Month: January 2022

France has taken a unique step to remind people cars suck. In December, the country passed a law requiring the creators of car commercials to encourage viewers to try not driving a car—at least, whenever it’s possible.

The world is barreling towards what basically all scientists (and Adam McKay) are warning is a climate catastrophe if fossil fuel use isn’t ended. One of the best ways to do that is reducing reliance on personal, gas-powered vehicles. (To say nothing of the air pollution reduction and other benefits that would accrue with less driving.) But how to do that is a bit of a challenge. Indeed, while most folks are aware that driving cars is bad in a vague existential sense, it’s still fairly difficult to pry ourselves away from them—especially when so much of our media culture reinforces the idea that cars are cool and safe and good.

France’s law—passed in December—offers a small behavioral nudge. Advertisements must now include reference to travel alternatives, such as walking or biking, taking public transportation or, at the very least, carpooling.

Under the new law, commercials aired in the country will be obligated to include one of the following phrases in their ad copy: “For short journeys, walk or cycle,” “Think about carpooling,” and “On a daily basis, take public transport.” (In French, of course.) In some cases, the ads will also be required to sport the hashtag #SeDéplacerMoinsPolluer, meaning “Move without pollution.”

The legislation, which applies not just to TV but also to print, web, and radio ads, mandates that the messages be presented in an “easily readable or audible manner” and that they be made “clearly distinguishable from the advertising message and from any other obligatory mention.” Companies that fail to meet such requirements will be subject to stiff fines—something in the neighborhood of €50,000 (roughly $72,100).

“Decarbonizing transport is not just switching to an electric motor. It also means using, when possible, public transport or cycling,” tweeted Barbara Pompili, France’s Minister of Ecological Transition, whose department is focused on advancing alternative energy solutions for the country.

That’s extremely true. Transportation is the biggest source of emissions in France (and the U.S. and many other developed countries for that matter). Personal vehicles are among the most carbon-intensive ways of getting around. Hopping a train or bus drastically reduces carbon intensity and overall emissions while walking and biking eliminate them entirely. Transition to no-carbon transit is absolutely vital for the world to have a shot at meeting its climate targets.

France’s law is somewhat equivalent to when the U.S. passed the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1984, the likes of which forced tobacco companies to include specific Surgeon General’s warnings about cigarette-induced cancer, emphysema, and pregnancy complications on the sides of all their products. Here, like there, the message is pretty simple: Feel free to buy one of these but you’re slowly killing yourself (and the planet), you doofus.

Reminding the public to pursue modes of travel that don’t involve personal gas-powered vehicles is great. But it can’t all be on individuals to make that transition happen. France—or any other country for that matter—also needs to make no-carbon means of getting around accessible for all. The country banned short-haul flights where rail options are available last year, which good. But it was also just a few years ago that France faced a revolt over a gas tax that would’ve screwed rural folks who lacked the infrastructure to get around outside of their own vehicles. Telling people to hop on a bike is a great first step. Ensuring everyone can do that is has to be the next one.

Hyundai is at CES with both transportation-related robots and a pitch for the future of the metaverse. As intriguing as the metaverse sounds, we’ll stick with the objects that move in the real world, because this is Autoblog after all.

The first pod that moves people — there are two — Hyundai refers to as a mother shuttle. Those are the extra-large pods you see on the street in the photo at the top of this post. Their use case is fairly obvious from the photo. It’s essentially a large pod designed to hold other smaller pods and transport them to their shared destinations. 

If you take the CES glasses off for a second, the mother shuttle starts to look more like an inefficient bus versus a great way to move around a city. You’re able to fit what appears to be eight pods in a single mobility module, which is just as good as a minivan. Granted, the occupants are more comfortable in their individual pods and don’t have to interact with others in the same transportation module, but it’s still far less useful than a bus is at moving large amounts of people.

The pods themselves are called Personal Mobility PnD pods, and they’re built off Hyundai’s “Plug & Drive” modular platform revealed at CES. This is the only one meant to move humans, but Hyundai suggests several other use cases with different top to the platform meant to move things other than humans. Hyundai says that the Personal Mobility pod is meant to provide “a comfortable experience to the destination while also protecting personal privacy.” The pods move around a city autonomously, and Hyundai says they have a drive time of one hour, and it takes two hours to charge back up.

Their best use case sounds like it would be for folks who have limited mobility. It would be a far better way of getting around than a wheelchair. Hyundai says they have autonomous capabilities with Lidar and camera sensors, but you can also control it manually with a joystick. The world Hyundai envisions with these pods teeming about a city street does not look like a perfectly joyous future, though. They take up way too much space on a sidewalk for everybody to ride around in their own personal pod, and it also looks like another excuse to avoid walking.

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Deere & Co. helped mechanize agriculture in 1837 with the first commercially successful steel plow. On Tuesday, the company unveiled a machine that could prove just as transformative: a fully autonomous tractor.

John Deere’s new 8R tractor uses six pairs of stereo cameras and advanced artificial intelligence to perceive its environment and navigate. It can find its way to a field on its own when given a route and coordinates, then plow the soil or sow seeds without instructions, avoiding obstacles as it goes. A farmer can give the machine new orders using a smartphone app.

Some tractors already operate autonomously but only in limited situations—following a route defined by GPS, for example, without the ability to navigate around obstacles. Others feature limited autonomy that still requires a farmer to sit behind the wheel.

“It’s a monumental shift,” says Jahmy Hindman, Deere’s chief technology officer, of the new machine, revealed at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “I think it’s every bit as big as the transition from horse to tractor.”

Self-driving tractors could help save farmers money and automate work that is threatened by an ongoing agricultural labor shortage. But automating more of farming, and adding AI, may also stir debate around replacing workers as well as ownership and use of the data it generates.

Deere did not say how much the new tractor will cost; its most expensive current models can run up to $800,000. Hindman says the company is exploring several possible models, including a subscription plan.

Autonomy has been creeping into tractors and other farm equipment for decades, with recent advances building upon progress made in robotics and self-driving cars.

The fully autonomous 8R relies on neural network algorithms to make sense of the information streaming into its cameras. Deere has been collecting and annotating the data needed to train these algorithms for several years, Hindman says.

A similar AI approach is being used by companies building self-driving cars. Tesla, for example, gathers data via its cars that is used to hone its Autopilot self-driving system. And while an empty field poses fewer challenges than a busy city intersection, Hindman admits that, as with self-driving cars, the system may have difficulty seeing its surroundings in extreme weather conditions such as snow or rain.

Qin Zhang, director of the Center for Precision & Automated Agricultural Systems at Washington State University, who previously worked on a prototype autonomous tractor with funding from Deere, says the technical issues seem to have been largely solved. But he says some farmers may find the system too expensive or too difficult to program.

Deere has been incorporating more AI and autonomy into its products over the past decade. In August, the company said it had paid $250 million to acquire Bear Flag Robotics, a startup that retrofits tractors to make them more autonomous. In 2017, it paid $305 million to buy Blue River Technology, which makes robots capable of identifying and eliminating unwanted plants using a high-precision blast of herbicide.

The new 8R tractor perhaps signals a bigger shift in Deere’s ambitions. It not only turns the company’s most iconic product into a capable robot; it also provides a virtuous cycle for training new AI algorithms and developing new products.

HTC wants to make it easier for Vive virtual reality headsets to track the movement of a user’s hands and the tools they might be holding. The company’s solution, a blobby bracelet called the Vive Wrist Tracker, promises accurate data from the fingertips to the elbow, even when the headset can’t see the tracker or a user’s hands occlude a handheld object.

The device, announced today at CES 2022, is designed for use with HTC’s all-in-one Vive Focus 3 headset, which tracks the location of a user’s hands using onboard cameras. That approach can fall short for a number of technical reasons, including that it’s hard to tell if a hand is small and close to the camera, or large and far away. Invisible LEDs on the Vive Wrist Tracker add more points of reference and exact scale to the equation, allowing the headset to calculate precise location and movement through a 3D space.

The Vive Wrist Tracker is about the same weight as a smartwatch, even though it’s more bulbous, and it’s 85% smaller and 50% lighter than a Vive Focus 3 controller. It comes attached to a standard watch wristband, but can also be attached to other objects, like a weapon or a tool, to provide highly accurate tracking in a wide variety of VR scenarios.

The new Vive Wrist Tracker will available in the first quarter of 2022, according to HTC, but the company did not specify a price point.

HTC says it has also designed an open-source 3D tracking solution that uses an inexpensive Arduino board and 3D sensor which can be attached to a tool and used in concert with the Vive Wrist Tracker. The company plans to release the plans free for users to download and experiment on their own.

HTC also announced two new charging solutions for the Focus 3 headset at CES. The Focus 3 Carrying Case is a weatherproof tote with a handle, latches for a shoulder strap, and a lockable zipper. Once a headset and controllers are packed inside, you can plug a charger into an external port and charge all the contents at once. The device will also automatically pair the controllers with the headset, even if they weren’t before, which is an incredibly useful feature for places that have multiple headsets, like arcades, schools, and training rooms, where controllers and headsets can easily get mixed up.

Similarly, the new Focus 3 Multi Battery Charger addresses the need of installations that need to charge lots of batteries at once. The device holds four of the headset’s detachable batteries and will charge them all at the same high speed, enabling businesses like arcades to easily swap out drained batteries for fully-charged ones, without long pauses in between games or training sessions.

HTC did not specify launch dates or price for the new charging accessories.

The company also announced a new partnership with telecommunications company Lumen Technologies at CES, promising to deliver wireless VR experiences that are comparable to wired PC-based VR, using private 5G networks and edge computing systems.