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Showing posts from October 22, 2016

Why Driverless Cars Could Become a Target for Road Bullies

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Autonomous vehicles will have to learn the written and unwritten rules of the road to integrate with human drivers. It's a jungle out there on US roads. There's a  near-constant jockeying for position as  everyone attempts to get where they're going  as fast as they can via overcrowded highways  and streets. In reality, drivers all exist  somewhere along a spectrum,  with the unnecessarily  aggressive on one end, the  overly cautious on the other, and the rest falling  somewhere in between. Drivers are constantly  processing information and anticipating what their fellow motorists may do based on a variety of  factors, often without consciously thinking about  it. Whether we want to admit it or not, most of us  size up other drivers based on their age, sex, race,  and the vehicle they're driving. For example, if you  spot a young person driving an expensive sports  car, you may deduce—based on your own  attitudes and their actions—that they're either a 

Airbus to Build a Personal Airplane by 2020

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The aerospace giant's Silicon Valley outpost is looking beyond Ubers and self-driving cars. There are self-driving cars, there are drones,  and then there is the Vahana project, an Airbus- funded venture that hopes to build the first  certified passenger aircraft that doesn't require  a pilot. The idea is reminiscent of flying car designs from the 1950s: as urban areas grow ever more  congested, their denizens need easy-to- operate, inexpensive craft that can take off and  land vertically, delivering them safely to their  destination and avoiding the traffic chaos  below. The Vahana engineers are working at A3,  Airbus's Silicon Valley incubator, and they  believe that there's no better time like the  present to implement that decades-old dream.  According to a Medium post last month, they  hope to have a full-size prototype before the  end of 2017, and a marketable design by 2020. The battery-powered planes would essentially  be aerial taxis, following pre-determine