EuroWire March 2018

Transatlantic cable

presentation in Arizona by the former Google self-driving car project Waymo “more of a demo than a real business proposition.” But actual passenger-free cars will, he reports, enter commercial service in 2018. To be sure, “commercial” is narrowly construed here, even though experts rate the example cited by Mr Ross at Level 4. Amber, a Dutch startup founded by recent graduates of the Eindhoven University of Technology, intends to have its rental cars driving themselves around the city later this year. The operation is a simple one: re-parking the company’s vehicles overnight so as to facilitate access to them the next day. Amber’s clients – so far, 45 employees of local businesses – are guaranteed to be within a reasonable morning walk of a car they have reserved. † For now, at the end of each day Amber’s student drivers reposition the scattered cars for the next day’s users. But over the course of the year the cars are to be programmed to reposition themselves. They will move slowly, by night, on dedicated bus lanes if available, stopping “for the flimsiest of reasons.” “We will try to avoid complex situations as much as possible, and the cars will be monitored all the time” from a distance, Steven Nelemans, who dropped out of his electrical engineering programme to serve as Amber’s CEO, told the Spectrum . In his view, the “mobility as a service” available from the company is of a decidedly different kind from that on offer from ride-hailing programmes and the big car companies.

† Commenting that the Internet “doesn’t lend itself cleanly to state lines,” Mr Brustein concurred. Citing other contentious telecom issues – among them, broadband privacy rules introduced by more than 20 US states last year – he predicted, “All signs point to a busy [2018] for tech policy in statehouses.”

Automotive

The first fully commercial self-driving cars will launch this year – moving by night in a college town in Holland What, precisely, is a driverless car? The answer – a car with no one behind the wheel – may be obvious, but it is not helpful. In IEEE Spectrum , the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (New York), Philip E Ross provided a clarifying “hierarchy” of the five levels of robocar, working backwards from most to least able. At Level 5, the car “can do it all.” At Level 4, the car does it all only in certain areas, under certain conditions. At Level 3, drivers must be prepared to take control after a 10-second warning. At Level 2, they must pay attention all the time. At Level 1, drivers get help with the braking. Level 0, says Mr Ross – perhaps with tongue in cheek – “has power windows.” At any level, today’s autonomous cars fall short of genuine commercial potential, and Mr Ross declared even an impressive

61

www.read-eurowire.com

March 2018