Baidu brings autonomous driving unit to Silicon Valley

Heading right into Google’s turf, Baidu is forming a self-driving car team in Silicon Valley. This unit will focus on research, development, and testing of its own autonomous vehicle. Baidu is calling its Autonomous Driving Unit in Silicon Valley as ADU-US. The team, which they plan to grow to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of 2016, will tackle things like planning, perception, control, and systems. They’ll take an “incremental approach,” starting with small “autonomy-enabled” regions and then design cars that will recognizable, like what we get from Google’s own fleet.

ADU-US will be working alongside Baidu’s Research team and they’re looking to have machine learning researchers with knowledge in both hardware and software, ranging from robotics and computer vision to onboard computers and sensors. They are looking for people with experience in the automotive industry as well.

Source: Market Wired

BMW plans major internal overhaul to further self-driving/smart car initiatives

BMW doesn’t want outsiders coming in, or rather, they don’t want to be the “Foxconn for a company like Apple, delivering only the metal bodies for them.” According to Klaus Froehlich, a BMW board member who oversees research and development, told Reuters at the Geneva auto show that the German automaker is planning major corporate changes to build its “most intelligent car.” The company doesn’t want to rely on the Internet players like Google and Apple out of fear that they might just become another supplier. Even though, it might be beneficial for them to tap the tech players who are more familiar with software.

BMW supposedly plans to have half of its R&D team become computer programmers within the next five years. At the moment, just about 20 percent of its 30,000 R&D team work in software. Not all of these would come in-house, though. Froehlich believes they would need to partner with others and outsource some of the work. BMW has supposedly held talks with Apple before but haven’t reportedly come close to an agreement.

Source: Apple Insider

Tesla to automate car parking with Summon feature

There will come a day when your car will be parking itself in your garage, at least Tesla’s cars can do that in the immediate future. The company released a new version of its software for the Model S and Model X. The version 7.1 of the software introduces a new Summon feature, which allows these cars to enter and exit parking spaces on their own. All you need to do is click on a button on the key fob to activate Summon. The Tesla then gets into enter or exit mode for garages and perpendicular parking spaces. For the garage, this uses Homelink garage door tool and it has to be on flat surfaces. The feature, though, is currently in beta but it could work in conjunction with Tesla’s other technologies in the future.

Source: Mashable

Ford and Google looking into alliance to build self-driving cars

Photo by Donny Halliwell

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The worlds of technology and cars are on a certain collision course and we're seeing various companies looking to partner to create solutions faster and cheaper. Ford and Google are reported to be in talks to put their resources together to build self-driving cars.

Ford has been at the forefront of integrating technology into their vehicles for many years now. First with their partnership with Microsoft for Ford Sync and later on their use of BlackBerry's QNX technologies for various aspects of safety and infotainment. 

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