Car Talk

[don]

Automakers Rethink Seats for Self-Driving Cars

By JIM MOTAVALLIJAN. 15, 2015

DETROIT — As self-driving cars become increasingly real, automakers are already reimagining how passengers may actually ride in the cars, without the need to pay such close attention to the road.

In at least one case, envisioned by Mercedes, the design would borrow more from the vintage carriages still on the road in “Downton Abbey” than briefcase cars in “The Jetsons.”

The Mercedes F 015 Luxury in Motion concept car, on display at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, features what the company describes as “four rotating lounge chairs that allow a face-to-face seat configuration.” In other words, the driver (and front passenger, too) can swivel around and make direct eye contact with the people in the back.

The Mercedes F 015 Luxury in Motion concept car features what the company describes as “four rotating lounge chairs that allow a face-to-face seat configuration.” In other words, the driver (and front passenger, too) can swivel around and make direct eye contact with the people in the back.

This concept actually goes back a long way. Horse-drawn carriages commonly offered vis-à-vis seating for passengers, and it has been a feature of self-driving car fantasies at least since the 1950s. In the late 1960s, Chrysler Imperials could briefly be ordered with an option that included a swiveling front passenger seat and a folding table for on-the-road business meetings — a kind of precursor to the custom conversion vans of the 1970s.

But will people traveling at highway speeds actually want to sit facing backward? On trains and other public transit, some passengers avoid it because of motion sickness.

There are less extreme solutions. In Detroit, Johnson Controls showed an interior that the company said might work for early-generation self-driving cars that still required the driver in place and ready to take back control. When autodrive is engaged, the steering wheel retracts and the front seats can be swiveled 18 degrees toward each other.

Thomas Gould, Johnson Controls’ design director for North American seating, said that face-to-face seating in fully autonomous cars was “a distinct possibility.”

“As long as your eyes and inner ear are telling your brain that you’re moving,” he said, rear-facing occupants shouldn’t experience car sickness.

Michael Robinson, a self-driving car stylist and chief executive of ED Design in Italy, acknowledged that some people taking train trips worried about motion sickness when facing backward, “but others comfortably sit facing rearwards, allowing them to carry on a conversation.”

Frank Rinderknecht, chief executive of the Rinspeed design firm in Switzerland, said that most people should be fine facing backward in a car, but he said that lying flat — as in some premium airplane seats — “would not only make you sick, but would be unsafe.” The Rinspeed XchangE concept imagines swiveling lounge seats that will let occupants put their legs up.

One big obstacle to the swivel design in a partly autonomous vehicle, experts say, is safety.

“Federal safety rules won’t allow swiveling seats like that because of positioning with the airbags,” said Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research. “And the driver has to be attentive to what is going on and ready to take the wheel if automated systems fail.”

Mr. Abuelsamid called Mercedes’ seating vision “pretty pie-in-the-sky for the foreseeable future, meaning the next 10 years.”




A 3-D Printed Car, Ready for the Road


JAN. 15, 2015

DETROIT — TUCKED away among the gleaming steel machines on display at the North American International Auto Show this week, an Arizona start-up was trying something new: manufacturing a car from scratch right on the convention floor.

Thanks to 3-D printing, a vehicle whose body, frame and interior were constructed from a carbon-polymer composite materialized as puzzled onlookers watched. After workers installed an electric motor, suspension and tires, the small car — which resembled a coupe crossed with a dune buggy — was ready to go.



The idea was the brainchild of John B. Rogers Jr., the founder and chief executive of Local Motors, based in Phoenix. Mr. Rogers, who prefers to be called Jay, was an infantry commander in the Marines, has an M.B.A. from Harvard and is determined to simplify the way automobiles are produced.

Mr. Rogers is no stranger to mobile machines: His grandfather ran the Indian Motorcycle Company and was also the first distributor of Cummins engines in the United States. He himself started a small custom rally-car business in Arizona in 2007, Local Motors.

But two years ago, as he read about the auto industry’s attempts to make lighter auto panels and parts, he had an epiphany.

“It occurred to me that our enemy was the supply chain. There are just too many parts,” he said in an interview. “That was the genesis of all this.”

The question though, was what could be done about it. Cars need parts, thousands of them. Mr. Rogers said he started obsessing about the idea of making a vehicle from a few solid pieces, and began looking for a material. He talked to experts about hardened clay, but that went nowhere. Other options, deemed impractical, also fizzled out.

Then a colleague attending a conference in Boston happened to cross paths with an engineer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who invited Mr. Rogers to visit the lab. Inside was an enormous device with a robot arm that emitted moldable plastic and made shapes — a 3-D printer.

“As soon as I saw that, I said, ‘That’s my machine,’ ” Mr. Rogers said. “I asked, ‘Can we make a car?’ ”

This week in Detroit, he showed off the answer — part of a road show in recent months as he has traveled the country with his creation, the Strati concept vehicle. Aside from a few dozen additional components, like the electric motor, wheels and suspension parts, the small concept car is made from 3-D printed carbon-polymer material.

On Monday, Mr. Rogers announced bigger plans: Local Motors would build a production factory outside Washington, capable of making up to 3,000 3-D printed vehicles a year.

The so-called microfactory, Local Motors’ fourth, is set to be completed within a year and will sell cars to the public. The company has its original microfactory in Phoenix and another in Las Vegas. It is also building one in Oak Ridge, Tenn., near the national laboratory, its partner.

Part retail store, part factory, the Washington plant will let consumers browse the designs, customize their cars, then have them created on one of the half-dozen industrial-grade 3-D printers on site and assembled in a matter of days.

“We like to think of it as Build-A-Bear, mashed up with Ikea, mashed up with Formula One,” Mr. Rogers said.

But the cars may not be entirely street legal. Local Motors’ first 3-D-printed car is categorized as a “neighborhood electric vehicle,” much like a golf cart. Under federal regulations, it is legal on public roads at speeds up to 25 miles per hour, and some states allow certain road access up to 45 miles per hour.

The company plans to offer a vehicle that can be driven on all roads in the United States by 2017, Mr. Rogers said. That would require passing safety requirements set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, including crash tests.

Jessica Caldwell, a senior analyst at Edmunds.com, said that while the market for customization of cars was blossoming, a 3-D-printed car remained “a bit gimmicky at this point in time.” Noting that the price begins at $18,000 and tops out at $30,000, she said most buyers would opt for a vehicle with more traditional amenities.

“I struggle to understand the value to the consumer besides having something cool and cutting-edge,” she said.

Terry Wohlers, president of the research firm Wohlers Associates, which tracks the 3-D printing industry, said while he did not anticipate the Fords or Toyotas of the world adopting 3-D-printed car bodies any time soon, the idea might work on a smaller scale.

“If you’re looking at low quantity, individualized kind of production, that could make sense,” Mr. Wohlers said. “But right now, the cost is too prohibitive to use for large-scale production.”

And although Toyota may not use 3-D printing for its Camrys, the major automakers have already adopted the technology when it comes to designing their cars: building models quickly, and testing the form, fit and function of certain elements.

“They’re all using it in a big way,” Mr. Wohlers said.

Some high-end automakers are going even further, integrating select 3-D-printed parts into production models. Examples include Lamborghini, which uses the technology for part of a console component, and Bentley, where part of a dashboard panel was printed that way, he said.

“Over time, we will see more of them adopt this kind of technology, if not for whole cars, for certain hard-to-produce or complicated parts that 3-D printing can make easier,” he said.

The cost of 3-D printing machines is also likely to drop. Currently, plastics-based machines average around $75,000, and machines that can 3-D print metal, a relatively new invention, cost upward of $500,000 each.

Mr. Rogers said Local Motors believed that a market existed for locally produced, individualized vehicles made with 3-D printing.

“This is not just a science experiment, but is something that can be developed, brought forward safely and enjoyed by consumers around the world,” he said. “It’s about allowing local communities, and people within those communities, to tailor vehicles to suit their individual needs.”

[GRG55]

Re: Car Talk

“Federal safety rules won’t allow swiveling seats like that because of positioning with the airbags,” said Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research. “And the driver has to be attentive to what is going on and ready to take the wheel if automated systems fail.”

I seriously doubt this will be a practical solution to automated system failure. For us aging Baby Boomers I expect the best thing about a "driverless" car is being able to sleep at the wheel

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Car Talk

“Federal safety rules won’t allow swiveling seats like that because of positioning with the airbags,” said Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research. “And the driver has to be attentive to what is going on and ready to take the wheel if automated systems fail.”

I seriously doubt this will be a practical solution to automated system failure. For us aging Baby Boomers I expect the best thing about a "driverless" car is being able to sleep at the wheel

LOL! It's true for me.

When machines drive cars I expect traffic congestion and delays to drop dramatically.
Way back in the 90's our group did work towards what back then was called "intelligent vehicle highway systems", IVHS.
Traffic and transportation communities across the world were investigating, writing papers, and holding conferences.

http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/jpodocs/repts_pr/1823.pdf

The mundane stuff was programmable display signs on freeways that could give real time info about traffic ahead, traffic lights that coordinated timing, and lanes that change direction to carry morning rush traffic inbound and evening rush traffic outbound.

The blue sky stuff back then imagined self-driving cars on high-speed highways.
Most people liked the concept of cars communicating with each other and the roadway on two levels.
At a macro level, cars and roadways exchanging info about their desired destination and routes so they could group up in small "pods" that would travel long distances together.
At a micro level, cars sharing real-time sensor information and decision making to operate the car.

Your car would chat to the roadway to help time traffic lights when you leave your office, merge onto a highway, and ease into tight formation with a handful of others going your route.
That pod of cars would drive very close together, very fast, way beyond human capability. Maybe eight or twenty cars going 150 mph only a few inches apart.
All cars in your pod constantly sharing info from on-board radars and sonars to avoid collisions and maneuver together, and coordinating with other pods to open gaps for lane changes.

When you get to your exit, your car would depart the pod, and coordinate with the local surface streets and surrounding cars to make lane changes and coordinate lane crossing maneuvers.

Back then this was essentially science fiction.
Today we have cheap gigahertz computers and fully developed digital communications links.
It's pretty much inevitable we will creep into self-driving cars that work like this, and traffic jams will become unusual.

[don]

Re: Car Talk

For us aging Baby Boomers I expect the best thing about a "driverless" car is being able to sleep at the wheel

and drive at night . . .

[shiny!]

Re: Car Talk

I would love a self-driving car but having had the habit of defensive driving drilled into me as a kid I'll never give up my hypervigilance. The more complex the system the more fragile it is, IMO.

The thought of lying down and sleeping while a car drives itself gives me the willies! If all the vehicles on the road were communicating with each other, speeding along together with only inches between them that'd be great, but I'd be worried about a power grid or computer failure making it all go kablooey. Can you imagine the carnage at rush hour?

Anybody here ever read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Car Talk

...Anybody here ever read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll"?

Yes, Shiny, I love that story. I might have read every short story that Heinlein and Silverberg ever wrote - as a boy I read every short story science fiction anthology in our small town library.
.
.
.

[shiny!]

Re: Car Talk

Yes, Shiny, I love that story. I might have read every short story that Heinlein and Silverberg ever wrote - as a boy I read every short story science fiction anthology in our small town library.

Cool! I still have a decent collection of old Sci-Fi anthologies on the bookshelf.

I'd rather see more fluid, more sophisticated mass transit systems (short range, long range, slow and fast) than millions and millions of individual cars that all have to be synchronized.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Car Talk

Cool! I still have a decent collection of old Sci-Fi anthologies on the bookshelf.

I'd rather see more fluid, more sophisticated mass transit systems (short range, long range, slow and fast) than millions and millions of individual cars that all have to be synchronized.

"internet of things" should probably find a way of creating instant mass customised point to point transportation.

Maybe an Uber on steroids.

There's Uber car, maybe Uber Van, Uber Bus, Uber Transport Subscribtion

Im thinking Amazon Prime-like "all you can eat" local transport(maybe throttled).

There's still a lot of under-utilised transport capacity and efficiency that can be squeezed, maybe with more Internet of things meets Google Maps meets Uber meets Amazon Prime.

[shiny!]

Re: Car Talk

"internet of things" should probably find a way of creating instant mass customised point to point transportation.

Maybe an Uber on steroids.

There's Uber car, maybe Uber Van, Uber Bus, Uber Transport Subscribtion

Im thinking Amazon Prime-like "all you can eat" local transport(maybe throttled).

There's still a lot of under-utilised transport capacity and efficiency that can be squeezed, maybe with more Internet of things meets Google Maps meets Uber meets Amazon Prime.

Mass transportation and ride sharing is easier in dense population areas like San Francisco. Doesn't work so well in large, spread out areas.

The San Francisco metropolitan area is 3,524 sq. miles. The Phoenix metropolitan area is 14,566 sq. miles. In SF, busses run every 5-7 minutes during rush hour, and bus stops are every couple of blocks. Busses in the Phoenix metro area are few and far between. People commute 30+ miles each way, living in one city and working in another. Busses and trains just can't cover all the areas sufficiently.

I see big, mostly empty busses on the streets of my city. They work for some people, but there is no mass-transit way for the majority of people who live in bedroom communities to commute to work. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use circulating vans that pick people up and drop them off at neighborhood stops as school busses do, then small busses can take them intermediate distances, then large busses or rapid transit trains can take them on the long commutes across town?

Maybe someday we'll have synchronized electric mass transit vehicles moving people on solar powered roads

Solar Roadways

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Car Talk

...I see big, mostly empty busses on the streets of my city. ...

It's true everywhere, and it's still a good thing.

In one aspect the buses are just like the roads- busy and crowded during the rush hours in the morning and evening, and underused at all other times,.

The most expensive part of the bus is the driver.
It's not practical to find drivers willing to work just a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours in the evening.
They want a full day's work and a full day's pay.

So the buses drive routes all day, picking up the odd passenger here and there.
After rush hours some buses run a bit at night to serve the small demand that exists at night.

The big loads they run at rush hour justify all the rest.

[don]

Re: Car Talk

Two self-driving cars involved in close call in California

Two self-driving cars from different companies have been involved in a close call on the roads of California.

A self-driving Lexus operated by Google apparently cut off a self-driving Audi run by Delphi Automotive as it was trying to change lanes, causing it to take “appropriate action” to avoid a collision, said a Delphi executive.

John Absmeier, who was travelling in his company’s car at the time, said the Audi was forced to abort its lane change in the incident, which happened earlier this week.

The close call is apparently the first such incident involving two self-driving cars.

Is it just me or did 'someone' get a little pissed off . . .

[LorenS]

Re: Car Talk

Maybe someday we'll have synchronized electric mass transit vehicles moving people on solar powered roads

Solar Roadways

Why not put panels over the roads?

We were in Carson City recently and parked at a hotel with solar panels over the parking lot. It was nice - covered parking. Parking on the panels just doesn't make sense to me, nor does driving on them.

[shiny!]

Re: Car Talk

Why not put panels over the roads?

We were in Carson City recently and parked at a hotel with solar panels over the parking lot. It was nice - covered parking. Parking on the panels just doesn't make sense to me, nor does driving on them.

I like it! In the south, panels over the roads and parking lots would provide much needed shade.

Check out the 100 mph Raht Racer. It has the same 3-wheel, tandem seating form as the Arcimoto and Elio with a safety roll cage, but it's powered with pedaling and a battery. Pedaling energy doesn't go to the wheels, but to a generator that charges the battery, amplifying the driver's energy output. Pedaling gives it a much longer range than current battery-only vehicles. It can also be driven like a pure recumbent bike with pedaling only, or battery only. Now if only they can bring it to production for the same price that Elio is promising.

I think we're in a very creative time, similar to the development of early airplanes and automobiles.