Autonomous Vehicles

[72gmc]

Almost amusing to see Levandowski, who despite his shenanigans appears to have profited from his former status as a guru, is now promoting autonomy only on industrial sites. The equivalent of autonomous slot cars on slot car tracks. I'm guessing this idea was proposed years ago and quickly dismissed as not $exy enough.

[vertical_doug]

I think the corollary is what a typical industrial robot is like versus 3-CPO in the movies or any of the dancing robots from Boston Dynamics.

[htwoopup]

How much of the issue laid out in @dgaddis ‘s OP due to almost industry culture.

By that I mean, all of these guys come from the software industry where the concept is ship before it is ready or else you aren’t a company. As an example of how this type of thinking is even demanded by the money see https://www.ycombinator.com/library/...arly-and-often.

The problem is that in regular software, so the spreadsheet pivot table doesn’t work….BFD.

But in cars, someone can actually die.

And, there is a culture in software engineering all too often to just do a hack to fix an issue and get to actually programming a real fix to the software in the next release. An example of that is shown in the OP example of having the emergency braking software turned off…it must have caused an issue with the Uber software so rather than fix the Uber software NOW let’s disable the Volvo stuff and get to that further down the product cycle.

This different culture and the folks running the companies not being car guys/ metal guys is further evidenced by the piss poor QA in production of Teslas. The quality of the fit and finish would NEVER get out of an auto plant run by car guys.

Just because you are smart in one thing doesn’t mean you are smart in everything. And while there are plenty of great software engineers (and many here), there are far too many who don’t spend enough time or ask for enough input from subject matter experts with different views and from different perspectives/views.

[72gmc]

I think the corollary is what a typical industrial robot is like versus 3-CPO in the movies or any of the dancing robots from Boston Dynamics.

That’s a good corollary. I’ll also guess that someone at some point didn’t want to accept that constraint, but constraints aid creativity, and there could be much more progress by now if the investments were focused on realistic use cases.

[72gmc]

“It feels like the widespread use of autonomous driving is seven years away, and it’s been seven years away for 10 years,” says U.S. Department of Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. “So the question is, will it be seven years away 10 years from now, or will we actually be getting somewhere?”

https://jalopnik.com/u-s-in-valley-o...hec-1849699276

[vertical_doug]

well, not to beat a dead horse but......

Tesla, Ford and VW Sound the Death Knell for Driverless Car Hype
2022-10-27 12:30:15.913 GMT


By David Welch and Craig Trudell
(Bloomberg) --

The autonomous-driving sector just endured a day that tech
and automotive giants may well look back on the way Wall Street
recalls March 16, 2008.

Whereas the day Bear Stearns collapsed was an epochal event
in the global financial crisis, when flawed assumptions about
the value of mortgages pushed banks to the brink — and some over
the precipice — Oct. 26, 2022, will go down as the date that
seismic consequences emerged from years of faulty presumptions
about driverless-vehicle technology.

First came the shock that Argo AI, the startup Ford and
Volkswagen had each seeded with multibillion-dollar investments,
was shutting down. Within hours, Reuters reported that Tesla’s
self-driving claims are under criminal investigation. A person
familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Justice Department
prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco have been probing
statements by the electric-car company and its executives since
last year.

It’s difficult to come up with two more polar-opposite
approaches to a mission one Ford executive said Wednesday will
be harder than putting a man on the moon.
Elon Musk put a target on Tesla’s back in 2016 by starting
to charge thousands of dollars for what the company calls Full
Self-Driving (FSD) capability. Six years later, the CEO
acknowledges the system still isn’t “feature complete,” and
cautions customers to expect two steps forward and one step
back.

By contrast, Argo CEO Bryan Salesky emphasized the need for
safe and limited deployments of test vehicles and close
partnerships with cities and stakeholders that its driverless
cars would share the road with.


Argo.ai seemed to take road safety more seriously than many
competitors, including a creative collaboration with A lot of people have seen Argo as one of the AV
"good guys."
Neither the scorched-earth nor the nice-guy method is
working.

Tesla is the subject of two defect investigations by the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and headed for
the first of several potential trials over crashes blamed on
Autopilot, its driver-assistance system. California accused the
company in August of misleading consumers, and a Golden State
resident who sued last month is proposing class-action status
for his claims that Musk has been stringing the public along
with perpetual promises that the company is on the cusp of
perfecting the technology.

Fans of the world’s richest man have gotten accustomed to
frequent posts from the soon-to-be Twitter owner about new
iterations of FSD beta software beaming to their vehicles. After
Musk tweeted recently about a next major release coming this
week, one follower replied with relief, writing that he’d been
hesitant to use the latest version of FSD after his Tesla veered
toward an oncoming car.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
@teslaownersSV@28delayslater Update probably goes to wide
release next week. This is a big one.

Ford thought when it first invested in Argo five years ago
that it would be able to broadly market cars capable of going
driverless in certain conditions by 2021. Now, the automaker has
concluded it needs to invest in driver-assistance technology
that’s more achievable in the near term. Its decision to switch
gears led VW to walk away, too, according to people familiar
with the matter, and Argo was unable to attract new investors.
The $2.7 billion impairment recorded on its investment in
Argo dragged Ford to an $827 million net loss last quarter. VW,
which reports earnings on Friday, announced an almost identical
injection in the startup in 2019.

“The team we have at Argo has been working on what I
consider to be the hardest technical problem of our time," said
Doug Field, who Ford hired away from Apple’s car project last
year. “It's harder than putting a man on the moon.”

This is a world away from what car and tech leaders were
saying when driverless-car hype was at its peak. McKinsey
predicted just three years ago that global revenue generated by
autonomous vehicles could reach $1.6 trillion annually by the
end of this decade. The head of General Motors-owned startup
Cruise similarly talked in early 2020 of a trillion-dollar
addressable market. Chris Urmson, who said while at Google that
the goal was for his son to never need a driver’s license, sent
out a memo to staff at his cash-strapped startup Aurora
Innovation last month laying out options including cost cuts and
even a potential effort to sell to Apple or Microsoft.
Argo is arguably the most substantial casualty within the
self-driving space to date, though it isn’t the first. San
Francisco-based Zoox sold to Amazon in 2020, and Uber cut bait
with its self-driving unit months later, offloading it to
Aurora. Early last year, GM’s Cruise acquired Voyage, a startup
that had been trying the narrow use case approach to autonomy,
operating in Florida retirement communities.

When GM reported quarterly results this week, analysts
pressed Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt about the state of autonomy. He
argued companies that are deploying and expanding now have game,
and are distinguishing themselves from those that don’t.
“We're seeing increased separation between the companies
operating commercial driverless services, and those that are
still stuck in the trough of disillusionment,” Vogt said.
“What's happening here is that the companies with the best
product have pulled ahead and are accelerating.”
Time will tell just how far along GM and Cruise will get in
building a viable business. The unit aiming for $1 billion
revenue by 2025 lost $497 million in the most recent quarter,
bringing its total deficit this year to $1.4 billion.

Ford CEO Jim Farley is skeptical the industry is anywhere
close. “Profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a
long way off,” he said Wednesday. “And we won’t necessarily have
to create that technology ourselves.”
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--With assistance from Keith Naughton, Monica Raymunt, Edward
Ludlow and Tom Schoenberg.