From Portland, Oregon, we bring you the Boxx — a meter-long electric scooter with looks apparently inspired by Volvo station wagons of yore.

Self-contained and with a tiny footprint, the 120 lb. Boxx is designed for urban environments where space comes at a premium. It’s small enough — and stylish enough — that it could be stored in a living room or office without looking out of place. Whether it’s comfortable to ride remains to be seen, but the company promises videos will be available soon.

Looks aside, the Boxx seems like it’s quite capable for getting around town. The base model, which retails for $3995, can go 40 miles between charges, but it’s possible to upgrade to double the range. Recharges take four hours or one hour depending on configuration. Top speed is governed at 35 mph, and the power to weight ratio is 2 to 1. It’s capable of ascending a 40 degree incline and can hold up to 300 lbs. in combined passenger and cargo load, including two cubbies for backpacks or briefcases. You can even order it with a heated seat.

A little more than a week after its public debut at the Portland International Auto Show, interest in the Boxx is strong, according to Paul D’Souza, International Director for Boxx Corp. “Basically we are flooded and can’t keep up with E-mail,” he said. “We have requests from all over the world.”

The company hasn’t released all their technical specs yet, but we do know that the Boxx is powered by proprietary hub motors that D’Souza says weigh only 10 pounds — about a third of what a traditional electric hub motor would weigh. Systems such as the “Autonomous Vehicle Occupant Adaption” and “BOXX Attitude Disertion (B.A.D)” have yet to be explained.

We do know that future Boxxes will feature LightGuard, a “virtual lane system,” and also a touchscreen-equipped modular vehicle controller known as CUBE.

Photos: Boxx Corp.

Junior, the autonomous Passat wagon that placed second in the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, during early road testing. Photo: Volkswagen.

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

Autonomous Cars Through the Ages

Mapping the Road Ahead for Autonomous Cars

Navigating the Legality of Autonomous Vehicles

The self-driving cars we’ve been promised since the dawn of the auto age are here. Google’s amazing robo-Prius hybrids have racked up more than 200,000 miles on public roads. Luxury cars boast gadgets that do everything but steer the car for you. And General Motors has predicted we’ll see autonomous tech in showrooms by 2020.
 
These cars have the potential to make our roads safer, our commutes more enjoyable and our lives richer. Well, OK, maybe that last one won’t happen. Still, there are doubters, haters and Luddites who say this will never happen. They offer a litany of reasons. Here are the five most common things the haters say, and why they’re wrong.

Autonomous vehicles will be inherently more unsafe than humans.

Yes, computers crash. So do humans. The traffic fatality and serious injury rate in the United States, while improved in recent years (owing little, if at all, to anything humans do behind the wheel), exacts such a human toll that if the driving environment were considered a workplace it would long ago have been shuttered by OSHA, traffic engineer professor Per Garder once told me, based on back-of-the-envelope calculations. This is why, with virtually every human activity (save perhaps underwater cave diving or base-jumping), the drive to that activity is the most dangerous part of one’s journey. And then there’s the fact traffic fatalities are heavily implicated in the question of why the United States punches so far below its weight when it comes to life expectancy.

A recent New York Times article featured an interesting quote from NHTSA’s chief counsel: “We think it’s a scary concept for the public. If you have two tons of steel going down the highway at 60 mph a few feet away from two tons of steel going in the exact opposite direction at 60 mph, the public is fully aware of what happens when those two hunks of metal collide and they’re inside one of those hunks of metal. They ought to be petrified of that concept.”

Ought to be petrified? A “scary concept”? In the United States, traffic fatalities are by far the most important contributor to the danger of leaving home. The public is fully aware of what happens when two hunks of metal collide because they are doing it all the time: Distracted, drunk, falling asleep, falling prey to human perceptual deficits or cognitive biases, driving recklessly through over-confidence or erratically through under-confidence, ignorant of the traffic regulations or just plain criminally negligent, human drivers are forever stuck in version 1.0 — and there’s no hope of an upgrade in evolutionary sight. Every scenario you can spin out of computer error — What if the car drives the wrong way — already exists in analog form, in abundance. Yes, computer-guidance systems and the rest will require advances in technology, not to mention redundancy and higher standards of performance, but at least these are all feasible, and capable of quantifiable improvement.

On the other hand, we’ll always have lousy drivers.

Hey, I like driving.

Really? Or do you like the point-to-point, nose-pickingly private individual mobility that the car affords? Do you enjoy the blood-pressure raising, joint-straining work of endlessly pressing the accelerator and the brake as you drive at near-walking speeds on the 405?

If the actual assembly-line-drudge operation of this machine were so enriching, why is so much of it already being automated? If you so truly enjoy the act of driving — the minor steering adjustments, the casual monitoring of the speedometer — why is not sufficiently gripping to keep you from fiddling with your damn phone behind the wheel?

But let’s say you’re still on a hedonic buzz from that twisty spin down Highway 1 you had when you were young and you still had hair and your future lay ahead on that gauzy ribbon of asphalt and not in the closer-than-they-appear rearview mirror. No one involved in autonomous vehicle technology is suggesting that there wouldn’t be a “manual” option, not simply for safety but for the idea that one day you may stumble, for a few minutes, into an accidental car commercial. Cars already have “regular” and “sport” modes for transmissions. Why not add a “One Step Away From Falling Down Mode” for the bumper-to-bumper grind home and a “Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Mode” for the Nürburgring, the drive-through of the Route 10 Starbucks in East Hanover, New Jersey, or anywhere else you feel a bit of human control may be in order?

We don’t have the infrastructure for autonomous cars.

Well, we didn’t have the infrastructure for cars, either — at least until bicyclists got together and helped make it so. There was a time in America when we embraced grand infrastructure projects — now we can’t afford the upkeep on what we’ve got.

We certainly don’t need to build any more roads, but there’s a compelling argument for making smarter roads. But the game-changing thing about the Google Driverless Car project is it essentially uses the existing road environment. No special infrastructure is required. Suddenly all those magnet-stripes-down-the-middle demonstration highways seem so Futurama — as in the World’s Fair, not the TV show. The test bed is the interstate highway itself: wide, rigidly standardized, relatively well maintained and generally boring as hell to drive. There’s no theoretical reason why cars with powerful locative technology, advanced vision systems, a suite of sensors and powerful software groomed over millions of hours of driving couldn’t be made to drive in standard environments. Google’s already proven they can be — its autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids have racked up some 200,000 miles on public roads.

This would never fly in the litigious United States.

It is true the U.S. tort liability system poses unique challenges for product innovation and would throw many hurdles in the path ahead for autonomous vehicles. I would only add two caveats: One, the U.S. auto industry already is well-versed in dealing with liability lawsuits, often losing cases in which, as Francois Castaing notes, “the vehicles involved met all of the requisite federal safety standards at the time of their design and manufacture” and it wasn’t a technical malfunction that was found to be “the proximate cause of the accident or incident.”

The only way to essentially rule out potential lawsuits owing to death or injury in a car — a product, it should be said, with performance capabilities far beyond what actually is allowed by law — is to not build the car in the first place. The second point is that, in terms of vehicle autonomy or semi-autonomy, we are not going from zero to 60. We have already had almost a decade of experience with adaptive cruise control and other semi-autonomous technologies with no evidence of a huge uptick in crashes or a huge wave of lawsuits.

When you ride with Google, you ride with Big Brother.

I hate to go even one block down Wingnut Drive, but here goes. Many of the most vitriolic responses to autonomous vehicles revolve around the loss of autonomy, loss of privacy, etc. News flash: The roads you’re driving on are publicly owned and funded. You have registered your vehicle with the government, which also has sanctioned your privilege to drive by ensuring (at least in principle) that you are capable of doing so without harming yourself or others. You are not just driving down a road, you’re navigating a thicket of state, local, and federal regulations. So until the time when someone dismantles all infrastructure-creating government bodies, abolishes the DOT and DMV and lets any idiot with a pulse behind the wheel, let’s agree that you’ve already ceded your autonomy when you get in a vehicle. And given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on police use of GPS, even when tracking criminals, the idea that more technology in the car leads ipso facto to more government control is questionable.

Although I said I’d list five reasons the robo-car haters are wrong, let me add this as a bonus point. I’m not so sure about the argument that autonomous vehicles will increase suburban sprawl (an argument that recalls the “Jevons Paradox” specter that making cars more fuel efficient will simply lead to more driving).

This may be so. There is presumed to be a limit, in time more than distance, to the daily commute people will tolerate. Beyond that limit, personal happiness falls off a cliff. An automated car isn’t going to let you spend more time with your kids, it isn’t going to provide a greater variety of restaurants down the block, and it’s still a sedentary activity that won’t help you live longer (unless it keeps you out of a crash). The utility of the commute could theoretically improve as people once stuck driving the car can now fire off e-mails with abandon. Then again, this increased utility might lead to more people taking advantage of the utility, thus leading to more traffic and more time spent in gridlock. At which point you might long for that other, essentially “self-driving” vehicle: the train.

For the first time in 12 years, an electric vehicle is the greenest new car sold in the United States.

The Mitsubishi i — known everywhere else as the i-MiEV — came out on top when the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy crunched the numbers. To calculate ratings, the beancounters considered manufacturing and recycling processes in addition to fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. Of course, we all know the greenest car is the one you already own and rarely use, but these rankings can help if you’re in the market for something new.

The itty-bitty i is the first EV to top the list since the General Motors EV1. In its debut model year here in the states, the e-Mitsu earned a score of 58 — the highest recorded in the 14 years the council’s been handing out the award. Spare us that tired argument about electric vehicles being coal-powered vehicles. The council factored in the grid when determining the i’s score and it still came out on top.

“Even taking into account the emissions generated from the electricity used to power the i-MIEV, it still handily outscores other vehicles on the market today,” lead vehicle analyst Shruti Vaidyanathan said in a statement.

The little jellybean of a car beat the Nissan Leaf and Toyota Prius, which ranked second (55 points) and third (54), respectively. It also topped the CNG Honda Civic, which has dominated the top spot for eight years. This year, the CNG Civic tied for second place with the Leaf. The Chevrolet Volt didn’t even show up in the top 12, which consisted of six hybrids, two EVs, three dino-juice compacts and one natural-gas vehicle.

Also missing from the list: hybrids from General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Kia and Infiniti. Diesels from Volkswagen and Audi appeared in the “best in class” rankings based on vehicle size, but not on the overall “greenest” list. The new Range Rover Evoque took the top spot among SUVs.

That doesn’t mean the ACEEE thinks EVs are for everyone. “As the list demonstrates, consumers can make ‘greener choices’ whatever their vehicle needs may be,” the organization said in a statement.

For now, the car with the smallest overall environmental impact is the Mitsubishi i, which earned the highest overall score in ACEEE testing. The four-seater officially went on sale in the United States in November in Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington, with a nationwide rollout ongoing. Customers in all states should be able to purchase an i by the beginning of the summer.

Photo: Mitsubishi Motors

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

Autonomous Cars Through the Ages

Navigating the Legality of Autonomous Vehicles

Five Reasons The Robo-Car Haters Are Wrong

Autonomous cars, once the stuff of science fiction, are here. Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius hybrids have racked up more than 140,000 miles on public roads. Audi has sent a driverless TTS racing to the summit of Pikes Peak. Just about every major automaker has similar projects underway.

Despite the rapid advances — four years ago the most sophisticated autonomous vehicles were capable of only short distances and low speeds — we’re still a long way from the day we’re all letting the robot drive.

Wired recently talked to half a dozen experts about the road ahead. Their views are presented here in a roundtable-type format.

Wired: Google’s self-driving cars are logging more miles per year on California freeways than the average driver. What needs to happen — technologically, legally, culturally — to get autonomous vehicles on the road?

Sven Beiker, co-director, Center for Automotive Research, Stanford University: Are we talking about a car where the driver can sit back and doesn’t have to do anything? I’d be very, very surprised if we see anything like that in this decade, maybe even next decade.

Think of supposedly automated airplanes. I haven’t seen the situation where the pilot and copilot come back to the cabin and say, “Hey get a me a brandy,” where the whole thing is on autonomous mode. You have two highly trained professionals monitoring the system, reading out loud to each what they’re going to do next, very diligently checking the mobility apparatus before and after each flight. How often do we even check tire pressure?

Ralf Herrtwich, head of Telematic Research Laboratory, Daimler: I would say it comes down to two things: the availability of technology and the certifiability of vehicles. Of course, to some extent, that goes hand and hand. The more mature technology becomes, the more willing authorities are to grant you the ability to put such a product on the road.

Stefan Liske, auto industry consultant, PCH: We have to respect the fact that we will never be able in the next 10 or 15 years to come up with a budget that would be needed in order to turn cities into environments for autonomous driving, so I would like to give you a very differentiated answer.

I think for safety reasons [autonomous vehicles are] very helpful; also for traffic efficiency for reducing pollution, for reducing traffic jams, for making the commute more efficient — like for people living in Los Angeles who have a one-and-a-half-hour drive in the morning and a one-and-a-half-hour drive in the evening.

If autonomous driving possibilities can reduce this commute every morning, every evening by 30 minutes or an hour, I think it’s a solution that makes sense. It’s a roadmap that makes sense but we as customers, we as drivers, will take a long time to get used to this. And we will have a huge customer group and a huge number of cities or even rural areas where we won’t see autonomous driving on a large scale in the next 10 or 15 years. If you really want to introduce autonomous driving on a large scale, you have to fulfill so many prerequisites. Like for example the connectivity between the cars, the connectivity between cars and infrastructure. That would be a given in order to introduce autonomous driving on a large scale.

Junior, the autonomous Passat that Volkswagen entered in the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, during an early test run. Photo: Volkswagen

Paul Saffo, futurist: There’s the question of customer acceptance. How much does the machine control, and how much does the human control? You have to find that sweet spot, keeping it device-centric while giving humans the illusion they have some control. At Procter and Gamble I heard a story about a new cake mix the company had created. The scientists said, “This is perfect, we can make cake mix that doesn’t require eggs or anything else.” They came up with the product, taste-tasted the result and testers loved it. But it was an absolute dud in the marketplace. A marketing guy said, “We need to add one sentence to the directions: ‘Add one egg.’” The engineers said it doesn’t need an egg. But if all you do is add water, the housewife doesn’t consider it her cake. If you add an egg, it becomes her cake.

Clifford Nass, co-director, Center for Automotive Research, Stanford University: The first cars had no intelligence. Then we developed cars with hidden intelligence. If I told you, “You know how ABS works? When you press your brakes, that’s a suggestion for the car to stop. It can take it or not as it judges appropriate,” people wouldn’t have bought antilock brakes.

No one ever said the car is now in control. Think of fuel injection. You think that when you press on the gas pedal, gas goes and when you take up the gas pedal, it stops? No, it’s an incredibly complicated thing. Automakers have been able to keep that all secret. The advantage is I don’t have to think about it or know how it works. But compare that to functions in the semi-autonomous car, where it does adaptive cruise but not auto lanekeeping, or it does lanekeeping and not adaptive cruise control. There’s a weird mishmash of functions. I think the industry has done itself a disservice by not having standards in how they roll this out. One car company has adaptive cruise control but not lanekeeping. One has auto parking but not adaptive cruise control. People don’t get practice with these technologies; they don’t get to build mental models of what the car is doing.

Wired: What’s the significance of Google essentially grabbing pole position for autonomous driving? Is it a shot across the bow of the auto industry, or a sexy Trojan horse for a Google application?

Saffo: The genius of Sebastian [Thrun]’s approach is to put the emphasis on software over hardware. Good software can compensate at a much more cost-effective level for limitations of hardware than good hardware can ever do. He’s taking this weak info approach, with lots of sources of weak info rather than a single bullet of data. That’s the way to build safe systems.

The way I think about what they’re doing is they’re making it happen now, with the environment as it is. If more intelligence gets built [into the road environment], they can accommodate. We don’t have to wait for highways to get intelligent to have robots roll on them.

Beiker: I could imagine that they have a leading edge in the whole field of computer vision and decision making, and dealing with huge amount of data in real time. This is just what Google is very, very good at. The auto industry is still learning. Dealing with huge amounts of data is something that’s still a growing field in the auto industry.

Wired: What are the risks in ceding greater, or even full, control to the car?

Herrtwich: I always tend to say the road is longer than it is wide. Steering is the most dangerous thing.

Typically, what many of the emergency systems that are out there do is give the driver a warning. If nothing happens, the system kicks in. If you go into the pre-safe brake system, you get a few beeps. If you don’t pay attention to the beeps, the car will brake automatically. In parallel [highway] traffic, you have all the time in the world to go through this cascade. But when you have obstacles crossing your path, that’s so spontaneous there’s little room for such a cascade of warnings. Even if you did it, you’d hardly be able to initiate something by yourself. Originally, the driver was considered the safety net, and now the system is the safety net because even if the driver were to take over, things are happening so fast that human reaction time does not allow that to happen.

Donald Norman, consultant and author, The Design of Future Things: The hardest part about automation is when it fails and you have to immediately take over. In aviation, you have highly skilled pilots. You’re five miles up. You may even have a minute or two before you hit the ground. There’s time to analyze and see what happens. In the automobile, you have unskilled drivers who don’t have a clue, they may not have been paying attention — and they may have a second in which they have to respond.

Beiker: The biggest challenge is the mix of human and autonomous vehicles on the road. You might end up with an autonomous vehicle that absolutely obeys all traffic rules. It might be sitting forever at a four-way intersection because no one else is coming to a stop. It might be the most expensive but slowest vehicle in traffic. It might behave kind of funny.

Some people in the industry argue that once you combine lane keeping assist and adaptive cruise control with the latest level of sophistication — like stop and go assist — then you essentially have an autonomous car. But it needs be integrated more, which is another significant step toward highly automated vehicle. That’s really something that we must not underestimate: How much the driving task already is changing through this.

Photo: Audi. Audi’s autonomous TTS, on the road.

New research out of MIT shows that going electric could save urban delivery fleets some serious money in the long term, as long as their trucks end up giving power back to the grid when they’re not in use.

Buying a battery-powered vehicle is a tough decision for a fleet manager to make. The initial cost of an electric delivery truck is usually around $150,000 — about three times the cost of a traditional gas or diesel truck. Longer-term gains exist, but currently take years to realize.

A new study from MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) took that well-worn math and added another component: Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) tehnology. In such a scenario, fleet owners would plug in their trucks when not in use and sell electricity back to the power grid. Depending on when trucks get plugged in, fleets could earn between $900 and $1400 per vehicle in electricity sales.

Using data culled from the New England power grid and the office supply giant Staples, who already operates a fleet of electric delivery trucks alongside those with internal combustion engines, the researchers found that total operational cost per mile would drop from 75 cents per mile for a diesel truck to 68 cents per mile for an EV.

Best of all, almost any fleet manager could realize those savings — even an individual owner/operator. “Almost all these costs scale down to the individual vehicle,” said Jarrod Goentzel, one of the study’s co-authors.

Since V2G technology depends on managing the flow of power to and from EVs, fleet vehicles would be particularly attractive candidates for V2G inclusion. They operate on a set schedule, which guarantees that utilities would receive a steady source of power.

“The initial opportunities for V2G are likely to be for fleets, because they can be managed and controlled,” Goentzel said.

Photo: Keith Barry/Wired.com

See Also:

• Postal Service to Test Electric Truck
• AltWheels Has Everything But Gasoline
• Who Needs A Smart Grid When You’ve Got Smart EVs? 

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

Autonomous Cars Through the Ages

Mapping the Road Ahead for Autonomous Cars

Five Reasons The Robo-Car Haters Are Wrong

I wasn’t long in the backseat of Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius, cruising smoothly down California Highway 85, before a sober, gray-flannel question pierced my giddy techno-utopian buzz: Is this legal?

On principle, it would seem downright churlish to penalize Google’s upstanding Prius — which kept letter-perfect lane position, following distance and speed-limit compliance — while all around us human drivers committed a panoply of illegal acts: talking on their phones, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, tailgating, you name it.

But what does the law say about autonomous vehicles?

“The law in California is silent, it doesn’t address it,” Google’s Anthony Levandowski told me. “The key thing is staying within the law — there’s a always a person behind the wheel, the person in the seat is still the driver, they set the speed, they’re ready to take over if anything goes wrong.”

Ryan Calo, who studies, among other things, the legal aspects of robotics at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, notes, “generally speaking, something is lawful unless it is unlawful — that’s the whole idea of having a system of so-called ‘negative liberties.’”

He has parried on this issue with economist Tyler Cowen, who counters with one local driving code, which states “No person shall operate a motor vehicle upon the streets of the city without giving full time and attention to the operation of the vehicle.” And yet by this definition alone there was nothing illegal about what the Google engineers, sitting up front and busily monitoring the Prius’ various operations, were doing. They were within both the spirit and letter of the law.

In fact, you could argue they were paying more attention than any of the drivers around us.

One reason Google’s autonomous Prius was not unlawful is autonomous vehicles have not been on society’s radar — or roads. As with drivers talking on cellphones (or any number of Internet issues) legislation tends to follow the adoption of new technology. Google, of course, isn’t taking chances and sent representatives to Nevada, which has a history of autonomous vehicle testing, to lobby in favor of Assembly Bill 511. The law “requires the Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada.” It defines an autonomous vehicle as “a motor vehicle that uses artificial intelligence, sensors and global positioning system coordinates to drive itself without the active intervention of a human operator.”

As at least one commentator has noted, although the bill defines artificial intelligence as “the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings,” many modern cars already do this, in any number of ways: Adaptive cruise control, anti-lock braking, lane-departure warning systems, self-parking, even adaptive headlights.

One of Google's autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids struts its stuff. Photo: jurvetson/Flickr

So is Nevada simply reaffirming what’s on the road, or raising the specter that existing in-car technologies would be subject to the requirements laid out in the draft regulations? For example, would the requirement that “prior to testing, each person must be trained to operate the autonomous technology, and must be instructed on the autonomous technology’s capabilities and limitations” apply to someone test-driving a new Mercedes-Benz?

Calo doesn’t think so.

“It sets out a definition of autonomous technology that is based in part on the statutory definition of autonomous vehicle that the legislature gave to the DMV, and then it very explicitly excludes essentially all of the individual technologies that are commercially available today,” he says. “It’s an open question if it would exclude them in their combination or in their particular uses but it reflects the DMV’s effort to say no, no, no, we’re really not talking about things you can buy today, we’re really not talking about the driver assistive technologies, we’re talking about autonomous in its extreme sense.”

Welcome to the brave new world of autonomous vehicle law. When the rules become official, Nevada will become the first state to broach the subject (largely thanks to Google’s influence). But as increasingly autonomous technologies enter our cars, the legal questions, liability in particular, have grown more relevant. As a report by the RAND Corporation notes, “As these technologies increasingly perform complex driving functions, they also shift responsibility for driving from the driver to the vehicle itself…. [W]ho will be responsible when the inevitable crash occurs, and to what extent? How should standards and regulations handle these systems?”

But the legal picture is still incredibly murky. For one, standards for many of these systems are still evolving, and there’s a certain level of mystery regarding their performance and their performance failures. Consider, for example, that it took the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and NASA investigators months of involved study to determine that the notorious Toyota unintentional acceleration incidents were less likely an electronic malfunction and “most likely the result of pedal entrapment by a floor mat [holding] the accelerator pedal in an open throttle position.”

“In the slipstream of this uncertainty,” Dutch researchers Rob van der Heijden and Kiliaan van Wees note in an article in the European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, “another source of uncertainty concerns doubts on whether legal regimes are adequate to cope with ADAS [advanced driver assist systems] or that they might create problems with regard to their development and implementation.” The fear of product liability always looms as an obstacle to innovation in the auto industry (and liability is a particularly American issue; one study noted that in 1992, Ford was hit with more than 1,000 product liability in suits in the United States and exactly one in Europe). As Rand notes, automakers initially opposed air bags because they worried about shifting responsibility from drivers to themselves; Calo points out that people have sued when a car in a crash does not have an air bag “because someone said at this price point you should have an airbag.”

It’s not hard to spin complicated crash scenarios involving autonomous vehicles and the tangled webs of post-event liability. Take a scenario envisioned by Rand: “Suppose that most cars brake automatically when they sense a pedestrian in their path. As more cars with this feature come to be on the road, pedestrians may expect that cars will stop, in the same way that people stick their limbs in elevator doors confident that the door will automatically reopen.”

But what if some cars don’t have this feature (and given the average age spread of the U.S. car fleet, it’s not hard to imagine a gulf in capabilities), and one of them strikes a pedestrian who wasn’t aware the car lacked this technology? If a judgment is found in favor of the pedestrian, are we encouraging people to be less careful? Or simply hastening the onset of universal pedestrian-crash avoidance features in cars? As Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, asks, “do we force the vehicles to adapt to our legal regime, to our motor vehicle code that sets out what is reasonably prudent or what a vehicle must do?” Or, he asks, “do we make some changes to these legal and social infrastructures to incentivize or encourage or speed up the adaptation of autonomous technology.”

Imagine another scenario: What if a driver in a car that uses lane markings to maintain its position goes off the road on a section where the markings have worn away? Is the local department of transportation at fault? Or the manufacturer of the road striping paint whose product didn’t last as long as promised? Or the automaker for not having a more robust backup system? Or the driver for failing to maintain the necessary vigilance? As der Heijden and van Wees write, “under fault-liability regimes drivers and vehicle owners will not be liable if they acted as a careful person.” But what’s the definition of a careful person in an autonomous vehicle? How could we prove ex post facto they were monitoring the car’s performance and not simply daydreaming?

Or what if the autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle is a Mercedes-Benz using a hypothetical Google geolocation product and it crashes into a barrier while headed for an off-ramp because it misjudged its location? Is fault attributed to Mercedes (acting on the information), or Google (providing the information), or the driver for not correcting for the error?

An interesting and related area of inquiry here is product liability in the case of crashes that occurred as drivers were given incorrect coordinates by navigation systems. As legal scholar John Woodward notes in an article in the Dayton Law Review, finding fault in that case requires not only locating the source of the malfunction (software, hardware, or a triangulation snafu involving a wayward satellite in the heavens), but ascertaining whether the navigation instructions doled out by GPS constitute a product or a service — which would render product liability claims moot.

Observers like Rand are optimistic that it all will be sorted out, and that liability concerns will not hold up the adoption of safety-oriented autonomous technologies.

“On the contrary,” they argue, “the decrease in the number of crashes and the associated lower insurance costs that these technologies are expected to bring about will encourage drivers and automobile-insurance companies to adopt this technology.”

Photo: Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval took a spin in one of Googles autonomous cars on July 20, 2011 in Carson City. He called the experience “amazing.” Sandra Chereb/Associated Press

This thoroughly modern custom out of England tastefully mines the past to create something that never was but could have been.

It’s called the Triumph Speed Twin Concept, a reference to the iconic 1937 Speed Twin 5T. It was designed by a pair of young British designers, Roy Norton and Tom Kasher, in what became something of an unofficial styling exercise for Triumph. The two were working on placement at the Xenophya industrial design studio when they approached Triumph with a proposal for “a bike taking retro themes in a modern direction.”

Triumph Product Manager Simon Warburton loved the idea and wrote a brief. He wanted a bike “styled to appeal to younger riders … the bike the Bonneville might have evolved into, in an alternative universe.”

The choice of the Triumph Bonneville is a good one: The 865cc twin is a retro throwback in itself. When the production bike was upgraded to fuel injection, the system was carefully disguised to look like traditional carburetors.

Norton and Kasher set to work, drawing influence from the cafe racers and bobbers of yore. Input from Triumph ensured the Speed Twin concept was feasible from a manufacturing and homologation standpoint. Barbour outdoor clothing, another venerable English brand, helped out with materials for the seat and grips.

Warburton is pleased. He says elements from the concept could influence future projects. We’d love to see those eye-catching girder forks on a production bike. Although they’re mock-ups here, the technology is ripe for resurrection with modern materials and engineering know-how.

Photos: Triumph Motorcycles Ltd.

Buick has released a new suite of smartphone games that encourage fuel saving habits. Hypermilers, rejoice!

The Buick Fuel Efficiency Games app might not have the flashiest name out there, but it’s a free app for Android or Apple that contains three separate games that teach about stop/start technology, regenerative braking and aerodynamic optimization. The games are promotional tie-ins with the automaker’s new mild-hybrid Regal and Lacrosse eAssist, and they make maximizing miles per gallon surprisingly fun.

The first two games require players to navigate through a course on a single tank of fuel. Regeneration Road shows off the eAssist system’s regenerative braking technology, forcing players to slow down for pedestrians while driving through a city. If that’s a little too much like driving to work, there’s also Roll and Boost — a “beautiful weekend drive through a flowing countryside” that’s only less relaxing due to the lack of nearby gas stations. Cover the most distance before running out of fuel, and you’ll win.

Finally, there’s Wind Tunnel Tester, which lets players reshape a Regal or Lacrosse in order to optimize fuel efficiency. The moral of that game? Spoilers and roof racks will sap your mileage. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t play a similar game on our Apple IIe back in our younger days. Unfortunately, with limited graphics and only four arrow keys instead of a full touchscreen, most of the cars we built back then ended up looking like Triumph TR-7s.

Currently, Buick’s game only gets twelve ratings in Apple’s App Store, but most of them are pretty positive. If the games prove popular, don’t be surprised if other automakers release promotional software with names like “Angry Merging” and “Parallel Parking Hero.”

Images: Buick

Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP are able to get as many as 20 of their autonomous microcopters to fly in formation and perform complex maneuvers flawlessly.

In an impressive new video, the GRASP — General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception — team makes their swarm of flying microbots flip, change direction, navigate through obstacles and even fly figure-eights with jaw-dropping agility and precision.

GRASP has since 2010 made remarkable advancements in the capabilities of their tiny quadrotors, developed by Kmel Robotics, and documented them with a series of videos showing bots flying hoops and building a tower-like structure. The lab is developing the ability to fly autonomously in formation, communicating with each other to maintain position. Last year the team demonstrated a basic formation flight with a lost-communication demonstration where one of the aircraft drops out on its own.

There is still plenty of human input as the tiny UAVs are programmed to fly various tasks. No Skynet yet. Such machines could be used for surveillance or search-and-rescue missions. They’re also just plain cool to watch.

As we wait for the next trick, we hope becoming self aware is indeed just science fiction.

Video: YouTube/TheDmel