Michigan approves millions for autonomous car testing facility

The State of Michigan approved a $17 million loan to build a 311-acre facility for autonomous vehicle testing on Wednesday. The loan will be used to purchase unused land at Willow Run, which used to be owned by General Motors and was a Ford bomber plant in WWII.

It will be one of the largest facilities dedicated to autonomous vehicle testing. The American Center for Mobility (ACM), which will run the facility, plans to add faux houses, traffic lights, and other urban features to simulate real life events.

Funding will be provided by the Michigan Strategic Fund (MSF). It has already spent $2.8 million on the ACM, bringing the total to $20 million. The investment group says that the ACM intends to pay back the loans over 30 years, though it didn’t mention how it plans to make money.

Automakers, universities, and other autonomous vehicles firms will be invited to test vehicles in the facility. The University of Michigan already has MCity, an 18-acre site, but may move or merge the facilities in the future, considering the huge size of ACM.

Members of the Michigan congressional delegation called on Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx to certify ACM as a national testing and verification facility, in the hopes that it would receive federal funding.

Foxx has not commented on the facility.

Funding for autonomous car facility a good start

The $20 million is a good start for ACM, but it wants an additional $60 million to complete the facility. This will include tunnels, bridges, and cul-de-sacs, making it the perfect facility to validate if a self-driving car is truly fit for the road.

Private investors may make up some of the investment, but the state of Michigan is pushing hard for federal funding to make up the difference.

Several automakers and tech firms have ongoing autonomous tests in the U.S., including Google, Tesla, Uber, General Motors, and Ford, but most of these are done on public roads with a driver inside the vehicle.

In a controlled environment, these firms may be able to test fully autonomous vehicles without a driver inside, or where the driver doesn’t need to keep his eyes on the road and can watch movies or sleep. That could be useful for advanced tests on self-driving systems behavior in certain situations, without worrying about fatal injuries.

GM to spend $1 billion on self-driving tech center in Detroit

It’s not all happening in Silicon Valley.

General Motors has created a new team dedicated to autonomous cars at its Warren Tech Center, based in Detroit. There are already several hundred employees working on the development of its self-driving system, alongside test drivers already active in San Francisco.

“We’ve got several hundred people in this space right now … expanding to several hundred people more (by end of this year into next year),” said Ken Kelzer, vice president of global vehicle components to Detroit News.

Inside the tech center, General Motors has developed an indoor track for car testing. Employees are also able to hail the autonomous Chevrolet Volt cars from outside of the building, using an app, which lets them test the self-driving system on public roads with traffic.

Adding another billion to GM’s autonomous spending

The tech center redevelopment is said to cost GM $1 billion—the same price it paid for self-driving startup Cruise Automation.

“The nice thing about the Tech Center is there are a lot of different traffic maneuvers,” said chief technology officer, Jon Lauckner. “For example, we have roundabouts where you have to merge on and merge off. It turns out to be a fairly complicated situation. There are definitely medians, left turns across traffic, you know the kinds of things you’re going to find definitely in an urban environment. And the kinds of things that are going to allow us to basically refine and further develop the sensing and processing that we’re going to need to have a fully autonomous vehicle in the future.”

GM expects the combination of in-house and real-life testing to propel them ahead of other automakers currently working on self-driving systems, though it is behind Tesla, Google, and Daimler, who have made large investments or managed millions of miles already.

The hailing services inside the building are expected, considering GM spent $500 million to own a part of ridesharing app Lyft earlier this year. GM wants its Chevrolet Volt to be a large part of Lyft’s driverless fleet, and in the meantime plans to sell a lot of the cars to drivers through prefered financing options.

Detroit Auto Show to launch an all-autonomous spin-off in 2017

After swamping the Detroit Auto Show for the past two years, event directors have decided to debut an autonomous spin-off show in 2017, called AutoMobili-D.

The event will be held in Cobo Center Atrium in Detroit, Michigan on Jan 8, according toBoston Free Press. The atrium offers a 120,000 square-foot space and indoor test track for manufacturers to preview self-driving capabilities to industry experts and fans of the motor companies in a controlled environment.

See Also: Volvo tests self-driving cars in China and Sweden

“AutoMobili-D will provide an international look at the ever-changing world of consumer mobility and the ecosystem of companies and innovations that are driving this exciting transformation,” said Sam Slaughter, 2017 NAIAS chairman. “AutoMobili-D will provide the ideal platform for B2B networking and thought-provoking demonstrations.”

The spin-off event comes at a time where auto shows are struggling to maintain a powerful spot in the industry. Regular manufacturers are starting to prefer livestreaming or virtual reality announcements to spending loads on a spot at an auto show. Autonomous cars are in a different zone however, as manufacturers preview one or two features instead of an entire car at auto events. Previews require test drivers and a lot of space, two things auto shows have in spades.

Detroit has always been the go-to auto show

“Just as NAIAS has served as the leading global venue for automakers to debut brand-defining vehicles, AutoMobili-D will be the go-to setting for automakers, suppliers and startups alike to unveil advanced technologies and initiatives that will move the transportation industry into the next century,” said Slaughter.

Next year, we might see the first iterations of “mind-off” autonomous cars, which require minimal human interaction to drive. We are already seeing NuTonomy potentially launch a taxi service in Singapore, Baidu preparing to launch a similar service in China, and Google setting their sights on driverless software on the roads by 2018.

Add to that General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and Citroën all working on autonomous vehicles, and the Detroit autonomous show looks to be a packed event full of startups and big name brands.