Mcity: Why is the University of Michigan building a fake town?
The University of Michigan just opened its new "Mcity" site, a 32-acre faux town with a downtown main street, a stretch of freeway, and multiple paved and unpaved roads. But Mcity's purpose isn't municipal, but technical: to provide a realistic test setting for driverless cars.
Built on the university鈥檚 campus in Ann Arbor, the 鈥渃ity鈥� was designed to re-create the situations self-driving cars would bump into (or not) on the road. There are building facades, fire hydrants, trash cans, mailboxes, and even mechanized pedestrians and cyclists. The area will serve as a testing ground where the vehicles can experiment with real life situations over and over again.
鈥淢city鈥� was officially launched during a ceremony on Monday, and cost an estimated $10 million.
鈥淚f you ever had one of those large play mats for toy cars as a kid, Mcity will look familiar. It features a variety of roads and streets, including a small section of freeway, a little downtown Main Street, an underpass, gravel and brick-paved roads, roundabouts, plus plenty of traffic signals and intersections. (Of course, this one is built for real cars and adults, not Matchbox toys.),鈥� wrote Jonathan Gitlin for .
鈥淭he whole lab is also packed with networked sensors to collect data on tests conducted on its streets.鈥�
Since 2010, Google has successfully tested a variety of driverless vehicles in locations across the country. Still, the company also confirmed that its prototype vehicles have been involved in 14 accidents since it began testing the self-driving cars 5 years ago, including 11 accidents during which the Google vehicle was rear-ended by another car.
This revelation led lawmakers in Michigan to support the concept of a closed testing site in their state.
While self-driving vehicles will be tested in Michigan in 2016, Sen. Gary Peters (D), a member of the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, stressed that "it's better to start in a closed facility." Senator Peters has authored several bills on advanced vehicle technologies in his role.
A similar facility, GoMentum Station, opened earlier this year in a private location in northern California. Several carmakers, including Google, use the site to test self-driving vehicles.聽
