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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
given that they had "infotainment" systems in cars that haven't even caught up to what amateurs were doing in the 80's and 90's... pretty sure the automakers don't have a snowball's chance in hell.
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.
And you think the car companies are that stupid ? If they ever manage to create self driving cars you can bet your ass these thing will not depend in any critical fashion on some third party shit firmware/software. It will all be done in house.
The problem with software companies (silicon valley) is that they design bottom of the barrel software. You can't have that in systems that have to be safe for passengers. Do Microsoft, Apple and & co. design avionics software ? No. For the same reason they will never design the equivalent for cars. It's not in their genes. Keeping people alive has a cost, and software companies want everything else but not that cost.
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
Most people will, as soon as they see that it's safer than driving themselves. Plus they get to play on their phones the whole trip, instead of just 80% of the time.
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.