'City' built for robot cars opens in Michigan

A test site on the campus of the University of Michigan might hold a glimpse into what our robot-filled future will look like. Set to open today, M City is a 32-acre playground for automakers that will test how a city filled with self-driving cars might function in real life. The $6.5 million landscape will pit the cars against suburban streets, highways, and rural roads, as well as unforeseen obstacles like traffic jams or pedestrians prancing across across medians (the test dummy, whose job it is to plunge in front of cars, is named Sebastian).

"We're replacing humans with machines and those machines need to be able to operate in a full, rich environment," the head of the Transportation Research Institute, Peter Sweatman, told Bloomberg.

While M City might sound like science fiction, it's a reality that's closer than many realize: Driverless cars could be flooding cities as soon as 2020. The Boston Consulting Group believes that self-driving cars might actually make up an entire quarter of global auto sales as soon as 2035. However, for the time being, the partnership behind M City has set its sights closer to home: It hopes to scale up the infrastructure needed for driverless cars in southeastern Michigan by 2021.

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