A Japanese Airline passenger aircraft (Flight JAL-516) collided upon landing
with a Japan Coast Guard plane that was on the ground. The JAL flight was given
clearance to land by air traffic control, Japanese authorities said on
Wednesday. The Coast Guard plane was not cleared for take-off, based on control
tower transcripts. Transcripts of traffic control instructions released by
authorities appeared to show the Coast Guard plane had been told to taxi to a
holding point near the runway, according to Reuters. Both pilots had repeated the instructions but
it appears very likely there was a “runway incursion,” as unauthorized entries into runways are called.  

Where did this happen?

The accident happened at Haneda Airport (HND), also known as Tokyo International Airport — Tokyo’s  busiest airport. Narita Airport (NRT) is further outside Tokyo and is often used for international flights, especially those bound for North America and Europe.

When? 

Tuesday, January 2, 2024. JAL-516 was scheduled to arrive at 17:35.  The first transmission from the cockpit of the passenger aircraft that mentions a fire was at 17:36.

Were there casualties?

The pilot of the Coast Guard plane escaped but was seriously injured. Five members on the coast guard plane perished. All 379 passengers and crew were evacuated from the passenger aircraft but 17 suffered injuries.

What kind of aircraft were involved?

An Airbus A350-900 like the one in that burned in Haneda Airport, Japan. Image: JAL

The passenger plane was an Airbus A350-900. A fuel capacity of 166,488 liters give it a maximum range of 9,700 nautical miles but on Flight 516, it was being used as a short haul carrier. 

Japanese Airlines configures the Airbus A350-900 for 369 passengers with 12 in first class, 94 in business and 263 in economy, according to SeatGuru.com.

Dash 8 operated by Japan Coast Coast Guard like the one at Haneda. Image: Planespotters.net.

The Coast Guard plane was a propellor-powered DHC-8, commonly called a Dash 8, made by Bombardier, was previously known as the de Havilland Canada Dash 8. It is a much smaller aircraft and has a maximum fuel capacity of 3,160 liters. 

Where was the Coast Guard plane heading?

The Coast Guard plane, which was carrying relief supplies, was heading to the scene of a major earthquake that took place Monday.

Where was the passenger plane coming from?

The Airbus A350 was arriving from Shin Chitose Airport (CTS) near Sapporo. The flight distance between CTS and HND is 509 miles (820 kilometers).  It’s normally a 1 hour 22 minute flight, according to flightradar24.com. 

How much fuel would the Airbus have had?

Although the Airbus A-350 is designed as a long-haul carrier, this flight from Sapporo to Tokyo was a short, domestic flight. The Airbus aircraft probably took off with a light fuel load and was landing with close to reserve fuel, a common practice as extra weight is extra cost for airlines. However, the Dash 8, ready to take off may have had a full load of fuel. The fireball that erupts after impact (seen on the video) is stationery , consistent with an aircraft that made an incursion into the runway but had stopped or was taxiing slowly. The A350’s seems to ignite upon impact, continuing down the runway on fire, but its flame is smaller until it is fully engulfed in flame 18 minutes later.

Had the situation been reversed, a fully fueled large passenger jet ready to take off hit by another plane landing, the situation would have been far worse.

The post Flight Full of Passengers Collides with a Coast Guard Plane in Japan. What Do We Know? appeared first on Engineering.com.

SkyBrowse CEO Bobby Ouyang casually mentions in a LinkedIn post that you can now upload a picture—any picture—and instantly have a sketch of it. How is this not worthy of a press release?

I’m sure SkyBrowse intends for this to be used for accident reconstruction, as that is what SkyBrowse was first known for. Apparently, sketches are required for traffic reports instead of photographs. Why police, investigators or lawyers would want a sketch instead of a photo is beyond me. A photograph contains much more information (color, shadows, detail…). It’s a dumbing down of information, pure and simple. 

Another place where sketches are required instead of photographs? Patents. The United States Patent and Trademark Office insists that applicants provide a sketch to convey an invention—even if a CAD model would be far more descriptive and photographs of a prototype far more informative.

If you are being forced to create a sketch for whatever purpose, rather than question the rationale, you can simply drag and drop the photo from its folder and drop it into the “upload image” box at https://www.skyebrowse.com/sketch and it will be instantly transformed into a sketch that looks very much hand drawn.

However, the instant photo-to-sketch service is a bit of a tease. Although it functions as a technology showcase, its true purpose is as a lead generator for the sales department. The sketches produced by the free service are watermarked and there is no way to download them. You are told that a model (drawing?) is available for as little as $3, but your only choice is to fill out a long form with no place to upload the photograph. Plus, you are required to provide information that an inventor would not have, such as “How many drone pilots do you have?”

To make this impressive technology useful for engineers, I recommend a “buy” button that collects the fee and passes on the photograph that you have uploaded and delivers an unwatermarked PDF or JPEG file. The low cost is a no-brainer and by itself could make SkyBrowse a household name, but filling out a long form is a deterrent. No engineer wants to touch off an automated email barrage or have to field calls from salespeople trying to upsell you the company’s more expensive products.

The post Turn Photos to Sketches Instantly-Now What? appeared first on Engineering.com.

The Rolex Perpetual, first introduced in 1931, was self-winding. A pendulum device supplied all its power. Could such a device be making a comeback? Image: Rolex.

The self-winding watch, patented in London in 1780, went on to power some of the finest Swiss watches, including the Rolex Perpetual in 1931. Despite this ingenious device, the watch came to rely on batteries with the onset of the quartz watch, which was more accurate and far cheaper than Swiss watches, self-winding or otherwise.

European bison with a GPS collar made by VECTRONIC Aerospace has a battery that can last 4 years. Image: Rewilding Europe.

Animal tracking is a whole other story but with a similar thread. Animal tracking devices also need to have perpetual power—which no battery can supply. Indeed, the battery in an animal tracker is the factor that limits its usefulness. An animal can only be tracked for as long as the battery has a charge. After that, the naturalist must find the animal (good luck with that now that it has no working tracker), sedate it and replace the battery in its tracking device. Not a fun time for either party. Wouldn’t both prefer sedation and trauma to occur only once?

For animal tracking, a pendulum device such as that used in self-winding watches, begs to be applied. A wild animal has kinetic energy in abundance and would not miss the little of it that is required to power a tracker.

Modern wearables, such as athletic wear studded with sensors, could be easily powered by the athlete’s movement. Why not have the flex in the sole of a runner’s shoe provide the power to an onboard microprocessor instead of a battery? Hysteresis generates energy normally wasted as heat. Chafing of clothes can be irritating, but one layer of clothing sliding over another can also provide useful energy. It’s a small change, but sometimes that is all that is needed.

In “Energy Harvesting for Wearable Technology Steps Up” (IEEE Spectrum, January 2024), we learn about researchers who are harnessing the energy available to wearables in lieu of batteries. More modern devices than the pendulum, namely, piezoelectric and triboelectric generators, can harness the energy in “bumps, jumps and strides to create tiny but still useful trickles of current,” writes Julianne Pepitone.

Caltech’s Wei Gao has developed an “electric skin” that reads heart rate, temperature and other biometrics that was first made of rubber. Sounds as if it would be too hot? It was hot by design. The lactate in the wearer’s sweat, combined with oxygen created pyruvate, is essentially a biofuel burnt in a mini fuel cell to charge capacitors in the e-skin from 1.5 to 3 volts for about 60 hours. The next iteration of e-skin replaced the rubber and fuel cells with sheets of Teflon and polyamide, which slid over each other to create static electricity. It wasn’t much (0.94 milliwatts) but it was enough. Gao’s next design uses solar power and 3D printing to make e-skin components that are small enough to be embedded into the e-skin.

The Kinefox wildlife tracker concept was developed by a research team from the University of Copenhagen’s Max Planck Institute. Image: ResearchGate.

Solar has been the power source most often sought in outdoor trackers and monitoring devices. However, solar power varies throughout the day and season. Solar power will be of little use in tracking nocturnal animals. And as IEEE Spectrum points out, it may be difficult to install a solar panel on a bison.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Max Planck Institute, inspired by the pendulum device first used in self-winding watches, created a tracking device with its modern-day equivalent, a micro-generator designed specifically for wearables called the Kinetron MSF32. This, combined with a lithium-ion capacitor, the institutes’ custom GPS-enabled tracker and a Sigfox low-power transmitter, was named the Kinefox.

It didn’t go well.

“The first collar we put on the bison got destroyed immediately,” said one of the researchers. “They’re 900-kilo animals.”

The team hopes to do better with wearables for humans, who are lighter and gentler than bison.

The Kinefox sells for €270—far less than the €3,500 to €4,000 price that is typical of commercially available trackers.

Research on using kinetic energy to power wearables could also benefit continuous monitoring devices in remote or inaccessible locations that make battery changing a challenge. 

The post Self-Winding Watches May Hold the Key to Forever Wearables, Animal Trackers appeared first on Engineering.com.

In Musk, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, we learn of how AI was to be used in Tesla vehicles to offer its long-awaited Full Self Driving mode. Year after year, Tesla promises its owners Full Self Driving (FSD), a hands-off-the-wheel, point-to-point driving, aka Level 4 autonomy, aka L4, but FSD remains in beta. That doesn’t stop Tesla from charging $199/month for it, though.

SAE J3016 Levels of Driving Automation. Image: SAE International.

Level 4 autonomy, or L4, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), is a hands-off-the-steering-wheel, vehicle drives itself from point A to point B mode. The only thing more magical, L5, is no steering wheel. No gas or brake pedal, either. L5 has been achieved by several companies but only for shuttles, such as Olli, a 3D-printed electric vehicle (EV), a highlight of IMTS 2016, the biggest manufacturing show in the U.S. However, Olli’s manufacturer, Local Motors, ran out of money and closed its doors in January 2022, a month after one of its vehicles that was being tested in Toronto ran into a tree.

The traditional approach to L4 has been programming for every imaginable traffic situation with an if-this-then-that nested algorithm. For example, if a car turns in front of the vehicle, then drive around—if the speeds allow it. If not, stop. Programmers have created libraries of thousands upon thousands of situations/responses … only to have “edge cases,” as unfortunate and sometimes disastrous events keep maddeningly coming up.

Scene from “Teslas in ‘Autopilot’ Crashing into Emergency Vehicles” segment by CBS Austin, July 24, 2023.

Teslas, and other self-driving vehicles, notably robotaxis, have come under increasing scrutiny. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated Tesla for its role in 16 crashes with safety vehicles when the Tesla vehicles were in Autopilot or Full Self Driving mode. In March 2018, an Uber robotaxi with an inattentive human behind the wheel ran into a person walking their bike across a Tempe, Ariz. street and killed her. Recently, a Cruise robotaxi ran into a pedestrian and dragged her 20 feet. Attempts by self-driving vehicle companies to downplay such incidents, suggesting they are few and far between, that autonomous vehicles are a far safer alternative to humans that kill 40,000 every year in the U.S. alone, have been unsuccessful. It’s not fair, say the technologists. It’s zero tolerance, says the public.

Musk: I Have a Better Way

Elon Musk is hardly one to accept a conventional approach, such as the situation/response library. The creator of the move-fast-and-break-things movement, now the poster of every wannabe disruptor startup, knew he had a better way.

The better way was learning how the best drivers drove and then using AI to apply their behavior in the Tesla’s Full Self Driving mode. For this, Tesla had a clear advantage over its competitors. Since the first Tesla rolled into use, the vehicles have been sending videos to the company. In “The Radical Scope of Tesla’s Data Hoard,” IEEE Spectrum reports on the data Tesla vehicles have been collecting. While many modern vehicles are sold with black boxes that record pre-crash data, Tesla vehicles goes the extra mile, collecting and keeping extended route data. This came to light when Tesla used the extended data to exonerate itself in a civil lawsuit. Tesla was also suspected of storing millions of hours of video—petabytes of data. This was revealed in Musk’s biography, where Musk realizes that the video could serve as a learning library for Tesla’s AI, specifically its neural networks.

From this massive data lake, Tesla employees identified the best drivers. From there, it was simple: train the AI to drive like the good drivers drive. Like a good human driver, Teslas would then be able to handle any situation, not just the ones in the situation/response libraries.

Mission Possible?

Whether it is possible for AI to replace a human behind the wheel still remains to be seen. Tesla still charges thousands a year for Full Self Driving but has failed to deliver the technology. Tesla has been passed by Mercedes, which attained Level 3 autonomy with its fully electric EQS vehicles this year.

Meanwhile, opponents of AVs and AI grow stronger and louder. Here in San Francisco, Cruise was practically drummed out of town after the October 2^nd incident in which it (allegedly) failed to show the video from one of its vehicles dragging a pedestrian who was pinned underneath the car for 20 feet.

Even some stalwart technologists have crossed to the side of safety. Musk himself, despite his use of AI in Tesla, has condemned AI publicly and forcefully, saying it will lead to the destruction of civilization. What do you expect from a sci-fi fan, as Musk admits to being, but from a respected engineering publication? In IEEE Spectrum, we have a former fighter pilot turned AI watchdog, Mary L. “Missy” Cummings warning us of the dangers of using AI in self-driving vehicles.

In What Self-Driving Cars Tell Us About AI Risks, Cummings issues guidelines for AI development, using examples of autonomous vehicles. Whether situation/response programming constitutes AI in the way the term is used can be debated, so let us give Cummings a little room.

We Have a Hard Stop

Whatever your interpretation of AI, autonomous vehicles serve as examples of machines under the influence of software that can behave badly—badly enough to cause damage or hurt people. The examples range from inexcusable to understandable. An example of inexcusable is an autonomous vehicle running into anything ahead of it. That should never happen. No matter if the system misidentifies a threat or obstruction, or fails to identify it altogether and, therefore, cannot predict its behavior, if a mass is detected ahead and the vehicle’s present speed would cause a collision, it must slam on the brakes. No brakes were slammed on when one AV ran into the back of an articulated bus because the system had identified it as a normal, that is, shorter, bus.

Phantom braking, however, is totally understandable—and a perfect example of how AI not only fails to protect us but also actually throws the occupants of AVs into harm’s way, argues Cummings.

“One failure mode not previously anticipated is phantom braking,” writes Cummings. “For no obvious reason, a self-driving car will suddenly brake hard, perhaps causing a rear-end collision with the vehicle just behind it and other vehicles further back. Phantom braking has been seen in the self-driving cars of many different manufacturers and in ADAS [Advance Driver Assistance Systems]-equipped cars as well.”

Backing up her claim, Cummings cites a NHSTA report that says rear-end collisions happen exactly twice as often with autonomous vehicles (56%) than with all vehicles (28%).

“The cause of such events is still a mystery. Experts initially attributed it to human drivers following the self-driving car too closely (often accompanying their assessments by citing the misleading 94 percent statistic about driver error). However, an increasing number of these crashes have been reported to NHTSA. In May 2022, for instance, the NHTSA sent a letter to Tesla noting that the agency had received 758 complaints about phantom braking in Model 3 and Y cars. This past May, the German publication Handelsblatt reported on 1,500 complaints of braking issues with Tesla vehicles, as well as 2,400 complaints of sudden acceleration.”

The post Is Using AI for Full Self-Driving a Good Idea? appeared first on Engineering.com.

5. Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider

In November, Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider made its first flight. This intercontinental bomber is scheduled to replace much of the USAF bomber fleet, so it has been equipped with the best technology and engineering $750 million-dollars-a-vehicle can buy.

Though the craft resembles the B-2, it is smaller, half the weight and has a wingspan 40 ft shorter. Much about the vehicle is still unknown, at least to the public. But what is known is impressive. It sports two Pratt & Whitney PW9000 engines with 27,000 lbs. of thrust and a weapons load around 20,000 lbs.

One reason for the similarity to the B-2 was to pack the design of the B-21 with proven technology so that engineers could focus on innovating other aspects of the vehicle. For instance, it has been reported by Aviation Week Network that to help reduce the radar cross-section of the B-21, engineers ran iterations of electromagnetic simulations. This improved the traditional trial and error method used to design other bombers.

The bomber includes also the first military aircraft fully designed using a digital thread. This included a digital twin of the vehicle that included the physical characteristics and shape of each part. This made it easier for engineers to find errors and issues with designs early in development, cutting costs significantly. Aviation Week Network also reported that CFD was performed to optimize the vehicle’s sensitivity to flow distortions.

4. The Sphere in Las Vegas

Nothing is ever small in Vegas and its new venue, the 366-foot-tall and 516-foot-wide Sphere, is no exception—having broken the record for the largest spherical structure in the world. Its construction and engineering are reported to have cost over $2.3 billion dollars. The exterior of the building houses a 580,000 square-foot, LED screen that woos travelers with displays ranging from the earth, satellite images and a scene out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Goose, an alien-cat Flerken, is trapped in the Vegas Sphere. Watch out, she is about to release her tentacles. (Image: Autodesk.)

But the specs don’t end with the exterior. Inside, the Sphere contains a 16K-resolution, 160,000-square-foot screen with haptic audio and temperature features that are able to individually target each of the venue’s 10,000 immersive seats. The building also contains 7,600 regular seats and standing room for 20,000 people. Other immersive additions include simulated wind, smells and beamforming sound. Hidden behind the transparent LED screen are 1,586 loudspeakers, 167,000 speaker drivers and 300 mobile loudspeaker modules. The venue also includes robots that greet people and answer basic questions.

Told you. (Image: Autodesk.)

The engineering behind this building is enormous and so is the work put into the images it displays. For a breakdown of how the engineering company Autodesk brought the MCU’s Goose to life, watch this:

Video showing the engineering behind Autodesk and Marvel Studios’ ad on the Sphere. (Video: Autodesk.)

3. Mercedes-Benz’s DRIVE PILOT for SAE Level 3 Self-Driving Vehicles

In the race to fully autonomous cars, Mercedes-Benz drove laps around the competition this September because its DRIVE PILOT system was certified as the World’s first SAE level 3 system. This will make the company’s EQS Sedans the first conditionally automated driving vehicle. What sets level 3 apart from level 2 is that under certain circumstances, the human driver can completely disengage from the road and perform other activities.

Therefore, the engineering necessary to certify an autonomous vehicle to SAE level 3 is considerable. The vehicle will need to be simulated, tested and decked out with numerous sensors to ensure safety. The amount of testing required is much more substantial than level 2 because at the higher rating the human is no longer in control of the vehicle. This means that when fully autonomous much of the liabilities and risks land on the company producing the vehicle. For DRIVE PILOT, the conditions where autonomous driving is acceptable are when the vehicle is moving up to speeds of 40 mph, on suitable freeway sections and during high traffic density.

To ensure Mercedes-Benz will reduce the risks and liabilities associated with certifying an autonomous vehicle to Level 3, its DRIVE PILOT system was engineered to include many redundant features such as:

• Extra steering and braking actuators.
• Additional on-board electrical systems.
• Numerous sensors including LiDAR, cameras, microphones and moisture sensors.
• High accuracy positioning systems.

“DRIVE PILOT is the world’s first and only system for conditionally automated driving with internationally valid type approval,” said Markus Schäfer, member of the Board of Management of Mercedes‑Benz Group AG and Chief Technology Officer, in a release. “It is engineered with a sophisticated system architecture based on redundancy with many different sensor types. I strongly believe that redundancy is key for safe automated driving for level 3 and beyond. Safety is one of Mercedes-Benz core values. Responsible handling of this technology is our top priority and the key to acceptance among customers and in society.”

2. Atom Computing’s 1,000+ Qubit Quantum Computing System

In late October, Atom Computing won the race to exceed 1,000 qubits on a single quantum computing platform. IBM was quick to respond with its own system to reach over 1,000 qubits in early December.

“This order-of-magnitude leap – from 100 to 1,000-plus qubits within a generation – shows our atomic array systems are quickly gaining ground on more mature qubit modalities,” said Rob Hays CEO of Atom Computing in a release.  “Scaling to large numbers of qubits is critical for fault-tolerant quantum computing, which is why it has been our focus from the beginning. We are working closely with partners to explore near-term applications that can take advantage of these larger scale systems.”

The benefit of fault-tolerant quantum computers is that they can overcome errors during computations, ensuring more accurate results. To get to that level, a system will need hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of physical qubits—according to Atom Computing. As a result, their jump into thousands of qubits represents an order of magnitude jump towards this goal.

Paul Smith-Goodson, vice president and a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, praised the engineering that was involved for Atom Computing to beat IBM to the punch. He said, “It is highly impressive that Atom Computing, which was founded just five years ago, is going up against larger companies with more resources and holding its own. The company has been laser focused on scaling its atomic array technology and is making rapid progress.”

1. Antora Energy’s Industrial Thermal Battery

Perhaps the biggest challenge engineers face as they design a greener future is the reality that industrial processes are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Whether you’re making glass, steel, cement, lime or a swath of other components, chances are you need to heat something above 1,000 C (1,832 F). Until recently, the only way to get to these temperatures at scale and on budget is by burning fuel.

How hot is this renewable energy solution for industrial processes? White hot! (Video: New Energy Nexus.)

Enter Antora Energy, creators of a completely electric thermal battery that can deliver process heat to industry up to 1,500 C. On paper, the concepts behind the workings of this battery are straightforward. However, the engineering behind making those concepts a reality is extensive—and so is its potential impact on the engineering industry.

The battery consists of industrial level coils that heat up blocks of pure carbon—like a toaster heating bread. The carbon, which can remain solid up to 3,500 C (6,332 F), gets so hot that it emits white light. This system is then housed in an impressively engineered insulation container that prevents the heat from escaping. The result is a battery that can produce heat from electricity and hold it for days on end.

To discharge the battery, one only needs to open a door to produce a beam of energy. That energy can heat something to extreme temperatures or be transferred back into electricity using a thermal photovoltaic panel.

By hooking up intermittent green energy, like wind and solar, to the battery, it can supply guaranteed, green electricity and industrial heat on-demand without any emissions and at a price comparable to fossil fuels. This means that this engineering marvel might have the biggest impact on the day to day lives of engineers in the very near future—solidifying its spot at the top of the list.

The post Top 5 Engineering Marvels of 2023 appeared first on Engineering.com.

The new head of General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) unit, Mo Elshenawy, acknowledged in an all-hands meeting on December 5 that Cruise had hit an “all-time low” and promised to restore trust with regulators and the public after all U.S. robotaxis were removed from service.

Elshenawy was installed as Cruise president last month after its founder, Kyle Vogt, stepped down.

Cruise was told to stop operating its self driving robotaxis after a

Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San Francisco on October 2. Cruise explanation,
paraphrased:

It was the pedestrian that hit their vehicle after being hit by another vehicle. And unlike the
driver of the vehicle, which fled the scene, the Cruise pulled over as it should. And besides, pedestrians get hit by human-driven vehicles
all the time. Yet, it is Cruise that is under federal investigation. How fair is that?

Indeed, the pedestrian struck by the two vehicles on October 2 wouldn’t have made the news if both vehicles had drivers. It appears as if the public has
adopted a a zero-tolerance policy on self-driving vehicles.

“We now know that we need to be significantly better than human performance and significantly better across a much wider spectrum of use cases and edge cases,” he said, according a transcript of the meeting obtained by Reuters.

Although Elshenawy appears to be blaming technology, Cruise’s failure in San Francisco may be as much, if not more, an image problem. Even though Waymo’s vehicles were involved in more incidents than Cruise (35 more crashes since the beginning of 2022, according to The San Francisco Standard, which used California DMV data), Waymo managed to avoid being tarnished the way Cruise was.

You might be wondering how Waymo got away with it. Let’s start with the vehicles. Waymo’s choice of vehicle is a decidedly luxurious Jaguar I-PACE SUV. Cruise chose to use an econobox, the Chevy Bolt. Which of those would a self-respecting, image-conscious techie, of which the city is full, want to get picked up in?

Kyle Vogt, founder of Cruise Automation when he was CEO. Image: LinkedIn.

Cruise Automation was a Silicon Valley startup. Its founder, Kyle Vogt, spent 4 years at MIT, which should have been enough to get a bachelor’s in electrical engineering or computer science, his declared majors, but a Your Tech Story article has him dropping out of MIT to join the startups Justin.tv and Twitch. After Twitch was acquired (for $970 million), Vogt founded Cruise Automation. Cruise may have lost quite a bit of its Silicon Valley cachet after its acquisition (for $1 billion) in 2016 by GM, a company with all the tech cachet of a dinosaur. From then on, Cruise was perceived as a car company first and a tech company second. Natives of San Francisco, where Cruise elected to test its robotaxis, may have questioned why a Detroit company wasn’t practicing in its own city and was putting San Franciscans at risk. Cruise was the visiting team, while Waymo was the home team. The crowd booed every infraction by Cruise.

Waymo, by comparison, which was sired by Google, is a source of Bay Area pride to this day. Here, everyone loves Google, works there, wants to work there, or has a Google story to tell. A fellow editor recalls seeing Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, riding their scooters to work before the company built Googleplex, their massive Mountain View campus.

A month before the October 2 incident, Vogt was interviewed by the Washington Post. There is a baseball superstition that you don’t mention a no-hitter while the game is in progress. In September, Vogt still had a no-hitter. 

“No one has ever been seriously hurt across several millions of miles of driving and hundreds of thousands of rides provided in San Francisco,” said Vogt. 

Vogt was, no doubt, frustrated. Cruise had been ordered to reduce its fleet of AVs by 50 percent for what he called “mundane” issues that “wouldn’t catch any attention if it was a human driver, but would cause a firestorm if it was a driverless car,” per the Washington Post.

The mundane incidents referred to included a Cruise vehicle that entered an intersection and was struck by a firetruck on its way to an emergency (a passenger was treated at the scene for non severe injuries), another that got stuck in wet concrete (an edge case not considered?), and perhaps the one that annoyed public officials the most: a snarl caused by several Cruise vehicles stalled in traffic near a music festival. The company blamed the music festival for jamming the data signal and preventing them from restarting the vehicles.

Vogt went on downplay the incident. “We’re talking about a 15-minute traffic delay” for a technology that is “providing a massive and quite measurable public benefit to the community.”

Although throwing a technology experiment out of San Francisco may be a surprise, AV ventures may face nationwide skepticism.

“These companies are using public roads and putting all the road users at risk with immature tech,” said Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor. “We’ve gotten to the point where we can live with the way human drivers are and we have no way to know whether driverless cars will be safer than humans.”

Vogt was to continue to promote AVs as the safer choice over human drivers, shouting over the voices of any first responders who found their paths blocked by Cruise vehicles and safety concerns by city officials. Of cars that blocked intersections, the company’s response was that its vehicles are trained to stop in a dangerous or misunderstood situation.

For Cruise’s ideal customers, those who probably didn’t need to drive in the city. Why bother with a car? You have to pay to garage it. We’ll Uber everywhere. The whole of San Francisco is 7 by 7 miles—ideal for short rides. But for the taxi drivers, the service workers, those barely hanging on in the Tenderloin and the Mission District, the messengers on their bikes … and all the rest of San Francisco, in fact, that someone could suffer, even die, from a new and insufficiently tested technology, proved to be too much. Vogt’s claims of unavoidable collateral damage on the way to a mostly safe self-driving vehicle utopia were met with zero tolerance.

What better city to launch a robotaxi service than in San Francisco, or so an out-of-town car company may have thought. Here was a population of techies infamous for making a lot of money—and spending it on food, drinks and entertainment. To get from bars to food trucks or high-end tweezer-food establishments then home required a ride service. But would you want a gabby driver, as Uber and Lyft drivers often are? Should you have to look up from your hook-up app to chat with someone who has nothing in common with you and is only angling for a bigger tip or more stars? Uber recognized this and introduced a “quiet mode” option on their app in 2019. Select it and your driver should not chat you up. But then you have to sit in someone’s car after you let them know you didn’t want to talk to them. Awkward. 

Not only does an AV avoid the chat or awkward silence—it has cachet. You arrive at your happy hour in a tech-decked-out Waymo and you casually mention how you got there. What could be more worthy of bragging rights than an AV, the epitome of technology (until we have flying cars, anyway)?

The size of the market that Waymo and Cruise is chasing is not entirely clear. Is it the market displaced by taxi services? Taxi driving does not appear to be lucrative, if judging by the taxi drivers or their vehicles. But taxi drivers have the most to lose with robotaxis. Taxi drivers have successfully fought off ride-sharing services in several major cities (London, UK, and Vancouver, Canada, for example), and still armed up, will no doubt protest robotaxis.

Uber, the company that started the whole ride-sharing phenonium, has abandoned its plan to abandon its drivers and replace them with AVs, after one of its robotaxis hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz. in 2018.

San Francisco was not the only city in which Cruise became unwelcome. Cruise vehicles seemed to have made pests out of themselves in Austin, Tex.

Robotaxis cause traffic jams in Austin, Tex. Image Autowire.

Every techie’s favorite city outside of California no doubt saw a coup in the making by accepting the Cruise robotaxis. As soon as the Cruise fleet coursed into Austin, the little white cars quickly drew attention to themselves—and not in a positive way. Here they were clogging up intersections, drifting into bike lanes. It was too much for Austin to bear—and a feast for local TV stations.

One news-at-11 account showed Cruise vehicles stopping in the middle of an intersection when confused.  

The post Robotaxi or Cruise Missile? GM Has an Image Problem appeared first on Engineering.com.

It was a cool but sunny Friday afternoon when Kenneth Wong, editor extraordinaire (Digital Engineering 24/7), and I waited for a Waymo robotaxi. It was going to be a first for both of us. Not living within San Francisco proper, Waymo’s limit of service, I had been denied the experience. But Kenneth, a San Francisco native for 20 years, had no excuse. We took our lunch at a Korean restaurant in Japantown, then hailed a robotaxi on the Waymo app.

Lovers of technology, keep reading. Those looking for thrills and adventure in traffic—that which the
media seems to delight in—robotaxis misbehaving, getting confused, running over and dragging pedestrians, as did a Cruise robotaxi
the evening of

October 2… will be disappointed.

In anticipation of our ride, I imagined troublesome scenarios for which the city is famous: not being able to see over the vehicle’s hood cresting some of San Francisco’s hills or getting caught in the intersection when a traffic light turned red. Zoom out to see gridlock. Zoom in to see angry pedestrians pounding on your hood and giving you the finger. They’ll do that in the city. Then there are the Munis, city buses that seem to operate with a God-given right of way that would plow into a confused robotaxi going the wrong way on a one-way street.

But on this Friday afternoon ride, nothing of that sort was happening. Both the ride to a cross-town BART station and the ride back to Japantown were equally uneventful.

Look, no hands. No driver, either. A Waymo
robotaxi operating in rush hour San Francisco traffic was flawless.

I was filming the ride … and getting bored. Nothing was happening. Nobody was going to watch this.

Kenneth, who if not a Zen Buddhist should be one, put me back on track. Go to a theme park for a thrill ride, but “this is exactly how I’d want my Lyft driver to drive,” he corrected.

“Lyft rider? More like your grandma,” I replied, failing to appreciate the peace and quiet. In 4 miles of rush hour downtown traffic, the Waymo vehicle had not even braked hard or swerved. Had I had a cup of tea, not a drop would have spilled onto the saucer¹ An oblivious driver opening a door ahead of us was met with an evasive move so gentle that only Kenneth noticed it. No drivers
in other vehicles honked. In fact, we attracted no attention from anyone outside the vehicle whatsoever. A stretch limo would have gotten us more attention than this Jaguar SUV bristling with more technology than the Russian embassy—its spinning LiDAR, cameras, radar … all failing to turn heads.
We had no driver for God’s sake. Surely, that is worthy of a second take? Yet no one was jumping in our path to test
the AV,  no moms throwing their babies to safety. I see a passenger in another vehicle pulling up next to us with a camera up… but they are watching something on it and paying no attention to the second biggest San Francisco tech story of the year (the first is ChatGPT, silly). All this brilliant technology we were riding in—or deadly danger, depending on where you sit on the issue—was being ignored.

You call for a Waymo with the Waymo app, just as you would an Uber or Lyft. Waymo uses Jaguar I-PACE SUVs—always white. Ours arrived in 5 minutes
at a pickup spot in Japantown. Unlike Uber and Lyft rides, which come to you, you
have to hunt down a Waymo. Waymo chooses to, or is mandated to, use certain locations near where you are getting picked up. It does the same thing when dropping you off near where you want to go. That could be a little annoying. What if it was raining? What if you were used to door-to-door service and now you have to walk a couple of blocks at each end?
City dwellers get spoiled. Not Kenneth, of course.

The vehicle that waited for us around the corner was 18 inches from the curb, perhaps to show it was waiting and not parked? It was the only Waymo around, so it was easy to spot, but Waymo also puts your name in lights (just your initials, actually) on top of the car so you don’t have to check the license plate. The door handles popped out of the Jaguar as it sensed my approach.

Getting into the Waymo could be a little disconcerting if you are used to greeting your driver. I imagine my wife woul greet the car anyway. She’s not an engineer. The Waymo vehicle, perhaps programmed for this, issues a welcome greeting. You press “start” on a screen inside the car or on your app and you’re off.

The Waymo glides into traffic. Except for half a block where it seemed to straddle lanes, it stayed perfectly centered and allowed plenty of room from the car in front of it and from crosswalks at traffic lights. You got the sense that it was well programmed for all that it encountered. At one point, I wondered why it was stopped at a green light, but then realized it was because
it was waiting for space to open in the lane past the intersection. I might have driven out and been trapped in the intersection, but Waymo knew better than to do that.

We’ll skip to the end because nothing happened. The car tells you that you have arrived at your destination. You have to pull the door handle twice to get out. This may be challenging for the rich and inebriated, perhaps Waymo’s target customer, but it was no problem for two respectable editors. The Waymo is smart enough to tell you to watch out for cars if you are stepping out in traffic. You exit wordlessly. This will take some getting used to: no one to say hello or goodbye to, no one to tip.

After being used to paying for personal service and door-to-door service, it was strange to have to pay about the same for the impersonal service of a Waymo. Our two rides were a little over $16.

“That’s about what Lyft would charge, said my ever-charitable city-dwelling friend.

But Kenneth, there is no driver! Shouldn’t I have to pay less? A lot less?

“Waymo is charging for the novelty,” offers my uncynical friend.                                                                               

But what of the other ride San Francisco made famous, Kenneth? Cable cars don’t gouge their passengers or charge for the novelty. Honestly, does Alphabet (Waymo’s parent company, which also owns Google) really need an extra 10 bucks? Shouldn’t they be more interested in gaining public trust even if it means buying acceptance? Changing a city’s favored mode of travel is a long-term play. Waymos could be the new mobility. Play it right and Waymo, you have changed the conversation, changed what AV stands for, from annoying vehicles back to autonomous vehicles.

One or two boring rides cannot serve as a guarantee of 100 percent safety for the future. Waymos work in traffic, around jaywalkers, cyclists, impaired drivers and other hazards. There will be situations for which they are not programmed. There will be blood. Like prime numbers, accidents will get less frequent with the increased presence of robotaxis, but there will always be another.

It is impossible to make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious. So it is with autonomous vehicles trying their best to dodge the fools they face in a limitless number of potentially dangerous situations. City officials and public agencies will be sure to require millions of miles of testing before they will allow robotaxis to operate without humans at the wheel. It’s for our safety, of course. Unspoken is the concern of taxi drivers—the most at risk of losing their livelihoods. Uber and Lyft drivers? They can switch to delivering restaurant food and groceries.

Major incidents involving autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. Image: San Francisco Chronicle.

Waymo’s journey with robotaxis has not been without incident. A Waymo struck and killed a “small dog” in May 2023 according to the California DMV, which demands an accident report for every significant incident involving an autonomous vehicle. The dog death was downplayed by Waymo as unavoidable The San Francisco Chronicle assembled stats for all autonomous vehicle collisions reported, and as you can see in the above map, there have been plenty involving Waymo vehicles.

But a closer look at the accident reports on the DMV will reveal that few of the incidents were Waymo’s
fault. The dog’s death was the only fatality on record. No person has yet to be seriously injured by a Waymo. A Waymo struck a motorcycle after the motorcycle rider lost control of it. The Waymo slammed on the brakes but hit the riderless motorcycle. In another incident, an SUV cut in front of a Waymo so fast that the Waymo could not stop in time. In fact, in most of the incidents, it was either a pedestrian or a driver of another vehicle that was at fault.

“Within the first 1 million public road miles that we drove without a human behind the wheel, we had no reported injuries, no collisions with pedestrians or cyclists, and every vehicle-to-vehicle collision involved poor driving by a human,” says Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer, in a July 6 post on the Waymo website.

That Waymo has a chief safety officer is in and of itself a statement. Cruise, the other robotaxi company allowed to operate in San Francisco, only added a chief safety officer after one of its vehicles struck a pedestrian the night of October 2 and dragged them 20 feet before coming to a stop. Cruise tried to hide the recording of the incident, alleges the California Public Utilities Commission, and faces fines of up to $1.5 million. Cruise’s driverless operations were suspended. Although the company could still have operated Cruise with safety drivers, on October 24, GM shut down all of
its robotaxi operations in the U.S.

Self-driving Cruise vehicles disabled by traffic cones in San Francisco in July 2023.
Anti-tech activists took great delight in placing the traffic cones on
Cruise cars, which left the vehicles confused and paralyzed. Source: Courtesy Safe Street Rebel.

It is possible that the city associated with tech gave little room for error to an
interloper from Detroit (Cruise is owned by GM). But it can also be said that Cruise’s
management was too cavalier about safety, too dismissive of complaints, too bent
on a mission to save us from ourselves.

On August 14, two stalled Cruise robotaxis delayed an ambulance taking an injured pedestrian to the hospital. The pedestrian died from their injuries. In an August 7 safety meeting, the San Francisco Fire Department told of 55 incidents in which autonomous vehicles had come too close to first responders. That several incidents involved Cruise vehicles should come as no surprise. Cruise has fewer miles driven in traffic than Waymo. By 2020, Waymo had completed 20 million miles of testing its AV fleet with “safety officers” at the wheel, whereas Cruise, just getting started, had 2 million miles
of testing.

It can be said that Waymo is a software company that also makes cars and Cruise is a car company that also writes software. Waymo’s Google ancestry has paid off enormously for Waymo. Waymo has been able to program many more situations and responses for its vehicles and can detect more shapes and predict more vehicle, pedestrian and cyclist behavior. Should Waymo use machine learning to model the behaviour of good drivers, it can probably draw on petabytes of traffic data from Google Maps and millions of hours of video from Street View plus Google’s leading-edge AI.

Although Waymo was involved in more incidents than Cruise, Cruise incidents resulted in more injuries, reports the San Francisco Standard. An exhaustive study by Ars Technica stated that “Cruise might have a problem with intersections,” whereas “Waymo has been successful at avoiding crashes at intersections” and concluded that “Cruise’s technology is pretty good but Waymo’s is better.”

Both tech editors involved in this admittedly unscientific experiment were thoroughly impressed with the way Waymo had solved some very difficult problems in negotiating dense city traffic and were convinced that Waymo was safer than being driven by a human driver. Ars Technica is a little more cautious, estimating Waymo to be about twice as safe as human drivers. By its calculations, humans driving the same number of miles as robotaxis in San Francisco would have had twice as many serious crashes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Board estimates that there are around 6 million car crashes reported to the police each year.” The agency counted 42,795 human deaths from motor vehicle traffic crashes in the U.S. in 2022. That all by itself should scream to have human drivers replaced with well-tested, relatively safe robotaxis.

The post Two Short Rides and It’s Obvious: Waymo Is Way Safe appeared first on Engineering.com.

I’m in Las Vegas for Trimble’s now-annual conference, Trimble Dimension, but at this year’s conference, they are talking about Formula 1. What’s the connection? The speaker on stage is with a Formula 1 racing team. And Las Vegas will be hosting a Formula 1 race next week, the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

The cars will be racing through the streets of Las Vegas, including the Strip, if you can imagine that.

Keeping the manhole covers in place will be just one of the problems race planners will have to overcome. Apparently, the ground effects of F1 cars create such a vacuum under the vehicle that the manhole covers are lifted up in the air—right into the path of the car following.

“Quite an effective way to deal with the competition,” joked Mark Gallagher, a professional speaker with considerable experience with Formula 1.

Gallagher tells of floating the idea of a Formula 1 race to a Las Vegas cab driver 18 months ago.

“So, you’re in town for vacation or…?” asked the cabbie.

“No, I’m here for business. We’re planning to have a Formula 1 race in Las Vegas,” Gallagher replied.

“That will be at the Speedway, then?”

“No, we’re going to have it downtown on the Strip on Saturday night.”

“What kind of speeds will you guys be doing?”

“About 220 miles an hour.”

“I don’t know how you could do that,” said the cabbie. “Our traffic is horrendous.”

The driver in the lead, with any luck, could be a young man barely old enough to have a driver’s license. Max Verstappen, the celebrated driver for Red Bull Racing, started Formula 1 driving at 17. He has honed his skills in video games and sees Formula 1 as merely a real-life version of the Sony PlayStation game.

Both the games and racing are about controlling data, says Gallagher. Today’s F1 car generates a terabyte of data, says Gallagher. The winningest team over the last 15 years, Red Bull Racing, has a race director who controls the race from screens at Red Bull Racing’s headquarters in the UK.

Red Bull’s driver gets a million dollars per win in addition to a salary of millions of dollars. Red Bull has already clinched the 2023 season, which is commemorated with the Constructors Cup.

The speaker tells a story about Lewis Hamilton, the winningest F1 racer ever with over 100 F1 race victories. Hamilton was told to do laps at a prescribed time per lap, a time that would keep the vehicle’s tires in good condition for half the race, and therefore, require only a single pit stop. The data showed that one pit stop would let Hamilton win the race as the other two leading competitors would require two pit stops.

Lewis Hamilton would win the race if he could do laps at less than maximum speed and have only one pit stop. Image: Trimble Dimensions.

But keeping to a set time bothered Hamilton. He thought he could go faster.

What if I were just to go as fast as I could for the whole race? he asked.

Hamilton would come in 3rd if he were to race at maximum speed. Image: Trimble Dimensions.

We’ve modeled that, too,” said his team. “You’ll wear out your tires with 6 or 7 laps to go and you will come in 3rd.”

The post Formula 1 Comes to Las Vegas appeared first on Engineering.com.

After being banned in San Francisco, following an incident in which a self-driving Chevy Bolt ran over and dragged a woman who was in a crosswalk 20 feet on October 2, Cruise, the self-driving division of GM, has suspended its robotaxi programs everywhere. Cruise had initiated robotaxi programs in Phoenix, Houston, Austin, Dallas and Miami, and between them all, had a fleet of 400 autonomous vehicles.

On LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter), Cruise and its CEO Kyle Vogt, respectively, issued statements about the suspension of all self-driving car operations while claiming that the suspension “is not related to any new on-road incidents,” a clear reference to the October 2 incident.

This self-imposed suspension marks a significant reversal for the Cruise program and may put the entire Cruise division in jeopardy.

The triggering event in San Fransisco is only the latest in a series of negative, much-publicized developments for Cruise. Cruise robotaxis have caused traffic jams and fire department headaches and have been stopped in their tracks by activists placing traffic cones on the vehicles’ hoods. That went viral.

The irony hangs heavy on Cruise CEO Kyle Volt. Cruise robotaxis will only make the streets safer, Vogt has argued. Only 2 weeks before the San Francisco incident, Vogt was interviewed in the back seat of a Cruise robotaxi for Mad Money. He and host Jim Cramer, who was visiting the city from his base in New York, had a totally incident-free ride, cruising the busy streets of San Francisco in Gnochi (all Cruise vehicles have names). They discuss all the reasonable, logical and financial reasons for self-driving cars (like fewer fatalities, fewer teenagers having accidents, lower insurance payments) and emotional ones (more privacy, less drunk driving). In fact, Cramer, a fan of the technology, can’t think of a single reason why Cruise would be anything but welcome in San Francisco, the epicenter of high tech.

Is this a city eating its young? asks Cramer—though not in those exact words. Neither Cramer nor Vogt can understand why Silicon Valley is rebelling against the technology it is associated with, a technology that will only make its streets safer.

Umm … Could it be that San Franciscans see Cruise as an outsider, the premature birth of a dinosaur from Detroit that is using its streets as a laboratory for unfinished code?

In the video, the pair discuss the “few” incidents that have occurred and shrug them off. A reminder: this was filmed before the October 2 incident. will make its streets safer, citing “independent research” that proves without a doubt the enormous safety advantage that autonomous vehicles offer. They shrug off “awkward moments,” like a self-driving car stuck in concrete and the hysteria that ensues after accidents and injuries involving self-driving cars.

“Think of a 737 full of people crashing every day,”[i] says Vogt, offering a stark contrast to the relative safety of Cruise vehicles.

Meanwhile, Google highlighted a Verge article in which “Waymo’s robotaxis are going the distance in San Francisco.” With Cruise out of the running, Waymo is enjoying being the only remaining robotaxi operator left driving in the city. Google, now known as Alphabet, was conceived by Stanford grads, has its headquarters in Mountain View, and is the modern poster child of Silicon Valley, which traces its roots to Hewlett-Packard’s garage in Stanford.

Mary T. Barra, CEO of GM, has yet to officially comment on Cruise’s October 2 incident or the robotaxi suspension announced by Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. GM sinks an average of $588 million every quarter in Cruise. A Chevy Bolt (an electric economy car with an MSRP of around $30,000) jumps fivefold in cost (between $150,000 and $200,000) after being equipped for full self-driving. The revenue is produced at $10 per ride—the average fare in San Francisco. And since October 2, with its San Francisco fleet grounded, it has produced zero dollars in revenue.

If the Cruise crisis is the next headache for Barra, who may be recovering from a migraine after a show-stopping United Auto Workers (UAW) strike that reached a tentative settlement only a few days ago. GM has had a spotty record in embracing new technology that dates back to the OPEC oil embargo and carries through to modern times with a halting start-stop-start on electric cars. In 2021, Barra announced plans to make GM go electric with all of its vehicles by 2035 but said it would be ending production of the Bolt by the end of 2023, only to revive the Bolt in July of this year. Last month, Honda killed a $5 billion plan to build Equinox electric vehicles (EVs) with GM.

In summary, GM’s commitment to EVs is inconsistent, and given the pressures from a suspended self-driving program with enormous negative PR and short-term revenue hurdles to overcome, how long can GM be expected to tolerate the Cruise division?

The post Cruise Suspends All Robotaxi Operations appeared first on Engineering.com.

In the future, all consumer goods in everyday use will gather performance data, aggregated and transmitted through the cloud back to the products’ manufacturers. For the engineers that design those products, the result is a data set to determine the upper and lower limits of performance for critical components, allowing an iterative design process that lets each generation of component and assembly become optimized for performance. The result is lower cost, and less environmental impact for each component. That’s good, but that data can also be aggregated by marketers to develop a very accurate profile of individuals in a household, to drive advertising. And it’s surrendered to those marketers without compensation. Uploading motor performance data in a washing machine to a design engineer is a good trade for consumers, because they get better machines in return. But surrendering data to an advertising agency without compensation, is bad business.  

Access all episodes of End of the Line on Engineering TV along with all of our other series.

* * *

Episode Transcript:

If you’re an engineer working in the consumer goods sector, imagine this scenario: you are designing an electric motor for a washing machine. The pressures to reduce costs are enormous in this highly competitive sector, and you need to design a motor at the absolute minimum of materials, labor and weight. How much can you take out of the previous generation design and still maintain reasonable durability? It’s a tough question, and there are several ways to find the answer. It’s possible to simulate the design extensively, and that’s the technique that’s in use every day around the world. It’s also possible to build prototypes, then test them to destruction to if there tough enough. To achieve the target durability without over engineering the motor. 

But imagine if that engineer could access motor performance data from hundreds of thousands of existing washing machines around the world, then analyse that data statistically for critical parameters like heat rise, current draw, and vibration. With that kind of information, it will be possible to which motor designs were deficient, but also which were overengineered for the application. This would set immediate upper and lower bounds for the motor designer, and reduce the number of iterations needed for perfection. Sounds great, doesn’t it? 

Well, this is the future of all consumer goods, from athletic shoes to pickup trucks, and the combination of smart products with cloud connectivity makes the data not only easy to aggregate, but extremely cheap as well. That’s great for engineers, but what else could be done with all that information? If you’re Google, or Amazon, aggregate enough of that information from enough of the products that we use every day, and it will be possible to build a very clear picture of who you are. How? 

By measuring how far you walk, and where. By geo-locating where you shop, and how far you drive to work, and how fast. By seeing how many times you use your coffee maker, and how many cups you create. By determining how electric razors are in use in the house, as well as dozens of other potential information sources that would allow smart systems to develop a very accurate profile of every individual in a household. That kind of information is in a strict sense, more valuable than the machine performance data that the engineer needs, and we already see a form of it in the directed advertising that we all see only use the Internet. 

But given that this information is highly valuable, why are we, the creators of that data, not compensated for it? I’m prepared to surrender performance data on my car’s transmission, or the heating element in my coffee maker, or the motor on my washing machine, if those things mean that the products that I bought I will cost less, and last longer. But giving a mass-market retailer information to build a profile on me so they can target me for advertising is a different matter. There has to be an economic transaction here. Samsung, or Ford or Nike can have a little bit of information if they use it to give me better products. But the Google’s Amazons of the world, hey, throw me a nickel every once in a while. 

The quid pro quo in the early days of broadcasting was that you endured commercials, and exchange for free entertainment. But in this world, you pay for the goods, and pay again in the form of critical data that you surrender without compensation. Engineers can make the world better with good data. Madison Avenue, not so much.

The post Everything is Aggregating Data. That’s Both Good, and Bad appeared first on Engineering.com.