The state of autonomous vehicle safety standard regulation in the US today is between two presidential administrations, with the Trump Administration-era regulations issued Jan. 14 likely to be soon superseded by policies of the Biden Administration. The Trump Administration rules would allow self-driving vehicle manufacturers to skip certain federal crash safety requirements in vehicles not designed to carry people, marking the first major update to federal safety standards to accommodate innovations of driverless technology, according to an account in The Detroit News.This would apply for example to the delivery vehicle from startup Nuro, which has no driver or passengers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated the rule would save automakers and consumers $5.8 billion in 2050. "With more than 90% of serious crashes caused by driver error, it's vital that we remove unnecessary barriers to technology that could help save lives," stated then NHTSA Deputy Administrator James Owens. On Jan. 25, Steve Cliff, deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, was named deputy administrator of the NHTSA. Ariel Wolf, counsel to the Self-Driving Coalition, said of the Jan. 14 announcement that the NHTSA rule was a "highly significant" development in safety rules for self-driving vehicles.

In 2015, Elon Musk guessed that the industry should expect fully autonomous vehicles by 2018--but that never happened. In 2014, Nissan promised multiple, commercially viable driverless vehicles on the market by 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic did not help the situation, this is another unmet promise. Why do auto manufacturers have to keep moving the goalposts on driverless vehicles? According to a research paper recently published in Nature Communications by the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), one of the obstacles that has hindered the development of autonomous vehicles comes down to a severe inefficiency in the way autonomous vehicle testing and evaluation is performed.

A year ago, Lyft submitted a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that summed up its 2018 autonomous vehicle testing activity in a single, short paragraph. "Lyft Inc. did not operate any vehicles in autonomous mode on California public roads during the reporting period," the letter read. "As such, Lyft Inc. has no autonomous mode disengagements to report." The 2019 data tells a different story. Lyft had 19 autonomous vehicles testing on public roads in California in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the CA DMV.

Nowadays autonomous technologies are a very heavily explored area and particularly computer vision as the main component of vehicle perception. The quality of the whole vision system based on neural networks relies on the dataset it was trained on. It is extremely difficult to find traffic sign datasets from most of the counties of the world. Meaning autonomous vehicle from the USA will not be able to drive though Lithuania recognizing all road signs on the way. In this paper, we propose a solution on how to update model using a small dataset from the country vehicle will be used in. It is important to mention that is not panacea, rather small upgrade which can boost autonomous car development in countries with limited data access. We achieved about 10 percent quality raise and expect even better results during future experiments.

Autonomous vehicle development is a time and resource-intensive business, requiring dozens of test vehicles, thousands of hours of data collection and millions of miles of driving to hone the artificial brains of the cars of tomorrow. What if you could do most of that in the cloud? That's the question Nvidia hopes to answer with the release of its Nvidia Drive Constellation testing platform for self-driving cars. The announcement came during the keynote address at Nvidia's 2019 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose Monday. Drive Constellation is, basically, a simulation and validation platform that allows automakers and developers to test their autonomous vehicles and technologies in a virtual environment that lives in a specially-designed cloud server.

Uber does not plan to continue testing autonomous cars in California as it faces fallout from one of its self-driving vehicles killing a pedestrian in Arizona. While Uber announced shortly after the accident that it would suspend its autonomous vehicle testing nationwide, a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) relayed the raid-hailing giant's plans to discontinue testing in California for the foreseeable future. "Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California", says a letter from deputy DMV director Brian Soublet to Uber. The company's authority to drive autonomous cars on public roads in California, first granted last March, expires at the end of this month. If it wants to secure a new permit after that, Mr Soublet wrote, the company "will need to address any follow-up analysis to investigations" from the Arizona crash.

Nvidia is temporarily stopping testing of its autonomous vehicle platform in response to last week's fatal collision of a self-driving Uber car with a pedestrian. Ultimately [autonomous vehicles] will be far safer than human drivers, so this important work needs to continue. We are temporarily suspending the testing of our self-driving cars on public roads to learn from the Uber incident. Our global fleet of manually driven data collection vehicles continue to operate. Reuters first reported the news.

Earlier this year we watched as an AI kept driving straight into the water in Grand Theft Auto: V. Rather than use Rockstar Games' crime-world magnum opus to train its self-driving vehicles, though, Waymo instead uses Carcraft. Named for Blizzard's enduring online RPG World of Warcraft, it serves as a testing ground for the company's autonomous efforts. Yes, Alphabet built its own virtual world to train self-driving cars. The Atlantic writes that Carcraft began as a way for Waymo to recreate scenarios the autonomous cars experienced on the road. Some 25,000 virtual cars currently tool around "fully modeled" recreations of Austin, home base Mountain View and Phoenix, driving around 2.5 billion miles per day in 2016.

Apple has asked the state of California to make changes in its proposed policies on self-driving cars, the latest sign the technology giant is pursuing driverless car technology. In a letter made public Friday, Apple made a series of suggested changes to the policy that is under development and said it looks forward to working with California and others'so that rapid technology development may be realized while ensuring the safety of the traveling public.' Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet Inc, Ford Motor Co, Uber Technologies Inc, Toyota Motor Corp, Tesla Motors Inc and others also filed comments suggesting changes. Here's the car that #Apple's using to test its autonomous car technology. California said on Tuesday it would review comments before deciding whether to make changes to the policy that aims to allow companies to test vehicles without traditional steering wheels and controls or human back-up drivers.

Private parties owning lots in Boston's Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park have been enabling autonomous vehicle testing on their property for the past year. The land was paved, yet undeveloped. This made it a perfect testbed for autonomous vehicles. This enabled companies working to perfect autonomous car technologies to test their creations in a controlled environment away from normal traffic. Tom Miller, the vice president of Kavanaugh Advisory Group, told the Boston Herald: "We think it's a great adventure, we think it's a great idea, and if an opportunity comes and we have a location where we could do it again, we'd do it in a heartbeat."