The future of auto cars to be studied closely.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A test site on the campus of the University of Michigan designed to simulate a city will help researchers test how self-driving cars will travel in the future without hitting pedestrians or causing crashes.
Set to open Monday, M City is a 32-acre, $6.5 million sandbox that will enable automakers to pit self -driving cars against suburban streets, highways, and rural roads, as well as unforeseen obstacles like traffic jams, or jaywalking pedestrians, according to The Week magazine.
Bloomberg reported it includes 40 building facades, angled intersections, a traffic circle, a bridge, a tunnel, gravel roads, and a a four-lane highway with entrance and exit ramps.
“We had the faculty here at the university design the fully evolved future,” Peter Sweatman, head of the Transportation Research Institute, which oversaw the creation of the Ann Arbor test facility, told Bloomberg. “After all, we’re replacing humans with machines and those machines need to be able to operate in a full, rich environment.”
M city represents an alternative to the current crop of test sites for autonomous cars, all of which were originally designed to evaluate how fast traditional cars can run laps or how well they handle with humans at the wheel.
“If you’re out on the public roadways, certainly all kinds of really unusual things will arise, but they’re only going to arise once,” Sweatman said. “We like the idea of creating challenging situations that we can reproduce as many times as we want.”
Automakers have been eager to take to the roads of M City, Sweatman said.
Manufacturers have said driverless cars may be on the road within half-a-decade. The market for autonomous technology is slated to grow to $42 billion by 2025 and self-driving cars may account for a quarter of global auto sales by 2035, according to Boston Consulting Group.
By 2017, semi-autonomous cars that operate in auto-pilot mode, park themselves and change lanes automatically will be available in “large numbers,” the firm reported.
Meanwhile, another one of Google’s autonomous cars from its massive test fleet was involved in a collisin on July 1, with three people being injured as the company’s vehicle was struck from behind by another vehicle.
The three employees suffered minor injuries because of whiplash, when another vehicle impacted from behind the Lexus RX450h prototype, reported Automotive News.
“Our self-driving cars are being hit surprisingly often by other drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the road,” commented Chris Urmson, director of Google’s autonomous vehicle project, in a recent blog post.
The Internet search giant has been testing self-driving cars since 2009, with its autonomous models being involved in accidents 14 times, of which eleven incidents involved rear-end crashes. The company stated its autonomous cars’ record is still spotless, as the robot vehicles were never at fault in any of the incidents.