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Akerson calls for GM tech to stymie Tesla

Electric vehicle maker Tesla has had some good days lately as sales of the Model S have exceeded expectations as much as the company's profits, thanks in no small part to innovative thinking that has resulted in mass sales of ZEV credits to other manufacturers, free charging stations, 90-second battery swaps and manufacturer-owned dealerships. All of this has the attention of General Motors, who views Tesla as a disruptive force to the auto industry and as a threat to the 104-year-old automaker.
Case in point: GM recognizes that Tesla must be doing something right if it can sell more of its $69,900 Model S sedans than the $39,145 Volt. So what is GM doing about it? Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson assigned a small team to study Tesla so the company won't be caught off guard in the future. In an interview with Bloomberg, Steve Girsky, GM vice chairman, said, "History is littered with big companies that ignored innovation that was coming their way because you didn't know where you could be disrupted."
GM was one of those big companies at one point, and it hasn't quite broken that mold. It has struggled to move on from the old, inefficient practices of its past, leading Akerson to chide employees at a recent conference in Houston because so many in-house patents had failed to be commercialized and implemented in GM designs. This, of course, resulted in a huge research-and-development budget that was wasteful. But Akerson knows that GM must rely on innovation and a tight focus on technologies that customers want if it is to be profitable and survive in the long term.

Could self-driving cars stop terrorist attacks?

Terrorists have taken to using a weapon that's easy to obtain and can do a lot of damage: ordinary vehicles, driven into crowds. A Department of Homeland Security-FBI bulletin from 2012 warned that "vehicle-ramming offers terrorists with limited access to explosives or weapons an opportunity to conduct a homeland attack with minimal prior training or experience." CNN recently listed nine vehicle-based terrorist attacks that have occurred within the past year, and in just in the past three months incidents in New York, Edmonton and Barcelona have claimed more than 20 lives and injured dozens after ISIS-affiliated drivers plowed into pedestrians. The deadliest so far was a Bastille Day attack in Nice, France that killed 86 people after a terrorist drove a truck into a crowd following a fireworks display. CNN also reported that "Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch encouraged its recruits in the West to use trucks as weapons," and noted that a 2010 article in the terrorist group's webzine called for deploying a truck as a "mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah." Such attacks have been more common in Europe and other places where guns are harder to get, making vehicles violent and readily available weapons. But it's not only ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists that have turned cars into weapons. A man with white nationalist ties drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring dozens more. Some believe that autonomous vehicle technology could help stop these tragedies. "Terrorist attacks like the one in New York are a good example of why we need AVs more quickly," Caleb Watney, technology policy associate at the R Street Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, recently told the website Inverse. Dr. Junfeng Jiao, director of the Urban Information Lab at the University of Texas, told Inverse that "these tragedies may be taken into account by the makers such as Tesla and Google" when developing autonomous technology. "This is a huge opportunity for the next generation to de-weaponize cars," he added. Many vehicles already have forward collision warning with emergency autonomous braking, and a few combine it with pedestrian detection, although the latter technology typically works at speeds below 20 mph.

Tesla working to eliminate side mirrors

Of all the concept car technologies, one of our favorites has been the deletion of side-view mirrors in favor of video cameras. Besides improving the look of the car, it'd lower drag and improve fuel economy. However, cost, available technology, and most importantly, the government, stand in the way of this tech making it onto a production model.
It's that last facet that Tesla is seeking to change. As Automotive News explains, when the Model X debuted in concept form, it was without wing mirrors. But when the production car was revealed, it had the conventional mirrors, largely because the camera'd car violated the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety code (Standard 111, to be precise).
Now comes word that Tesla has actively been lobbying the NHTSA to do away with the standard. It's got breathing room at the moment. We reported a few months ago that the federal mandate regarding backup cameras had been pushed back to 2015. That gives Tesla plenty of time to work the safety administration over regarding the mirror replacement, getting the new tech approved in the next mandate.