. Provided all goes according to plan, the brand wants to handle “millions” of deliveries by mid-2024, at prices that beat conventional ground-based delivery.

“Volkswagen must and will do better for everyone that trusts our brand and for the law enforcement officials tasked with protecting us. In addition to a full investigation of what went wrong and actions taken to address the failure, we want to make it right for the future. Today, we are setting a new standard for customer peace of mind. As of June 1, we will make these connected vehicle emergency services free for five years as one significant step we can take as a commitment to our owners and their families,” Zaluzec said in a statement sent to Ars.

Most MY2020 or newer VWs can use connected services, apart from MY2020 Passats. From June, owners can sign up for five years of free Car-Net Safe and Secure, which uses the vehicle’s onboard modem to connect to the emergency services via the car’s SOS button. In gasoline-powered VWs, there is also an anti-theft alert. VW says it will make Car-Net Remote Access free for five years as well. This lets owners interact with their car via a mobile app and can lock and unlock the doors, honk the horn and flash the lights, and, if fitted, remote-start the vehicle.

Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight: “During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.”

Connect has secured the first US order to convert 75 ATR 72-600 planes to Universal Hydrogen powertrains with the purchase rights for 25 more. With the first successful flight complete, Universal Hydrogen kicks off a two-year testing program that is expected to enable full certification for hydrogen electric passenger flights using the aforementioned ATR 72 planes by 2025. The flight also marks the Dash-300 flying test bed as the largest hydrogen electric plane to take flight, paving the way for more hydrogen electric conversions of existing aircraft. You can watch a video of the flight on YouTube or embedded in Electrek’s article.

The permit is not for all public roads in the state. The tests are currently limited to shuttling Zoox employees on a one-mile public route between two office buildings at the company’s headquarters in Foster City, California, at speeds up to 35 miles an hour. The company hasn’t said how big its test fleet is, but executives have said they have built “dozens” of vehicles, although fewer than 100. Zoox said one of its vehicles completed a test run with employees on board over the weekend.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece “takes a crack at explaining ‘technical debt’ to the masses.” Tufekci writes:

Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn’t return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week’s major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed.

It’s been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week.

And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries.

“The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn’t ignore the problem,” the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots’ union “pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.”) “In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay.”

Speaking about this week’s outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that “We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions.”

But Tufekci concludes that “Ultimately, the problem is that we haven’t built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management…. For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public.”

December is expected to be an even bigger month based on early data coming in. For example, Tesla has already delivered 5,000 Model Y vehicles in Norway alone in December. The Model Y’s rise in popularity in Europe coincides with Tesla ramping-up Model Y production at Gigafactory Berlin. The automaker recently confirmed that the factory is now producing 3,000 Model Y vehicles per week. All those vehicles are for the European market, and Tesla also ships cars from Gigafactory Shanghai to Europe.