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Tag: self-driving cars

  • Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla

    Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla

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    As I arrive, he’s laying out an impressive lunch spread of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including at the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: Its first public use of the Softbank cash. It might have flown under the radar until that headline-making funding round in May, but this start-up started up in 2017, and like most overnight successes has been a long time in the making.

    That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “trough of disillusionment” so common in tech when hype has to translate into application. Some of the biggest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the toughest problem they were working on. Too tough, in some cases: Among many others, Apple, Uber and Volkswagen have quit AV programs in recent years.

    But there’s a new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo is now giving 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and has just announced its expansion to Austin and Atlanta from early next year. Autonomous trucking service Aurora will make its first driverless trips soon in Texas. Tesla has finally shown the Cybercab, even if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous ride-hailing service Verne, which uses pretty, bespoke two-seat coupes with no steering wheel or pedals launches in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen more cities already signed up.

    Wayve may not have anything like Waymo’s scale, budget, or miles driven. But it does have Alex Kendall, who has that same early-Elon combination of messianic vision, drive, and an ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem himself. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one which which might allow it to scale up far faster and roll out more widely than its rivals.

    “In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at peak hype cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, this is a year away, and it’s going to be magical’. But I could see that the technological approach that most were taking just wasn’t going to give us this future of intelligent machines that we all dream of. They thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I thought of it as an AI problem.”

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  • General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan

    General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan

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    Since General Motors acquired the San Francisco self-driving-tech developer Cruise in 2016, the Detroit automaker has poured more than $8 billion into creating a robotaxi service. Now GM is turning off the spigot.

    On a call with investors today, General Motors CEO Mary Barra said the company would no longer invest in Cruise and its robotaxi services. Instead, GM says it will combine Cruise’s efforts on autonomy with its own teams focused on driver-assistance features. Eventually, the combined team will build “personal” autonomous vehicles, the chief executive said.

    “Given the considerable time and expense required to scale a robotaxi business in an increasingly competitive market, combining forces would be more efficient and therefore consistent with our capital allocation priorities,” Barra said on the call.

    In a statement emailed to WIRED, Cruise CEO Marc Whitten said the company and its board are “collaborating closely with GM on next steps.”

    Cruise had an uncertain few months. Last fall, the company was operating robotaxi services in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin, Texas, and preparing to launch in more cities. Then, in October 2023, a Cruise vehicle hit a San Francisco pedestrian who had been thrown by a human-driven vehicle in a hit-and-run. Weeks later, it emerged that Cruise employees hadn’t divulged to regulators that the company’s vehicle had dragged the pedestrian more than 20 feet, seriously injuring them. California officials pulled the company’s permit to operate its autonomous cars in the state, and Cruise halted operations throughout the country.

    Cruise never quite recovered from the incident, which critics said pointed to a flawed approach to safety. The robotaxi company has paid millions in fines related to the incident to federal and state authorities. Nine top executives and company founder and CEO Kyle Vogt left, and eventually GM laid off nearly a quarter of Cruise’s employees. Cruise began limited testing in a handful of cities this summer but never again returned to offering Uber-like service.

    Barra told analysts Tuesday that GM found that deploying and maintaining a robotaxi fleet is both too expensive and too far away from the manufacturer’s core business of building and selling cars.

    “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies,” Vogt posted on X Tuesday afternoon.

    What Comes Next

    Cruise technology will now be used to refine the company’s Super Cruise tech, which is designed to perform some “hands-free” driving tasks—lane keeping, lane changing, and emergency braking—on specific highways. Drivers are warned to always stay alert while using Super Cruise, which cannot drive “autonomously.”

    Eventually, GM intends to sell “level 4” vehicles to car buyers, which can drive completely autonomously on some but not all roads. “We know people everywhere love to drive their own vehicles, but not in every situation,” Barra told analysts.

    General Motors owns 90 percent of Cruise and says it has reached an agreement with other shareholders to own more than 97 percent of the firm. GM will “restructure and refocus” Cruise as part of the effort, but Barra could not say whether the new arrangement would lead to layoffs.

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  • AI-Powered Robots Can Be Tricked Into Acts of Violence

    AI-Powered Robots Can Be Tricked Into Acts of Violence

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    In the year or so since large language models hit the big time, researchers have demonstrated numerous ways of tricking them into producing problematic outputs including hateful jokes, malicious code and phishing emails, or the personal information of users. It turns out that misbehavior can take place in the physical world, too: LLM-powered robots can easily be hacked so that they behave in potentially dangerous ways.

    Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania were able to persuade a simulated self-driving car to ignore stop signs and even drive off a bridge, get a wheeled robot to find the best place to detonate a bomb, and force a four-legged robot to spy on people and enter restricted areas.

    “We view our attack not just as an attack on robots,” says George Pappas, head of a research lab at the University of Pennsylvania who helped unleash the rebellious robots. “Any time you connect LLMs and foundation models to the physical world, you actually can convert harmful text into harmful actions.”

    Pappas and his collaborators devised their attack by building on previous research that explores ways to jailbreak LLMs by crafting inputs in clever ways that break their safety rules. They tested systems where an LLM is used to turn naturally phrased commands into ones that the robot can execute, and where the LLM receives updates as the robot operates in its environment.

    The team tested an open source self-driving simulator incorporating an LLM developed by Nvidia, called Dolphin; a four-wheeled outdoor research called Jackal, which utilize OpenAI’s LLM GPT-4o for planning; and a robotic dog called Go2, which uses a previous OpenAI model, GPT-3.5, to interpret commands.

    The researchers used a technique developed at the University of Pennsylvania, called PAIR, to automate the process of generated jailbreak prompts. Their new program, RoboPAIR, will systematically generate prompts specifically designed to get LLM-powered robots to break their own rules, trying different inputs and then refining them to nudge the system towards misbehavior. The researchers say the technique they devised could be used to automate the process of identifying potentially dangerous commands.

    “It’s a fascinating example of LLM vulnerabilities in embodied systems,” says Yi Zeng, a PhD student at the University of Virginia who works on the security of AI systems. Zheng says the results are hardly surprising given the problems seen in LLMs themselves, but adds: “It clearly demonstrates why we can’t rely solely on LLMs as standalone control units in safety-critical applications without proper guardrails and moderation layers.”

    The robot “jailbreaks” highlight a broader risk that is likely to grow as AI models become increasingly used as a way for humans to interact with physical systems, or to enable AI agents autonomously on computers, say the researchers involved.

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  • Emergency Vehicle Lights Can Screw Up a Car’s Automated Driving System

    Emergency Vehicle Lights Can Screw Up a Car’s Automated Driving System

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    Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. The camera systems the researchers used in their tests were manufactured by HP, Pelsee, Azdome, Imagebon, and Rexing; none of those companies responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

    Although the NHTSA acknowledges issues in “some advanced driver assistance systems,” the researchers are clear: They’re not sure what this observed emergency light effect has to do with Tesla’s Autopilot troubles. “I do not claim that I know why Teslas crash into emergency vehicles,” says Nassi. “I do not know even if this is still a vulnerability.”

    The researchers’ experiments were also concerned solely with image-based object detection. Many automakers use other sensors, including radar and lidar, to help detect obstacles in the road. A smaller crop of tech developers—Tesla among them—argue that image-based systems augmented with sophisticated artificial intelligence training can enable not only driver assistance systems, but also completely autonomous vehicles. Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker’s vision-based system would enable self-driving cars next year.

    Indeed, how a system might react to flashing lights depends on how individual automakers design their automated driving systems. Some may choose to “tune” their technology to react to things it’s not entirely certain are actually obstacles. In the extreme, that choice could lead to “false positives,” where a car might hard brake, for example, in response to a toddler-shaped cardboard box. Others may tune their tech to react only when it’s very confident that what it’s seeing is an obstacle. On the other side of the extreme, that choice could lead to the car failing to brake to avoid a collision with another vehicle because it misses that it is another vehicle entirely.

    The BGU and Fujitsu researchers did come with a software fix to the emergency flasher issue. Called “Caracetamol”—a portmanteau of “car” and the painkiller “Paracetamol”—it’s designed to avoid the “seizure” issue by being specifically trained to identify vehicles with emergency flashing lights. The researchers say it improves object detectors’ accuracy.

    Earlence Fernandes, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research, said it appeared “sound.” “Just like a human can get temporarily blinded by emergency flashers, a camera operating inside an advanced driver assistance system can get blinded temporarily,” he says.

    For researcher Bryan Reimer, who studies vehicle automation and safety at the MIT AgeLab, the paper points to larger questions about the limitations of AI-based driving systems. Automakers need “repeatable, robust validation” to uncover blind spots like susceptibility to emergency lights, he says. He worries some automakers are “moving technology faster than they can test it.”

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  • Cybertruck’s Many Recalls Make It Worse Than 91 Percent of All 2024 Vehicles

    Cybertruck’s Many Recalls Make It Worse Than 91 Percent of All 2024 Vehicles

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    Aftermarket prices might soften further as Tesla is now starting to deliver a new $79,990 model to reservation holders. Not that there’s any longer much need to place reservations—North American Tesla stores now accept walk-in orders for Cybertrucks, with delivery two or three weeks later. “I am calling it: Original reservation list is basically finished,” said reservationist BayouCityBob on a Cybertruck owners forum last month. Tesla had claimed to have banked more than one million $100 pre-launch reservations for the Cybertruck.

    “I was thinking I have to wait a couple of [years] before my time comes,” MC1987 responded to BayouCityBob, citing his invitation to purchase his second Cybertruck (the poster had returned their first, a top-spec Cyberbeast, because of alleged “build quality issues.”) “This is so wild,” they said.

    As most other parts of the world have yet to sanction Cybertruck sales, Tesla can’t boost take-up outside of North America. UK automobile listings website Carwow describes the Cybertruck as a “rolling axe head”, a nod to the fact that the sharp-angled pickup is literally too edgy to meet strict European pedestrian-safety regulations.

    Nor can Tesla rely on the US consumer’s love affair with pickups. “Something like 70 percent of all truck sales involve a truck being traded in,” says Drury. “This isn’t the case with [the Cybertruck],” he revealed, using Edmunds’ trade-in data.

    “While Cybertruck hasn’t been on the market too long, it’s been long enough for us to capture some of the used ones. Because there’s no sign that Cybertrucks are being traded for trucks—which is what we typically see in America—then this likely isn’t a vehicle being used for truck-like purposes,” says Drury.

    While the Cybertruck’s six recalls this year might not alarm “edgy” consumers, the bad press that often results won’t impress Tesla shareholders—higher-than-average recalls could tarnish the greater brand.

    Any spike in general automobile recalls should not necessarily worry consumers since defects range widely in severity, and very few are stop-sale orders or demands to immediately cease driving any particular model. Auto makers might hate to file them, but recalls demonstrate that the regulatory system is working as designed.

    However, with Musk advising government—even if it’s at arms-length—some regulators might get their wings clipped, perhaps even reducing the number of product recalls, potentially increasing danger for consumers. Not all Cybertruck owners will be too fussed about that, though.

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  • Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future

    Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future

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    A third-generation San Franciscan, Gabe says he grew up playing with Nancy Pelosi’s kids and went to high school with Gavin Newsom, and now he’s a driver the way they’re politicians—it’s in his blood. He’s been operating taxicabs, Ubers, or Lyfts since 1995, and even helped organize a taxi workers’ strike in the late ’90s. He has also written about driving, ride-hailing, or motorcycling for the past two decades. And if you think we’re being silly about car-chase movie tropes, Gabe was a machine-gunner for the US Marines during the first Gulf War—so he is at least ex-military. He’s driving a gray Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV (9/10, WIRED recommends) and keeps his military service ribbons affixed to the dashboard. There’s also a 100-year-old ukulele poking out of the center console.

    The chase begins as planned: One of us hails a Waymo a few blocks away, rides it to the edge of the parking lot, then bolts to join the others in our pursuit vehicle. “You know what you have to say, right?” Gabe says from the driver’s seat as we scramble to buckle up. WIRED blinks.

    “Come on!” Gabe says. “Haven’t you ever seen old movies? You jump in the cab and you say, “Follow that car!”

    But the Waymo just sits there. For two agonizing minutes. Plenty of time for us to stare awkwardly at our quarry—a vehicle whose shape recalls a cartoon shark with a bunch of spinning doodads implanted in its skin—as it stares back at us through its 29 cameras and five lidars, mapping our contours.

    “It looks shy,” says Gabe.

    “It’s ashamed. It’s so ashamed,” WIRED says. “It knows it’s being tricked.”

    Then, at 10:42 am, the Waymo starts to move. WIRED shouts, “Follow that car!”

    Less than a minute later, Gabe sighs. “I’m not used to driving this slow.”

    Before we go any further, let’s get something out of the way: Riding around inside a self-driving vehicle, especially for the first time, is an immediately cool experience. It starts out like an amusement park ride—the empty gondola sidles up, you step in, you shut the door. Then it becomes the opposite of an amusement park ride. No thrills. No lurches. No clatter. Just you, some soft black leather, a default computer voice, and—for now—a steering wheel, ghostly turning this way and that.

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  • Cybertruck Finally Gets Full Self-Driving (Supervised)

    Cybertruck Finally Gets Full Self-Driving (Supervised)

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    A select number of all-electric Tesla Cybertrucks now have the ability to drive on US highways hands-free, after the automaker pushed an update to vehicles this morning. Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy wrote on X that Cybertrucks will be the first Tesla features to receive the “end-to-end on highway” driving feature, which the company says uses a “neural net” to navigate all parts of highway driving.

    “Nice work,” Tesla CEO (and X owner) Elon Musk responded to his AI chief.

    The feature appears to be in “early access,” meaning it’s only available to some Cybertruck owners who purchased the feature. It’s unclear when the automaker will release the feature more widely. Tesla, which disbanded its public relations team in 2021, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

    Tesla owners’ manuals maintain that the full-self driving feature, or “FSD (Supervised)”, should only be used if drivers are paying attention to the road. The feature reportedly turns off if it detects that drivers are looking elsewhere. Critics have argued that Tesla’s marketing incorrectly leads drivers to assume that FSD can truly drive itself, and that the automaker hasn’t been proactive in preventing driver misuse.

    Customers who purchased base model Cybertrucks early, at pre-order, paid $7,000 for access to the driving feature, with some waiting almost a year for it to actually be available on their trucks. Tesla owners can now subscribe to the “FSD (Supervised)” feature at $99 per month.

    One Cybertruck driver reported on X that, based on driving this morning, the feature is “working well.”

    The feature’s introduction is some much-needed good news for the Cybertruck, which has faced a rocky introduction into Tesla’s lineup. The vehicle was delayed for years by the Covid-19 pandemic and by engineering issues. (A leaked “alpha” briefing on the vehicle, first reported by WIRED, found the truck had serious issues with braking, handling, and noise.)

    The all-electric truck has also been subject to a handful of safety recalls, including one in which the company had to repair or replace accelerator pedals that had gotten stuck.

    As more automakers rush into the electrification race, and Tesla’s huge lead in electric cars has been eroded by other manufacturers, Musk and company seem to believe that “self-driving” features enabled by AI will help Tesla regain its edge. “The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy,” Musk told investors this summer.

    The US’ road safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has found that Tesla’s Autopilot feature, an older and less sophisticated version of FSD, didn’t sufficiently prevent drivers from misuse—and was involved in 13 fatal crashes between 2018 and 2023. After a years-long investigation into Autopilot, last year Tesla recalled 2 million vehicles with Autopilot. (The automaker said it did not agree with the government’s conclusions.)

    Earlier this year, Tesla settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a Northern California man who died while using Autopilot on his Model X.

    Tesla also faces a class action lawsuit alleging it misled customers who purchased Teslas after Musk promised the cars had everything they needed to drive autonomously. Eight years later, Tesla has made significant improvements to its driverless features, and plans to make big bucks off the feature—but still hasn’t produced self-driving technology.

    That could change this month. Musk has promised that Tesla will unveil a self-driving taxi, called a “Cybercab,” at an event in Southern California on October 10.

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  • Waymo Is Picking Up at the Airport. That’s a Big Deal

    Waymo Is Picking Up at the Airport. That’s a Big Deal

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    On Tuesday, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle developer Waymo said it would begin operating all-day, curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona. The announcement came with little fanfare—a post on X. But it signals that after years of delay, self-driving vehicles might be (literally) moving in the right direction.

    The new curbside airport service sends a good signal about Waymo’s business, says Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst with Gartner. “The airport is the primary destination and departure point for any sort of mobility service, whether it’s a cab, shuttle bus—or an autonomous robocab,” he says. Almost a decade ago, then-upstarts Uber and Lyft fought hard to gain access to airports. Less price-sensitive business travelers, families lugging bags, and anyone who doesn’t want to spend to park at the airport all want easy-to-access rides, making it an ideal place to base a taxi service.

    Even before all-day curbside service began, the airport was Waymo’s most popular destination in Phoenix, says Brad Gillette, Waymo’s market lead in the city. Waymo has operated self-driving vehicles in Arizona since 2017, and began offering rides to Phoenix’s airport at the end of 2022. For the first year of service, passengers could only get picked up and dropped off from the stations along the airport’s “Sky Train”—areas with less intense traffic. Late last year, Waymo began to offer nighttime curbside service between 10 pm and 6 am, also periods in which the airport was less hectic. Now, the service is open anytime, to anyone who downloads the company’s Waymo One app.

    The company says it has served nearly 100,000 rides to and from the airport since it first started its station service nearly two years ago, and is now serving thousands of travelers per week.

    The airport departures and arrivals curbs are also a really difficult place to drive. Cars pulling in and out, hunting for passengers, operating in tight spaces—this sort of thing is hard enough for a human. Gillette says it took Waymo a year of testing to ensure the company’s technology “can predict and react appropriately, with a certain level of assertiveness, in order to pull into the right place at the right time.”

    Waymos will pick up and drop off from designated terminal rideshare and electric vehicle pickup areas, Eric Everts, a public information officer for the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said in an email. Through Waymo’s app, passengers will be given specific dwell times to load into vehicles, and the cars will leave them behind if they don’t hit the deadline, Everts wrote—implying that traffic cops won’t have to hassle the driverless vehicles to move along.

    Bumpy Ride

    Last summer, curbside pickup and dropoff became a point of contention as Waymo and competitor Cruise both applied to begin full-time paid passenger robotaxi service in San Francisco—to, basically, officially take on Uber and Lyft in the city where those services were born. In letters to the regulator overseeing the permitting, the city of San Francisco said it was concerned that robotaxis weren’t pulling close enough to curbs to pick up and drop off passengers.

    For California regulators, who control autonomous vehicle operations in the state, the concern wasn’t much of a sticking point: A commission approved the permits in August 2023 . (Cruise has since had its permit to operate rides in the state revoked, after state officials alleged the company concealed details of an incident in which an autonomous vehicle dragged a pedestrian some 20 feet.) But for some city officials and residents, robotaxis’ behavior at the curb was enough to say, no thanks.

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  • Japan Launches a Development Project for Self-Driving EV Taxis

    Japan Launches a Development Project for Self-Driving EV Taxis

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    The company also hopes automakers will adopt Autoware to develop their own autonomous vehicles, and Suzuki and Isuzu Motors have already invested in Tier IV. In this respect, Tier IV’s strategy is different from that of Waymo , a US company that is vertically integrating the development of most of the technology required for self-driving taxis.

    A Good Role Model

    In rural areas of Japan, public transportation infrastructure such as trains and buses are being shut down one after another, and Japan’s aging population has resulted in a serious shortage of taxi and bus drivers. Given this situation, regulators have raised the possibility that self-driving taxis will no longer need approval from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism if they are operate jointly with existing taxi companies.

    Even now, self-driving taxis can be operated as long as there is a person in the driver’s seat who also acts as a supervisor, so robotaxis are easy to introduce into an area even if professional drivers are in short supply. Even if fully autonomous driving is realized, there is a good chance that it will be possible to respond by remote monitoring in some areas.

    Tier IV hopes that by quickly demonstrating its model for self-driving taxis, more corporate partners will adopt the company’s technology and hardware to provide services. “We think it would be enough for us to commercialize our own areas in about three locations,” says Tier IV’s Kato. “By making this a reference model, we want to make it easy for partner companies to deploy their services.”

    In other words, just as Google has developed its Pixel series as a model in the world of Android smartphones, it would make sense for Tier IV to package and provide everything from the platform to the solutions and vehicles needed for operation, and demonstrate their commercial operation as a package.

    The company is also looking to distribute Autoware around the globe. “Japan is the only country that is showing the service as a reference model,” says Kato, “but we are considering providing software, hardware, solutions, and other things to the global market.” In fact, Autoware is most widely used in China and is spreading to the United States, Taiwan, and other countries.

    “In the future, we will be able to flexibly respond to requests depending on the region and demand, providing only software, only parts, or even entire vehicles and systems,” says Kato. “Which part will take up more weight will depend on the country or region, and frankly we don’t know yet. Still, we want to be in a position to provide everything if there is a demand.”

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  • You Won’t Believe What Car Headlights Have in Store

    You Won’t Believe What Car Headlights Have in Store

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    Sure, duh: Vehicle lights serve the important and vital safety function of allowing drivers to see where they’re going, and everyone else to see when they’re coming. But for decades, car designers have clocked headlamps and tail lights as an opportunity for creativity, to build a distinctive brand that says, “Here comes that car.” Think of Lamborghini’s y-shaped headlights, or the almost menacing double barrels of the Dodge Challenger, or the halo rings on BMWs.

    But a new era of car light design, ushered in by new technologies, powertrains, and even business models, has transformed the front profile of vehicles. “It’s been an incredible, critical acceleration in the last few years,” says César Muntada, the head of light design at Audi.

    The result is lights that are brighter, thinner, and in more complex configurations than ever before. Lights that dance when a car is approached by its owner, lights that blink when it’s being charged. Lights that can be customized to fit personal taste, or even mood. Lights that even, if regulators allow them, won’t blind other drivers. In the future, cars might even use lights to communicate with others on the road.

    Today, automakers are doubling down on unique headlight signatures, arguing that a car’s front is its most important bit in not only selling the vehicle to customers, but the idea of the vehicle—what it means.

    “We call it a face,” says Tim Kozub, who directs Cadillac’s design team. “It relates back to us as humans. The front of the vehicle is the personality.” Internal Cadillac market research shows that people react first to a vehicle’s front, then its rear, and then its side view, he says. So car designers are spending even more time—and money—on getting the face just right.

    Light It Up

    In some ways, the story of the beautification of the vehicle headlight is the story of advances in light technology. In the mid-20th century, headlights were small, halogen bulbs inside a large eye. By the early 1990s, some automakers began using xenon or high-intensity discharge (HID) headlamps, which were more powerful, efficient, and lasted longer than halogen. At the turn of the century, automakers experimented with using different shapes and textures inside headlights.

    Finally: Enter the LED. Starting with a 2007 Lexus, automakers began using the smaller, powerful, and even more long-lasting lights inside headlamps. Headlights no longer needed to be bulbs inside a large casing, says Raphael Zammit, the chair of the Transportation Design program at the College of Creative Studies.

    The creativity has flowed from there. “We’ve moved away from the physical aspect of lamps and moved towards a very thin, minimalist perspective,” says Zammit. “You’re looking at lines, gestures of lines. LEDs have taken it to the next level.”

    Just in the past few years, automakers including Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Hyundai have introduced digital headlights, which use LEDs and vehicles’ increasingly sophisticated onboard computers to illuminate with even more specificity. Audi’s Matrix-design headlights can, for example, “greet” drivers with model-specific headlight animations, a kind of personalized hello enabled by advances in lighting.

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