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Utrecht leads the world in using EVs for grid storage
The Dutch city of Utrecht is embracing vehicle-to-grid technology, an example of which is shown here—an EV connected to a bidirectional charger. The historic Rijn en Zon windmill provides a fitting background for this scene.
Hundreds of charging stations for electric vehicles dot Utrecht’s urban landscape in the Netherlands like little electric mushrooms. Unlike those you may have grown accustomed to seeing, many of these stations don’t just charge electric cars—they can also send power from vehicle batteries to the local utility grid for use by homes and businesses.
Debates over the feasibility and value of such vehicle-to-grid technology go back decades. Those arguments are not yet settled. But big automakers like Volkswagen, Nissan, and Hyundai have moved to produce the kinds of cars that can use such bidirectional chargers—alongside similar vehicle-to-home technology, whereby your car can power your house, say, during a blackout, as promoted by Ford with its new F-150 Lightning. Given the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, many people are thinking hard about how to make the best use of all that rolling battery power.
Utrecht, a largely bicycle-propelled city of 350,000 just south of Amsterdam, has become a proving ground for the bidirectional-charging techniques that have the rapt interest of automakers, engineers, city managers, and power utilities the world over. This initiative is taking place in an environment where everyday citizens want to travel without causing emissions and are increasingly aware of the value of renewables and energy security.
“We wanted to change,” says Eelco Eerenberg, one of Utrecht's deputy mayors and alderman for development, education, and public health. And part of the change involves extending the city’s EV-charging network. “We want to predict where we need to build the next electric charging station.”
So it’s a good moment to consider where vehicle-to-grid concepts first emerged and to see in Utrecht how far they’ve come.
It’s been 25 years since University of Delaware energy and environmental expert Willett Kempton and Green Mountain College energy economist Steve Letendre outlined what they saw as a “dawning interaction between electric-drive vehicles and the electric supply system.” This duo, alongside Timothy Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Alec Brooks of AC Propulsion, laid the foundation for vehicle-to-grid power.
The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It’s yet to be shown clearly why that’s good for the driver.
Their initial idea was that garaged vehicles would have a two-way computer-controlled connection to the electric grid, which could receive power from the vehicle as well as provide power to it. Kempton and Letendre’s 1997 paper in the journal Transportation Research describes how battery power from EVs in people’s homes would feed the grid during a utility emergency or blackout. With on-street chargers, you wouldn’t even need the house.
Bidirectional charging uses an inverter about the size of a breadbasket, located either in a dedicated charging box or onboard the car. The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It’s yet to be shown clearly why that’s good for the driver.
This is a vexing question. Car owners can earn some money by giving a little energy back to the grid at opportune times, or can save on their power bills, or can indirectly subsidize operation of their cars this way. But from the time Kempton and Letendre outlined the concept, potential users also feared losing money, through battery wear and tear. That is, would cycling the battery more than necessary prematurely degrade the very heart of the car? Those lingering questions made it unclear whether vehicle-to-grid technologies would ever catch on.
Market watchers have seen a parade of “just about there” moments for vehicle-to-grid technology. In the United States in 2011, the University of Delaware and the New Jersey–based utility NRG Energy signed a technology-license deal for the first commercial deployment of vehicle-to-grid technology. Their research partnership ran for four years.
In recent years, there’s been an uptick in these pilot projects across Europe and the United States, as well as in China, Japan, and South Korea. In the United Kingdom, experiments are now taking place in suburban homes, using outside wall-mounted chargers metered to give credit to vehicle owners on their utility bills in exchange for uploading battery juice during peak hours. Other trials include commercial auto fleets, a set of utility vans in Copenhagen, two electric school buses in Illinois, and five in New York.
These pilot programs have remained just that, though—pilots. None evolved into a large-scale system. That could change soon. Concerns about battery wear and tear are abating. Last year, Heta Gandhi and Andrew White of the University of Rochestermodeled vehicle-to-grid economics and found battery-degradation costs to be minimal. Gandhi and White also noted that battery capital costs have gone down markedly over time, falling from well over US $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to about $140 in 2020.
As vehicle-to-grid technology becomes feasible, Utrecht is one of the first places to fully embrace it.
The key force behind the changes taking place in this windswept Dutch city is not a global market trend or the maturity of the engineering solutions. It’s having motivated people who are also in the right place at the right time.
One is Robin Berg, who started a company called We Drive Solar from his Utrecht home in 2016. It has evolved into a car-sharing fleet operator with 225 electric vehicles of various makes and models—mostly Renault Zoes, but also Tesla Model 3s, Hyundai Konas, and Hyundai Ioniq 5s. Drawing in partners along the way, Berg has plotted ways to bring bidirectional charging to the We Drive Solar fleet. His company now has 27 vehicles with bidirectional capabilities, with another 150 expected to be added in coming months.
In 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, presided over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. Here the king [middle] is shown with Robin Berg [left], founder of We Drive Solar, and Jerôme Pannaud [right], Renault's general manager for Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images
Amassing that fleet wasn’t easy. We Drive Solar’s two bidirectional Renault Zoes are prototypes, which Berg obtained by partnering with the French automaker. Production Zoes capable of bidirectional charging have yet to come out. Last April, Hyundai delivered 25 bidirectionally capable long-range Ioniq 5s to We Drive Solar. These are production cars with modified software, which Hyundai is making in small numbers. It plans to introduce the technology as standard in an upcoming model.
We Drive Solar’s 1,500 subscribers don’t have to worry about battery wear and tear—that’s the company’s problem, if it is one, and Berg doesn’t think it is. “We never go to the edges of the battery,” he says, meaning that the battery is never put into a charge state high or low enough to shorten its life materially.
We Drive Solar is not a free-flowing, pick-up-by-app-and-drop-where-you-want service. Cars have dedicated parking spots. Subscribers reserve their vehicles, pick them up and drop them off in the same place, and drive them wherever they like. On the day I visited Berg, two of his cars were headed as far as the Swiss Alps, and one was going to Norway. Berg wants his customers to view particular cars (and the associated parking spots) as theirs and to use the same vehicle regularly, gaining a sense of ownership for something they don’t own at all.
That Berg took the plunge into EV ride-sharing and, in particular, into power-networking technology like bidirectional charging, isn’t surprising. In the early 2000s, he started a local service provider called LomboXnet, installing line-of-sight Wi-Fi antennas on a church steeple and on the rooftop of one of the tallest hotels in town. When Internet traffic began to crowd his radio-based network, he rolled out fiber-optic cable.
In 2007, Berg landed a contract to install rooftop solar at a local school, with the idea to set up a microgrid. He now manages 10,000 schoolhouse rooftop panels across the city. A collection of power meters lines his hallway closet, and they monitor solar energy flowing, in part, to his company’s electric-car batteries—hence the company name, We Drive Solar.
Berg did not learn about bidirectional charging through Kempton or any of the other early champions of vehicle-to-grid technology. He heard about it because of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster a decade ago. He owned a Nissan Leaf at the time, and he read about how these cars supplied emergency power in the Fukushima region.
“Okay, this is interesting technology,” Berg recalls thinking. “Is there a way to scale it up here?” Nissan agreed to ship him a bidirectional charger, and Berg called Utrecht city planners, saying he wanted to install a cable for it. That led to more contacts, including at the company managing the local low-voltage grid, Stedin. After he installed his charger, Stedin engineers wanted to know why his meter sometimes ran backward. Later, Irene ten Dam at the Utrecht regional development agency got wind of his experiment and was intrigued, becoming an advocate for bidirectional charging.
Berg and the people working for the city who liked what he was doing attracted further partners, including Stedin, software developers, and a charging-station manufacturer. By 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, was presiding over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. “With both the city and the grid operator, the great thing is, they are always looking for ways to scale up,” Berg says. They don’t just want to do a project and do a report on it, he says. They really want to get to the next step.
Those next steps are taking place at a quickening pace. Utrecht now has 800 bidirectional chargers designed and manufactured by the Dutch engineering firm NieuweWeme. The city will soon need many more.
The number of charging stations in Utrecht has risen sharply over the past decade.
“People are buying more and more electric cars,” says Eerenberg, the alderman. City officials noticed a surge in such purchases in recent years, only to hear complaints from Utrechters that they then had to go through a long application process to have a charger installed where they could use it. Eerenberg, a computer scientist by training, is still working to unwind these knots. He realizes that the city has to go faster if it is to meet the Dutch government’s mandate for all new cars to be zero-emission in eight years.
The amount of energy being used to charge EVs in Utrecht has skyrocketed in recent years.
Although similar mandates to put more zero-emission vehicles on the road in New York and California failed in the past, the pressure for vehicle electrification is higher now. And Utrecht city officials want to get ahead of demand for greener transportation solutions. This is a city that just built a central underground parking garage for 12,500 bicycles and spent years digging up a freeway that ran through the center of town, replacing it with a canal in the name of clean air and healthy urban living.
A driving force in shaping these changes is Matthijs Kok, the city’s energy-transition manager. He took me on a tour—by bicycle, naturally—of Utrecht’s new green infrastructure, pointing to some recent additions, like a stationary battery designed to store solar energy from the many panels slated for installation at a local public housing development.
This map of Utrecht shows the city’s EV-charging infrastructure. Orange dots are the locations of existing charging stations; red dots denote charging stations under development. Green dots are possible sites for future charging stations.
“This is why we all do it,” Kok says, stepping away from his propped-up bike and pointing to a brick shed that houses a 400-kilowatt transformer. These transformers are the final link in the chain that runs from the power-generating plant to high-tension wires to medium-voltage substations to low-voltage transformers to people’s kitchens.
There are thousands of these transformers in a typical city. But if too many electric cars in one area need charging, transformers like this can easily become overloaded. Bidirectional charging promises to ease such problems.
Kok works with others in city government to compile data and create maps, dividing the city into neighborhoods. Each one is annotated with data on population, types of households, vehicles, and other data. Together with a contracted data-science group, and with input from ordinary citizens, they developed a policy-driven algorithm to help pick the best locations for new charging stations. The city also included incentives for deploying bidirectional chargers in its 10-year contracts with vehicle charge-station operators. So, in these chargers went.
Experts expect bidirectional charging to work particularly well for vehicles that are part of a fleet whose movements are predictable. In such cases, an operator can readily program when to charge and discharge a car’s battery.
We Drive Solar earns credit by sending battery power from its fleet to the local grid during times of peak demand and charges the cars’ batteries back up during off-peak hours. If it does that well, drivers don’t lose any range they might need when they pick up their cars. And these daily energy trades help to keep prices down for subscribers.
Encouraging car-sharing schemes like We Drive Solar appeals to Utrecht officials because of the struggle with parking—a chronic ailment common to most growing cities. A huge construction site near the Utrecht city center will soon add 10,000 new apartments. Additional housing is welcome, but 10,000 additional cars would not be. Planners want the ratio to be more like one car for every 10 households—and the amount of dedicated public parking in the new neighborhoods will reflect that goal.
Some of the cars available from We Drive Solar, including these Hyundai Ioniq 5s, are capable of bidirectional charging.We Drive Solar
Projections for the large-scale electrification of transportation in Europe are daunting. According to a Eurelectric/Deloitte report, there could be 50 million to 70 million electric vehicles in Europe by 2030, requiring several million new charging points, bidirectional or otherwise. Power-distribution grids will need hundreds of billions of euros in investment to support these new stations .
The morning before Eerenberg sat down with me at city hall to explain Utrecht’s charge-station planning algorithm, war broke out in Ukraine. Energy prices now strain many households to the breaking point. Gasoline has reached $6 a gallon (if not more) in some places in the United States. In Germany in mid-June, the driver of a modest VW Golf had to pay about €100 (more than $100) to fill the tank. In the U.K., utility bills shot up on average by more than 50 percent on the first of April.
The war upended energy policies across the European continent and around the world, focusing people’s attention on energy independence and security, and reinforcing policies already in motion, such as the creation of emission-free zones in city centers and the replacement of conventional cars with electric ones. How best to bring about the needed changes is often unclear, but modeling can help.
Nico Brinkel, who is working on his doctorate in Wilfried van Sark’s photovoltaics-integration lab at Utrecht University, focuses his models at the local level. In his calculations, he figures that, in and around Utrecht, low-voltage grid reinforcements cost about €17,000 per transformer and about €100,000 per kilometer of replacement cable. “If we are moving to a fully electrical system, if we’re adding a lot of wind energy, a lot of solar, a lot of heat pumps, a lot of electric vehicles…,” his voice trails off. “Our grid was not designed for this.”
But the electrical infrastructure will have to keep up. One of Brinkel’s studies suggests that if a good fraction of the EV chargers are bidirectional, such costs could be spread out in a more manageable way. “Ideally, I think it would be best if all of the new chargers were bidirectional,” he says. “The extra costs are not that high.”
Berg doesn’t need convincing. He has been thinking about what bidirectional charging offers the whole of the Netherlands. He figures that 1.5 million EVs with bidirectional capabilities—in a country of 8 million cars—would balance the national grid. “You could do anything with renewable energy then,” he says.
Seeing that his country is starting with just hundreds of cars capable of bidirectional charging, 1.5 million is a big number. But one day, the Dutch might actually get there.
This article appears in the August 2022 print issue as “A Road Test for Vehicle-to-Grid Tech.”
Michael Dumiak is a Berlin-based writer and reporter covering science and culture and a longtime contributor to IEEE Spectrum. For Spectrum, he has covered digital models of ailing hearts in Belgrade, reported on technology from Minsk and shale energy from the Estonian-Russian border, explored cryonics in Saarland, and followed the controversial phaseout of incandescent lightbulbs in Berlin. He is author and editor of Woods and the Sea: Estonian Design and the Virtual Frontier.
What happens during an extended blackout? How long can EVs supply the grid? Hours? Days? What's the plan when most or all EV batteries are dead and the power is still out?
The company, says the company—but other interpretations persist
Mark Harris is an investigative science and technology reporter based in Seattle, with a particular interest in robotics, transportation, green technologies, and medical devices. He’s on Twitter at @meharris and email at mark(at)meharris(dot)com. Email or DM for Signal number for sensitive/encrypted messaging.
A Tesla user charges his Model S in Burbank, Calif.
On 29 September 2020, a masked man entered a branch of the Wells Fargo bank in Washington, D.C., and handed the teller a note: “This is a robbery. Act calm give me all hundreds.” The teller complied. The man then fled the bank and jumped into a gray Tesla Model S. This was one of three bank robberies the man attempted the same day.
When FBI agents began investigating, they reviewed Washington, D.C.’s District Department of Transportation camera footage, and spotted a Tesla matching the getaway vehicle’s description. The license plate on that car showed that it was registered to Exelorate Enterprises LLC, the parent company of Steer EV—a D.C.-based monthly vehicle-subscription service.
Agents served a subpoena on Steer EV for the renter’s billing and contact details. Steer EV provided those—and also voluntarily supplied historical GPS data for the vehicle. The data showed the car driving between, and parking at, each bank at the time of the heists. The renter was arrested and, in September, sentenced to four years in prison.
“If an entity is collecting, retaining, [and] sharing historical location data on an individualized level, it’s extraordinarily difficult to de-identify that, verging on impossible.” —John Verdi, Future of Privacy Forum
In this case, the GPS data likely came from a device Steer EV itself installed in the vehicle (neither Steer nor Tesla responded to interview requests). However, according to researchers, Tesla is potentially in a position to provide similar GPS tracks for many of its 3 million customers.
For Teslas built since mid-2017, “every time you drive, it records the whole track of where you drive, the GPS coordinates and certain other metrics for every mile driven,” says Green, a Tesla owner who has reverse engineered the company’s Autopilot data collection. “They say that they are anonymizing the trigger results,” but, he says, “you could probably match everything to a single person if you wanted to.”
Each of these trip logs, and other data “snapshots” captured by the Autopilot system that include images and video, is stripped of its identifying VIN and given a temporary, random ID number when it is uploaded to Tesla, says Green. However, he notes, that temporary ID can persist for days or weeks, connecting all the uploads made during that time.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla MotorsMark Mahaney/Redux
Given that some trip logs will also likely record journeys between a driver’s home, school, or place of work, guaranteeing complete anonymity is unrealistic, says John Verdi, senior vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum: “If an entity is collecting, retaining, [and] sharing historical location data on an individualized level, it’s extraordinarily difficult to de-identify that, verging on impossible.”
Tesla, like all other automakers, has a policy that spells out what it can and cannot do with the data it gets from customers’ vehicles, including location information. This states that while the company does not sell customer and vehicle data, it can share that data with service providers, business partners, affiliates, some authorized third parties, and government entities according to the law.
Owners can buy a special kit for US $1,400 that allows them to access data on their own car's event data recorder, but this represents just a tiny subset of the data the company collects, and is related only to crashes. Owners living in California and Europe benefit from legislation that means Tesla will provide access to more data generated by their vehicles, although not the Autopilot snapshots and trip logs that are supposedly anonymized.
Once governments realize that a company possesses such a trove of information, it could be only a matter of time before they seek access to it. “If the data exists…and in particular exists in the domain of somebody who’s not the subject of those data, it’s much more likely that a government will eventually get access to them in some way,” says Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor in the schools of law and engineering at the University of South Carolina.
“Individuals ought to think about their cars more like they think about their cellphones.” —John Verdi, Future of Privacy Forum
This is not necessarily a terrible thing, Walker says, who suggests that such rich data could unlock valuable insights into which roads or intersections are dangerous. The wealth of data could also surface subtle problems in the vehicles themselves.
In many ways, the data genie is already out of the bottle, according to Verdi. “Individuals ought to think about their cars more like they think about their cellphones,” he says. “The auto industry has a lot to learn from the ways that mobile-phone operating systems handle data permissions…. Both iOS and Android have made great strides in recent years in empowering consumers when it comes to data collection, data disclosure, and data use.”
Tesla permits owners to control some data sharing, including Autopilot and road segment analytics. If they want to opt out of data collection completely, they can ask Tesla to disable the vehicle’s connectivity altogether. However, this would mean losing features such as remote services, Internet radio, voice commands, and Web browser functionality, and even safety-related over-the-air updates.
Green says he is not aware of anyone who has successfully undergone this nuclear option. The only real way to know you’ve prevented data sharing, he says, is to “go to a repair place and ask them to remove the modem out of the car.”
Tesla almost certainly has the biggest empire of customer and vehicle data among automakers. It also appears to be the most aggressive in using that data to develop its automated driving systems, and to protect its reputation in the courts of law and public opinion, even to the detriment of some of its customers.
But while the world’s most valuable automaker dominates the discussion around connected cars, others are not far behind. Elon Musk’s insight—to embrace the data-driven world that our other digital devices already inhabit—is rapidly becoming the industry standard. When our cars become as powerful and convenient as our phones, it is hardly surprising that they suffer the same challenges around surveillance, privacy, and accountability.
But can a fire-hose approach solve self-driving’s biggest problems?
Mark Harris is an investigative science and technology reporter based in Seattle, with a particular interest in robotics, transportation, green technologies, and medical devices. He’s on Twitter at @meharris and email at mark(at)meharris(dot)com. Email or DM for Signal number for sensitive/encrypted messaging.
In 2019, Elon Musk stood up at a Tesla day devoted to automated driving and said, “Essentially everyone’s training the network all the time, is what it amounts to. Whether Autopilot’s on or off, the network is being trained.”
Tesla’s suite of assistive and semi-autonomous technologies, collectively known as Autopilot, is among the most widely deployed—and undeniably the most controversial—driver-assistance systems on the road today. While many drivers love it, using it for a combined total of more than 5 billion kilometers, the technology has been involved in hundreds of crashes, some of them fatal, and is currently the subject of a comprehensive investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
This second story—in IEEE Spectrum’s series of three on Tesla’s empire of data (story 1; story 3)—focuses on how Autopilot rests on a foundation of data harvested from the company’s own customers. Although the company’s approach has unparalleled scope and includes impressive technological innovations, it also faces particular challenges—not least of which is Musk’s decision to widely deploy the misleadingly named Full Self-Driving feature as a largely untested beta.
“Right now, automated vehicles are one to two magnitudes below human drivers in terms of safety performance.” —Henry Liu, Mcity
Most companies working on automated driving rely on a small fleet of highly instrumented test vehicles, festooned with high-resolution cameras, radars, and laser-ranging lidar devices. Some of these have been estimated to generate 750 megabytes of sensor data every second, providing a rich seam of training data for neural networks and other machine-learning systems to improve their driving skills.
Such systems have now effectively solved the task of everyday driving, including for a multitude of road users, different weather conditions, and road types, says Henry Liu, director of Mcity, a public-private mobility research partnership at the University of Michigan.
“But right now, automated vehicles are one to two magnitudes below human drivers in terms of safety performance,” says Liu. “And that’s because current automated vehicles can’t handle the curse of rarity: low-frequency, long-tail, safety-critical events that they just don’t see enough to know how to handle.” Think of a deer suddenly springing into the road, or a slick of spilled fuel.
Tesla’s bold bet is that its own customers can provide the long tail of data needed to boost self-driving cars to superhuman levels of safety. Above and beyond their contractual obligations, many are happy to do so—seeing themselves as willing participants in the development of technology that they have been told will one day soon allow them to simply sit back and enjoy being driven by the car itself.
For a start, the routing information for every trip undertaken in a recent model Autopilot-equipped Tesla is shared with the company—see the the previous installment in this series. But Tesla’s data effort goes far beyond navigation.
In autonomypresentations over the past few years, Musk and Tesla’s then-head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, detailed the company’s approach, including its so-called Shadow Mode.
In Shadow Mode, operating on Tesla vehicles since 2016, if the car’s Autopilot computer is not controlling the car, it is simulating the driving process in parallel with the human driver. When its own predictions do not match the driver’s behavior, this might trigger the recording of a short “snapshot” of the car’s cameras, speed, acceleration, and other parameters for later uploading to Tesla. Snapshots are also triggered when a Tesla crashes.
After the snapshots are uploaded, a team may review them to identify human actions that the system should try to imitate, and input them as training data for its neural networks. Or they may notice that the system is failing, for instance, to properly identify road signs obscured by trees.
In that case, engineers can train a detector designed specifically for this scenario and download it to some or all Tesla vehicles. “We can beam it down to the fleet, and we can ask the fleet to please apply this detector on top of everything else you’re doing,” said Karpathy in 2020. If that detector thinks it spots such a road sign, it will capture images from the car’s cameras for later uploading,
His team would quickly receive thousands of images, which they would use to iterate the detector, and eventually roll it out to all production vehicles. “I’m not exactly sure how you build out a data set like this without the fleet,” said Karpathy. An amateur Tesla hacker who tweets using the pseudonym Green told Spectrum that he identified over 900 Autopilot test campaigns, before the company stopped numbering them in 2019.
For all the promise of Tesla’s fleet learning, Autopilot has yet to prove that it can drive as safely as a human, let alone be trusted to operate a vehicle without supervision.
Liu is bullish on Tesla’s approach to leveraging its ever-growing consumer base. “I don’t think a small…fleet will ever be able to handle these [rare] situations,” he says. “But even with these shadow drivers—and if you deploy millions of these fleet vehicles, that’s a very, very large data collection—I don’t know whether Tesla is fully utilizing them because there’s no public information really available.”
One obstacle is the sheer cost. Karpathy admitted that having a large team to assess and label images and video was expensive and said that Tesla was working on detectors that can train themselves on video clips captured in Autopilot snapshots. In June, the company duly laid off 195 people working on data annotation at a Bay Area office.
While the Autopilot does seem to have improved over the years, with Tesla allowing its operation on more roads and in more situations, serious and fatal accidents are still occurring. These may or may not have purely technical causes. Certainly, some drivers seem to be overestimating the system’s capabilities or are either accidentally or deliberately failing to supervise it sufficiently.
Other experts are worried that Tesla’s approach has more fundamental flaws. “The vast majority of the world generally believes that you’re never going to get the same level of safety with a camera-only system that you will based on a system that includes lidar,” says Dr. Matthew Weed, senior director of product management at Luminar, a company that manufacturers advanced lidar systems.
He points out that Tesla’s Shadow Mode only captures a small fraction of each car’s driving time. “When it comes to safety, the whole thing is about…your unknown unknowns,” he says. “What are the things that I don’t even know about that will cause my system to fail? Those are really difficult to ascertain in a bulk fleet” that is down-selecting data.
For all the promise of Tesla’s fleet learning and the enthusiastic support of many of its customers, Autopilot has yet to prove that it can drive as safely as a human, let alone be trusted to operate a vehicle without supervision. And there are other difficulties looming. Andrej Karpathy left Tesla in mid-July, while the company continues to face the damaging possibility of NHTSA issuing a recall for Autopilot in the United States. This would be a terrible PR (and possibly economic) blow for the company but would likely not halt its harvesting of customer data to improve the system, nor prevent its continued deployment overseas.
Tesla’s use of fleet vehicle data to develop Autopilot echoes the user-fueled rise of Internet giants like Google, YouTube, and Facebook. The more its customers drive, so Musk’s story goes, the better the system performs.
But just as tech companies have had to come to terms with their complicated relationships with data, so Tesla is beginning to see a backlash. Why does the company charge US $12,000 for a so-called “full self-driving” capability that is utterly reliant on its customers’ data? How much control do drivers have over data extracted from their daily journeys? And what happens when other entities, from companies to the government, seek access to it? These are the themes for our third story.
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