There have been plenty of reports and overall concern about the safety of self-driving cars.
Well, now they have their own city to roam free. M City, 32 acres of land on the north campus of the University of Michigan, opened Monday (July 20) in the hopes of becoming an initial and safer testing environment for how self-driving cars will travel in the future, according to Bloomberg.
The $6.5 million, 32-acre facility in Ann Arbor tries to replicate a modern city's traffic and pedestrians via highways and side streets. Bloomberg reports that M City has 40 building facades, a bridge, gravel roads, bustling intersections and obstructed views in addition to a four-lane highway, all the same way any modern city tends to have.
"We had the faculty here at the university design the fully evolved future," Peter Sweatman, head of the Transportation Research Institute, which oversaw the construction of M City, said in an interview, told Bloomberg. "After all, we're replacing humans with machines and those machines need to be able to operate in a full, rich environment."
M City even comes equipped with Sebastian, a robot pedestrian who purposely walks into traffic to test self-driving cars' reaction time to hit their brakes instead of mowing him down.
Essentially, Sweatman hopes that M City's controlled environment becomes the initial testing grounds for self-driving cars and prefers the constructed metropolis over public roads, the way Google has tested its self-driving cars on Silicon Valley streets.
"If you're out on the public roadways, certainly all kinds of really unusual things will arise, but they're only going to arise once," Sweatman said. "We like the idea of creating challenging situations that we can reproduce as many times as we want."
Sweatman believes that once a technology is proved in M City, it can be tested in public.
M City figures to be part of a driverless-car boom that should hit the road running within the next five years. The Boston Consulting Group tells Bloomberg that the autonomous vehicle industry will balloon to $42 billion by 2025 and self-driving cars could account for 25 percent of global auto sales by 2035.
