In connected car news this week were Tesla, Blackmore, WaveSense, Microelectronics and NXP.
Besta’ Tesla
Elon Musk was seen taking a toke on of marijuana on YouTube and more executives left. The stock price feel 6%. However the numbers for the Tesla 3 sedan were 14,250 more than many other electric vehicle as well as many other gas-powered sedans.
EV Charging from Boston to DC
Nissan and EVgo have completed their plan to connect the cities of Boston and Washington D.C. with a series of nine electric vehicle fast charging stations. The completion of the Northeast fast charging corridor provides a comprehensive charging infrastructure, giving electric vehicle (EV) owners peace of mind and convenience when traveling the 500 miles between the two cities.
Each fast charging station can charge up to four or more EVs simultaneously at a power output of 50kW. The stations have also been designed and constructed to adapt to future advances in EV technology, including pre-wiring for higher charging outputs to allow easy upgrading to 150kW fast chargers.
EverQuote & State Auto Mutual Join Octo DriveAbility Marketplace
Octo Telematics, a leading global provider of telematics and data analytics solutions for the auto insurance industry, announced that EverQuote a leading online insurance marketplace in the U.S. connecting consumers with insurance providers, and State Automobile Mutual Insurance Company (State Auto), a leading independent agent-based property and casualty insurer operating in 33 states, have joined Octo’s DriveAbility® Marketplace, an insurance distribution platform that enables various industry partners and ecosystem service providers to offer additional customized insurance services to their customers. The DriveAbility Marketplace delivers an insurance solution to increase customer engagement for Octo’s partners, such as EverQuote, in collaboration with national, regional or state-specific insurance providers such as State Auto.
Borgward Launches R&D in Sunnyvale.
Borgward Group, a global automotive startup with more than 100,000 cars off the production line since the brand was reborn in 2015 in China, announced the launch of its new U.S. headquarters and R&D center in Sunnyvale, California. Borgward will also unveil its unique new AI safety and reliability technology for autonomous vehicles tomorrow at the AI Conference presented by O’Reilly and Intel AI in San Francisco.
The platform is currently in prototype, with three unique risk features — automatic honking, advanced risky behavior identification and labeling, and marking of high-risk physical areas – to be incorporated into Borgward production cars within three years. Borgward will also make its platform available to other OEMs, in a long-term effort to create a global industry standard in safety testing for all autonomous cars.
New Doppler Lidar for Automotive from Blackmore
Blackmore Sensors and Analytics, Inc., the pioneers behind the world’s first Doppler lidar for automotive applications, confirmed that their system exceeded expectations in real-world scanning and mapping across the Bay Area’s busy highways and on the congested streets of San Francisco. This road testing clearly shows how Blackmore’s Doppler lidar can deliver the performance needed to make autonomous vehicles safer, smarter and more reliable than those equipped with traditional lidar.
Backers including BMW i Ventures and Toyota AI Ventures, Blackmore’s team has successfully parlayed more than ten years of experience refining frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar with the Department of Defense to address the automotive industry’s rigorous requirements.
Blackmore’s sensor is the only lidar currently available that instantly delivers real-time velocity measurements of every detected point, helping make autonomous driving smarter and safer. Traditional pulsed lidar systems do not measure motion directly, meaning velocity information is only available after running computationally complex and error-prone analytics algorithms on multiple frames of data. With Blackmore’s instantaneous Doppler-enhanced data, autonomous vehicles perceive the world around them with very high confidence and the low latencies required for safe navigation.
Blackmore’s Doppler lidar also eliminates interference from sunlight and other sensors, and improves long-range performance compared with conventional lidar. These features, when combined with velocity measurements, deliver the trifecta required to help make autonomous driving safer.
SDA Allies with Berkshire Hathaway
Safe Drive Systems (SDS), the leading developer and distributor of advanced auto safety technologies, has announced a new alliance partnership with Berkshire Hathaway GUARD Insurance Companies in a fleet technology pilot project.
During the pilot, SDS systems will be installed in the vehicles of selected fleet customers of Berkshire Hathaway GUARD Insurance Companies to evaluate whether the installation will reduce the frequency and severity of their claims. The vehicles will be equipped with SDS’s RD140 Anti-Collision Radar System, supplemented with the SDS Fleet Management System (FMS) including real-time tracking abilities, report generation software, driver behavior scoring, and the Fleet SDS mobile application.
Funding for WaveSense for GPR Radar
–WaveSense, Inc., making the world a safer place through commercialization of its military-proven ground-penetrating radar (GPR) for autonomous vehicles, today announced it has closed a $3M seed round. Led by Rhapsody Venture Partners, with participation from Vas Ventures, NOMO Ventures, and other leading VC firms, this investment will fund WaveSense’s development of a commercial version of its military proven sensor.
Using ground-penetrating radar, WaveSense creates subterranean maps by scanning up to 10 feet below the roadbed to lock on to unique underground features like soil layers, rocks and pipes. As the vehicle drives, the WaveSense sensor scans the road bedding about 126 times per second and compares the scans to its onboard map to determine the exact vehicle position in relation to the vehicle’s road lane. This mode of navigation has been utilized by the US military and demonstrated to be accurate to within a few centimeters at standard highway speeds, even during night time whiteout snowstorm conditions.
Microelectronic Partners with TomTom
Microelectronics a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, and TomTom (TOM2), the leading independent location technology specialist, today announced a package of development tools in the STM32* Open Development Environment that connect directly to TomTom Maps APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for location, tracking, and mapping data services, speeding product development and reducing time-to-market and development costs for developers.
This first-of-its-kind-development package consists of an STM32 Discovery host board for 2G/3G cellular-to-cloud connectivity, a GNSS expansion board based on ST’s industry-proven Teseo satellite navigation technology, and a software Function Pack that connects your Internet-of-Things (IoT) node via a cellular network to a range of TomTom Maps APIs. With this hardware and software package and a TomTom developer account, developers can quickly add location-based services to their IoT and Smart City applications. Among these services are the translation of GPS coordinates into a street address inside a map (Reverse Geocoding), retrieval of nearby point of interests, and the production of accurate navigation directions.
NXP Buys OmniPHY
NXP Semiconductors, has acquired OmniPHY, a provider of automotive Ethernet subsystem technology. The company’s expertise includes automotive Ethernet, a technology that enables the rapid data transfer required for autonomous driving. OmniPHY’s advanced high-speed technology, combined with NXP’s leading portfolio and heritage in vehicle networks, uniquely positions NXP to deliver the next-generation of data transfer solutions to carmakers. Financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed.
OmniPHY is a pioneer in high-speed automotive Ethernet IP and automotive qualified IP for 100BASE-T1 and 1000BASE-T1 standards. Over its six-year history, it has worked with some of the largest consumer companies in the world and has developed competitive 1st-silicon-right solutions for emerging markets like automotive and industrial Ethernet. OmniPHY interface IP and communication technology along with NXP’s automotive portfolio will form a “one-stop shop” for automotive Ethernet. The companies’ technology synergies will center on 1.25-28Gbps PHY designs and 10-, 100- and 1000BASE-T1 Ethernet in advanced processes.
Mobility As Service Well Replace Private Car Trips
A new study from Juniper Research has found that adoption of MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) platforms will replace over 2.3 billion urban private car journeys annually by 2023, compared with just 17.6 million globally in 2018. This is equivalent to 18 times the number of taxi journeys across New York in 2016.
West Europe will lead MaaS adoption, accounting for 83% of global MaaS trips in 2023.
It found that the success of public-private partnerships, the high quality of transport service provision and positive trial outcomes are major factors for traction in Europe. Conversely, Juniper forecast that the growth of MaaS in the US will be slower, given the highly-fragmented nature of the state and federal system, coupled with lukewarm legislative support for regulating a ‘free market’.
Juniper ranked 15 world cities based on their readiness for large-scale MaaS service deployment. Metrics considered included the existing/planned stage of deployment, cohesion of public transport services and infrastructure development. The top 5 ranked cities were:
1. Helsinki
2. Stockholm
3. Vienna
4. Amsterdam
5. Austin
SoundHonund Voices Peugeot
SoundHound Inc. the leading innovator in voice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies, y announced a partnership with Groupe PSA, one of the largest car manufacturers in Europe, to develop a cloud-based and embedded conversational voice interface for use in cars across the Groupe PSA portfolio, including Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Opel, and Vauxhall models. Powered by SoundHound Inc.’s Houndify™ voice AI platform, the in-car voice interface will be available in European markets starting in 2020.
With the Houndify integration, drivers will be able to perform a variety of tasks simply by speaking naturally, including: finding nearby restaurants and businesses, adjusting temperature and air conditioning, launching connected services, and more. Language roll-out plans are being developed to make available globally. Groupe PSA is focused on innovating to meet customer needs, through connectivity and autonomy, and enhancing the driving experience.
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