Google cars sing

Numbers from July 2016
We are still walking around Los Altos, on much the same routes. It continues to be usual to see 6 Teslas in an hour, 3 or 4 Honda Fits, and 1 or 2 Ford Focus hatchbacks. On one exceptional Friday we counted 17 Tesla Ss. There's the occasional Tesla X, about 2 per week. The list of electric cars we have seen is now much longer.

- 3 sorts of Tesla ( the original Roadster, the S, and the X)
- electric Fiats (the 500e)
- Nissan Leafs (2 or 3 a day of these)
- electric Honda Fit
- electric Focus
- Chevy Spark
- Google car
- Smart electric
- BMW i3 (fewer than 1 per day) , i8 (rare)
- Rav4
- electric Golf
- electric Mercedes

At least once every weekday, sometimes several times, a little Google car drives by the house. Sometime earlier this year they acquired a distinctive noise, multiple tones which together form a minor key chord, loud enough to be heard from 100 meters away on a quiet street.

Tesla HQ and the Ford Research Center are both a short cycle ride away in Palo Alto. Looking round their parking lots early on a Sunday morning, the Tesla lot had 20 or so vehicles, from a variety of other manufacturers. The Ford lot had one each of every current Ford model, still with their 'new car' stickers, and nothing else at all.

Numbers from June 2015
Having been counting for another year, here's the update on the numbers. Taking much the same routes with the same frequencies, the number of Teslas we see hasn't increased by much - there was one day when we counted 12, but that was unusual. The number of Fits has also increased. What has changed is that we are seeing more diversity - one or two BMW i3s most days, the same number of electric Focuses and Fiat 500s. About once a week since the start of 2015 we've seen an electric VW Golf and the little electric Mercedes.

Numbers from June 2014
We walk regularly around Los Altos at the weekends. Usually for 3 or 4 miles, at a leisurely pace, so we are out for around and hour and a half. About three years ago, we started counting cars, to compare the frequency of Honda Fits with Ford Focuses. Teslas started to show up, so they were counted too. For comparison, Nissan Leafs were added. At this point, we've been doing this enough that anecdote starts to approach data. Yesterday we saw 6 Teslas, 3 Fits, 1 Leaf and 1 Focus. It has become routine to see more Teslas than Fits.

http://www.cunningsystems.com/2015/06/tesla-town-2
http://www.cunningsystems.com/2014/06/tesla-town
https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/ (image credit)