Self-Driving Cars Get A Test City To Themselves

This might be the coolest auto lab in the country.

Driverless cars don’t have to worry about hitting pedestrians in Mcity, a 32-acre fake town that opened Monday at the University of Michigan.

The university wanted to simulate environments that pose the greatest challenges to automated vehicles. It has also started prototype driving since last month of the smallish, bubble-shaped prototypes of its own design on public roads, around Mountain View and in Austin, Texas. There’s even “Sebastian”, an engineered pedestrian that can step into traffic to test whether the vehicles can sense him and act accordingly. The facility will also develop ways for cars to identify nearby self-driving vehicles and traffic signals, and run them under various weather conditions, particularly the heavy snowfall common to Michigan winters, Bloomberg reported.

Peter Sweatman, the director of the Mobility Transformation Center, says other test sites in Sweden and Japan have some of the same features, but the Michigan site is one of the most advanced autonomous vehicle testing grounds in the world. “The future of automated, connected vehicles holds the promise to drive down those numbers significantly”. 60 companies will test out autonomous cars at Mcity.

If you have any doubt about how quickly self-driving cars are coming to the road, check out M City in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

One of the university’s goals is to have driverless vehicles on Ann Arbor roads by 2021.

The investment cost of MCity was $10 million, Michigan Radio reports.

Ryan Eustice, an affiliate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, has been testing at the web site with Ford Motor Co. considering that November, when the streets were being paved but other features were not nevertheless mounted.