Word: driverless
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...much of Dubai has been built on short-term loans, based on the idea that income from the projects would buoy liquidity and help roll forward debt payments. For example, Dubai's driverless metro system, one of the most advanced in the world, is financed through three-year notes, which the city-state believed they could renew as ticket fees helped pay the interest. Now, the international consortium that is building the system - including the Japanese construction giants Mitsubishi and Obayashi as well as the Turkish company Yapi Merkezi - are probably left with huge fees unpaid...
DARPA's first driverless rally, in 2004, was an off-road race. This year the agency focused on urban features. The 60-mile (100 km) course included intersections and buildings, and contestants had to park and merge with traffic. On the outside, most of the vehicles looked quite similar: conventional sedans and SUVs plastered with corporate-sponsor logos and encrusted with sensors, their backseats loaded with rack-mounted PCs. The one big exception was a monster truck so enormous that the course had to be widened to accommodate...
...runner-up, a Passat from Stanford. The Chevy's average speed of 14 m.p.h. (23 km/h) wasn't exactly blazing but was a big improvement over the 2004 race, in which no robots finished at all. The atmosphere was celebratory, though tempered by the uncanniness of watching driverless cars à la Stephen King's Christine, a 1958 Plymouth with a taste for blood. "It's pretty creepy when your vehicle starts beeping and it peels out," says a grad student on the MIT team, which placed fourth. "You're sitting here thinking, Oh my God, what's happening? But when...
AUTOPILOT Toyota's driverless NGV bus runs on compressed natural gas and uses magnetic markers embedded in the road to find...
AUTONOMOUS LAND VEHICLE. A robot-like, driverless device on which work is well in progress. The 15,000-lb. behemoth "sees" through a television camera linked to a built-in computer that matches images to data in its memory and decides which way the vehicle should go. The blue-and-white ALV successfully lumbered down a Denver test track earlier this summer. Though it negotiated the narrow, half-mile course at just 3 m.p.h., that was far faster than in any previous trial...