The Anti-Driverless Car Movement Strikes Back
“Hands-free driving. Cars that park themselves. An unmanned car driven by a search engine company. We’ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.” Some men get a testosterone thrill from having their hands on the wheel of a car, or so they tell the Antiplanner. I just remind them that, […]
Driverless Cars and the Law
The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), which has done much of the development of driverless cars, may join with Stanford’s law school to review the legal changes needed for driverless cars to take the road. The most important (and most difficult) change will probably be to liability law: true no-fault insurance systems would […]
Podcars or Robocars?
San Jose held a conference last week on podcars, the new name for personal rapid transit (PRT). Exhibitors included a variety of planning and consulting firms as well as at least three companies–2getthere, Ultra (which built the Heathrow line), and Vectus–that would like your tax dollars so they can build a podcar system for your […]
Crash Postpones Driverless Test
The Antiplanner was looking forward to seeing Volkswagen run a driverless Audi up the windy Pikes Peak Road at racing speeds last month. Unfortunately, this test was postponed by a crash — not of the driverless car but of a helicopter that was aiming to photograph the test. (Maybe someone should develop a pilotless helicopter.) […]
More on Driverless Cars
Between hiking, cycling, and doing research on transportation and tax-increment financing, the Antiplanner has been too busy to write a decent column today. So I’ll just link to a couple of recent articles on one of my favorite topics, driverless or autonomous cars. First, the Kansas City Star notes that driverless cars are “just around […]
Growing Interest in Driverless Cars
As the nation’s transit industry slowly implodes from the weight of political control, the replacement for transit is getting some attention in the press. Researchers from the University of Parma are sending two driverless cars from Italy to Shanghai. Researchers at Ohio State University have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to develop […]
