Fred Lambert

From Electrek:

It sounds like ordering 20,000 vehicles from an automaker gets you on top of the list for deliveries.

Jaguar has now delivered its first production all-electric I-Pace in the US and Waymo got several for testing its autonomous driving technology.
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Waymo unveiled its latest vehicle equipped with its self-driving technology: a self-driving and all-electric Jaguar I-Pace.

They are building a fleet of those new vehicles to add to their existing test fleets and their upcoming commercial services, which is expected to launch later this year starting in Phoenix.
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Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving company born out of Google X, is seen by many as the leader in the field of self-driving.

After focusing on autonomous passenger cars to soon launch a self-driving ride-hailing service, the company is now expanding the effort to trucks. 
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Volkswagen has been heavily investing in batteries in order to support its planned ramp-up of electric vehicle production starting next year.

Their efforts have so far been focused on actual battery production and securing the rarer raw materials needed, like cobalt, but they are also exploring more future-oriented options to improve batteries at the technological level.

Today, VW is announcing a partnership with Google to use quantum computers to improve electric car batteries and others parts of the future of transportation, like traffic optimization and new machine learning processes.
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Alphabet’s Waymo announced today it is expanding its self-driving vehicle test program to Michigan in order to test in tougher winter conditions.
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Last week, we reported on Electrek that by adding 300 Chevy Bolt EV to its self-driving test fleet, GM was on its way to having the biggest captive self-driving test fleet in the world, but Waymo just crushed that dream today.

Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving effort and now an official Alphabet company, announced that it is deploying 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan in Phoenix. Interestingly, it’s not only about gathering data from driving since they will also give actual rides to the public through a new program.
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In October, we got our first look through spy shots at the Chrysler Pacifica minivans that Google has been outfitting with its self-driving technology. Today, Chrysler and Waymo, the new Alphabet company created out of Google’s self-driving effort, have officially unveiled the final design of a Chrysler Pacifica with self-driving hardware.
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While Tesla’s fleet recently reached 222 million miles driven on Autopilot in about a year, Google’s fleet of self-driving cars just passed the 2-million miles mark last month after 7 years on the road. As we previously discussed, Tesla’s Autopilot miles are not really equivalent to Google’s self-driving miles, but it still gives us a good indication of the speed at which each company is deploying their semi-autonomous and autonomous programs.

Now Google is about to speed up its effort by deploying a lot more vehicles through its partnership with Fiat-Chrysler to build a fleet of self-driving Pacifica, Chrysler’s new plug-in hybrid minivan. The first few prototypes were spotted in Mountain View over the weekend.
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Earlier this year, we wrote a profile on an interesting startup, Zee Aero, developing a battery-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft near Google’s X lab. The company caught our attention when it started hiring talent from NASA, Tesla and Stanford.

At the time, we couldn’t confirm where the money was coming from, but today we learn that Alphabet’s billionaire CEO Larry Page is secretively behind the electric aircraft startup, reportedly financing it with over $100 million, and even setting up a competing startup, Kitty Hawk, to test another model.

The group’s proximity with Google led a lot of people to believe it was financed by the tech giant, but in fact, Page is financing the initiative himself and not through Alphabet or Google Ventures. 
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Following a report this morning from Bloomberg suggesting that Google and Chrysler were about to announce a deal that would see Google’s self-driving technology being implemented in Chrysler’s upcoming new Pacifica minivan, the CEOs of both companies have now confirmed an agreement albeit not exactly what was being discussed earlier today.

While this morning’s report suggested a plan to work on a few “dozens of self-driving prototypes” in order to later bring the technology to the production version of the Pacifica, instead the deal would now see Google buying about 100 Pacifica minivans from Chrysler to use as prototypes,  but no exactly like it does with its current Lexus SUVs, and the Mountain View company will provide a “technological crash course” in self-driving technology to Chrysler though the new partnership.

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The automotive industry is a capital-intensive industry. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne knows it and that’s why he is open to work with Google or Apple:

“Google can buy every automaker out of petty cash. And Apple — they made a net profit of $24 billion in one quarter. This is nonsense. What are we defending? What?”

In a not yet released 2-hour interview with Automobile Mag‘s Georg Kache, Marchionne discusses the recent rumors of a FCA partnership with Google for self-driving cars and how the automaker wants to position itself in an industry disrupted by the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber. 
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Baidu, China’s most popular search engine, like its US-based counterpart Google, is heavily investing in autonomous driving technologies and today it officially announced the launch of a self-driving car R&D center in Silicon Valley, right in Google’s backyard.

The company expects its team will grow to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The company already moved several of its staff from its newly-created Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU) to Sunnyvale and recently hired a Tesla Autopilot software engineer.
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A new video with multiple angles and new pictures of the Google’s self-driving car hitting a bus last week and its aftermath have been released today. The accident is believed to be the first where Google’s system could be found at fault.
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Since Tesla launched the Model S in 2012, the automaker has been talking about releasing a software development kit (SDK) to create a full third-party app ecosystem for its 17-inch touchscreen, which acts as a center console for the Model S and X, but despite several inquiries from eager app developers, there has been little communication about the project until now.
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Google published today its annual report on disengagements of autonomous mode for its self-driving car program (SDC), which is required by California’s DMV. The report details events where Google’s test drivers have taken control over the car’s autonomous system, whether it’d be because of a shutdown due to technology failure or for safety reasons.

After having driven over 1.3 million miles in autonomous mode, Google’s self-driving cars were involved in 17 reported accidents, but the company prides itself of not having been at fault in any of them. But with today’s report, we learn the self-driving cars would have caused 10 accidents during the past year if test drivers wouldn’t have disengaged the system and taken controls.
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A group of influential technology entrepreneurs and investors introduced today a new non-profit artificial intelligence research company called ‘OpenAI’. Tesla CEO Elon Musk joins his former PayPal colleagues and venture capitalists Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, along with several other tech investors, to pledge $1 billion toward the organisation with the goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole”.
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Last month we reported on Google planning a “watershed” quantum computing announcement, which the company and NASA delivered jointly today. Google’s Quantum AI team announced the results of its latest test in understanding the physics governing quantum annealers, which shows that quantum annealing can outperform simulated annealing by more than 10⁸ times – yes that’s 100,000,000x faster.

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Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.

Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.

In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
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