A vision for transportation in the "City of Tomorrow," interplanetary lessons for autonomous vehicle development, and a life-size Lego Batmobile were among the items promoted by automakers recently.

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[naviga:li]Ford recently released its vision for a City of Tomorrow, looking at how transportation options in development today will affect urban infrastructures in the future. The automaker expects that autonomous vehicles will be introduced within five years, and that vehicle technology will also include advances in electric models, ridesharing, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. In the long term, Ford predicts that there will be larger concentrations of autonomous electric vehicles, more high-speed public transit options in large cities, advanced use of drones and transportation management systems to handle traffic and respond to emergencies, and the conversion of some roads to green spaces and parks.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]Nissan has featured Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley, in a profile explaining how his experience at NASA is benefiting the automaker's autonomous vehicle research. Sierhuis says that while working at NASA, he developed a computer language to be used in intelligent systems as well as autonomous technology for robots and human habitats to be used on Mars. He suggests that the challenge of making an autonomous vehicle is similar, since it will have to know how to interact with humans and its surrounding environment. One of Sirhuis's research projects created an algorithm based on traffic light patterns to help map an autonomous vehicle's route and avoid stops.[/naviga:li]

[naviga:li]The Lego Model Shop in Enfield constructed a life-size Batmobile of the plastic bricks to be featured by Chevrolet at the North American International Auto Show. The vehicle was inspired by one featured in the upcoming film "The Lego Batman Movie" and used a total of 344,187 bricks. The Lego Batmobile measures 17 feet long, weighs 1,695.5 pounds, and took 2,055 hours to design and build.[/naviga:li]

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