U.S. House Panel Approves Broad Proposal on Self-Driving Cars

As reported by Reuters: A U.S. House panel on Wednesday approved a sweeping proposal by voice vote to allow automakers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards and bar states from imposing driverless car rules.

Representative Robert Latta, a Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee overseeing consumer protection, said he would continue to consider changes before the full committee votes on the measure, expected next week. The full U.S. House of Representatives will not take up the bill until it reconvenes in September after the summer recess.

The measure, which would be the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would require automakers to submit safety assessment reports to U.S. regulators, but would not require pre-market approval of advanced vehicle technologies.

Automakers would have to show self-driving cars "function as intended and contain fail safe features" to get exemptions from safety standards but the Transportation Department could not "condition deployment or testing of highly automated vehicles on review of safety assessment certifications," the draft measure unveiled late Monday said.

The issue has taken new urgency because road deaths in the United States rose 7.7 percent in 2015 over the previous year to 35,200, the highest annual jump since 1966. Traffic deaths climbed nearly 8 percent in the first nine months of 2016, government data showed.

Current federal motor vehicle safety rules prevent the sale of self-driving vehicles without human controls. Automakers must meet nearly 75 auto safety standards, many of which were written with the assumption that a licensed driver will be in control of the vehicle.

General Motors Co (GM.N), Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Ford Motor Co (F.N), Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) and others have been lobbying Congress to pre-empt rules under consideration in California and other states that could limit self-driving vehicle deployment.

States could still set rules on registration, licensing, liability, insurance and safety inspections, but could not set self-driving car performance standards, under the proposal.

California state assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez questioned "why Washington would want us here in the states to not look at the safety standards – it should be up to every state."

Representative Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, said the bill creates a "strong but flexible regulatory framework" that seeks to avoid "a patchwork" of different state rules.

Auto dealers want the final bill to clarify that the measure would not preempt state dealer franchise laws that generally bar automakers from selling vehicles directly to consumers.

Democrats praised the bipartisan proposal but said they want more changes before the full committee takes it up, including potentially adding other auto safety measures.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, said it is "pleased that the legislation is moving forward, and expect to see areas fine-tuned in the legislation."

Consumers Union, a public advocacy group, said the bill needs more changes and must "ensure that automakers demonstrate automated vehicles' safety and don't put consumers at greater risk in a crash." The group opposes "restricting states' safety authority without strong federal safety standards in place."

The administration of former President Barack Obama last year unveiled voluntary guidelines on self-driving cars that asked automakers to submit a 15-question safety assessment. President Donald Trump's transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, said she plans to update those in the coming months.

Separately, Republican Senator John Thune, who is working with Democrats, said Wednesday he hopes to release a draft self-driving car reform bill before the end of July.

Karamba Is Writing Software to Keep Your Connected Car from Getting Hacked

As reported by MIT Technology Review: With cars becoming more connected and autonomous, cybersecurity is a constant worry for automakers. They dread the likelihood of intrusions into the connected car from hackers, terrorists, extortionists, and thieves (see “Your Future Self-Driving Car Will Be Way More Hackable”)—not to mention the random 12-year-old with mischief in mind.

Apprehensions about automotive cybersecurity came to a head when a pair of white-hat hackers broke into a Jeep Cherokee in 2015, leading to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles by Chrysler Fiat to fix a software bug in the Uconnect infotainment system (see “Carmakers Accelerate Security Efforts after Hacking Stunts”).

Cars represent a fundamentally different sort of security challenge from laptops, servers, or mobile phones, in which corruption or theft of data is the hacker’s objective. A cyber-attack on a moving vehicle may create a deadly safety hazard, and conventional antihacking software could be too slow or ineffective to avert an incident.

“Dealing with consumer safety, and not just with data security, requires different security methods to protect our cars, in contrast to technologies that protect servers and enterprise networks,” says David Barzilai, executive chairman and cofounder of Karamba Security, a two-year-old startup based in Hod HaSharon, Israel, with an office in metropolitan Detroit.

“Using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify malware after hackers infiltrate the car is too late,” he says. “The approach must be to prevent an attack when hackers attempt to hack.”

The field of automotive cybersecurity is small but expanding rapidly as new threats are discovered to emerging technologies such as vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication. Harman International, maker of the Uconnect system in the hacked Jeep, acquired TowerSec, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, in early 2016. Argus Cyber Security, another Israeli competitor, recently discovered and demonstrated a way to penetrate a car’s electronics with a “dongle,” an innocent-looking piece of hardware resembling a flash drive that operates software via a car’s USB or other port. Tesla and Fiat Chrysler both offer monetary “bug bounty” rewards for hobbyists and amateur hackers who find and report software vulnerabilities.

Given the skill, motivation, and creativity of hackers, it is unclear that any one approach can comprehensively block their entry to a vehicle’s electronic architecture. “Vulnerabilities will be inadvertently designed into systems,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst for Navigant, a marketing research firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

A premium car may come equipped with a hundred or more electronic control units, or ECUs (in actuality, small computers), connected to one another as part of the vehicle’s electronic architecture. Only a handful, such as the infotainment system and the remote keyless entry, are connected wirelessly to the outside world, offering openings for attackers. Karamba focuses on blocking intrusion at these points, as one critical layer of a larger security design.

Karamba’s antihacking software is embedded in an ECU when it is manufactured, so it is incorporated into the device’s factory settings and not subject to change. Its role is to block spurious code at the point of intrusion, sealing the ECU and denying entry to any code that does not comply explicitly with the factory settings.

Using software monitoring programs to find and destroy malware, Barzilai maintains, is too slow and requires constant updates by developers; that can promote an arms race with hackers, who try to outwit security programs as they grow more sophisticated. Such programs can also generate false positives, he says, which are dangerous in cars because they may impede safe operation.

Glen De Vos, chief technical officer for the automotive parts maker Delphi Automotive, says that layers of security beyond what Karamba is proposing will become necessary as cars develop more connected properties, including autonomous driving, and therefore transmit more data wirelessly both to the cloud and to one another.

“You have to think of the car like you think of an Xbox or PlayStation or a mobile phone,” De Vos says. “You have software and data that are resident on the device, but also in the cloud. Increasingly, we have to think beyond the sheet metal to the entire enterprise. What Karamba does is an important component, but it’s not the whole thing.”

Karamba’s four founders are all veterans of Israel’s high-tech electronics and software industry, and two of them served in the Israel Defense Forces’ 8200, a renowned intelligence unit specializing in cyberwarfare that has a long list of startup founders among its alumni.

The company was founded after Ami Dotan, now its chief executive officer and a former vice president of R&D for a leading Israeli defense contractor, learned in a casual conversation that an automotive supplier had recently lost a contract for a vehicle infotainment system because of inadequate protection against cyber-attack. Astonished that cars weren’t already better protected, Dotan contacted Barzilai to suggest a startup.

Because automotive cybersecurity is relatively new field of specialization, Karamba thinks there is room to make its software part of the electronic architecture for vehicles that are in development or yet to be designed. This May, the company announced $12 million in Series B funding, bringing the total amount invested to $17 million. Among investors is Fontinalis Partners, cofounded by Bill Ford Jr., the executive chairman of Ford Motor. Karamba says it has had 16 “engagements” with suppliers and automakers in the past year, but so far it has yet to announce a contract.

Hyperloop's First Real Test is a Whooshing Success

As reported by Wired: YOUR DREAM OF one day zipping from one city to another in a pod in a pneumatic tube just took one more step toward reality. Hyperloop One announced Wednesday that it successfully tested a full hyperloop.

The step into the future occurred in May at the company’s Nevada test track, where engineers watched a magnetically levitating test sled fire through a tube in near-vacuum, reaching 70 mph in just over five seconds.

That is but a fraction of the 700 mph or so Hyperloop One promises, but put that aside for now. What matters here is all the elements required to make hyperloop work, worked: propulsion, braking, and the levitation and vacuum systems that all but eliminate friction and air resistance so that pod shoots through the tube at maximum speed with minimal energy.

“This is integrating all of the pieces,” says Josh Giegel, Hyperloop One’s engineering chief. “It’s the first phase of a test program that will get us to a production unit.”

Hyperloop One also revealed its design for the pod that will carry the people (or cargo) if and when this thing becomes real. The pod, made of aluminum and carbon fiber, is 28 feet long and resembles a bus.

The May test comes just about a year after Hyperloop One publicly demonstrated its propulsion system on a tube-free track. The addition of that full-scale tube—11 feet in diameter and 1600 feet long—and the engineers’ ability to suck nearly all the air out of it, is a big step, but there’s plenty left to do. For one, they need to master the airlock system that will allow pods to move into and out of the tube without wrecking that vacuum, then spending the time and energy pumping all the air back out.

That addition to the system will come soon after the company reaching its next goal, Giegel says: hitting 250 mph. All the while, the tubers will be working to improve reliability and reduce costs, two crucial elements to solving the riddle that will make all this engineering work seem simple: Building and certifying a system the public and regulators believe is safe, then operating it at profit, in a space already dominated by established, efficient competitors like airlines.

Oh, and it has to beat back rivals like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which plans to build systems in Slovakia and South Korea in the next few years, and Arrivo, launched by former Hyperloop One lead engineer, Brogan BamBrogan.

All that’s in the future. For now, you can focus on the news that your tubular pipe dream is realer than ever.

Audi Knows Millennials Will have to Deal with Self-Driving Boredom

Chances are, that time will be spent on Facebook.

As reported by Engadget: During Audi's elaborate introduction of its new (Level 3 autonomous) A8 in Barcelona, it also talked about the 25th Hour, a research project it says will "define the premium mobility of the future." Simply put, now that you're not driving, what do you do in an autonomous car?

The automaker teamed up with the Fraunhofer Society to build a "driving" (it's actually more just sitting) simulator to conduct tests on subjects to see how they react to different stimuli. The simulation recreated the feeling of riding in a car while it drives through city streets at night using large projections on the wall while displaying information on the "windows" of the vehicle.

The researchers then studied the brain activity of 30 millennial subjects from Hamburg, San Francisco and Tokyo as they were shown ads and social media updates and asked to perform random tasks. Unsurprisingly, the EKGs of the riders showed increased arousal (get your head out of the gutter) when bombarded with information and asked to execute certain activities.

While this seems like a "well, duh" moment, the reality is that automakers need to figure out what people will do in their car when they stop driving. Both Audi and BMW are already trying to figure that out, because it's not like any other situation we currently encounter. Public transit is, well, public; driving with friends is a social experience. A single rider in an automated vehicle day after day, that's something new.

As a luxury automaker looking toward the future and wanting to continue to sell cars, it's important for Audi to determine what type of environment it'll create -- even if some of those potential customers will never actually be behind the wheel.

Autonomous cars will help us reclaim lost time. Audi said that on average people spend 50 minutes per day behind the wheel. What will we do with that time? Will we watch TV, work, connect to social media or something completely different? That's what Audi's trying to find out and in the process making sure it doesn't create an annoying environment.

During Audi's Tech Summit, I got a chance to do a less intense version of the test conducted on the millennials. I didn't wear a skullcap with wires hanging every which way. Instead a heart rate monitor was attached to my wrists and fingers. I sat in the "car" with a few other journalists, and we went for a short "drive." The demonstration went from relaxed to slightly annoying when I was asked to count the number of times certain letters appeared while being bombarded with ads on the displays.

My EKG readout showed a slight arousal blip during the test. That's not that surprising: My day usually involves dealing with a ton of data and distractions while writing. So I chalk it up to what's normal for me. But I did start to reach for my phone (they asked us not to do that) out of habit. Not doing anything is an odd feeling in our connected world. But doing too much is also not healthy. Audi and other carmakers need to find a happy medium.

Melanie Goldmann, head of culture and trends communication at Audi, said in a statement, "The results show that the task is to find the right balance. In a digital future, there are no limits to what can be imagined. We could offer everything in the car -- really overwhelm the user with information. But we want to put people at the center of attention. The car should become a smart membrane. The right information should reach the user at the right time."

The 25th Hour is a nice marketing term. Audi is planning on making self-driving cars just as luxurious as its current cars, just in a different way. Regardless of what finally ends up in our robot-chauffeured vehicles, carving out more free time in our hectic lives is wonderful. It'll just be interesting to see how we use it.

Hypersonic Aircraft are now More Likely Thanks to a Newly Developed Ceramic Coating

There are a few reasons why you aren't flying across the country in hypersonic aircraft, but the simplest of them is heat: when you travel at speeds over Mach 5, the ultra-high temperatures (around 3,600F to 5,400F) strip layers from metal. How do you protect a vehicle when even the toughest ceramic tiles can't handle those conditions? A team of British and Chinese researchers might have the answer. They've engineered a carbide-based ceramic coating that's about 12 times more effective than current ceramics, making hypersonic aircraft more realistic.

The structural problems are primarily caused by processes called oxidation and ablation. This occurs when extremely hot air and gas remove surface layers from the metallic materials of the aircraft or object travelling at such high speeds. To combat the problem materials called ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) are needed in aero-engines and hypersonic vehicles such as rockets, re-entry spacecraft and defense projectiles.

The trick was to rely on a different manufacturing technique, reactive melt infiltration, to give the coating a unique structure that's both extremely strong and resistant to oxidization. The next-best conventional coating, zirconium carbide, can withstand heat but is prone to degrading.

Professor Ping Xiao, Professor of Materials Science, who led the study in University of Manchester explains: 

“Current candidate UHTCs for use in extreme environments are limited and it is worthwhile exploring the potential of new single-phase ceramics in terms of reduced evaporation and better oxidation resistance. In addition, it has been shown that introducing such ceramics into carbon fibre- reinforced carbon matrix composites may be an effective way of improving thermal-shock resistance.”

Any commercial use of the coating is a long ways off, if just because the hypersonic vehicles themselves are still a distant prospect. If it works well in practice, though, those extreme speeds would be feasible without compromising safety, especially in the long term. You'd see hypersonic aircraft that could fly you to another side of the planet within a couple of hours, and spacecraft that could return to Earth without needing frequent ceramic tile inspections and replacements. In short, flights that were once extra-risky could become virtually commonplace.

Advanced Materials

Advanced materials is one of The University of Manchester’s research beacons - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet.

Referecne: "Ablation-resistant carbide Zr0.8Ti0.2C0.74B0.26 for oxidizing environments up to 3,000 °C" Yi Zeng, Dini Wang, Xiang Xiong, Xun Zhang, Philip J. Withers, Wei Sun, Matthew Smith, Mingwen Bai & Ping Xiao Article number: 15836 (2017) doi:10.1038/ncomms15836 

Watch Lucid Air's Electric Vehicle Reach 235MPH on the Track

As reported by Engadget: Electric cars are quick off the line by their very nature (they have gobs of torque available at all times), but what about top speed -- how are you supposed to know how quickly they can go when they're usually capped at an artificial 155MPH ceiling? Lucid Motors is happy to help... sort of. The fledgling electric car maker has posted video of a Lucid Air prototype reaching a whopping 235MPH on a test track after removing its speed limiter, or 18MPH more than it managed in April. That's performance you rarely see from supercars, let alone a luxury sedan. That doesn't mean that it would beat a conventional supercar in a drag race (gas-powered vehicles tend to catch up once they hit their peak torque levels), but it's impressively fast for a company's first car. At least, until you realize that you won't see those numbers on the street.

It's not just public speed limits that will keep the Lucid Air below 235MPH. As with Tesla, Lucid is unlikely to lift that 155MPH software speed limit on production cars lest it anger rival luxury brands who've informally agreed to that restriction in the name of safety. You certainly wouldn't get this kind of breakneck pace from the base-model Lucid Air -- you'd need to pony up for a high-powered variant to achieve this feat even if there were no restrictions. Also, notice how this prototype is both stripped down and includes both a roll cage and a large spoiler? It's going to have a much easier time hitting 235MPH than a production car loaded with creature comforts and no real racing amenities, especially when it's driving on a road instead of the track.

As such, this is more of a theoretical exercise than a representation of what you'll actually get. With that said, it's still useful as a demonstration of how far EVs have come from the days when they were barely quick enough to keep up with traffic.

House Panel Votes to Split Air Force, Create New US Space Corps

As reported by Federal News Radio: As part of its version of the 2018 Defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee voted late Wednesday night to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces: the U.S. Space Corps, which would absorb the Air Force’s current space missions.

You could be forgiven if you haven’t been closely following the debate about creating the nation’s first new military service since 1947. Several members of the panel said they themselves were blindsided by the proposal, and staged an unsuccessful effort to block the change until it could be studied further — or at least until the full committee had held at least one hearing on the subject.

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said he only learned about the proposal last week, when it first came before the subcommittee on strategic forces.

“I chastised my staff and said, ‘How could I not know that this was happening?’ They said, ‘Well, they had a meeting about it and you missed it,’” Turner said. “A meeting is certainly not enough. Maybe we do need a space corps, but I think this bears more than just discussions in a subcommittee. We have not had Secretary Mattis come before us and tell us what this means. We have not heard from the secretary of the Air Force. There’s a whole lot of work we need to do before we go as far as creating a new service branch.”

Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), a retired Air Force colonel, was similarly surprised by the Space Corps proposal. She said she had not been aware of it until it appeared in the bill the full committee debated on Wednesday.

“This is honestly the first time I’ve heard about a major reorganization to our Air Force,” she said Wednesday evening. “This is sort of a shocking way to hear about a very major reorganization to our military, and I think it deserves at least a couple hearings and discussions on the matter at the full committee level.”

But the measure, which would also establish a new U.S. Space Command and make the new chief of the Space Corps the eighth member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has the support of both Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the full committee, and its ranking Democrat, Adam Smith (D-Wash.) The bill language was developed by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the top Republican and Democrat on the strategic forces subcommittee.

All of them argued Wednesday that the creation of a dedicated service for space had been studied for years, and that the idea’s time had come.

“There’s been nothing shortsighted about this,” Rogers said. “We started working on it vigorously in September, and we’ve had countless meetings with a number of experts who have advised us as to how this should be construed. In fact, this idea for a space corps as one of the solutions to Air Force space came from the Rumsfeld Commission in 2001. GAO has done three studies on this, all of which tell us that you cannot maintain the current organizational construct of the Air Force and solve the acquisition problems and the operational problems that we have. The Air Force is like any other bureaucracy. They don’t want to change.”

Cooper agreed, saying the creation of the new service would properly reflect space’s importance as a new warfighting domain, “whether we like it or not.”

“And space has not been given adequate priority by our friends in the Air Force,” he said. “They do many things wonderfully well, but this is a new area, a new responsibility that a corps would help us address more effectively. We could wake up one morning and be blinded and deafened by adversary powers, because so many of our most precious assets are up in space. The chairman has had countless meetings about this over 10 months. I don’t know where my friend from Ohio has been.”

The bill would order the Defense Department to establish the new corps by January 2019. It would be a distinct military service within the Department of the Air Force, in much the same way the Marine Corps operates as a service within the Department of the Navy. The Secretary of the Air Force would oversee both the Air Force and the Space Corps, but the new chief of staff of the Space Corps would be a new four-star position, co-equal with the chief of staff of the Air Force. DoD would have to deliver reports to Congress in both March and August of next year on the details of how it plans to set up the new service.

Smith, the full committee’s top Democrat, said that schedule left plenty of time to iron out any unanswered questions about the plan.

“I think it’s being done in a deliberate and intelligent manner,” he said. “Space has changed. We’ve already taken for granted for too long that we dominate space, and we don’t anymore. We need to be ready to confront this, and yes, buried deeply within the Air Force, you could do that, but it doesn’t get the priority it deserves, given how important it is and how it impacts everything that we do.”

Although the Air Force’s top leadership has not testified before the House on the proposed reorganization, the service’s secretary and chief of staff have both expressed opposition.

“My sense is that we have an opportunity being placed in front of us right now to take a look at what is the way we fight in the air, on land, at sea, and we take those processes, procedures, tactics, techniques, and actually apply them across the space domain,” Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “And so right now, to get focused on a large organizational change would actually slow us down. I think it would actually move us in the wrong direction.”

But Thornberry said opposition from the Air Force is no reason for delay, pointing out that the Pentagon has a long history of fighting changes to its own organizational structures.

“It was Congress that created the Air Force and the Department of Defense in 1947 when it became time to force the Army and the Navy together, it was Congress that did Goldwater-Nichols,” he said. “There are times when an issue becomes ripe and it is our responsibility to act. I believe this is the time for us to act.”