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New autonomous testing ground in Michigan will help battle bad weather

If one of the big weaknesses of autonomous vehicles is their ability to navigate in the snow, consider this a trial by fire. The American Center for Mobility says it has opened its $110 million driverless car testing facility on the site of a former General Motors assembly plant in Michigan, with Toyota and auto supplier Visteon the first to begin testing this week. The ACM proving ground is a 500-acre site at historic Willow Run in Ypsilanti Township, near Ann Arbor. It's one of 10 sites designated by the U.S. Department of Transportation as pilot proving ground sites to test AV technologies. It features a variety of simulated environments to test driverless cars, including a 2.5-mile highway loop, two double overpasses, intersections, roundabouts and a 700-foot curved tunnel. It also opens just as the region experiences a series of snowstorms and the first frigid temperatures of the season. That ability to test autonomous vehicles in a wide variety of weather conditions is important, as autonomous vehicle sensors have struggled to handle cold, wet and snowy conditions. Google parent Alphabet in October said its Waymo division was expanding its winter testing operations to Michigan, making it the sixth state where it's testing its driverless car systems. In a Medium blog post, Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote that "This type of testing will give us the opportunity to assess the way our sensors perform in wet, cold conditions. And it will also build on the advanced driving skills we've developed over the last eight years by teaching our cars how to handle things like skidding on icy, unplowed roads." Waymo also opened a development center in suburban Detroit in 2016, working with Fiat Chrysler to integrate its autonomous technology into Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans. Visteon began testing and validating its DriveCore autonomous driving platform to evaluate algorithms, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure technology and other systems. Toyota used the facility Wednesday to begin orientation and driver training. ACM has so far secured $110 million to construct the first two phases from founders Ford, Hyundai America Technical Center, Toyota and Visteon, and says it expects to announce more investment soon.

Hyundai i20 WRC gets shakedown in Finland

It's always a good day when we get to post a video about rally racing. It's even better when that video is of a new WRC competitor undergoing testing. This spy video shows Hyundai's i20 WRC, a car that debuted nearly one year ago at the 2012 Paris Motor Show. It's set to usher in Hyundai's return to top-flight motorsports, and will do battle with the cars from Citroen, Ford and Volkswagen that are currently contesting the 2013 season.
This video, which shows the i20 testing on the notoriously tough Finnish rally stages, gives the impression that progress on the new WRC contender is going well. It certainly looks fast, and as with the vast majority of rally cars, it sounds absolutely wonderful (listen to some of those gun-shot-like backfires). Take a look below for the whole, glorious three minutes and 20 seconds of unadulterated rally noise, flying dirt and jumping.

Solid-state batteries: Why Toyota's plans could be a game-changer for EVs

Word out of Japan today is that Toyota is working on launching a new solid-state battery for electric vehicles that will put it solidly in the EV game by 2022. Which leads to a simple question: What is a solid-state battery, and why does it matter? Back in February, John Goodenough observed, "Cost, safety, energy density, rates of charge and discharge and cycle life are critical for battery-driven cars to be more widely adopted." And risking a bad pun on his surname, he seemed to be implying that all of those characteristics weren't currently good enough in autos using lithium-ion batteries. This comment is relevant because Goodenough, professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin - it so happens, he turns 95 today - is the co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, the type of battery that is pretty much the mainstay of current electric vehicles. And he and a research fellow at U of T were announcing they'd developed a solid-state battery, one that has improved energy density (which means a car so equipped can drive further) and can be recharged more quickly and more often (a.k.a., "long cycle life") than a lithium-ion battery. (Did you ever notice that with time your iPhone keeps less of a charge than it did back when it was shiny and new? That's because it has a limited cycle life. Which is one thing when you're talking about a phone. And something else entirely when it involves a whole car.) What's more, there is reduced mass for a solid-state battery. And there isn't the same safety concern that exists with li-ion batteries vis-a- vis conflagration (which is why at airplane boarding gates they say they'll check your carryon as long as you remove all lithium-ion batteries). Lithium-ion batteries may be far more advanced than the lead-acid batteries that are under the hood of essentially every car that wasn't built in Fremont, Calif., but as is the case with those heavy black rectangles, li-ion batteries contain a liquid. In the lithium-ion battery, the liquid, the electrolyte, moves the lithium ions from the negative to the positive side (anode to cathode) of the battery. In a solid-state design, there is no liquid sloshing around, which also means that there's no liquid that would freeze at low operating temperatures. What Toyota is using for its solid-state battery is still unknown, as is the case for the solid-state batteries that Hyundai is reportedly working on for its EVs.