A potential stretch of road between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, will in potential be home to road lanes specifically designated for self-driving cars.
State and private partner Cavnue announced Thursday the formation of a new public-private partnership to create Southeast Michigan's first form of autonomous car corridor to help speed up testing. Finally, the ultimate aim is to close "long-standing holes" in area transportation access.
While the lanes will be a testbed for autonomous vehicles at first, the state and Cavnue want the project to be future-proof. When self-driving cars have become smarter, the lanes can change to handle different types of vehicles, such as large freight movers and more. For first for these lanes, Cavnue mainly pictured smaller people-mover-type vehicles, but the project has already drawn other big names.Ford, General Motors, Waymo, Argo AI, Toyota, Honda, TuSimple, BMW and more have all signaled support for this public-private project. Each will work with Cavnue to develop an advisory committee to draw up neutral standards for how to implement the corridor so no OEM nor company benefits more than the other.
It is a far-reaching undertaking that we are unlikely to see for years materialise. Phase one should concentrate on testing and constructing roadways for these lanes, which will last for two years. Building will be one of the "initial stages" which will be decided after phase one. With Roadshow Cavnue reaffirmed that these lanes will be used exclusively by autonomous vehicles with no authorized conventional traffic. A Cavnue rendering depicts the lanes as walled off from "normal traffic" and reveals what the future of the highway could look like.
Once we see the autonomous car lanes of Cavnue come to life, they will also bind Michigan highlights of "opportunity zones" to showcase small businesses, Detroit's airport, other cities, education centers, and more — chief among them being Ford 's future transportation hub at Michigan Central Station.
Russia's Yandex corporation conducts self-driving vehicle production in Ann Arbor, Michigan
The business was celebrating running an autonomous Prius around town for an hour without a driver for human health.
If we talk of the production of self-driving vehicles in America, we generally think of companies like Waymo, Cruise or Argo, but, of course, we don't think of an actual vehicle manufacturer. Nonetheless, the thing is that there are other relatively productive developers that work elsewhere in the world.
Some of those is the Russian company Yandex, which has for years been plugging away at the problem of self-driving vehicles. Yandex is a frequent CES attendant in Las Vegas, and now, according to the company's announcement Thursday, it is having even more of a foothold in the United States.
It is opening a facility specifically in Ann Arbor, Michigan. What is Michigan doing so? Unlike cities like Moscow and Tel Aviv, where Yandex also operates, Michigan allows self-driving vehicles to work behind the wheel without an engineer, and Yandex is already profiting from that.
Argo AI's self-driving third generation car doesn't look that different
The company recently posted a video of one of the self-driving Priuses test driving around Ann Arbor for an hour without any human intervention (which we can see) with no human being in the driver's seat at all. Anyway it inspired me.
Currently, Yandex is officially prohibited from transporting passengers in his vehicles when no human driver is present — according to Yandex, the only place he is permitted to do so is a college town / business park called Innopolis in western Russia. Citing a "more progressive regulatory climate," however, it plans to go further in the future than that in Ann Arbor.