Beverly Hills Joins CARS to Develop Self-Driving Car Fleet

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – In its quest to provide residents with safe and convenient transportation options, the city of Beverly Hills became the first in the nation to join the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, the city announced.

The membership to CARS, which is devoted the research and development of self-driving cars, was approved by the City Council last week.

“Joining CARS signals our commitment to the future of mobility,” said Mayor John Mirisch.

Beverly Hills has been working on building its own fleet of autonomous vehicle, or self-driving cars. Mirisch said joining CARS will help the city have the most reliable and safest self-driving cars on city streets.

"With the increased presence of automation in transportation and the adoption of new mobility models, communication between the public sector and the research community is ever more important,” said Stephen M. Zoepf, Ph.D., Executive Director of CARS. “We’re excited to have the city of Beverly Hills as part of the conversation at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford.”

CARS is the home of the highly successful Stanford Solar Car Project, which every two years fields a team of students who participate in a competition to drive solar vehicles across the Australian Outback.

Areas of research at CARS include understanding how people will interact with automated vehicles, the impacts of vehicle automation from policy to ethics to law and advances in sensing, decision-making and control.

Phase 1 of the city’s AV program calls for Beverly Hills to develop partnerships with manufacturers and work with policy makers on changing the regulatory environment to allow testing and deployment of systems for both public and privately owned AVs.

Photo courtesy of Stanford