Samsung Launches Business Unit To Focus On Driverless Cars (koreatimes.co.kr)

An anonymous reader writes: South Korean electronics giant Samsung has announced a new focus on developing driverless cars and infotainment systems in its attempt to compete with domestic rival LG in the automobile arena. The chip and smartphone company has placed executive VP Park Jong Hwan at the front of the push. The project will combine efforts from various technology units, including battery maker Samsung SDI and software service provider branch Samsung SDS. The sector is an opportunity to make up for Samsung's declining television sales, and a slowing smartphone business which is struggling to compete with fresher, cheaper models in China and India.

Comments

Korea really needs this

[Spy Handler]

If any country needs driverless cars, it's Korea. If you think American roads are full of drunk drivers and aggressive douchebag drivers who ignore rules of the road, you haven't been to Korea.

And I say that as an ethnic Korean.

Re:Korea really needs this

[rsborg]

If any country needs driverless cars, it's Korea. If you think American roads are full of drunk drivers and aggressive douchebag drivers who ignore rules of the road, you haven't been to Korea.

And I say that as an ethnic Korean.

Whatever. Try south India - like in Chennai, you have any of the given on a road at any given time: cars, busses, mopeds, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, bikes, pedestrians crossing randomly, farm animals crossing randomly, and street peddlers aggressively soliciting motorists (esp. when traffic crawls).

Additionally, it's accepted that traffic rules are best treated as "suggestions" or "recommendations", it's perfectly commonplace to see motorcycles, cars, mopeds, and the like veer into oncoming traffic on the other side to pass (I've seen a bus do this occasionally also).

It amazes me every day that more people don't die in this manifestation of primal chaos.

Driverless cars that spy on you..

[Anonymous Coward]

..and feed you targeted ads from your onboard 'infotainment' system.

Leave the me the fuck alone, I just want to drive my car myself!

Re:Driverless cars that spy on you..

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars spy on you already now. Some vendors have implemented remote systems to send info back to the manufacturer when a part gets broke/used up/etc. The same moment its indicated to the driver. This gives the contracting service partner enough time to order the part. All this runs over the mobile network.

And the trend is towards expansion, not decline. I predict that by the time that there are actually real driverless cars purchaseable, you can't buy a car without tracking anymore. The companies can make too much money from it, and customers just don't care, so a company which puts up a car at a higher price for less tracking is at an economic disadvantage. As a german, I always find information about the car industry in the tech news. And this information indicates that at least the german car makers want to focus on privacy. But I guess they will only sell the feeling, like with all this "green emissions" lie they sold cars with.

Re:Driverless cars that spy on you..

[Anonymous Coward]

I buy cars that spy on me because I'm a loser and I bend over and accept it, you should too!

There won't be 'driverless' cars, and non-losers either don't buy things that spy on them, or find a way to make sure they aren't be spied on. Enjoy your loser life, loser.

Smartphones have developed driverless cars already

[turkeydance]

no need to innovate

Re:Smartphones have developed driverless cars alre

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done smartphones, well done. Now we only have to make these coffins on wheels secure.

Reminds me of the early 80s

[wafflemonger]

Remember the days when every typewriter, toy, cereal company made their own PC? I would not be surprised to see a Cheerios driverless car soon.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[godrik]

Except samsung is already pretty much on that market.

Samsung is a huge company that produces electronic, cellphone, dishwashers, but also airplanes, tanks, battleships, ...
So whatever they do in the self driving car domain will probably be repurposable in their military business.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[gstoddart]

Yeah, and everyone is going to cause the same class of problems, have the same kinds of failure modes and corner cases, and they're all going to throw their hands up in the air and say "oh, I have no idea what to do, you drive meat puppet".

In the early 80s everyone was working against a fairly well described architecture for the PC, and ultimately used the same parts or licensed fabrication of their own piece.

For a driver-less car system, having a bunch of companies develop these and hope they work feels like it will end up being the wild west of hoping you don't encounter a random failure mode at any given time.

There really needs to be some level of standards and certification applied here -- or the driver-less cars are going to make the same kind of stupid mistakes as things like the IoT are making now. Companies will be lazy, take shortcuts, miss some things entirely ... and it will be the consumers who have to buy them and field test them.

The idea of a bunch of companies trying to solve this problem, and a bunch of cheap knock-offs and other bits of corner cutting being responsible for driving us around is kind of scary.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[LessThanObvious]

Driver-less cars is an R&D money pit with no chance of return on investment. I would hope companies know this, but they too afraid to let another company get ten years ahead on the technology and achieve total domination when the driver-less nut finally cracks in 2035 when there will finally be any possibility to sell enough volume to turn a real profit. IMHO.

Re: Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get a car analogy for all this?

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[ShanghaiBill]

Driver-less cars is an R&D money pit with no chance of return on investment.

The global car market is worth $2 Trillion per year. Spending on self-driving R&D is less than 0.1% of that. If anything, this is an area with severe underinvestment, especially by established car manufacturers.

when the driver-less nut finally cracks in 2035 ...

Are you serious? Tesla Autopilot is already available to consumers, and does 80% of what you expect a SDC to do. Bumping that up to 90%, 95% ... is a software upgrade. By 2017 you may still need to manually drive on dirt roads, but cars that are 99% autonomous will be available.

By 2035, manually driven cars will be banned from public roads.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that Samsung does all this stuff is kind of an oversimplification. Samsung Group is just a corporate overlord over bunch of more or less independent companies like Samsung Electronics, Samsung insurance, Samsung semiconductors. Some of these companies don't even have Samsung in their name.

I worked at Samsung Electronics. Other parts of this hydra were so far away, that it was easier to buy stuff from external companies than from other company under Samsung umbrella.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

They should use a Samsung Howitzer as the base :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K9_Thunder

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Kjella]

Are you serious? Tesla Autopilot is already available to consumers, and does 80% of what you expect a SDC to do. Bumping that up to 90%, 95% ... is a software upgrade. By 2017 you may still need to manually drive on dirt roads, but cars that are 99% autonomous will be available. By 2035, manually driven cars will be banned from public roads.

No. Not even close. There's so many roads with crappy or no road markings or hidden by mud or snow, it doesn't obey even a tiny fraction of the road signs or rules of the road, at best it might manage an emergency stop through collision detection if you let it run through a pedestrian crossing by itself. It's entirely in the blue if it has sensor capability or processing capability to do more, Musk at least publicly admitted that it clearly doesn't have the redundancy. Basically if one sensor goes bad or broken or is blocked by rain or snow or mud the autopilot will turn off, hardly acceptable behavior. And he's years behind Google in figuring out how exactly a car can drive by itself. Even if they exist in 5 years and get semi-popular in 10 years, that manual cars will be banned in 20.... care to make a wager? I'd call you an optimist if you said 50 years.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[ShanghaiBill]

There's so many roads with crappy or no road markings or hidden by mud or snow

The way that Tesla handles this, is to collect the GPS data of other Teslas that have driven the same road. If you drive down a road a dozen times, then it has enough data to know where the lane is, regardless of mud or snow. That is a more redundant and reliable algorithm than a human driver has. Please note: this is technology that is already working and available to consumers.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

Driver-less cars is an R&D money pit with no chance of return on investment. I would hope companies know this, but they too afraid to let another company get ten years ahead on the technology and achieve total domination when the driver-less nut finally cracks in 2035 when there will finally be any possibility to sell enough volume to turn a real profit. IMHO.

How can you call that no chance of return on investment?
Not putting yourself in a position where the competition will crush you 20 years from now is a pretty damn good investment.
It might not be good for quarterly profits but that isn't the same as no ROI.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the thing I don't get with people who say that driverless cars never will happen.
Most of the issues are already addressed in any new car if you get all the extras.
Cruise control isn't just a fixed speed anymore, it has been adjusting to surrounding traffic for how long? Lane following isn't a feature that only a few new cars have.
Getting to a point where you sit back and relax during the highways and takes control when you get near your destination doesn't require a big leap. The technology is already out there, it just needs to be refined to handle the situations that current human drivers doesn't handle well.

Re:Reminds me of the early 80s

[Anonymous Coward]

Driver-less cars will greatly reduce the size of the car market, since a single car can be shared between multiple users. Currently the car is sitting idle >90% of the time, that's why we need to many cars in the first place.

In the long run, driver-less cars will almost eliminate private car ownership.

they heard Apple was working on this, and, well...

[swschrad]

but they will have curved glass. counts for something.

Aggro drivers

[sjbe]

If you think American roads are full of drunk drivers and aggressive douchebag drivers who ignore rules of the road, you haven't been to Korea.

I've been to China and much of Southeast Asia and frankly most US drivers are pretty tame and rule abiding by comparison. I've been to a number of places where the traffic signals and lines on the road are merely suggestions that are routinely ignored. I haven't been to Korea but I can't imagine it is worse than India or some parts of China.

Re:Aggro drivers

[ShanghaiBill]

I've been to China and much of Southeast Asia and frankly most US drivers are pretty tame and rule abiding by comparison.

Other than Japan and Western Europe, pretty much anywhere in the world has worse drivers than America. Some places in Africa and the Middle East have 10 times the deaths per mile driven. But even Japan and Western Europe are not directly comparable to America, since a lower proportion of their population drives. Many of the people taking public transit are likely the worst drivers, and in America, where public transit is rarely a realistic option, those people are behind the wheel.

I once saw a pedestrian killed in a Shanghai crosswalk. She was crossing with her kid when the light changed. The cars didn't even hesitate to accelerate. She was trapped between two lanes of continuous traffic, and maybe 30 cars sped by while she stood there, until one hit her. She died, and her kid was seriously injured. When the cops showed up, they just treated it as part of their daily routine.

And Apple heard that Google was working on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but Apple will have rounded edges. Counts for something.

Koreans

[Anonymous Coward]

drive like crazy people.

Malinvestments

[Anonymous Coward]

They might have returned the capital to their investors while their competitors make huge malinvestments in 'what's hot'.

DO NOT INTEGRATE

[gurps_npc]

An entertainment device does not need and has no business being integrated into the driving computer.

Doing so is a HUGE security risk.

Any device designed to entertain/inform/communicate with the humans inside the vehicle should be air-gapped away from the controls of the driverless car.

We do not want to let a bug/feature of the entertainment system be used to hack the driving software.

Nor do we want the human's downloading of 25 movies for their cross country trip to someway use up resources/bandwith that the driving device.

Anything else just constitutes a totally un-necessary security risk for minimals saving in weight/money.

Hope their cars are better than their appliances..

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=samsung+cracked+drum

Drivers required

[Anonymous Coward]

When I think about cars, I see unending hardware failure. When I think about software, I see unexpected and hard to reproduce bugs. Bad design. Botched security. No way I'd trust the life of my children to an autonomous car. Much less one I could afford.

Driverless cars should not exist except in controlled environments. Even trains have an operator. Planes are somewhat of an exception, but they don't interact with obstacles or humans (usually; for the better). Some degree of automation is good, but I firmly believe drivers can't be replaced. Imagine an autonomous vehicle in a snow storm in Canada, where you can barely see the road or other cars, and there's random ice everywhere (which you are aware of from watching the news showing the resulting chaos). I'm sure some autonomous systems can do a good job with enough sensors and prodigious software, but until all that is well tested in extreme conditions...

I'd rather make the decisions. And should other options run out, ethically choose what I damage and who I save from getting hit. The insurance industry enables us to distribute risk without losing our freedom. Car makers can sell affordable cars to replace the damaged ones. Simple system, human control, more jobs.

Would you trust an autopilot with 10-year-old software and hardware? "Oh, but they'll update it", you say. Might even be mandatory by law. But that's costs and ressources for the companies that would rather sell you new cars... And now, they'll basically have the power to decide when you can't use your car anymore. I wouldn't want that for my next computer and it's not even 10% of what a non-driverless car costs.

Re:Drivers required

[ShanghaiBill]

When I think about cars, I see unending hardware failure.

Less than 1% of injury auto accidents are caused by hardware failure. Nearly all are caused by human error.

No way I'd trust the life of my children to an autonomous car.

You need to learn to access risk more rationally. Self-driving cars have already been tested for millions of miles, and have a safety record far better than human drivers.

Can anyone image Feinstein driverless cars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where that backdoor to "keep predators away" that "only law enforcement can use" and is thus legally required in all vehicles gets exploited by psychos to crash every road-going vehicle in America in an instant, crippling the economy and causing millions of casualties.

Bitch will probably be dead by then though, and never get to see what horrific unintended consequences her 'think of the children!' pandering brought.

They're going to have a naming problem...

[MiniMike]

They're going to have a problem using their favorite name, since Ford already came out with a Galaxy model.

Personally, I would wait for the Note SUV anyway...

Hey look!

[MobSwatter]

Samsung: Americans like being made stupid and it is profitable!

Let me guess

[codeButcher]

It will cost a fortune, need to recharge every hour or two, and despite its advanced navigation system, not be able to detect that an obstacle is too low to pass through underneath without getting stuck?

Oh wait, I'm thinking of that robotic vacuum thingy....