The University of Michigan has just opened the country’s first test track for connected and automated vehicles, or what really is the first fake American town outside of Celebration, Florida.
The 32-acre Mcity, a $10 million project funded in part by the Department of Transportation, is now available to any automaker, supplier, or organization that wants a huge, confined, and highly realistic place to mess around with the latest driver assists. Fifteen companies have committed $1 million to Mcity’s R&D over the next three years, and the university is inviting everyone else in the autonomous sphere, including insurance, telecom, and traffic signaling companies. Mcity—much like Autoliv’s Carson City in Sweden, which was the world’s first such facility—has building facades to simulate downtown streets.
But while Carson City is only seven tenths of a mile long with one intersection, in Mcity we’d need a map. There are street signs and traffic lights. The roads are up to five lanes wide, with roundabouts, sidewalks, and bus stops. There’s an underpass next to highway guardrails. Some of the roads are brick, others are gravel, plus the planners threw in a few Fitch barriers to properly quiz the computers. We’ll also admit Mcity is a better test environment than what we pulled off in our 2012 night vision comparison, which relied on a parking lot filled with remote-controlled turkeys and plastic deers wearing traffic-cone shoes. Science marches on.
“Not only do our competitors not have anything like this, the manufacturers don’t, either,” said Jim Sayer, the site’s deployment director and lead researcher of the country’s only vehicle-to-vehicle test program, which is conducting a trial of up to 20,000 cars on the same public roads we drive every day in Ann Arbor.
Sayer is right. Aside from an urban-style track Toyota built in Japan, automakers aren’t testing out their electronics in simulated cities. Not even Google or Apple have anything as exacting as Mcity. We look forward to leaving some realistic tire marks on our first visit—strictly in the name of safety, of course.
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