A 32-Acre Test Site for Self-Driving Cars

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 20, 7:04AM EDT

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The regular use of self-driving cars is way off in the future. The software for these cars is still immature. Witness the recent minor crash of one of Google’s experimental vehicles. No one was hurt, much. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) ought to be further along than any other company. It has an army of engineers and several years of test miles already driven. Many German car companies, and the so-called Big Three in America, have also started testing.

The testing of these cars has come of age, even if their use has not. A new 32-acre facility will allow testing under a nearly infinite set of circumstances:

Testing new technologies in a realistic off-roadway environment is an essential step before a significant number of highly automated vehicles can be deployed safely on actual roadways. Working with the Michigan Department of Transportation, U-M researchers have designed Mcity, a unique test facility for evaluating the capabilities of connected and automated vehicles and systems.

Occupying 32 acres at the University’s North Campus Research Complex, Mcity simulates the broad range of complexities vehicles encounter in urban and suburban environments. It includes approximately five lane-miles of roads with intersections, traffic signs and signals, sidewalks, benches, simulated buildings, street lights, and obstacles such as construction barriers. Current plans call for the facility be operational by spring 2015.

While self-driving cars have been tested on the road, nothing up to this point offers “sidewalks, benches, and simulated buildings.”

This facility allows new sets of experiments, and even if those are successful, the self-driving car industry will still face at least two barriers. The first is that most people, as far as anyone can tell, want to drive their own cars. The second is the belief that, even if unfounded, the best self-driving cars cannot be safe. Robots are as prone to accidents as people are.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.