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Did Silicon Valley Lose The Race To Build Self-Driving Cars? (autoblog.com)
schwit1 quotes Autoblog:
Up until very recently the talk in Silicon Valley was about how the tech industry was going to broom Detroit into the dustbin of history. Companies such as Apple, Google, and Uber -- so the thinking went -- were going to out run, out gun, and out innovate the automakers. Today that talk is starting to fade. There's a dawning realization that maybe there's a good reason why the traditional car companies have been around for more than a century.
Last year Apple laid off most of the engineers it hired to design its own car. Google (now Waymo) stopped talking about making its own car. And Uber, despite its sky high market valuation, is still a long, long way from ever making any money, much less making its own autonomous cars. To paraphrase Elon Musk, Silicon Valley is learning that "Making rockets is hard, but making cars is really hard."
The article argues the big auto-makers launched "vigorous in-house autonomous programs" which became fully competitive with Silicon Valley's efforts, and that Silicon Valley may have a larger role crunching the data that's collected from self-driving cars. "Last year in the U.S. market alone Chevrolet collected 4,220 terabytes of data from customer's cars... Retailers, advertisers, marketers, product planners, financial analysts, government agencies, and so many others will eagerly pay to get access to that information."
Last year Apple laid off most of the engineers it hired to design its own car. Google (now Waymo) stopped talking about making its own car. And Uber, despite its sky high market valuation, is still a long, long way from ever making any money, much less making its own autonomous cars. To paraphrase Elon Musk, Silicon Valley is learning that "Making rockets is hard, but making cars is really hard."
The article argues the big auto-makers launched "vigorous in-house autonomous programs" which became fully competitive with Silicon Valley's efforts, and that Silicon Valley may have a larger role crunching the data that's collected from self-driving cars. "Last year in the U.S. market alone Chevrolet collected 4,220 terabytes of data from customer's cars... Retailers, advertisers, marketers, product planners, financial analysts, government agencies, and so many others will eagerly pay to get access to that information."
It is all about the supply of data to those leeches called Advertisers.
If every Ad agency in the world was to suffer a horrible death tomorrow it would not come too soon.
They are a plague on society.
Slashdot should really put in a filter for every article submission that's in a form of a question, and not allow it to go through until the submitter changes it. These blatant click-bait headlines are irritating as fuck.
Longer answer: Since nobody's crossed the finish line so far, I'm not sure why anybody would want to speculate about the winner.
We are now just Information Annuities to companies. Want to buy a TV, the company selling you one wants a "personal relationship" with you, forever. They really don't mind if you are alive or dead, just as long as the information stream continues. Buy a cheap alarm/radio, they'll want you to sign up for their periodic infoblasts to whatever account you chose, and the unending stream of return information.
Auto industry says to Silicon Valley: Stick to your ads and datamining nerds! We'll handle the cars. You can't beat us, we got self-driving programs too, and ours suck just like yours, but we already have the market cornered, so nyah!
Which is harder building a self driving car to be sold to the public.
Have 30+ years of building IT then design car
Or
Have 30+ years of building cars then design IT
It boils down to a race of money vs money, and the car manufacturers have taken together more money than silicon valley. Yes, silicon valley has boatloads of money, and even more insight into and control over our lives and data, but they can't deploy as much resources as the car industry can.
Silicon valley is a place that (mostly) lives off disrupting other industries and markets, and many of them are very vigilently fighting digitalisation. Just take Uber vs taxi companies. Or airbnb vs hotels. Or whatsapp vs mobile carriers (everyone remember having to pay for single SMS messages?). Or google vs libraries (that was the place you visited to research about a subject in the old days). Sometimes though the industry that's about to be disrupted sees that in the long run, it will lose, and I think the car companies have chosen to innovate themselves.
Silicon valley find other industries to disrupt though, they are very important.
Also there are way more regulatory hoops to jump through to build a system that goes into a car. Detroit has been doing it for 100 years, so they know how to play the game.
Silicon Valley can do it... it's just that most Silicon Valley Investors don't have the patience to grind through the many years it takes to clear regulatory requirements.
Gates knew in 1980 that he wanted to supply the software for the PC, not the hardware. The SV guys want the same deal for cars. Other than Tesla, most of them will end up partnering with existing car companies for manufacturing, sales, and maintenance.
Silicon Valley can make bullshit up, but when it comes to actually making something real not a single actual engineer can be found.
Tesla is known to have a massive amount of data to train their system on, and has already shown that they can do fleet learning.
However, other companies use the same MobileEye camera that Tesla did for the V1 hardware, so maybe others have data from that too.
I'd still put my money on Tesla though, the V2 cars are on the roads already, and training is already underway on a large scale.
I wish the author would stop thinking that for Silicon Valley to win, Detroit has to lose, or vice versa. Waymo and Uber can make money without putting Detroit companies out of business. It's probably in everyone's interest if software companies focus on software, and hardware companies focus on hardware.
Perhaps this is just my perception but I've always thought the plan was to develop the technology and then license it to car manufacturers. Did anyone honestly think that some technology companies were actually going to manufacture entire cars without any experience in the field of manufacturing let alone automotive manufacturing?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Until it is criminal to hatvest and sell data, I have no sympathy for any of them. If people want to see the true descendents of the rail barons and slave owners, look no further than everyone outlined in this article. They have normalized exploiting other human beings for profit, and it is disgusting to me.
Years ago I watched a documentary about a startup automobile manufacturer. They were using Dodge Omni door handles and interior parts because they were already vetted by DOT for use, so they didn't have to submit their own designs. Fail fast and often doesn't work well when the DOT has to sign off on every part.
It's not about companies. Silicon Valley as well as innovation in general needs great individuals. If those individuals "defect" to the auto industry, then that's where the necessary innovation will appear to come from. The vast majority of the tech we use today could have and in fact has been developed by very few people. Most people in the tech industry are glorified support staff. Autonomous driving isn't something that Silicon Valley already knows how to do, so there is no good reason to expect autonomous cars to be developed there first.
Cars are products. Can't send them updates full of bugs every other day and change their behavior all the time.
Also, cars are not advertisement vehicles. So, that means they are outside their core competencies.
Of course, I'm talking about the famous Silicon Valley companies. The reality is that most of the car manufacturers' autonomous teams are also located in Silicon Valley, but they are low profile ;)
City streets, highways, and freeways are a chaotic environment where drivers tend to favor their own expediency over the safety of others. This stacks the odds of success against self driving cars. A more structured environment where the penalties for deviant behaviors are far greater would be much more suited for autonomous vehicles. Perhaps air traffic control would be a more suitable environment for researching autonomous vehicles?
What we want is cheaper electric cars, not self-driving cars.
#DeleteFacebook
just don't do roaming as the cost can add to the price of a new car for only 1GB of data.
So who won the race? Where can I buy a fully self-driving car?
Since Capitalism is an amazing system that gives consumers the options they want, I'm sure there will be non-privacy invading cars that are available for the original price and privacy invading cars that are marked down %25 to compensate. You know, just like one can go to the store and buy every TV model in the 'non-smart' version.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
...being really good at one thing (ie some particular nuance of tech) doesn't automagically make you an expert at every other thing?
Someone please also communicate that to Hollywood.
-Styopa
Broom as a verb? Arse off, David.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
....but they got a new dating app for gay pets!
You don't see that innovation coming out of Detroit.
Elon Musk is on record for saying that Tesla cars would drive themselves by the end of 2017, adding that it would mean full autonomy with a reliability greater than that of a human.
In my opinion, the reason why Apple and Google have pulled out is not that the technology does not work, but that it is not yet demonstrably sufficiently reliable, and that cheap sensors that make the technology both feasible and economic are not out yet.
Meanwhile the traditional car makers are content with a partnership with the likes of Mobileye just to exist in this space.
Personally I believe full car autonomy is feasible, safe and useful on highways, and has been for some time. I'm not sure about economic. The other use cases are not so clear cut.
This being slashdot, I didn't bother clicking through to read the whole thing. But the most important advantage that the car companies have wasn't in the summary: regulatory capture.
They own the legislatures in several midwestern states and they own the state and federal regulatory agencies as much as the agencies own them.
They have already managed to get a law passed in Michigan that was hailed as the most permissive framework in the nation for autonomous cars. The one thing that everyone missed is that only car manufacturers can apply for a license. So no google, no apple, no any of the other parts manufacturers who are building autonomous driving subsystems. (Actually google fought for and received a "grandfathered" status for their tests)
The car companies are currently pushing the same legislation in neighboring states.
Apple was doomed from the start. The hood was welded shut and Microsoft tried to sue them over features that were too similar to Windows.
I trust the likes of Toyota, GM, Ford, et al above the likes of Google, Apple, Uber or Lyft. Companies that have actually had to manufacture their own stuff as opposed to simply sourcing it from the best combination of upstream Chinese suppliers.
" Retailers, advertisers, marketers, product planners, financial analysts, government agencies, and so many others will eagerly pay to get access to that information."
And that is why nobody will ever find my name on the title of a GM product. Or, I suppose, anything recent enough to phone home on its own.
Tech companies still have arguments over if testing should be done! Yeah, they were ever gonna be building cars.... Building cars requires real engineers.
I drive. BMW i3 which is considered a very technically advanced car. I regularly think to myself "If I wrote code like this, I'd be unemployed"
I think that GM, Ford and other car brands will release self driving cars far ahead of when the code is safe and sound. They have to. They believe if they don't get there first, they will lose to more technically competent companies.
Making cars is extremely difficult, but unlike car companies, tech firms have the luxury of taking their time to get it right. If a company like BMW can't even manage software update or dead links on their own web site, and they can't manage developer sdks for their own portals, they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near self driving cars.
Consider Ford who is suing Microsoft for their failures with using Windows CE for their cars. They had horrifying revision management, no software update mechanism, etc... they treated software as if you could just release a version without proper quality control and assume you wouldn't have to maintain it. They are now making precisely the same mistake with QNX and will sue them when it fails too.
In 10-15 years, legacy car companies will have to reinvent themselves as manufacturing companies for "fabless car companies" as they will no longer be suitable for designing their own vehicles.
They're working on building self-carjacking vehicles.
Over a year ago, when schmucks were saying that SDC's were just around the corner (five years time) I pointed out that SDC's were mostly at the same level in the mid-nineties as they are now, with improvements barely incremental.
Of course, I got told that things have changed, that large strides have been made and that revolutionary improvements have appeared for SDC. Bull, of course.
Since the mid-nineties the hardware used for SDC has increased in computational power by perhaps four orders of magnitude (1000000%) while the SDC capability (how often a human has to intervene to correct is one measure) has increased by perhaps 2%. This is not a sign of improvement.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Car manufacturers and parts suppliers were ahead of Silicon Valley from day one
The real question should be why did the auto companies take so blinding long to start going public with their solutions. I know for a fact that the big three in the US have been working this problem for over 50 years. Classmates I had at Univ of Mich in the mid 60s were working on driverless cars with several proposed technologies. I suspect they were working on it from the WW-II days once radio controlled bombs and bombers were invented. What took them so long to get up off their asterisks and do something?
{^_^}
In my opinion, the reason why Apple and Google have pulled out is not that the technology does not work, but that it is not yet demonstrably sufficiently reliable, and that cheap sensors that make the technology both feasible and economic are not out yet.
The sensors are the easy part. The hardware is a solved problem. It's the software that is the problem. With hardware you can look at something that is 99% complete and make a pretty good guess about what to put into the missing 1% to solve the problem. Software that is 99% there may never be 100%, not matter what you do.
Some problems are not solvable even with all the computing power in the world. Those tend to be the software problems (AKA the math problems). SDC's have already solved the hardware problem for the last two decades. They haven't made much progress solving the software problems. At this point there is no indication that the software problem is solvable within our lifetime.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.