Ford’s push for driverless vehicles includes man disguised as car seat

Hiring by companies in central Ohio and for most of the state’s metropolitan areas is expected to moderate in the final three months of 2017, according to a quarterly hiring survey released Tuesday.

The quarterly Manpower survey shows that 18 percent of employers say they plan to hire in the final quarter of the year and 8 percent say they will cut jobs. Of the rest, 73 percent say they expect no change and 1 percent say they don’t know.

T hat 10-point spread between hiring and firing is 17 points below the projections for the July 1-Sept. 30 quarter, when nearly a third of employers said they would be hiring, and 6 points below the same quarter of 2016.

After the robust third-quarter results, some modera- tion was expected, said Sue Ellen Deiley, a director for Experis, a professional-ser- vices company that is part of Manpower.

“I don’t think it is nega-

Andy Schaudt is an invisible man.

He is wearing a “seat suit” to make it look like his Ford Transit Connect van is driving itself.

His bespectacled face is obscured by a fake headrest hood. His torso is tucked behind custom-sewn upholstery armor, like the pads protecting a Yankees catcher but in meticulously chosen black and stone leather hues to mirror Ford’s usual inan- imate seats.

The automaker is trying to devise a “standard visual language” so its self-driving cars can communicate with humans. The company is testing a bar of flashing white lights on the wind- shield meant to replace the little nods and go-ahead half- waves that keep people from getting into crashes.

And that me ans some deception in the service of progress.

Ford tapped a half-dozen Virginia Tech Transporta- tion Ins t itute researchers, Schaudt among them, to spend August tooling around Arlington pretend- ing not to be there. They drove more than 1,800 miles and collected 150 hours of 360-degree video from six cameras mounted on their gray van.

It’s satisfying work, but it can be uncomfortable at times, jolting usual conventions in the way strangers interact. tive . ... It’s just bringing it back to normal,” she said.

Also, hiring typically slows toward the end of the year, she said.

“They’re closing out their budget,” she said of employers. “They’re maintaining their budget, but not increasing it.”

In any case, with central Ohio’s low jobless rate of 4.4 percent, companies can

One of Schaudt’s colleagues apparently didn’t get going quickly enough when a light turned green, prompting another motorist to speed around to the right and begin to yell. Then he saw nobody there “and said it out loud — there’s nobody driving this car!” Schaudt’s said.

Aggressive drivers want to employ “communication methods that aren’t exactly required for navigation,” Schaudt noted. So when they conclude there’s nobody’s there to scream at, “it’s a jaw dropping moment.”

Other times, it’s Schaudt and his colleagues who can get a bit thrown.

“It’s kind of awkward when you are in the vehicle and somebody’s looking right in the window at you. And it’s OK for you look at them, because you’re behind this hood and they don’t see you,” Schaudt said. “But you still kind of look away.”

The Virginia experiment was the brainchild of Ford engineer John Shutko, who has been pushing the idea of the light bar with colleagues from other car companies find it tough to increase hir- ing, she said.

Ohio and most other metro areas in the state show a decline similar to Colum- bus’, according to Manpower.

Only Cleveland showed an uptick from the year- ago period, a move that reflects what Deiley says is an increase in hiring by manufacturers.

“Our manufacturing busi- around the world. He said Ford doesn’t see a com- petitive advantage in the research, but instead wants to share its findings as a way to improve safety and get people more comfortable with driverless vehicles.

Shutko had been spending his days thinking about the inside of autonomous cars — and how passengers will react to having no driver. How would the car need to communicate with them if it needed to change routes because of a backup, some- thing an Uber driver could just mention casually?

As he burned through those questions, he came up with another big one.

“When you pull the driver, how’s that going to impact civilians and others on the outside of the vehicle?” Shutko said. It was some- where between and “Ah ha!” moment and an “Oh no! moment.”

“It was like an ‘Oh good- ness!’ Now we’re going to have to think about some- thing beyond what we nor- mally think about,” Shutko said. It’s an opportunity, he said, years before going ness is going through the roof right now,” she said.

Other than that sector, the best job prospects in central Ohio through the end of the year are in con- struction, professional and business services, private education and health care, leisure and hospitality, and government. into production, “to start to understand how people will behave around this type of technology.”

Shutko and his team discarded the idea of using words on the outside of the van to signal people, saying they were too confusing in a multilingual world. And he said symbols, too, can be ambiguous. Research has shown, for example, that all sorts of people don’t know what the symbol for rear defrost in their car means, he said.

So they went with lights. A solid white light is meant to signal the van is driving autonomously. A flashing light means it’ll be accelerating. And when two lights move side to side — the engineers call that The Hoff Signal, as in David Hasselhoff from “Knight Rider” — it means the van is yielding.

On a drive Wednesday to demonstrate the seat suit, the blue sleeves of Schaudt’s Virginia Tech shirt poked out by his knees. But he held the wheel down low so people couldn’t’ see them. And they didn’t. A cook at Cheesetique, taking a smoke break on an Arlington, Virginia, sidewalk, stared through the rolling van’s front windshield. Nothing.

“You could tell no one was actually driving the car,” said Travis Hicks. “Sooner or later, it’s going to be back to the future.”

Many people didn’t even seem to see the van.

An elderly woman with a dog didn’t look up as it rolled toward her. The jaywalker on her phone didn’t even notice Schaudt was there.

The office of COLUMBUS — Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine spent more than $12 million to replace the anti- quated software it uses to help collect unpaid debts and taxes owed the state.

But after four years of work and ongoing problems, the new software still doesn’t work. It can’t import and read the data from the old system.

The software vendor, Ventech Solutions of Colum- bus, and the attorney general’s office now are squaring off in court over who is responsible for the multi- million-dollar flop.

Each accuses the other of breach of contract and mak- ing the mistakes that led to the failure of the software system to function.

A lawsuit filed July 21 in the Ohio Court of Claims by Ventech denies wrongdoing and claims DeWine’s office has “unclean hands” for its conduct and mistakes that led to the failure.

DeWine’s office filed a lawsuit a few hours later in Franklin County Common Pleas Court seeking the recovery of the $12-mil- ion-plus it already has paid, as well as damages for Ventech’s “many failures.”

Ventech was awarded a contract by the attorney general’s office in December 2012 to customize off-the-shelf col- lections software to replace the existing 1996 system by June 30, 2016, according to court filings.

The attorney general agreed to pay an additional $731,000 to Ventech under amendments that gave the company more timeto complete its work as it failed to meet completiondeadlines, DeWine’s office claims.

On Oct. 31, 2016, the attor- ney general’s office took its old software system offline based on Ventech’s representations that the new system was ready, the attorney general office’s said.

It failed to work, causing a “significant loss of revenue and various costs” since the old system was offline for days, leaving the state unable to collect money it was owed, the lawsuit states.

The office paid a bout $472,000 to its staff attempting to activate the new system and then bringing the old one back online, the suit said. The office’s collections enforcement division brought in $450 million in taxes and debts owed the state in the 2016 fiscal year.

Ventech said it had completed all the work required under the contract and requested ano t her $1.8 million to continue work, prompting the cancellation of the contract, the attorney general’s office said in its filing. The action also accuses the company of fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation.

Lawyers for Ventech, which filed paperwork last week seeking to move DeWine’s lawsuit to the Court of Claims, blames DeWine’s office for “numerous delays” and failing to provide the correct specifications and data to make the new system operable. Its lawsuit seeks damages from the attorney general’s office.

DeWine’s office now is working in house to bring the new software online and is soliciting bids for assistance from a outside vendor, said office spokesman Dan Tierney.

“Our off i ce is disappointed that this complication occurred but remains confident a new system will ultimately be implemented in adequate time for the current system to be replaced,” he said.