Monday, 31 October 2016
Why Ford, Lincoln, and Lexus Testers Rule the Self-Driving Roost
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Dozens of established carmakers, technology companies, and startups are working furiously on autonomous vehicles. But if you look at the cars that are actually driving themselves on roads today, just two models are miles ahead: the Lexus RX450 and the Ford Fusion, with its sibling, the Lincoln MKZ.
Public records sourced from the California Department of Motor Vehicles show the Ford Fusion and the Lexus RX450h make up 80 percent of self-driving cars that are not vehicles being tested by their own manufacturers. Nationwide, the figures are harder to come by. Going by publicly available information, the Fusion and the RX450h roughly account for more than a third of all autonomous test cars in the United States.
Leading the Lexus camp is Google, with the largest total of self-driving cars: 24 RX450hs and 34 of its own prototypes. Zoox, a Silicon Valley startup aiming to make a fully autonomous vehicle for ride sharing, also uses a Lexus crossover for testing.
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“There are no other OEMs that are currently so open to work through third parties.”
– Bobby Hambrick, CEO, AutonomouStuff
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It comes as no surprise that Ford itself uses a pair of Fusions for experimenting with autonomous driving in the Golden State, but so does Udacity, an online educational organization that has just launched a nine-month “nanodegree” program to train engineers in self-driving technology. Two other Silicon Valley startups, Faraday Future and Drive.ai, rely on the Lincoln MKZ for their autonomous road tests, as does the Chinese tech company Baidu.
Outside California, self-driving Lincoln MKZs also can be found in New Jersey through Nvidia, the graphics and computing company, and Ford Fusions in Illinois, where AutonomouStuff, a provider of components for self-driving cars, tests them mostly away from public roads. In Pittsburgh, Uber is using at least 14 more Fusions as part of its pilot self-driving-taxi program.
But why are these models so popular when there are so many other vehicles available? The Tesla Model S, for example, has a modern electric drivetrain and plenty of space and power for the sensors and computers that all experimental vehicles need. It also comes with radar and cameras built in. But apart from Tesla itself, only Bosch is using a single Model S to develop next-generation driving technologies.
The answer, for the Lexus at least, was almost accidental. When Anthony Levandowski was building Google’s first self-driving cars, he chose a Toyota Prius because it had an easily accessible drive-by-wire system.
Levandowski, now VP of self-driving technology at Uber, explained why Google moved to the Lexus in 2012: “The Prius fleet was aging. We wanted vehicles that you could take to more places, including four-wheel drive because we wanted to test in the snow,” he said. “The RX450h is a great Tahoe vehicle, and electrically, it’s exactly the same as a Prius. A Prius and a Lexus are the basically the same car from a hackability standpoint.”
The popularity of the Fusion is also all about hackability, said Bobby Hambrick, CEO of AutonomouStuff. He noted that Ford is almost unique in exploring collaborations with outside companies. “Ford worked with a small engineering firm we hired, to put together hardware [and] software to interface with the native system in the car. There are no other OEMs that are currently so open to work through third parties,” Hambrick said, “and we’ve talked to many of them.”
The Fusion also allows electronic drive-by-wire control of all the key driving functions without extra hardware. “A lot of cars [do this] nowadays, but most of them aren’t rated to be driven on the road—they’re only meant for self-parking or lane keeping,” Hambrick said. “Just hacking into a car doesn’t mean you’re doing it safely. The MKZ/Fusion is one of the rare ones that is continuously rated for full self-driving, so it won’t fail when you’re driving down the highway.”
Oliver Cameron, who leads the self-driving-car team at Udacity, agreed. “We chose the Lincoln MKZ because of our ability to control the vehicle programmatically,” he said. “We can fit a drive-by-wire kit to send commands like steering, acceleration, braking, and more. Only certain vehicles can be hooked into like this.”
The Fusion’s hackability may have been a convenient coincidence, but Ford’s welcoming attitude is no accident. At a conference in September, Ford CEO Mark Fields said: “We are rethinking our entire business model. It’s no longer about how many vehicles we can sell; it’s about what services we can provide. We believe that the next decade is going to be defined by the automation of the automobile.”
As today’s startups mature into businesses making their own self-driving vehicles, Ford and Toyota should be well placed to turn today’s experiments into tomorrow’s strategic partnerships. But they should not expect to have the field to themselves for long.
“While we’re talking about cars that are easy to hack, the Nissan Leaf has one analog wire you can splice into and send commands over,” said Uber’s Anthony Levandowski. “That’s an awesome thing to have.”
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Apparently, This Brash Custom Mustang Is a Ford GT Homage
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It’s fitting that the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show and Halloween take place within days of each other. At SEMA, cars dress up in all sorts of wild ensembles and stuff their guts with performance parts (and marketing B.S.). For Halloween, humans put on silly costumes and stuff their guts with sugar. And during both, you see all sorts of things you never thought you’d lay your eyes on. One example is the GTT, a custom Ford Mustang by Zero to 60 Designs that is claimed to be a tribute to the Ford GT supercar.
First, let’s start with the things that aren’t a matter of opinion: the performance bits. Zero to 60 added a ProCharger supercharger, an exhaust from Magnaflow, an ECU tune from SCT Performance, a Pro-Street-S suspension from Eibach, Brembo brakes, and Pirelli tires. The builder claims that the overall package boasts more than 800 horsepower and comes equipped with all the necessary parts to handle it.
The styling is where things start to get subjective. The exterior modifications include, but are not limited to, a new front fascia, a custom hood with air vents, wider fenders, side skirts, a new spoiler, rear-wheel cooling ducts, dual round taillights, a rear diffuser, and a centered dual exhaust.
At first glance, the link to a GT might not be immediate. In fact, the rear is actually pretty reminiscent of a different supercar, the Ferrari 599XX, with a more bulbous booty. But, if you put this car and a GT next to each other, there are some fairly obvious tie-ins. The frowning lower front fascia, a few of the shapes and placements of the scoops, the hood, the rear fin, and the diffuser offer callbacks of sorts. Obviously, the overall shapes of the cars are highly different, but you can’t say there are no similarities. Sure, this thing doesn’t look that much like a Ford GT, but then again, a trick-or-treater in a Batman costume isn’t going to be mistaken for a real superhero.
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Ford Is Running a Basically Stock 2017 F-150 Raptor in the Baja 1000
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Apparently keen on juicing more mileage from its “Built Ford Tough” tagline—and also keen on flexing marketing muscle—Ford is entering an almost completely stock 2017 F-150 Raptor pickup in this year’s Baja 1000 desert race. The grueling contest is as fitting a litmus test for the off-road-ready Raptor as anything we can think of.
But first, what does Ford mean when it says the Baja-running Raptor is “stock”? Per SCORE’s rules (Baja’s sanctioning body), even to run in the stock full class, Ford needed to fit the Raptor with a safety cage, racing seats and harnesses, a fuel cell, and extra LED lighting. Of course, some sweet graphics were slapped onto the truck’s body, along with a nifty spare tire mount in the pickup bed, for that proper stadium-truck look. Ford says it slightly retuned the F-150 Raptor’s Fox Racing shocks and springs to account for the extra weight of the safety gear, but otherwise, the truck is as you can buy it in the coming months. It even rides on the factory Bridgestone K02 all-terrain tires. Sweet. The truck will make a stop at the SEMA show in Las Vegas this week, then hit Baja November 16–20.
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The Original Volkswagen GTI Finally Earns the Lego Treatment
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October 31, 2016 at 11:39 am by Brian Silvestro | Photography by Lego Ideas
Lego cars are all the rage right now. Creators have been building all sorts of vehicles with the little plastic blocks, from a Lancia Stratos to a Porsche 911 GT3 RS. And now, the Volkswagen Mark 1 Golf GTI has finally received the Lego treatment.
This set, posted by user Athabaska on Lego’s “Ideas” creator site, is an impressively accurate and well-thought-out build of the famous Mark 1 GTI hot hatch. Featuring a red-trimmed fascia and even a neat titled license plate, it looks like the ultimate holiday gift for the gearhead in your family.
Perhaps the most impressive part of this design isn’t the exterior, but rather the nicely laid out, extremely detailed interior. It comes complete with a correct-style dashboard, steering wheel, and even two rows of seating. The car also has a working hood, which flips up to reveal a makeshift Lego engine. Sadly, we don’t think it’s functional.
This isn’t the first VW to get a miniature Lego version of itself. That title went to the iconic Beetle, which gained enough support to make it to Lego’s Creator marketplace. Seeing as how popular the original GTI is among enthusiasts, we don’t think the set will have a problem making it to production.
This story originally appeared on Road & Track.
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Red Rocks and Duroplast: It’s Bryce Canyon’s Trabant!
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When one considers the automobile’s role in the German state of Saxony today, thoughts turn to Porsche’s modern facility in Leipzig—the one churning out Panameras, Cayennes, and Macans—or to BMW’s Leipzig plant, where the Bavarian concern’s i cars and 1- and 2-series vehicles are constructed. Thirty years ago, Saxony buzzed with the gutless two-stroke rap of locally built Trabants, the German Democratic Republic’s main contribution to 20th-century motoring and a deleterious reminder of what sad havoc totalitarianism’s ugly thumb can wreak on the glorious art of German automotive engineering.
Trabis are not, however, a common sight stateside, so imagine our surprise when we happened on one. It was parked up on some rocks on a parking barrier outside a Sinclair station on Utah’s State Route 63, the road into Bryce Canyon National Park. Judging by its patina, the Honecker-era runabout seemed to have been resting there for some time. Naturally, we pulled over and grabbed a couple of snaps, because, hey, fish-out-of-water Duroplast-bodied East German semi-reasonable motorcar facsimile! When we arrived at our hotel for the night, we couldn’t stop thinking about the little Trabi with its die-cut Bitburger stickers gradually evaporating in the sun. Naturally, we consulted the World Wide Web for more information.
Turns out, the car was used by a man named Rolf Becker to drive to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He began the journey in Los Angeles, was advised by a friend to avoid Las Vegas and hit Reno instead, then drove on to Salt Lake. The car eventually wound up at Ruby’s Inn, the hotel across the street from the aforementioned service station. This isn’t the only car Becker has driven to the Olympic Games; the man has made something of a habit of the practice, although the last trip we could find any information on was his Magdeburg-to-Sochi drive of 2014.
Becker grew up in Halle, Saxony, where he became known as an expert barrel organist. He even once played the thing for 48 hours in pursuit of a record. And at some point after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he began driving Trabants all over the world, a smoky ambassador of East German culture. We’re not entirely sure how many Trabis Rolf has left behind along the way (he claims to have left cars on “all continents,” but we’re not sure about Antarctica), but running across this fabulously craptastic, sun-bleached, crusty piece of a bona-fide odd duck’s history was definitely a highlight of a fine day out.
And perhaps, on the eve of a U.S. presidential election featuring candidates with very different attitudes toward the Kremlin’s bare-chested brawler, in a contest rife with allegations of Russian meddling, it’s good to be reminded of the sort of thing that Russian meddling results in. A little bit of Duroplast is a fine and interesting thing to find out on the road, but by and large, we’d prefer to leave such things in the past.
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