As we navigate into the 21st century, great innovations promised by Star Trek and Marty McFly are starting to become reality. Transporters and self-tying shoes aside, ask any daily commuter what they want, and they will say autonomous cars.
Imagine heading into the office sipping your coffee and reading the paper at 65 miles per hour while Alexa or Google drives your car. Well, that future could still be a little further away than people think. The Washington Post just released a very interesting online simulator showcasing how difficult a problem full Level 5 Autonomy truly is.
As the simulator nicely outlines, autonomous cars work by using sensors located all over the car. These sensors, comprised of radar, lidar and cameras, feed dozens of gigabytes of data into a central computer, every minute. This can locate your vehicle down to the centimeter. Currently, computer developer Nvidia has one that can perform at this speed.
Despite all these sensors and data, self-driving cars still face a lot of obstacles and development work before they can become reliable enough to be commonplace. Basically, they have trouble seeing and hearing. In daylight, a human can see four times better than the current technology.
Sensors have trouble discerning a pedestrian from a bicycle. Some have had trouble seeing stopped vehicles in the road. Others cannot discern animals smaller than a moose quickly enough. Large objects alongside you on the road, like a motor home, can effect line of sight and cause sensor blind spots.
We are asking a lot of a machine to be able to react and make split-second decisions like a human being. The ongoing chess game that is navigating our roadways is constantly changing.
These issues will be overcome in time, but another issue may confound your dream of catching 40 winks on the interstate. Currently, 40 states have different regulations regarding autonomous vehicles. The federal government is not regulating testing currently, which could make for decades of waiting before there is a framework of how to regulate this technology.
BYD has launched the third-generation Qin Plus DM-i in China, and the first thing that caught my eye is its price. According to CarNewsChina, the plug-in hybrid sedan starts at 79,900 yuan, which is about $11,980. That’s an incredibly low price for a brand-new car, especially by US standards.
What’s even more impressive is the range. The Qin Plus DM-i can drive up to 137 miles on electricity alone, which should cover most people’s daily commutes without using a drop of gas. Once the battery runs out, the 1.5-liter engine takes over. Thanks to its 17-gallon tank and roughly 91 mpg with a drained battery, the combined range reaches up to 1,423 miles.
Apple won the PC market’s worst quarter, but that’s not the entire story. It won the race by stumbling less than everyone else.
PC makers shipped just 57 million computers worldwide in Q3, which might look good, but it’s a 21% year-over-year plunge (via Counterpoint Research). And despite Apple’s Mac shipments falling by 11%, to 5.6 million, its market share rose from 8.7% to 9.8%. How did that happen?
Update (October 22 23:54 PT): In response to our query, GM clarified that offline recording support is already available on eligible vehicles. Like Tesla's Sentry Mode, it requires owners to connect a USB drive to save incident recordings, which can be viewed on the vehicle's infotainment screen. The upcoming Connected Cameras feature will build on this by giving owners remote access to these recordings via the revamped OnStar app, allowing them to check footage without walking out to their car.
General Motors has announced plans to add a new Connected Cameras feature to its OnStar service starting next year, giving drivers a way to monitor parked vehicles remotely and capture footage of certain incidents.