Speaking at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit, key original iPod team member and Nest founder Tony Fadell explained why Detroit is such an ideal place to test autonomous vehicles. He points out (via Katie Burke on Twitter) that Detroit has two key ingredients: a low population, and a lot of existing city infrastructure.
Detroit’s population is currently around 680,000, which is down considerably from over 1 million at the beginning of the 1990s, and a peak population of around 1.8 million according to the 1950 U.S. census. That change means that Detroit has the city infrastructure of an urban area with at least twice its population density – meaning there’s plenty of city streets, traffic lights and intersections to deal with, but fewer pedestrians to also manage at the same time.
