Self driving car news from Tesla, Nutonomy and Apple

Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla is developing its own custom artificial intelligence chips for its driverless cars. However, his previous prediction that full self driving car capability would be achieved this year has been postphoned at least two years.

Elon now says Tesla could achieve some level of full self-driving within two years (2020), but in 2021 self-driving capabilities would be significantly better than human drivers.

Tesla has faced some turmoil and problems in their self driving group
* Tesla stopped working with Mobileye and are using computer vision technology in Autopilot 2.0 and is not using LIDAR
* The lead self driving technologist position has seen turnover

Nutonomy and Lyft self driving

Earlier this year, nuTonomy and Lyft announced a partnership focused on bringing nuTonomy vehicles to the Lyft network in Boston. Today, we’re pleased to announce that passengers in Boston’s Seaport district were able to experience self-driving rides on the Lyft network in nuTonomy vehicles. As the pilot progresses, select Boston passengers in Seaport area will be matched with nuTonomy self-driving vehicles when they request rides through the Lyft app.

These rides mark the first-ever public pilot between a ridesharing company and an autonomous vehicle company in the United States. Our pilot with Lyft also comes on the heels of nuTonomy’s own public passenger pilot, which we launched earlier this month.

Apple Self driving

In April, Apple received a permit to test self-driving cars in California. In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that they were working on software that could allow cars to drive themselves. During a talk on Friday, Apple’s director of artificial intelligence research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, spoke about some of the company’s recent advances in machine learning that would be useful for such a project.