Slashdot Mirror
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."
False dichotomy. 20 years ago, a typical new care contained 20 separate CPUs with software running on all of them. That number has gone up a lot since then. Car makers have a lot of experience developing software for realtime applications. Ad distribution companies don't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
TFA's author seems to think that just because big car companies have joined the race, they have already won.
You're assuming that Silicon Valley companies were the first into the self driving car world. They are the noisiest bunch, for sure, and like to lend weigh to the idea that they are the grand innovators in this area.
However, self-driving car research has been going on for *decades* in the computer vision and robotics worlds in academia, sometimes with sponsorship from car companies. I remeber going to vision conferences in the mid 2000s seeing talks about autonomous vehicles doing long drives on normal roads with automatic detection of road signs, obstacles etc etc.
The first DARPA grand challenge won was in 2005 (autonomous car navigating a dirt road course with vaious interesting obstacles), which was before any of the major silicon valley companies got involved. The first, second and third places all had vehicle companies as sponsors and collaborators.
SJW n. One who posts facts.