State Of Autonomy: June Recap

3 min readJul 2, 2018

Alibaba announces a projectile microwave or something. It’s a new species.

Every month, I recap the news articles I’ve consumed around autonomous vehicles, calling out the highlights and keeping track of market projections. This is also your chance, dear readers, to nominate a topic for discussion in the following month.

Whole lotta talk this month… action, not so much. May Mobility did deploy a public trial in Detroit, which you’ll see covered in my new Commercializations section. I thought this would be the best way to inform readers of real-world applications, as the nuance of any company’s design scope (i.e. operating domain) is often lost in the PR.

This Month’s Highlights:

Commercializations:

Note: I used to have a chart here about progress vs. predictions… I’m changing that up to focus on any entity who launches a commercial service.

May Mobility, the young guns out of Michigan working on self-driving software, have deployed five six-passenger Polaris shuttles along a fixed route for Detroit’s Quicken Loans employees. While the application isn’t much to write home about, it is one of the first situations where an AV (albeit manned by a safety driver) has attempted to directly replace a transit route — these employees were, until now, being hauled around by traditional shuttles.