More on Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles have made it to Harrisburg.  PennDOT, the City of Harrisburg, and Carnegie Mellon hosted the Pennsylvania Safety Symposium at the Capitol Complex to highlight safety and technology advances.  Fox 43 has the story.  Carnegie Mellon is conducting a lot of research and Pittsburgh is where Uber is piloting its autonomous initiative.  I saw one of their vehicles in a trip to Pittsburgh earlier this month. 

Also, NHTSA has just released guidelines for autonomous vehicles.  Business Insider has the story.  Key takeaways include:

• Three barriers have been preventing fully autonomous cars from hitting the road: 1) high technological component prices; 2) varying degrees of consumer trust in the technology; and 3) relatively nonexistent regulations. However, in the past six months, there have been many advances in overcoming these barriers.
• Technology has been improving as new market entrants find innovative ways to expand on existing fully autonomous car technology. As a result, the price of the components required for fully autonomous cars has been dropping.
• Consumer trust in fully autonomous vehicle technology has increased in the past two years.
• California became the first US state to propose regulations. California’s regulations stipulate that a fully autonomous car must have a driver behind the wheel at all times, discouraging Google’s and Uber’s idea of a driverless taxi system.