vehicles

Lex Fridman's two-hour podcast with George Hotz, founder of Comma.ai, covering openpilot, autonomous driving and Hotz's views on AI and technology.

Technology Connections' hour-long guide to electric vehicles, covering costs, trade-offs and especially how little home charging power most drivers need.

A TEDx talk arguing that battery electric vehicles are not as environmentally friendly as commonly believed and that the rush to adopt them is misguided. TED flagged it as containing claims that lack scientific support.

Fully Charged episode where Elliot drives the NIO ES8 SUV and visits a battery swap station that replaces the pack in about three minutes. It covers the ownership model of swapping and what it could mean for EV charging.

Brian Douglas introduces Braitenberg vehicles, simple robots whose sensors are wired directly to motors yet show surprisingly lifelike behavior. He draws on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles.

A compilation of hover tests of exoatmospheric kill vehicles, the small rocket-propelled interceptors used in missile defense, including early prototypes from the late 1980s. It shows the vehicles maneuvering with thrusters in test facilities.

A two-minute clip of the self-driving cars from the film Minority Report, showing driverless vehicles with rotating passenger compartments on a highway.

George Hotz of Comma AI gives a 2017 conference talk on lessons from building a self-driving system. He argues about how driving should be defined and why the common approach to autonomous vehicles is flawed.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

A three-minute Computer History Museum clip showing Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoRs Mercedes van and later VaMP sedan, early self-driving vehicles tested from 1986 to 2003.

A three-minute clip about Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoR and VaMP projects, in which fully autonomous vehicles drove thousands of miles on public roads in the 1980s. It is a brief look at early German self-driving research.

Waymo's 2017 announcement that its fully autonomous vehicles are test-driving on public roads with no one in the driver's seat. It gives a short overview of the project's history and plans.

A TechCrunch interview with Anthony Levandowski about his new startup Pronto.ai and autonomous vehicles, after the Uber and Waymo lawsuit. He discusses lessons learned and the role of lidar.

A Veritasium video, sponsored by Waymo, that rides in a fully driverless car in Chandler, Arizona and argues for putting autonomous vehicles on roads based on safety data.

JJRicks rides a driverless Waymo in Phoenix when it gets confused by traffic cones, blocks traffic, and evades the support vehicles sent to retrieve it. The episode is one of a long series of rider-view Waymo videos.

Physics Girl compares hydrogen fuel cell cars and battery electric cars after driving 1800 miles in a Toyota Mirai. The video was part of a series sponsored by Toyota.

Not Just Bikes argues that self-driving cars will worsen sprawl and car dependence and harm cities. The video compares car-centered and people-centered urban design and weighs what cities should do instead.

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

An ABC7 News Bay Area reporter rides in a driverless Waymo robotaxi through San Francisco and documents the trip, including a couple of awkward moments. It is a short TV news segment showing what a robotaxi ride is actually like.

Yandex shows its self-driving taxi navigating snowy Moscow streets after a heavy snowfall, dealing with traffic, pedestrians, parked cars and snowbanks on real roads.

JJRicks rides in Waymo's fully driverless Level 4 cars in Phoenix with nobody in the front seats, across two long rides. It is the first in a series of such ride videos.

Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car program, shows footage of how the car perceives the road and decides what to do. Examples include cyclist hand signals, school buses, police officers and complex intersections.

A short research demo of Autonomous Intersection Management, a protocol in which self-driving cars reserve slots through an intersection instead of obeying signals or stop signs. It uses UT Austin's autonomous vehicle Marvin and a simulation to show cars crossing without stopping.

A short IEEE Spectrum clip of Stanford's autonomous car Junior learning to powerslide into a parking spot. It shows several approaches to the maneuver.

Google's 2012 video of Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, taking a drive in its self-driving car including a drive-through stop. It was shared as a human-interest demonstration of the technology's promise.

A two-minute Google video of its self-driving car handling city street scenarios near the Googleplex. It shows the car dealing with cyclists, pedestrians, construction and a railroad crossing.

A short CMU Robotics Institute clip on NavLab 1 from 1986, the first self-driving car to carry people on board. It was very slow but revolutionary for its era's computing power.

AI Addict reviews a Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta drive, showing hard braking, red-light running, wrong-way turns and a collision with a bollard. The video is timestamped by incident.

Reporters follow Waymo self-driving cars for more than 170 miles around Arizona to see how they handle lane changes, accidents and traffic. The short video shows real-world driving behavior in 2018.

Not Just Bikes argues that urban noise comes mostly from motor vehicles, drawing on the book Curbing Traffic and a visit to Delft, a city that takes noise seriously.

Real Engineering examines the efficiency of hydrogen as an energy carrier. It follows production, storage and fuel cell conversion losses and compares hydrogen cars with battery electric vehicles.

Engineering Explained examines Toyota's hydrogen-burning V8 engine built with Yamaha and explains the practical problems of hydrogen combustion vehicles. It covers efficiency, storage and distribution issues.

A first-day ride-along with an Amazon delivery driver using the Rivian electric delivery van. She covers the van's new technology, how it compares to the standard Ford Transit delivery vehicles, and quirks and issues she noticed on the job.

Tony Seba's 2016 keynote argues that batteries, electric vehicles, self-driving cars and solar will converge to disrupt energy and transportation. He predicts by 2030 all new vehicles will be electric and autonomous and that oil and other fossil fuels will be obsolete.

Fully Charged's first of three reports from the Orkney Islands, covering the Surf 'n' Turf project that uses surplus wind and tidal power for hydrogen and electric vehicles.

Stanford futurist Tony Seba argues that electric vehicles, battery storage, solar and autonomous vehicles form a 10x exponential disruption that will make fossil fuels obsolete within about a decade. It draws on his Clean Disruption book.

Engineering Explained argues that internal combustion engines are far from dead, and discusses the continued development of ICEs and the problems facing electric vehicles.

A short South China Morning Post report on Nio's second-generation automated battery-swap stations for electric vehicles. It notes that Nio had built more than 800 stations in China by early 2022.

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

Dashcam footage of a Tesla Model S on adaptive cruise control hitting a stopped van, with the driver listing the safety systems that failed to react. The uploader still calls the Model S the best car in the world.