The National Transportation Safety Board’s entry into the investigation of the first fatal crash of a Tesla Model S is a monumental turning point in the autonomous driving movement. While long-time observers of the NTSB note that it only gets involved in investigations where broader implications exist, the agency’s interest… Read More
Author: Roger C. Lanctot
Time for the ZeroDollar Car?
Bankrate.com came out with a report last week raising questions regarding new car pricing with a city-by-city breakdown of affordability. Bankrate’s key finding: a median-income household can not afford the average price of a new vehicle in any of the 50 largest cities in the U.S.… Read More
No Turning Back on Autonomous Driving
Politicians will tell you that Fridays are reserved for announcements (defeats, resignations, indictments) intended to be ignored or lost in the end of week news sink. In that context, the Friday before the U.S. Fourth of July three-day weekend may be regarded as second only to the Friday before Christmas as an ideal opportunity… Read More
Driverless Policy Making
The Vision Zero movement, embraced by Sweden and select U.S. and foreign cities around the world, continues to elude the grasp of U.S. Department of Transportation leadership. I was reading an impassioned letter to the President by Marianne Karth on the issue this morning – impassioned because Karth lost two daughters … Read More
Is Tesla’s Tough Love Two Way?
Tesla applied some tough love last month. The company let two drivers know that the crashes they suffered were their own fault.… Read More
How AT&T Will Turn on Car 2 Car Connectivity
Cnet reports that, starting this week, AT&T is offering “Unlimited Plan” customers the option to add connected cars or a ZTE Mobley Wi-Fi plug-in device to their plan for $40/month for unlimited data – $10/month will buy 1GB. The plan applies to certain Buick, Audi, Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Jaguar, Land… Read More
Ride Hailing is Not Ride Sharing
There are many misconceptions about ride sharing as journalists and analysts are wont to refer to Uber, Lyft, DiDi and the rest. Conceived as a means to increase asset utilization by allowing drivers to pick up passengers along their way, ride sharing services instantly became ride hailing services directly competing with taxis… Read More
How a Connected Watch Will Change the Connected Car Business
It’s amazing the amount of excitement being ginned up over connected cars. Analyst firms regularly publish estimates of hundreds of millions of connected cars on the road by 2020. It’s enough to make you believe it might happen.
If we even come close to those projections it will be a miracle given the disconnect between the wireless… Read More
Future Connected Cars 2016
There are times when a speaker for a large corporation clearly breaks from the cold corporate talking points and suggests something that you just know his managers will consider cringe-worthy. Haden Kirkpatrick, described on the event agenda of the Future Connected Car event in Santa Clara as “director of strategy and … Read More
Paranoia, Porsche, Paul Newman & Self-Driving Cars
I was watching a documentary on the racing life of Paul Newman yesterday and I couldn’t get over the disconnect between Paul Newman’s near-obsession with auto racing and the general public’s understanding of the man. Most of us know Newman for salad dressing and iconic movie roles, but it appears, based on the… Read More
Intel – Everyone’s Favourite Second Source?