December

• Nikon invested $25 million in Velodyne and the two will collaborate on ways to use Nikon’s optics know-how in lidar units. (Velodyne)
• Self-driving start-up Ottopia raised $3 million. (Ottopia)
• Lidar developer Luminar announced that it is partnering with Audi’s autonomous driving subsidiary AID. AID said that the Luminar product was “clearly above the pack in terms of range and density”. (Luminar)
• Uber received approval to restart self-driving vehicle tests in Pittsburgh. (Uber)
• Zoox released a safety report about the company’s approach to self-driving vehicles. Zoox detailed their chic-looking remote operations centre, suggesting they believe cars can easily be driven from large screen iMacs. (Zoox)
• ai head Anthony Levandowski said he had sat in a self-driving car on a car cross-country trip lasting four days. He apparently did not have to take control of the vehicle at any time and the whole journey was accomplished with a basic set of maps and cameras. (The Guardian). Levandowski says the demonstration served to show how a driver assistance feature will be more than capable. (Pronto)
• Leddartech will collaborate with French light shaping firm Cailabs to improve lidar performance. (Leddartech)
• Rinspeed is working with Luxoft on an autonomous version of the microSNAP reconfigurable vehicle. (Luxoft)
• The head of VW’s in-house self-driving unit, AID, has a “high opinion” of Waymo but thinks GM’s Cruise is “hyping a bit”. He says that 90% perception accuracy is now standard but things get tough at 95%. (The Verge)
• BMW showed off its latest state of the art self-driving hardware, giving an insight into the power demands of current prototypes. BMW’s L3 chip draws a respectable 25W but the L4 (200W) and L5 (600W) chips probably need a fair bit of work before they are production ready for long range or high utilisation roles. (Autocar)
• Ouster detailed the robustness tests it has devised for its lidar units -- with short videos of the rigs in action. (Ouster)
• The 2018 AI Index report was published. Much of the publication is given over to statistics on paper publishing and university course entry but the pages on technical performance help quantify the latest state of the art. For instance, in object recognition in context, an essential component for self-driving vehicles, the highest average precision is 72%. The expert opinion “what’s missing?” section also makes for interesting reading (AI Index)
• Waymo’s test fleet in Arizona has been attacked 21 times according to local police, with offences ranging from pointing a gun at the cars to a Jeep driver who repeatedly brake-tested them. With 400 Waymo cars roaming the streets and the low severity of some of the incidents it was unclear whether vehicles were being “targeted” as headlines suggested or this is a normal amount of problems over a two-year period. (Telegraph)
• BASF has a paint in development that reflects lidar better but it is unclear how performance will benefit unless all legacy cars are resprayed. (Cnet)
• Although self-driving vehicles still can’t identify black ice, one team has shown a possible path towards a solution: lidar is used to gauge how much sunlight is falling on a patch of road and this is combined with weather and other data to guesstimate how likely it is to develop icy conditions. (Digital Trends)
• Bosch will unveil its own autonomous vehicle concept at CES 2019. (Bosch)
• Continental published a consumer survey around driving habits and opinions on driver assistance and automated driving, conducted in several countries. There is considerable scepticism on the benefit and timescale for autonomous vehicles -- something that is unlikely to change whilst the technology is not widely available. (Continental)
• First-hand feedback of Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service in Phoenix surfaced (seemingly by mistake). A repeat customer said that they had been generally impressed but noticed that the vehicles often took longer routes to avoid difficult manoeuvres and the pick up and drop off points were restricted meaning that on one occasion they were set down a block away from their intended destination. Their experience of disengagements (one in four trips) was substantially higher than Waymo’s reported figures from testing in California. (Ars Technica)
• A group of companies including Toyota, Velodyne, Intel and ARM have joined an open-source initiative for autonomous driving called the Autoware Foundation. (Autoware)
• Further adding to the fragmentation of SAE levels 0 - 5 for driver assistance, BMW executives talk about level 2, 2+, 3 and 3 minus. (Automotive News)
• Waymo launched the Waymo One driverless ride hailing service. The initial service seems much like the trial the company has already been running in Phoenix: it even has the same customers. Waymo promises that in time a wider group will be able to use the vehicles. (Waymo)
• Lidar developer Ouster announced a tie-up with data labelling firms Playment and ai to offer embedded data labelling software that the partners say could reduce workload by 50%. (Ouster)
• Leddartech secured a $24 million credit facility. (Leddartech)
• Cleveron showed off autonomous cars with arms that allow it to place deliveries outside the vehicle. It hopes to begin testing in 2020. (Futurism)
• Toyota invested in Parallel Domain, a company that develops simulations to test driverless cars. (Toyota)

November

• The CTO of Starsky Robotics claimed in a blog post that “many” of the lidar markets currently on the market fall apart in less than six months and that cameras and radar alone (backed up with on-demand remote human operators) were enough for the kind of highway only driving the company intends to carry out. (IEEE Spectrum)
• Volvo issued a press release about a collaboration with lidar developer Luminar in which Luminar’s CEO said the company’s lidar units repeatably demonstrated 250m range, allowing highway speeds. (Volvo)
• AEye said it had raised $40 million in new funding from a group of yet-to-be-announced investors including “multiple global automotive OEMs, Tier 1 and Tier 2s”. AEye says it has developed a lidar that can track large trucks over 1 kilometre away “without difficulty”. Since the test was of a single vehicle on an isolated airstrip, competitors may question how representative this is of the real world. (AEye)
• Commercial self-driving bus services will start on the Forth Bridge crossing in Scotland in 2021. (Independent)
• GM’s Cruise division will open a new office in Seattle. (GeekWire)
• JLR will test driverless cars in London through a partnership with taxi firm Addison Lee as part of a scheme funded by the UK government. (City AM)
• Waymo’s CEO said, “autonomy will always have some constraints” and that widespread usage is decades away. (CNET)
• Long range infra-red camera developer AdaSky raised $20 million. (Deal Street Asia)
• Continental and EasyMile are setting up a joint research team in Singapore. (Continental)
• Self-driving operating system developerai emerged from stealth mode with $15.5 million. (TechCrunch)
• Ouster published a blog post arguing the merits of the 850 nm wavelength and saying that its lidar had been designed to scale with improvements in chip technology, meaning a 640 line system is “extremely likely” in future. (Ouster)
• One of Waymo’s cars crashed into a motorcyclist. The company blamed the human driver and that the automated system would have avoided the incident, even though the safety driver had only recently taken over because they were concerned that the actions of a car in front were too difficult for the automated system to deal with. (Waymo)
• Optimus Ride said it would use Nvidia’s hardware for self-driving vehicles, starting immediately. (Optimus Ride)
• ComfortDelGro will start trials of driverless vehicles using equipment supplied by EasyMile. (Channel News Asia)
• The inaugural season of Roborace seems set to use human drivers for half of each race. (Engadget)
• Luminar says it now has contracts with 16 OEMs and is in detailed discussions with 16 more. (TechCrunch)
• Velodyne published a blog post highlighting what they see as a number of drawbacks with the 1550 nm wavelength for lidar units, much-vaunted by some companies because it allows higher powered lasers to be used whilst remaining eye-safe. Velodyne argue 1550 nm can have worse impacts on eyes in some circumstances; are worse in rain, fog and snow than 905 nm lidars (Velodyne’s chosen wavelength) -- a weakness that is offset by increasing power. Finally, Velodyne argues that 1550 nm units are inherently more costly due to the componentry required, something not all lidar developers accept as fact. (Velodyne)
• Daimler will launch a driverless ride hailing pilot in San José, California in partnership with Bosch. The service will use modified S-Class limousines and be offered to “a selected user community”. (Daimler)

October

• FAW’s Hongqi (Red Flag) brand will launch a L4 car at the end of 2019 in partnership with Baidu. (Reuters)
• Waymo is the first company to be granted a Californian permit for driverless car testing without a safety driver inside the vehicle. It already operates cars without safety drivers in Arizona. (Reuters)
• Uber requested permission to resume self-driving vehicle testing with safety drivers. (Business Insider) and released a safety report containing information about its self-driving program. Despite Uber’s efforts to provide greater detail than some of its peers have in their own safety reports, there are still gaps between the published document and best practice, for instance, Uber’s section on quality processes does not mention anything around sub-supplier selection to remove sources of underlying common hardware / software failures (by using completely different componentry) in different parts of the system (to improve redundancy). (Uber)
• Sensible 4 showed off an autonomous bus designed by Muji that it says will be in operation by 2020. (Sensible 4)
• Quanergy completed a Series C round that valued the business at over $2 billion. (Quanergy)
• Baidu believes that you will soon be able to sing karaoke and eat hot pot in autonomous cars. (Bloomberg)
• Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi’s VC unit invested in Chinese self-driving technology start-up WeRide.ai. (Nissan)
• Volvo’s deal to supply XC90 cars that will be used in autonomous ride-hailing by Uber is “back on track” according to the firm’s CEO. (FT)
• VW will operate a self-driving ride hailing service in Israel in partnership with Intel and Champion Motors. The project will start pilot operations in 2019 and aims to run a commercial service by 2022. (Intel)
• Volvo is partnering with Baidu to create customised, fully electric autonomous cars that will be sold by both companies in China. (Volvo)
• Ford started jointly testing autonomous vehicles in China with Baidu. (Ford)
• Waymo has started charging customers to ride in self-driving vehicles. (Financial Times)
• Lyft acquired augmented reality develop Blue Vision labs in a deal said to be worth up to $100 million. (BlueVision)
• Lidar developer Innovusion raised $30 million from a group of investors including NIO Capital and said it would begin sales of Cheetah lidar units. (Innovusion)
• Researchers published a paper that collated data collected from an online survey of 40 million responses to the best way to act in trolley problem scenarios (i.e. where one of two people / groups must die to spare the other). The results showed that opinion varied considerably by country. (Technology Review)
• ai has launch a free ride hailing scheme in Texas to test its autonomous vehicles. (Auto Rental News)
• A senior official at the US department of transportation criticised the quality of safety metrics being used by self-driving vehicle developers and said they were insufficient to prove that vehicles are road-worthy. (Bloomberg)
• US authorities halted the testing of an autonomous school bus saying that the terms of the permit didn’t cover transportation of school children, despite the presence of a full time conductor, the trips being on a closed course and the maximum speed of the vehicle being set at 8mph. (BBC)
• Indian ride sharing start-up Zoomcar will install Netradyne driver monitoring hardware in customer vehicles to provide “feedback” on the quality of their driving. (Autocar)
• BMW announced that software firms KPIT and TTTech would join its self-driving platform with the specific aim of developing tailored solutions for third parties. (BMW)
• VW and Ford are reportedly exploring in-depth sharing of autonomous driving technology. Ford already has a majority share in partner Argo AI whilst VW has partnered with Aurora but was apparently rebuffed in an informal takeover approach. Ford executives stressed that nothing was off the table. (Bloomberg)
• Or, VW might collaborate with Waymo on ride hailing. The firm is said to be contemplating purchasing a 10% stake in Waymo for €12 billion. (Reuters)
• Lidar firm SOS Lab raised $6 million. (Optics)
• Autonomous driving developer Momenta raised $46 million in a round valuing it at over $1 billion. (Momenta)
• Self-driving simulation company Cognata raised $18.5 million. (Reuters)
• Lidar developer Leddartech recently opened new development sites, in Austria and Canada. (Leddartech)
• UK Taxi firm Addison Lee and autonomous vehicle developer Oxbotica announced a plan to commence services with self-driving taxis in London by 2021. (The Guardian)
• Uber has reportedly been receiving unsolicited bids for its self-driving arm. (Financial Times)
• An article suggested that Google’s initial self-driving cars had a worse safety record than official documents show, because of the cavalier attitude of some of the developers. (New Yorker)
• Rinspeed unveiled a new, smaller, version of its skateboard concept called the MicroSNAP. (Car Scoops)
• Sensor fusion company Vayavision raised $8 million. They claim that through processing, their technology can dramatically upscale lidar and radar inputs. (PE Hub)
• The head of Toyota’s self-driving program in the US said the safety argument for robotaxis was flawed because the gains were insufficiently large over human drivers. (IEEE Spectrum)
• Lidar developer RoboSense announced $45 million in funding. (RoboSense)
• Uber sponsored a study by RAND into safe testing of autonomous vehicles. (RAND)
• Waymo’s fleet passed 10 million miles of testing on public roads and said it was racking up 10 million virtual miles each day. (Waymo)
• Hyundai’s Cradle VC unit and Toyota AI Ventures invested in Perceptive Automata, a firm developing software to predict intent of pedestrians near to self-driving cars. (Hyundai) (Toyota)
• US transport regulator NHTSA published draft guidelines for autonomous vehicles. It promised to be proactive and to reinterpret rules written for human drivers to include self-driving vehicles, but also stressed that it would prioritise safety. This is something of a mixed bag for self-driving proponents since although reliable autonomous cars are expected to have less accidents that human-driven ones, there is nothing even approaching a consensus on how to do this without driving billions of miles. (NHTSA)
• US magazine Consumer Reports said that GM’s Supercruise driver assistance system was the best on the market, with Tesla’s Autopilot also being commended. Tesla critics portrayed it as a loss for the brand. (USA Today)
• Self-driving truck start-up Ike emerged from stealth mode saying it planned to run trucks that would never have to leave the US highway system, instead transferring loads at hubs. The company has licenced Nuro’s autonomous driving technology. (Wired)
• Sensor developer Aeva announced $45 million in new funding. (Venture Beat)
• Navya announced a cooperation with Charlatte Manutention to develop autonomous vehicles for use in closed-course settings, such as airport baggage delivery. (Navya)
• Ford called on self-driving vehicle developers to adopt a common standard for communicating intent to other road users, e.g. whether a vehicle has decided to slow down and give another road user right of way. (Ford)
• Waymo had a significant portion of its lidar patents struck off following a challenge. (Ars Technica)
• Honda will invest $750 million in a 5.7% share in GM’s Cruise self-driving unit and has agreed to a further $2 billion of spending over the next 10 years. (GM)
• Honda and GM are developing a purpose-built shared autonomous vehicle built on Cruise’s technology. The teaser image in a blog post by Cruise’s CEO suggests it looks something like VW’s Sedric concept. (GM)

September

• Robosense will offer its new low-cost 64 line lidar unit with an algorithm called “gaze” that focuses on objects detected after broad sweeps have taken place, in order to get a more detailed perception. (Robosense)
• A US survey found owners overestimated the abilities of their driver assistance systems; 29% were confident enough with their adaptive cruise control to be distracted at the wheel. (CNBC)
• Argo AI’s CEO said Ford’s driverless car program will involve up to 100,000 vehicles. (Bloomberg)
• Knorr-Bremse and Continental intend to jointly develop a turnkey solution for heavy trucks that will allow them to operate in autonomous platoons. (Knorr-Bremse)
• BMW’s development chief said the brand’s cars will always have steering wheels and the change to autonomy will take three decades, starting from 2005, meaning a 20 year wait “until this applies to all parts of the world”. (Autocar)
• Radar developer Lunewave raised $5 million from investors including BMW iVentures. (Lunewave)
• Leddartech released a white paper discussing the application of lidar for vehicle identification. It contains more data on resolution than is normally disclosed. Even with lidar mounted only a few metres from the vehicle, Leddartech report a resolution of 14cm - 24cm on a target moving at 100 km/h for a 16 line unit, underlining why in practice self-driving vehicle developers are rarely using the units for object identification. (Leddartech)
• Bosch invested in lidar developer ABAX Sensing. (Bosch)
• The Knight Foundation is spending $5.25 million on a series of experiments in American cities aimed at better understanding the interaction between autonomous vehicles and communities. (Venturebeat)
• Self-driving software developer Oxbotica raised £14 million. (FINSMES)
• Robosense said its 64 line lidar system will cost under $200 per unit once in mass production. (Robosense)
• Autonomous vehicle developer PerceptIn began sales of its DragonFly autonomous pod, with a $40,000 asking price. The pod is speed limited to 20 mph. (PerceptIn)
• Aptiv sees autonomous vehicle fleet sizes of 1,000 cars or more becoming common in the early 2020s and that costs for retail customers will remain too high until at least 2023. The company says Europe is “a bit behind” in the development of autonomous vehicles. (Handelsblatt)
• Blackmore released a demonstration video showing how its doppler lidar product can categorise products by relative velocity without post-processing. (Extreme Tech)
• Argo AI has licensed its lidar technology to Ball Corporation for use in aerospace and defence projects. (Zacks)
• NRG Systems acquired the low cost lidar technology of Israeli firm Pentalum. (Engineer Live)
• VW’s trucking division believes autonomous vehicles will catch on more quickly in the US and China because they think the regulators are more open to change. (Handelsblatt)
• A UK government-funded research project into autonomous vehicles published its final findings, including data on willingness to pay based on a survey of several hundred people. (Venturer)
• ai announced a new CEO, saying founder George Hotz was now head of research. (Comma.ai)
• Hyundai Mobis signed a contract with Tata Elxsi to develop a simulation program for autonomous driving by 2019. The partners may find the project harder than they anticipate, especially since photo realistic graphics may be completely unrepresentative of the way AI camera imagery. (Yonhap)
• Volvo Trucks presented a concept for an electric and autonomous truck. (Volvo)
• GM ‘s CEO confirmed the firm is on track to launch geofenced operation of driverless vehicles next year but demurred on giving a timeframe for autonomous features to be available for retail customers. (Fast Company)
• Mando announced that it had an autonomous vehicle testing permit for California. (Mando)
• Denso led a funding round in deep learning specialist ThinCI saying the company provided “5 to 10 times” more computing power and performance than competitors. (Denso)
• Waymo’s CTO said the firm was at the point of industrialising the three main pillars of its self-driving solution: sensors; high resolution maps and; the software stack. (Forbes)
• Metawave are now claiming 500 metre range for their high resolution radar, having previously said it was over 150 metres and that it believes units will sell for $500 once high volume production begins. In discussing specific examples however the company clarified that the radar might identify a truck with 90% confidence at 300 metres, but a motorcycle with only 50% confidence at the same distance. (All About Circuits)
• Aurora’s approach to convincing regulators that self-driving cars are ready is to show that the vehicle is capable of navigating and then present the AI’s history of correct object identification and semantic understanding. The company believes that through this data, it will be possible to agree a likely failure rate. (Wired)

August

• Russian ride hailing firm Yandex has begun an on-road pilot of autonomous vehicles. The two car fleet runs between set destinations; the customer experience is therefore more like an on-demand bus. (Yandex)
• Lidar developer Blickfeld reportedly raised an additional $6 million. (Evertiq)
• A crash test report by Apple confirmed that the company’s test fleet is being used in autonomous mode on public roads. (California DMV)
• Waymo’s test fleet is getting rave reviews from its users but drivers who encounter the vehicles frequently are being driven to distraction -- and in some cases illegal evasion manoeuvres. (The Information)
• Waymo’s fleet completed its nine millionth mile of testing. (Waymo)
• A UK consortium including JLR have been testing autonomous pods with big eyes. (Mashable)
• Toyota invested $500 million in Uber and announced a collaboration to create purpose-built autonomous vehicles (based on the Sienna minivan) that will run on Uber’s network with an initial fleet in service from 2021. (Toyota)
• Aptiv’s fleet of 30 self-driving vehicles in Las Vegas, USA have already logged 5,000 journeys (on Lyft’s network) since operations began in May. (Aptiv)
• The CEO of self-driving developer Zoox stepped down or was fired, depending on who you asked. (SMH)
• Waymo is currently using remote operators in an advisory capacity. Rather than taking control of the vehicle, they select next steps from a list of suggestions by the vehicle and these are then executed according to the vehicle’s programming. (The Verge)
• Lidar supplier Quanergy said it was expanding production “by an order of magnitude” in order to become the volume leader. (Quanergy)
• Waymo has established a subsidiary in China, fuelling speculation of a launch in the country. (Reuters)
• An ex-GM executive who now consults with Waymo listed GM, Daimler and Toyota as the OEMs best positioned for autonomous vehicles, in his opinion. (Forbes)
• Mapping start-up Carmera said it has raised $20 million. (TechCrunch)
• Self-driving developer Ghost Locomotion said it has $15 million in funding. (Crunchbase)
• VW reportedly tried to buy self-driving software developer, and partner, Aurora but was rebuffed because the firm wanted the freedom to work with multiple carmakers. (Bloomberg)
• Waymo researchers said the company has 25,000 vehicles in its virtual test fleet driving eight million simulated miles each day -- an average of 320 miles per day -- indicating that the simulated world, dubbed Carcraft, is processed at around real world pace (13 mph would be respectable in an urban area). (Business Insider)
• FiveAI said it will start operating an autonomous test fleet in London suburbs in late 2019, following several months off data gathering by five manually-drive, sensor-laden vehicles starting soon. The company’s ultimate aspiration is to run ride hailing services with its own vehicles. (TechCrunch)
• US supermarket Kroger announced details for a self-driving delivery pilot using Nuro The shop involved is not Kroger-branded and there will be a $5.95 delivery fee for all orders. (Kroger)
• Lidar maker Quanergy has reportedly seen its funding plan disturbed by Daimler’s recent sourcing of sensors from Velodyne and rumours of quality problems. The company appears to have put a planned IPO on hold but insists it is one of the “finalists” for a Daimler supply agreement. (Bloomberg)
• Mapping supplier RideOS announced $25 million in investment. (RideOS)
• Hertz and Aptiv announced a strategic partnership that includes running Aptiv’s vehicles in Las Vegas but also aspires to create a standard set of operating procedures. (Hertz)
• Swedish self-driving start-up Einride unveiled a new model called T-log which is says can handle off-road activities in addition to the on-highway capabilities of its predecessor. (Business Insider)
• Uber is stopping development of self-driving trucks. The company still sees a future for freight movement using autonomous vehicles but believes the way forward is to develop working driverless passenger transport and then transfer the technology to commercial vehicles. (TechCrunch)

July

• Wipro and Genesys will collaborate on software and maps for self-driving cars. (Economic Times of India)
• Self-driving truck start-up Kodiak says it has raised $40 million. (TT News)
• Data labelling company Scale, which says it counts GM, Lyft, Zoox, Voyage, NuTonomy and Embark amongst its customers, raised $18 million. (TechCrunch)
• Navya sold 36 autonomous shuttles in the first half of 2018, for over €200,000 each. (Navya)
• Driverless truck maker Nikola said it had already raised $100 million of a $200 million Series C target. (Nikola)
• News of the hiring of Tesla’s former engineering VP reignited interest in Apple’s self-driving project. (TechCrunch)
• BMW executives said test drives of autonomous cars often last 1,000 km, with an average of three driver interventions, and expressed scepticism that fully autonomous driving will be allowed on public roads. (Autocar)
• Waymo is running a pilot scheme with Walmart where shoppers order goods online and then collect them from a local store in an autonomous vehicle. It isn’t fully clear why the service isn’t offering to simply transport the goods directly. Waymo also announced an increased series of tie-ups in Phoenix, USA aimed at funnelling easy to service customers from major corporate partners such as dealers, rental companies and hotels. (Waymo)
• Uber restarted operations of its autonomous test fleet in Pittsburgh, USA but the cars will remain in manual mode, gathering data for simulation and mapping, for an unspecified period of time. (Uber)
• ZF executives said they expect take-up of private autonomous vehicles to lag commercial vehicles due to cost and reliability concerns. (Journal Auto)
• Waymo has now reached 8 million miles driven on public roads in autonomous mode. (The Verge)
• Rinspeed is putting a product based on the Snap Motion, an autonomous vehicle built on a flexible skateboard-type chassis into limited production for proof of concept applications. (Rinspeed)
• Zoox is reportedly raising $500 million in a round that will value the company at $3.2 billion. (TechCrunch)
• Self-driving truck start-up Embark raised $30 million. (Fortune)
• Apple’s testing program has grown, with 66 self-driving cars registered for testing in California. (9to5Mac)
• Coast Automotive unveiled its P-1 autonomous minibus. (Venturebeat)
• The deputy head of US highways regulator NHTSA said it was too early to put rules in place for driverless vehicles but that the agency is continually trying to assess when it would be “appropriate” to do so. (Automotive News)
• Parking aggregator SpotHero says it has 500 AV-ready parking spots in Chicago. (Venture Beat)
• Autonomous vehicle developer ai raised $102 million. (Deal Street Asia)
• High resolution radar developer Arbe Robotics announced $10 million in fund raising. (Arbe)
• Baraja is ready to start shipping units of its new Spectrum-Scan modular lidar system, the specification of the units in terms of range, resolution and wavelength is unclear. (Baraja)
• The Vietnamese government granted a licence for autonomous vehicle trials to local firm FPT Software. (Xinhua)
• Daimler’s autonomous vehicle program will be underpinned by Nvidia electronics. (Daimler)
• Daimler will run a pilot autonomous ride hailing service in San Francisco, starting in 2019, in partnership with Bosch. The scheme will also integrate car sharing and multi-modal services. (Daimler)
• BMW joined Baidu’s Project Apollo, securing a board seat. (BMW)
• Anthony Levandowski, formerly of Waymo and Uber, seems to have formed a new company called ai, but since the firm is still in stealth mode, no one knows for certain. (TechCrunch)
• Neuvition announced a new lidar with 480 lines of resolution and a claimed range of 200 metres. (Neuvition)
• Civil servants running the UK road network expressed scepticism that autonomous vehicles would be widespread on city streets by 2021, but wouldn’t be surprised to see them operating on motorways. (New Civil Engineer)
• Valeo joined the Project Apollo autonomous car collective led by Baidu. (Valeo)

June

• Waymo’s CEO said all the announcements around vehicle purchases so far (JLR I-Pace and Chrysler Pacifica) have been for intended services in the USA and that a “large number” would be needed for services in Europe. (Reuters)
• US supermarket chain Kroger will run a driverless delivery pilot scheme in partnership with Nuro. (The Verge)
• US crash investigators said the Uber safety driver involved in the fatal crash was not looking at the system interface, as they had claimed, instead phone records apparently show that they were streaming a talent competition on their phone. (Wired)
• US regulators told the company behind “Autopilot buddy” to stop selling it. The $199 accessory is put onto the steering wheel to defeat Tesla’s safety measures (checking drivers are holding on to the steering wheel). (The Verge)
• Israeli start-up TriEye said it was developing an infra-red sensor that could be integrated into cameras, helping them to detect in objects where current performance is very poor (such as mist or dust). (Globes)
• Ford believes self-driving delivery vehicles have greater application in the suburbs than built-up areas. (PC Mag)
• PSA believes that 120 million km of test mileage are necessary to verify self-driving on highways -- with greater distances required for rural roads and cities. (PSA)
• A group of hackers published a series of images from Tesla’s Autopilot overlaid with system categorisation and radar data. Their analysis reveals previously unknown shadow capabilities of Autopilot (e.g. how good it is at tracking stopped vehicles) and provide information on which cameras perform which detection role. (Electrek)
• Magna announced a partnership with May Mobility. Magna will carry out the final assembly and fitting of shuttles to May Mobility’s specification. (Magna)
• Rental company Enterprise will run Voyage’s fleet of AVs and says it is lining up other customers. (Bloomberg)
• Volvo invested in lidar company Luminar. Toyota previously said they will use Luminar’s products. (Volvo)
• Innoviz is partnering with HiRain to provide lidar-based driverless technology sets to Chinese OEMs. (Innoviz)
• Autonomous car software developer AutonomouStuff has been acquired by Hexagon. (Hexagon)
• Waymo’s CEO said that company’s brand probably wouldn’t be as strong as incumbent brands in Europe and this could lead to a service branded by a partner. (Reuters)
• According to executives, Waymo has reached 7 million miles of on-road driverless testing. (Ars Technica)
• Driverless pod maker Navya is hoping to list in Paris. (Les Echos)
• Tesla will release version 9 of its operating system in August. CEO Musk said the new software would “begin to enable full self-driving features”. (Electrek)
• Self-driving delivery robot company Starship Technologies (Daimler invested in a prior round) raised $25 million. (TechCrunch)
• Toyota participated in a $7.5 million investment in self-driving robot delivery company Boxbot. (Toyota)
• GM will offer (hands off highway driving) SuperCruise on all Cadillac products by 2020 and begin rollout to other GM vehicles after that. (GM)
• GM’s Cruise settled a legal action brought by a cyclist who collided with one of their cars but the terms were not made public. (Reuters)
• FCA executives said the retail market for autonomy will not progress beyond L3 systems for a long time and that L4/L5 systems will cost $10,000 and, if on sale before 2023, would not be automotive grade. (FCA)

May

• Uber said it was closing its self-driving operations in Arizona, dismissing 300 employees. (AZ Central)
• The NTSB released a preliminary report into the fatal Uber crash. The report detailed that the pedestrian crossing the road was first detected about 120 metres ahead of the vehicle, although the vehicle AI was unable to identify them as a person (with a bicycle). It also emerged that Uber had deactivated its own emergency braking systems and was completely reliant on the driver to react to prevent an accident. (NTSB)
• Apple is reportedly using VW’s ItalDesign factory to modify minbuses for use as autonomous vehicles on Apple’s campus. The same story also linked the company to self-driving developer Torc Robotics. (New York Times)
• Sony’s CEO refused to deny aspirations to develop cars. (Bloomberg)
• US / Chinese autonomous car start-up ai announced $128 million in funding and released a kit called Aries that it says enables L4 autonomous capability for under $8,000 per vehicle. (Roadstar.ai)
• Mobileye’s CEO put the retail cost of the company’s fully autonomous driving solution (mostly camera-based but apparently to eventually include some “backup” radar and lidar” at under $8,000. He also divulged some of the resources required to help AI develop, the company has a team of “more than 2,000” analysts in Sri Lanka labelling data collected by Mobileye sensors. (Bloomberg)
• Waymo’s detailed application for a Californian permit to operate self-driving vehicles in a limited commercial trial showed several interesting elements of their set-up. (Mark Harris)
  • Page 19 says Waymo does not currently have (or plan to use) remote operators to pilot the vehicle (indicating that in the event of a problem, operators will go to the vehicle).
  • Page 21 describes the geo-fenced area that the vehicles will be allowed to cover, including roads with speed limits of up to 65 mph (although it doesn’t say the vehicles will travel this fast) and that vehicles will operate in good weather, light rain and fog (indicating issues with other conditions, potentially for reasons of both sensor capability and vehicle control).
  • Page 22 says that in the event of bad road conditions or weather, vehicles will safely pull over, not try to complete their journey.
  • Page 24 shows Waymo’s proposed geofenced zone. Vehicles will only carry out journeys that start and end within the geofence.
• Hyundai’s Cradle venture fund, Toyota AI Ventures and Denso invested in radar start-up Metawave’s $10 million round. The company claims that its “next generation” radar can see over 150 metres with high resolution. (Metawave)
• The implied take rate of Nissan’s ProPILOT driver assistance technology suite is around between 20% - 25% on vehicles where it is offered. (Nissan)
• Uber’s CEO said the company will resume testing autonomous vehicles in “the next few months, I don’t know”. Uber has reportedly determined that the decision software was at fault for the recent fatal crash; the car spotted the pedestrian but, under a protocol designed to reduce false positives, decided to continue its present course rather than swerve or avoid them. (The Information)
• ai will offer a ride hailing service using autonomous vans starting this summer in Texas -- the small number of vehicles in the fleet may hamper efforts to recruit customers. (Bloomberg)
• GM’s head of strategy said it will take around 6 months to learn a new city. (GM)

April

• Aptiv and Lyft announced a fleet of 30 vehicles in Las Vegas, USA that will take part in a long term autonomous trial as part of a “multiyear agreement”. (Aptiv)
• Autonomous vehicle AI provider Algolux raised $10 million, led by GM Ventures. (FINSMES)
• A German-led study found that consumers were prepared to pay for autonomy, but not much. Only around 50% of respondents would part with more than €1,000 for the technology. The authors noted that this could be a lack of imagination on behalf of those surveyed and that technology demonstrations could change things. (Fraunhofer)
• An MIT project is working on vehicles that do not require high quality maps and instead use (relatively) rough data about the surroundings to determine its route. (IEEE Spectrum)
• A British Tesla owner was convicted of dangerous driving after putting his vehicle on Autopilot and climbing into the passenger seat whilst on a motorway. The owner told police he was the “unlucky one who got caught”. (BBC)
• BMW will use a solid state lidar sourced from Innoviz and Magna for autonomous vehicles -- by extension, presumably FCA vehicles will too; given that they are developing a shared self-driving platform. If rumours are to be believed then you can add Hyundai-Kia to the list too. (Magna)
• Self-driving start-up Voyage announced an open source safety library comprising code and scenarios. The company hopes it can become a widely-used foundation for autonomous vehicle software. (Voyage)
• Waymo’s CEO said that the company “might disrupt the utilitarian market” and explained the company’s “Firefly” program of self-built cars as a way to exploit a short-lived loophole in testing regulations, rather than an attempt to become an OEM itself, saying he “wasn’t aware of” any longer term goal for Waymo to make its own cars. (Autocar)
• Local Motors announced a collaboration with Robotic Research, a company with past experience in automating systems and vehicles for military applications. (Local Motors)
• Alibaba’s CEO said the company had done “a lot of research on driverless things”, sparking speculation about what they might have in mind. (Yahoo)
• Uber says it has a way to improve the accuracy of GPS in areas with high rise buildings: rather than being confused by the weak signals from satellites, it identifies “negative information” and fills in the obscured trace. (The Verge)
• Luminar, a maker of high resolution lidar, said that it would have a production rate of higher than 5,000 units per quarter by the end of 2018. The company is working with four major automakers (Toyota plus three others) at present. Luminar said that a key component has dropped in cost from tens of thousands of dollars to $3 per piece, and the entire sensor cost “a lot” less than $1,000 per unit to produce (purchase price remains unclear). (Forbes)
• ai raised $5 million in funding, at present the company sells aftermarket dongles that plug into cars and offer enhanced control over vehicle functions. At the same time, it collects data from users in the hope of creating a crowdsourced self-driving platform. (TechCrunch)
• Ford said its research indicated that driverless delivery vehicles would complete routes 25% more efficiently than those piloted by humans. (Autocar)
• Waymo’s CEO indicated during an interview that Honda would shortly be announced as a partner, with a focus on delivery vehicles. Ford and Hyundai were also mentioned as partners (as part of the Waymo / Uber trial it was disclosed that Ford and Waymo came close to a deal in 2015/16). (Bloomberg)
• Three Chinese companies -- GLP, G7 and NIO Capital -- formed a JV to develop smart trucks. (Deal Street Asia)
• Visteon launched a machine learning and data processing platform, called DriveCore. (Visteon)

March

• Cepton launched the Vista “120 line equivalent”, 200m range lidar; mass production will begin in Q2 2018. The company said it was “a cost point nobody can touch with this type of performance” without providing specifics and pointed to the units relatively low power consumption (at 9W, its about the same as many 16 line units). (Cepton)
• Waymo’s CEO said the company was doing “zero” work on data gathering but that it might “be a workstream in future”. (Telegraph)
• Uber reached a settlement with the family of the woman recently killed in a collision with a self-driving car. (Reuters)
• Uber gave up its testing permit for California. (Engadget) The company also shut down its on-demand package delivery service. (TechCrunch)
• Local Motors will use Elite Transportation Services to provide fleet management for its AVs. (Mass Transit)
• Intel’s MobilEye division released the results of using its proprietary object recognition algorithms against the publicly-available video of Uber’s fatal self-driving crash. The company said that even with the (assumed to be) low resolution version of the camera feed, it could have detected the pedestrian a minimum of 1 second prior to the collision. (Intel)
• Scotty Labs, a start-up developing remote control for autonomous vehicles said it had raised $6 million and formed a partnership with Voyage. (Scotty Labs)
• Nvidia announced a virtual testing platform for autonomous vehicles saying that it can simulate data inputs from a variety of sensors. (Nvidia)
• ai announced that it would start awarding drivers “gold stars” for good driving whilst the company’s data logging equipment is operating. The value of the gold stars does not appear to extend beyond a warm feeling in the driver’s heart. (Comma.ai)
• Waymo will use Jaguar’s I-Pace as its first all-electric autonomous vehicle, planning for up to 20,000 -- a fleet that Waymo says could operate 1 million trips per day. (Waymo)
• Further details emerged of the Uber crash and various pundits and experts weighed in, including the Teamsters union. Waymo’s CEO said his company’s software “would be able to handle situations like that one” and Velodyne said that they would have expected their lidar to detect the pedestrian, but made clear that it is the responsibility of other systems to interpret the lidar data and make appropriate decisions. Police released a video of the incident which appears to show the vehicle failing to recognise the pedestrian crossing the street, even after they appear in the glare of the headlights -- indicating either radar and lidar failing to detect their presence, or that the object identification software wrote the sensor data off as a false positive. (Twitter)
• Apple have reportedly increased the size of their test fleet in California to 45 vehicles -- second only to GM’s Cruise in the state. (TechCrunch)
• Toyota reportedly held talks with Uber about buying the latter’s driverless technology. (TechCrunch)
• BMW iVentures and Toyota participated in an $18 million investment in lidar maker Blackmore. (Blackmore)
• Gatwick airport in the UK will trial use of autonomous vehicles “airside”, saying that its fleet of 300 vehicles are stationary 90% of the time. (zdnet)
• Magna invested $200 million in Lyft and the two parties will develop self-driving vehicles for use on Lyft’s network. Importantly, the deal appears to give Magna access to Lyft’s data, a privilege which previous investors, such as GM and JLR seem to have failed to secure. (Magna)
• A test car owned by Uber had a fatal collision with a pedestrian whilst in automatic mode. (The Guardian)
• Uber has started using autonomous trucks in commercial service (with a safety driver behind the wheel). Human drivers take loads from pick-up to a transfer hub and then the automated truck drives a section of highway to another transfer hub (where a human-driven truck picks up the load once more). (TechCrunch)
• Waymo has started testing autonomous trucks in a third location: Atlanta. (Waymo)
• May Mobility’s CEO (BMW and Toyota are investors) said it was buying in many of the sub components for its electric autonomous vehicle and would beat Waymo and Cruise to market “with a successful product”. (Xconomy)
• HERE published a study into consumer attitudes around privacy, with a focus on location sharing. Bad news for proponents of the “personalised advertising will pay for everything” school of thought… it was the lowest rated reason for consumers to share data (page 34). (HERE)
• Uber is reportedly courting Waymo to provide an autonomous vehicle fleet for use on Uber’s network -- similar to the intent of Waymo’s existing partnership with Lyft. (Engadget)
• Aurora (partnering with VW, Hyundai and Byton) raised $90 million in a Series A round. (TechCrunch)
• ai said that it had been successfully trialling autonomous vehicles on the streets of Nansha and that it has agreed a partnership with Guangzhou Automotive Group. (Pony.ai)
• California will allow test autonomous vehicles that do not have safety drivers behind the wheel. (California DMV)
• Pix said it was running an event to create a self-driving car in five days using a team of 15 people. (Pix)
• Waymo said its fleet has now covered 5 million miles on public roads and celebrated by releasing a short video with real time information overlaid onto video a vehicle in motion. Although the video looks cool, note the limited range (the long range view from 1:40 is illustrative here) and resolution of the real time data versus some of the cleaned up images other companies have showed off in the past. Also note that the conditions are about as perfect as you can get for video. (Waymo)
• Toyota and BMW iVentures invested in May Mobility, a maker of autonomous buses. (Toyota)
• Toyota is restructuring its autonomous driving efforts and spending an additional 300 billion yen (about $2.8 billion). The effort will be led by US-based Toyota Research Institute. (Toyota)

February

• Avis said it will continue to expand its operations with Waymo. (Reuters)
• Uber’s CEO posted photos of a meeting with Toyota’s leadership, saying that the two companies were discussing a partnership for autonomous vehicles. (Deal Street Asia)
• Uber’s CEO said autonomous cars would be in operation on Uber’s network “in less than a year”. (Bloomberg)
• Hyundai’s head of autonomous vehicles said that sales will be driven by ride sharing fleets rather than individual customers. (Bloomberg)
• Waymo has received a permit to operate commercial ride-hailing services in the state of Arizona, where it already has a test fleet. (Quartz)
• A report by the London Assembly (regional government) said that the city would not be ready for driverless cars before 2030, and urged the adoption of car sharing instead. (Bloomberg)
• Mining company Rio Tinto said that it would increase its 80 vehicle autonomous mining truck fleet to 140 units by 2019, citing substantial increases in productivity and cost reductions. (Rio Tinto)
• Driverless buses are going into operation at Fukushima, reducing the number of people at the site. (Japan Times)
• Byton announced a partnership with Aurora to develop level 4 and 5 self-driving vehicles. (Byton)
• Uber and Waymo settled their ongoing case over stolen IP after a few days in court. The $245 million settlement will be paid in Uber stock at a $72 billion valuation. Google emails released during the trial confirmed that the company had tried to agree a tie-up with Ford (long rumoured but previously denied by both companies). (Futurism)
• Continental and Nvidia agreed a partnership for self-driving car technology, intending to integrate Continental’s sensor technology with Nvidia’s chips. The partners hope to be able to offer a Level 3 product in 2021. (Continental)
• Autonomous truck company Embark said it had completed a 2,400 mile journey from California to Florida to test its systems (with safety drivers). There were numerous disengagements but the company was encouraged that often the intervals were several hours at a time (not unexpected from highway driving if the system is competent). (Engadget)
• Uber’s CEO said that because some routes are “tricky” for autonomous vehicles, Uber expects to see “a mix of human-driven vehicles along self-driving ones for years to come”. The company also thinks that self-driving cars “must” be shared, rather than individually owned. (Uber)
• Scania and Chinese truckmaker Haylion agreed a collaboration to work on autonomous trucks. (Scania)
• Long-rumoured talks for Hyundai to join BMW’s self-driving alliance are reportedly in the final stages. Memo: Hyundai recently announced a collaboration with Aurora on driverless cars. (Handelsblatt)
• Mercedes-Benz’s VP of strategy said putting self-driving systems in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine “doesn’t make sense” because of the negative impact on fuel economy. (Wired)
• California’s DMV released reports from companies authorised to test autonomous vehicles in the state (newcomers are exempt). The reports cover the period to November 2016. Notably, Faraday Future failed to submit a report on time. Analysts quickly crowned Waymo as the champion of the self-driving space, with Cruise getting an honourable mention for the level of improvement in the last 12 months. Drawing deep conclusions from the data is becoming increasingly dangerous. Many OEMs with testing licences run very small fleets in California, rarely putting their vehicles on the road (Tesla is one). Even Waymo’s fleet is shrinking (but miles per car are going up). (Ars Technica)
• Lyft is opening a European office, but it isn’t aimed at running ride sharing yet. Instead, it is creating an autonomous vehicle centre in Munich, Germany. (Bloomberg)
• Autonomous delivery van company Nuro raised $92 million. Its concept vehicle has slots for different customer grocery orders, enabling it to drive to your door (carrying them in is your job). (Reuters)
• Udelv announced the start of public trials with its autonomous delivery vehicle. (Golem)

January

• Uber’s CEO believes the company will serve fare paying customers with autonomous vehicles within the next 18 months serving fare paying customers. The initial use cases will be limited to certain areas / trips. He forecast that full autonomy, for a given vehicle to operate any trip without limitations, was 10 - 15 years away. (TechCrunch)
• Lidar supplier LeddarTech and Optis announced a partnership to create accurate simulations of lidar signals that could be used in virtual autonomous vehicle testing. (Optis)
• Waymo will start testing AVs in Atlanta, but this may not lead to a public ride sharing program. (Fortune)
• Self-driving start-up ai raised over $112 million in funding. The company hopes to run a fleet of vehicles in Guangzhou, China, following the investment. (TechCrunch)
• Magna released the Icon radar aimed at self-driving vehicles and developed in collaboration with Uhnder, a start-up still in stealth mode. Magna claims a range of more than 300 metres for the sensor. (Magna)
• A back-to-back comparison of camera-based and lidar point cloud generation by the US Army Corps of Engineers found that, for sensors with similar resolutions, lidar data was much faster to process. (GIM International)
• PSA is planning for 80% of its vehicles to have a limited ability to navigate themselves and 10% to have L4/L5 capability by 2030. (Les Echos)
• US transport officials said that new rules for self-driving cars would be released in the summer. (Reuters)
• Navya and VIA announced the integration of the Navya AV features into VIA’s app so that customers can summon and then control certain aspects of the Navya vehicle. (VIA)
• Gett, in partnership with MobilEye, will install mapping equipment on 500 London black cabs in order to map streets ahead of autonomous vehicle deployment. (Auto Express)
• Baidu announced a JV with Singaporean group Asia Mobility Industries, in addition to a joint investment fund with $200 million to spend on advanced mobility projects. (Press Release)
• GM unveiled a Bolt without a steering wheel, and requested permission to use the vehicle on public roads in the US. Following Waymo’s example, the company released a “safety report” that explains the workings of an autonomous vehicle without providing any technical substance beyond widely-agreed and long-standing principles. (GM)
• Toyota debuted the e-Palette concept vehicle at CES; a scalable electrified and autonomous vehicle. Toyota announced partnerships with Didi, Uber, Amazon and Pizza Hut to develop applications for the vehicle and said it was sharing technology development with Mazda, Uber and Didi. (Toyota)
• Aurora announced tie-ups with VW and Hyundai. The focus of the VW project is mobility as a service (robo taxis), whereas Hyundai are aiming for a level 4 vehicle by 2021 (presumably for retail). The company also said it would partner with Nvidia to create new hardware for self-driving cars based on existing Nvidia (Nvidia)
• Lidar maker Ouster said that it would sell its recently released OS-1 sensor for $8,000 per unit to research and educational customers -- subject to them passing eligibility requirements. (Ouster)
• Autonomous technology developer AIMotive said it had raised $38 million in a Series C round with investors including Samsung, Cisco and Bosch. (AIMotive)
• Local Motors said it had created a financing agreement for its autonomous vehicles that would allow operators to lease over 84 months, subject to teaming up with Local Motors’s approved partners. (Local Motors)