No Need to Worry About That Volvo Self-Parking Car Accident Video

Why how we talk about car technology matters.

As reported by Popular Mechanics: "System Error"  

That's the story badge for a post on Fusion today about a recent video of a Volvo XC60 driving into a group of bystanders. Labeled "Self-parking car accident!", the clip shows the vehicle backing up and then accelerating into a group of people who expect it to stop. But it doesn't.

Here's the problem: There was no system error. If there was any error, it was with the humans operating the vehicle. According to Volvo representative Johan Larsson, the video is mislabeled. Now, no one has talked to the people in the video, but Larsson says the demonstration is most likely of Volvo's pedestrian-detection and self-braking systems, not of any self-parking feature. And as Larsson also points out, this car does not appear to be one that has the pedestrian-detection feature, which is an option. If that's true—that they tried to test out the pedestrian-detection feature on a car that doesn't have it installed—then this is really just a case of dumb humans.

But that's not how Fusion decided to cast it, titling the story Volvo says horrible 'self-parking car accident' happened because driver didn't have 'pedestrian detection'. Fusion's Kashmir Hill sets up a scary scene of an automated future gone awry, but when all the facts are given proper context, the truth is quite the opposite.

We don't know if and when truly autonomous cars will hit the road. What we do know is that our vehicles are becoming increasingly sophisticated machines capable of incredible feats, and for exactly that reason reporting and writing about this topic in a responsible way is extremely important. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of a car that can drive itself, let alone park itself. When something really does goes wrong, the coverage is going to be everywhere and sensationalized. Is there really a need to create controversy where there is none? If anything, it's this kind of response that can create a chilling effect on innovation.

That said, let's run through some key paragraphs in the Fusion post to see what went wrong:

"A group of people stand in a garage watching and filming a grey Volvo XC60 that backs up, stops, and then accelerates toward the group. It smashes into two people, and causes the person filming the video with his phone to drop it and run. It is terrifying."

In trying to set a dramatic scene, Hill seems to imply that the car does not have a driver and is acting under its own volition. In fact, there is a passenger and driver in the car.

"The main issue, said Larsson, is that it appears that the people who bought this Volvo did not pay for the "Pedestrian detection functionality," which is a feature that costs more money."

When explaining Larsson's "disturbing" response, Hill uses italics to indicate that she is absolutely perplexed that an expensive and advanced technology might cost more money on top of the standard price. (Or, perhaps, she's astonished that Volvo wouldn't equip all of its cars with all available safety tech, no matter what the cost.) I think we're all in agreement that pedestrian-detection systems should one day be standard, but there are many different types of safety systems that cost extra money. If they were all standard or made mandatory by NHTSA, that extra cost would just be passed on to the buyer. For now, Volvo, one of the safest car manufacturers in the world, would rather give people the option here.

"The Volvo XC60 comes with City Safety as a standard feature, however, this does not include the Pedestrian detection functionality," said Larsson. The "City Safety system" kicks in when someone is in stop-and-go traffic, helping the driver avoid rear ending another car while driving slowly, or under 30 mph.

Keeping the car safe is included as a standard feature, but keeping pedestrians safe isn't. "It appears as if the car in this video is not equipped with Pedestrian detection," said Larsson. "This is sold as a separate package."

To be fair, City Safe protects the cars you might hit and the people in them, but I guess it's more shocking to couch it this way. More importantly, the most common type of vehicle-on-vehicle accident is a low-speed rear-end collision, often combined with distracted driving. So it makes sense that City Safety would be the safety feature that comes standard, no?

But even if it did have the feature, Larsson says the driver would have interfered with it by the way they were driving and "accelerating heavily towards the people in the video." "The pedestrian detection would likely have been inactivated due to the driver inactivating it by intentionally and actively accelerating," said Larsson. "Hence, the auto braking function is overrided by the driver and deactivated."

So, what are we saying here? In this scenario—which is probably hypothetical, since the car most likely didn't have pedestrian detection—it sounds like Hill wants the reader to be bothered by the fact that the car wouldn't have just stopped itself and outright prevented the driver from accelerating into the passengers.

The fact is, today's safety systems require a tricky balance of aiding and warning drivers without completely removing their power to make steering and throttle inputs. Until cars become truly autonomous, the driver is ultimately responsible for understanding how the technology works and to use it appropriately.

Meanwhile, the people in the video seem to ignore their instincts and trust that the car assumed to be endowed with artificial intelligence knows not to hurt them. It is a sign of our incredible faith in the power of technology, but also, it's a reminder that companies making AI-assisted vehicles need to make safety features standard and communicate clearly when they aren't. According to the Dominican blog, the "two men hit were bruised but are ok."

Well, this is all mostly true, and Hill makes some good points! People shouldn't assume that every car has semiautonomous capabilities that will stop it from hurting them. They also probably shouldn't stand in front of a car to test those technologies, either. As for making all safety systems standard, that's a bit more complicated. But her final thought is spot on: Carmakers need to make sure people clearly understand what technology is in their car and what their vehicle is capable of. This is a very valid point to make as our cars only get more complicated. Too bad we had to wade through everything else to get there.

Urban Transportation Will Go All-Electric Sooner Than You Think

As reported by TechCrunch: Think of the vehicle that will change urban transportation. If the image in your mind is not an electric bus, you’re thinking of the wrong vehicle.

The electrification of the passenger vehicle has made headlines for good reason. Vehicles like the Tesla Model S and BMW i8 are beautiful and fast, and cars like the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf offer compelling value to commuters. But we’d be lucky if plug-in vehicles represent more than 5 percent of passenger vehicles sold in the United States over the next five years. Worries about range and cost are real, and it will take time to undertake the public effort – and build the charging infrastructure – to address consumer concerns.

Yet in other parts of the transportation industry, the electric drivetrain will experience much more rapid adoption. The most unexpected, and most impactful, shift will be for the mass transit bus. 

A Bus Is the Perfect Use Case for an Electric Drivetrain

The electric drivetrain does a few things much better than a combustion engine. Electric motors have very high torque – buses are heavy, so they require high torque to accelerate. Electric motors can also deliver that torque at low speeds – buses stop and start often, so they require that power at low speeds. And batteries can recover energy from all of that braking.

As a result, an electric bus uses 20 percent of the raw energy of a diesel bus to go the same distance. In MPGe terms, a typical diesel bus may get 3.9 MPG – whereas an electric bus would get 21.4 MPGe. An electric drivetrain is also easier to take care of than an engine with controlled fuel explosions, more moving parts, filters and fluids.

The net result is that the total lifetime cost to own and operate an electric bus is 35 percent lower than that of a diesel bus. In five years, as battery and other costs come down, that advantage will only increase.

If you could buy a Tesla for less than an equivalent product and simultaneously save well over 50 percent on operating costs, the purchase decision would probably be quite easy. That is the kind of decision that transit operators will face in 2020.

Batteries Are Cheap in the Context of a Bus

Battery cost is a key barrier to adoption of electric vehicles, whether in a car or in a bus. However, a transit bus travels 3.5x more miles per year and carries 6x more passengers than a car, on average, so the battery cost is spread over 20x more “passenger miles” in a bus versus a car. Net, the real cost of the battery is multiples cheaper in a bus than a car, suggesting that the transit industry will shift toward electric vehicles before passenger cars.

Furthermore, batteries keep dropping in price. In 2015, price per kWh of automotive lithium-ion batteries was 60 percent lower than in 2010. In another five years, prices will likely drop by a similar percentage. Some analysts project that Tesla’s Gigafactory will drive so much volume that costs for batteries could decline by over 80 percent. And new technologies may completely transform the cost curve. All of this means that the case for electric buses will become more and more compelling over time.

But why do buses matter? Won’t everyone be taking Uber in the future anyway? 

Public Transit Is a Killer App in People Moving

A public transit system is the cheapest way, per mile, to get from A to B. No matter how many miles you drive per year, if public transit is an option, it is cheaper than owning a car, car-sharing, or ridesharing.

Within public transportation, buses are extraordinarily efficient versus other options. The New York Times recently noted how much money governments spend on light rail as opposed to improving and marketing existing bus systems. A transit bus line is much cheaper than light rail to build, and offers unparalleled flexibility. Add electric to the mix, and that transit bus line is also half as expensive to run.

The Environmental Case

In addition to making immense financial sense, the transition to EV bus transit is important for urban environments. Even after taking into account the emissions from the electricity generation, an electric bus emits 4-6x fewer greenhouse gases than a bus that runs on diesel or natural gas. As solar and other renewables continue to increase as a percent of energy produced, the greenhouse gas emissions from electric vehicles will continue to fall.

Improves Transportation Today, and Solves Problems of Tomorrow

Most cities were designed when less than a third of the population lived in urban areas. Today, over half of humanity lives in cities, and that will grow to two-thirds by 2050. Reliance on the passenger car has created substantial costs from congestion. In the U.S. alone, congestion cost the economy $124 billion in 2013, or 0.7 percent of GDP – two Googles in revenue. We will need multiple solutions for addressing this congestion, including car sharing and ridesharing, but the electric bus is the killer solution for the modern city.

New entrants to the bus industry, including Bay Area-based Proterra (disclosure: Michael Linse is Chairman of Proterra) and the Chinese battery maker BYD, as well as incumbents such as New Flyer and Volvo, are understanding the transformative impact of the electric bus.

By 2020, we expect a majority of transit buses sold in the U.S. to be electric, and we expect the availability of highly efficient, low cost, zero emissions, and quiet electric buses to lead to a renaissance of urban transit in the United States.

Device Can Track Soldier Movements With or Without GPS

As reported by Defense Systems: Army researchers are developing a pocket-size device that will give soldiers precise geolocation information even when GPS signals are unavailable.

The Warfighter Integrated Navigation System (WINS), being developed at the Communications Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center, uses a variety of sensors to track a soldier’s movement from a last known location, recording footsteps, speed, time, altitude and other factors to show the soldier’s location on a map.

"It's got a number of inertial sensors, such as a pedometer and an accelerometer, things you will find on your cell phone but of a higher quality," Osie David, a CERDEC researcher, said in a news release. "Even if the enemy is denying you GPS or the terrain is, you can still get known location on here so it will show up on your Nett Warrior device or your command and control system."

Finding alternatives to GPS is a focus for the Defense Department precisely for those times when Global Positioning Systems signals don’t get through, whether because of terrain such as dense forests or jungles, or enemy interference. GPS signals can be jammed even with low-powered devices or spoofed by stronger signals.

Or both. In 2011, it is thought that Iranian engineers jammed the GPS signal for an U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel drone, then spoofed its coordinates to make it land in Iran instead of its base in Afghanistan. University of Texas students also have demonstrated using spoofing to take control of unmanned aircraft and even an 80-foot yacht. 

The military doesn’t expect that it ever will do without GPS—it’s still the most accurate and far-reaching geolocation system ever created and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. But in addition to hardening GPS signals against jamming and other electronic warfare attacks, researchers are working on alternatives for those times when GPS service is blocked.

Driver is Fined for Using His Apple Watch While Driving

As reported by Engadget: Now that electronics manufacturers are releasing more and more smartwatch models, you might be wondering what the authorities' stance is on using one while driving. Well, this clears things up a bit for our Canadian readers: a man named Jeffrey Macesin was recently pulled over and fined $120 for using his Apple Watch behind the wheel. Macesin told CTV News Montreal that the watch was inside a bag, and that he was only changing songs on it at that moment, since it was plugged into the car radio. He thought the cop only wanted him to get out of the way when he turned the cruiser's lights on, but the officer obviously thought the device was a cause of distraction.

In the end, he got a ticket under Section 439.1 of the Quebec Highway Safety Code, which states "No person may, while driving a road vehicle, use a handheld device that includes a telephone function." Technically, smartwatches aren't handheld devices, but it has an LCD screen and smartwatch-like features, so they fall within a grey area. A lawyer who specializes in traffic violations, Avi Levy, told CTV News he believes a smartwatch is a Bluetooth device instead of a handheld, and "it has been established in the law that you're allowed to use Bluetooth devices and it doesn't constitute an infraction."

In at least two other locations, New South Wales and Victoria, Australia, cops made it clear in April that if you use a smartwatch while driving, you could face penalties.

A study by the U.K. Transport Research Laboratory found smartwatches are far more distracting than smartphones. According to the Huffington Post, the research found it takes 2.52 seconds for someone to react in the event of an emergency after looking at their smartwatch, compared to 1.85 seconds if they were using a handheld cellphone.

With this data and citing the fact that only more distracting apps are bound to come on the market, Paul Singh, CEO of the vehicle safety company Smart Witness, called upon the U.K.’s Department of Transportation to “place an immediate ban on the use of [smartwatches] by drivers.”

“We don’t want to sound like kill-joys and the health and safety police but there’s no doubt that using smart watches whilst driving will cause serious accidents,” Singh wrote for the Huffington Post.  Singh’s post noted that the U.K. banned drivers from using handheld phones in 2003.

In the U.S., only 14 states have banned handheld cellphone use all together. However, 44 states have banned texting while driving.

There do not appear to be any proposed bans on driving and using a smartwatch in the U.S. yet, but last year, there were several bills introduced that proposed making it punishable to drive and use a Google Glass device.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 3,000 people were killed in the U.S. in 2012 in accidents caused by distracted driving.

Space Station Module Move Makes Room for Private Spaceships

As reported by Space.com: Astronauts on the International Space Station moved a closet-like storage module to a new spot on the orbiting lab Wednesday (May 27) to make room for a new docking port to welcome private space taxis in 2017.

During an hours-long move, the station's bus-size Permanent Multipurpose Module rode a robotic arm to a new perch on the space station's Harmony connecting node. It was the first move for the module, which NASA calls the PMM, since its installation on the station's Unity node in 2011. You can see a video of the space module move here.

Early in the docking process, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly noted a warning message that was quickly cleared by NASA. "Except for that first little message there, it all looked perfect," Kelly said after the module move was finished.

NASA worked closely with controllers at the Canadian Space Agency in Quebec to move the module using a robotic arm. The work began at 4:45 a.m. EDT (2045 GMT), according to NASA, with the de-mating of the 14-foot-wide (4.3 meters) module taking place at 5:50 a.m. EDT. The module move was closely supervised by Kelly and fellow NASA astronaut Terry Virts, who commands the station's Expedition 43 crew.

The is just one in a series of steps to prime the International Space Station to receive crew flights on U.S.-built commercial spacecraft. Currently, the station's docking ports are designed to accommodate NASA's space shuttle fleet (which retired in 2011) and Russia's Soyuz space capsules, which now ferry all crews to space.

Boeing and SpaceX are creating new spacecraft that will begin sending astronauts aloft around 2017. Two docking adapters will fly into space aboard two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft this year; astronauts will install the adapters in a series of spacewalks.

NASA is shifting to commercial vehicles to reduce its reliance on Soyuz spacecraft, and regain a U.S. capability of launching astronauts into space.

The PMM was first used to haul supplies from Earth while the space station was under construction. Then called "Leonardo," the Italian Space Agency's module flew eight times in space before the STS-133 crew left it behind in 2011 to dock to Unity.

Today, the module is used as a 2,400-cubic-foot (68 cubic meters) storage facility, able to hold 11 tons of equipment, or up to 16 racks, plus several storage bags.

SpaceX Cleared for US Military Launches

As reported by BBC News: The US Air Force has certified the private company SpaceX to launch military and spy satellites.

A joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing has had a monopoly on those launches since 2006.

Founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, SpaceX has already won contracts with NASA to ferry cargo and crews to the International Space Station.

The approval from the US military followed two years of intensive reviews by the US Air Force.

"SpaceX's emergence as a viable commercial launch provider provides the opportunity to compete launch services for the first time in almost a decade," Air Force Secretary Deborah James said in a statement.

Mr Musk said the decision was "an important step toward bringing competition to national security space launch."

In June, the Air Force expects to open bidding for the contract to launch GPS satellites built by Lockheed and it will be SpaceX's first opportunity to compete for military work.

Russian engines

The US military has been relying on the Atlas 5 rocket, which uses Russian built engines, to power payloads into space.

But the military only has until 2019 to use that system, as US lawmakers have banned the use of Russian engines for launches that concern national security.

The certification of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will give the military an alternative rocket ahead of the ban.

New Research Suggests that Hackers can Track Subway Riders Through Their Phones, Even Without GPS

As reported by the Daily Dot:  Underground subways offer no place to hide from hackers.

Determined hackers can track the movements of millions of subway riders around the world even as they go underground by breaking into smartphone motion detectors, new research from Chinese academics reveals. The attack can track subway riders with up to 92 percent accuracy.

The ability to track subway riders represents a significant cybersecurity threat to the tens of millions of people who use public transportation every day. There are more than 5.5 million daily New York City subway passengers, and over half of those people are carrying smartphones, thus exposing themselves to tracking.

"If an attacker can trace a smartphone user for a few days, he may be able to infer the user’s daily schedule and living/working areas and thus seriously threaten her physical safety," wrote Jingyu Hua, Zhenyu Shen, and Sheng Zhong of Nanjing University, one of China’s oldest universities. "Another interesting example is that if the attacker finds Alice and Bob often visit the same stations at similar non-working times, he may infer that Bob is dating Alice."

Smartphones have long been considered God’s gift to spies. They offer myriad tracking tools, from the browser to the GPS sensor, and they stay with their owners almost all day, every day.

The new research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, shows hackers can track people without either cell service or GPS, both of which are heavily protected from attackers and often don't work underground anyway. By contrast, motion sensors, like the accelerometer that enables screen rotation, are much more vulnerable and can give everything away.

Every subway in the world has a unique fingerprint, the researchers said, and every time a train runs between two stations, that fingerprint can be read in the accelerometer, potentially giving attackers access to crucial information.

“The cause is that metro trains run on tracks, making their motion patterns distinguishable from cars or buses running on ordinary roads,” the researchers wrote. “Moreover, due to the fact that there are no two pairs of neighboring stations whose connecting tracks are exactly the same in the real world, the motion patterns of the train within different intervals are distinguishable as well.”

To make this attack a reality, the researchers propose a new attack that learns each subway’s fingerprint and then installs malware on a target’s phone that steals accelerometer readings.

The trio of researchers performed experiments in China by tracking volunteers carrying smartphones through subways in Nanjing. Tracking accuracy reached 70 to 92 percent.

The attack is "more effective and powerful than using GPS or cellular network to trace metro passengers," the researchers assert. Accelerometers simply aren't protected the way GPS and cell networks are. An accelerometer can be accessed, run, and read without the user knowing, whereas smartphones display indicators when either GPS or cell service is being used.

There are several defenses against this hack, the most interesting one being power-consumption scrutiny. To track someone using this method, a hacker would have to continuously access the phone's accelerometer, draining significant power no matter how well the malware was concealed. If you monitor your phone's power consumption, you should notice when an app is using too much of the battery—possibly for nefarious reasons.

The Chinese research paper can be read below:

We Can Track You If You Take the Metro: Tracking Metro Riders Using Accelerometers on Smartphones