Welcome to Mcity, the Place Driverless Vehicles Call Home - Discover Magazine (blog)
On Monday, the University of Michigan announced the founding of Mcity, a 32-acre stretch of land on the Ann Arbor campus that no person will ever call home. Instead, driverless cars milling about Mcity’s urban and suburban environs will represent the “city’s” population. Mcity serves as the first urban environment specifically designed to test and perfect autonomous vehicle technologies before they are mass-marketed. A century later, Silicon Valley has started to lead the way in terms of advancing automotive technology — Google’s self-driving vehicles are already cruising the streets of California , for example. For the “founders” of Mcity, the test facility is a bold move to reassert Michigan’s top-dog status in the future of automobile technology. By all appearances, Mcity is a real city complete with traffic lights, roundabouts, construction obstacles, sidewalks, streetlights and even a quaint downtown district. With a plethora of real-world props, researchers and engineers can design myriad traffic scenarios to test self-driving vehicles’ skills. The $10 million Mcity was planned as a safe place to test the limits of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies, which will play a key role in preventing collisions. Ford is already testing technology in Mcity , and Honda, GM, Toyota, Nissan and other tech companies have also invested in the facility. Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com
