Humanless City Built To Test Self-Driving Cars

A huge self-driving vehicle testing facility at the university of Michigan opens today. The facility is called, “M City.” It’s 32 acres in size and cost $6.5 million to construct. It features multiple types of driving conditions for the autonomous vehicle trials. However, this place won’t have one thing that most cities do: humans.

This is a testing ground that will have robotic concoctions playing the role pedestrian and cyclist. The makeup of the facility includes 40 fake buildings, a traffic circle, a bridge, a four-lane highway, highway on and exit ramps, purposefully obstructed vehicle views and gravel roads. The goal in “M City” is to be as close to real life as they can be in order to accelerate vehicle testing.

Toyota is among the collaborators on this research project, along with Ford, GM and the Michigan Department of Transportation. Speaking about the project to Bloomberg was Hideki Hada, the general manager of Electronic Systems at an Ann Arbor Toyota facility. Hada told Bloomberg, “We would never do any dangerous or risky tests on the open road, so this will be a good place to test some of the next technology. A big challenge is intersections in the city, because there are vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles together with complex backgrounds with buildings and connections to infrastructure. That’s why this is really important.”

Peter Sweatman, head of the Transportation Research Institute, which created “M City” said self-driving testing is critical as it could be a very marketable product in the near future. Sweatman told Bloomberg, “We believe that autonomous technology is going to be extremely attractive to consumers. So it’s going to have to be deployed as quickly as we reasonably and responsibly can. We designed M City to hyper-accelerate the process.”

Just how attractive do you think self-driving cars will be for consumers? Google just had another self-driving accident crash, but reports indicate it’s not the computers fault. Twelve crashes in just under 3 million miles isn’t too bad. Do you think all of this testing will add up to you selling self-driving cars at your store within five or 10 years?