Uber and Self-Driving Cars

In 2015, ride-share company Uber partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Advanced Technology Center. The goal was to make self-driving cars a consumer reality. The National Robotics Engineering Center was also involved with the project, and took on the task of researching vehicle safety.

In August, cars took to the streets of Pittsburgh. Currently, there are 14 autonomous Ford Fusion’s in Uber’s fleet. When a user requests a car, they’ll get one of the test Fusions, if available. A driver is also present for safety control.

Journalists got early access to the fleet, and reporters from NPR, TechCrunch, and Wired have all shared their experiences with Uber’s self-proclaimed cars of the future. The reporters’ stories are generally consistent with one another. The driver has the option to switch off the autonomous mode and go manual, as was the case for several obstacles in the road.

Uber refers to Pittsburgh as “the double black diamond of driving”: the city experiences four distinct seasons that create a wide variety of driving conditions. Its roads are also full of potholes, and the city arrangement includes a unique grid and several bridges. They’ve contrasted this approach with Google’s self driving cars, which operate exclusively in the Silicon Valley sun. Uber believes that all of these variables make Pittsburgh one of the more challenging cities for driving. They figure if they can perfect autonomous ridesharing there, then expansion to other cities will be easier.

In the long term, Uber envisions a world where even the safety driver isn’t necessary. Eliminating the human aspect of driving, they believe, will make roads safer.

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What We Know About The Chevy Bolt

The Chevrolet Bolt EV is due to be released later this year, and is expected to compete closely with the Tesla Model 3. Right now, it looks like Chevy will be beating Tesla to market. According to USA Today, The Model 3 is planned to be widely released in mid- or late-2017, with new orders not set for delivery until 2018.

Beating Tesla’s car to market could be good news for Chevrolet. GM’s entry-level company has boasted that the Bolt’s range can best that of its Tesla competitor. Chevrolet’s electric vehicle is expected to clear over 235 miles per charge, compared to the Model 3’s 215.

The Verge Transportation Reporter Jordan Golson took to the digital publication to share an extensive preview of the new electric vehicle, along with his notes from a test drive. The big takeaway? It doesn’t feel like an electric car. It feels like an ordinary four-wheeled road ready vehicle, and that familiar feel may be able to push consumers in the direction of electric vehicles.

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Google Duo Update

Late this past Summer, Google entered into the video messaging space when they launched Duo. In an announcement on the company blog, they highlighted the 1-to-1 video app’s simple design and intuitive interface. One of its primary goals is to provide users with a seamless video chat. To do this, the app will actively adjust call quality depending on available bandwidth. It can also switch between wifi and cellular data so that calls won’t drop when a signal does. Duo can also be used with an Android device to place calls to an iOS device. This lets it compete with FaceTime which is only compatible with Apple products.

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Aetna + Apple Watch

Aetna wants to make Apple Watches more accessible, reports CNET. The health insurance provider announced plans to launch a program that will allow partners to provide employees with the smartwatch for a reduced rate, and possibly for no cost at all. The brief report likens this decision to provide the technology to subsidizing gym memberships and activity trackers. The Apple Watch has already drawn some comparisons to popular fitness tracker fitbit, and it makes sense that an insurance provider would like to make it easier to access tools that can help monitor an individual’s health. At their most recent World Wide Developer’s Conference, Apple unveiled an improved HealthKit, a developer’s tool that stores health and wellness information across iOS and watchOS devices.

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EV Charging Solutions

Electric vehicle sales are climbing. But  some consumers are hesitant to make the switch because of concerns that EVs can’t carry them long distances. And as long as charging infrastructure remains sparse, this is a valid concern. But the problem of too few charging stations may have found a (temporary) solution in the sharing economy.

Scientific American profiled the “Airbnbs of charging”, networks that allow users to offer use of their private EV outlets. These listings supplement public outlets provided by cities, local entrepreneurs and corporate investments. Right now, there are 13,925 public charging stations in America. But taking private listings into account increase that number increases. This is true outside of the US, too. In Sweden, Renault Group’s Elbnb app has increased the number of available stations by 40%.

But the network of charging stations is not without its faults. There is no standardized outlet, so any given EV may not be able to plug into the station that’s available. There’s also the issue of time— it can take several hours to charge your vehicle. This presents an issue on an individual level (getting behind schedule on a business or road trip), and a shared one (potential wait times to use a private station). Before setting out on a trip, sometimes one isn’t sure of where charging stations will be along the route. The private model is an improvement but is a potential disaster for scheduling and trip planning.

Plugshare is a company that is trying to fix that. While they allow users to list their private stations, they also want to install charging stations alongside highways. This way, drivers can have a better idea of when and where they can charge.

Plugging in isn’t the only “charging” concern. What about money? As the article points out, using solar panels makes sharing your charger virtually free. But only a handful of states has legislation that clarifies the resale of electric energy. Some EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan are offering free use of their charging networks for a limited time. Others are charging fees based on time spent at the station or by the kWH.

This hasn’t solved all the problems, but there are plenty of solutions being explored.

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Fighting Mosquitoes with Mosquitoes

Since 2015, Zika has been a public health concern in most of the Western Hemisphere. But biotech startup MosquitoMate is furthering prevention efforts by attempting to sterilize disease-carrying mosquito populations.

For the past year, researchers have worked on a way to prevent the spread of the virus. The mosquito that transmits the virus, Aedes Aegypti, is more aggressive than other mosquito species. They bite humans both during day and night, and need a minimal amount of water to lay their eggs.

Wired has profiled the MosquitoMate’s experiments with mosquitoes infected with the Wolbachia microbe. While scientists aren’t sure why,  Wolbachia disrupts the reproductive process. When the microbe is present in one or both mating mosquitoes, the resulting eggs are not able to hatch. MosquitoMate is basing their efforts on this research. The lab is infecting the eggs of Aedes Albopictus, a related mosquito that can mate with Aegyptius, with Wolbachia. The insects arethen released into Clovis California, a Zika hotspot. Hundreds of thousands are expected to be released by the end of summer to maximize potential mates for Aegypti females. Once the eggs are laid, they shouldn’t hatch. An upside to these efforts is that the males don’t bite; only females do, to lay their eggs.

The solution sounds straightforward but is still experimental. It’s also difficult to implement nationwide because different states have different processes for getting such a procedure approved. For example, the EPA oversees the procedure in California. The same procedure in Florida, on the other hand, involves more FDA oversight—  which can be slow to approve an experiment like this. The problem is compounded by the fact that Florida is one of the states with the highest Zika-transmission risk.

Bureaucratic hurdles aren’t the only issue MosquitoMate and similar labs face. The community needs to be on board too. Some are suspicious of the procedure, and others find the thousands of new mosquitoes— even though they don’t bite— to be a nuisance. Researchers are hopeful that Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes will reduce the disease-carrying agents, but it is suffering from a negative public perception. To combat this, the lab has been engaging in community education and outreach efforts.

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Tesla’s AutoPilot

An innovative step Tesla took four years ago is now putting them well ahead of the autonomous car competition. In 2012 the automotive manufacturer introduced an around the clock cellular internet connection. As MIT Tech Review’s Tom Simonite has pointed out, this connectivity has proved to be what Tesla needs to make it’s own self-driving cars smarter and safer.

Tesla can use this connection to gather data to help guide its initiative toward self-driving cars. This connection allow Tesla to retrieve data from drivers, observing how a human reacts and behaves on the road in a variety of situations, including light traffic vs. heavy traffic or clear vs. stormy conditions. This data is then used as a benchmark for its constantly self-driving technology.

But Tesla isn’t limited to just pulling observational data. According to Sterling Anderson, Tesla’s Autopilot Program director, the company can upload new software to cars on the road. This constant stream of data exchange has put the auto manufacturer ahead of its primary competitors like Google and (according to some rumors) Apple.

Eighteen months ago Tesla began installing new sensors onto its vehicles, under the premise that they were a part of a new auto-brake feature. But underneath that selling point was the fact that the sensors would also detect nearby objects on the road, enabling engineers to see exactly how drivers were reacting to them on a day-to-day basis. Anderson boasts that every ten hours Tesla receives one million miles of data, and since the sensors became standard in 2014 they have accrued 780 million miles’ worth of driver data.

This information only makes their autonomous software better, and if it performs well against the data, it’s uploaded to the cars for the feedback loop to begin once more. When the software is used on a self-steering vehicle, they can accurately see how well it holds up to a human standard. By leveraging a large data set from real world drivers, Tesla looks to be able to quickly iterate on its self-driving software.

Even though software updates are regularly being installed on Tesla’s vehicles, drivers needn’t worry about autopilot actually taking over when the driver is behind the wheel. But a major issue that Tesla needs to address if/when autopilot is made available is human responsibility. Some drivers, expecting self-driving cars to function free of error, can behave recklessly and find themselves unprepared to take over in case of a malfunction. Google, for example, ran tests where employees were allowed to use self-driving cars. The results were troubling: one employee, while traveling at 65 miles per hour, actually plugged in his cellular device to his laptop. Google has completely restructured its program, but Tesla is still convinced that Autopilot can coexist with responsible human driving practices.

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