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Transportation AI

Did Silicon Valley Lose The Race To Build Self-Driving Cars? (autoblog.com) 130

Posted by EditorDavid from the dominated-by-Detroit dept.
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."
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Did Silicon Valley Lose The Race To Build Self-Driving Cars? More

Did Silicon Valley Lose The Race To Build Self-Driving Cars?

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  • Headlines in a form of a question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26, 2017 @12:38PM (#53933677)

    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.

  • No (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @12:44PM (#53933701) Journal

    Longer answer: Since nobody's crossed the finish line so far, I'm not sure why anybody would want to speculate about the winner.

    • There isn't much point speculating about who will win after the winner has crossed the finish line.

    • TFA's author seems to think that just because big car companies have joined the race, they have already won.

      Now, it's quite possible that they may eventually win, but not at all certain.

      TFA's author is displaying only his biases, not his knowledge or insights.

      • Re:No (Score:5, Informative)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @02:36PM (#53934145) Journal

        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.

    • I don't really care about the answer. If Detroit wins then that is good. Or if Tokyo wins. Spread around the tech a bit more, why concentrate everything in Silicon Valley?

    • No one is speculating on winners. They are speculating on losers. If a company is firing engineers involved in the project, that's a pretty clear sign.

  • Information Annuities (Score:3)

    by gtall ( 79522 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @12:44PM (#53933703)

    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.

  • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      Money isn't really a problem either way. Wall Street will fund anything they think will make big bucks. The big Silicon Valley companies have been making huge profits, so if they needed money for an auto plant, plenty of investors would jump at the chance.

      I mean, we don't even have to talk about hypotheticals. There's a real example of a Silicon Valley big shot going into the auto industry: Elon Musk. He made it big with PayPal, and now he's building building billion-dollar factories and making cars that
    • Money's got nothing to do with it. It's the difference between bits and bytes. Actually building hardware is completely different from "building" software.

      And that's just the start. Distributing software is easy. Distributing hardware requires a lot more overhead.

      Bits versus bytes

  • Not Really, But Harder Than Expected (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BBF_BBF ( 812493 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @12:57PM (#53933749)
    But what Silicon Valley realized is that selling something that can kill people if there are bugs isn't quite the same as creating a website or app that can be updated daily.

    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.

    • This is about as far from the truth as one can be. Technology company after technology company is losing money. Amazon lost money for more than a decade before it started profiting. Long-term potential over short-term profits are endemic to Silicon Valley investments - even with the prospect of a long-shot potential profit and overwhelming chances of never earning.

      And NO, it's not simply a matter of waiting for "regulatory hoops." To my mind the regulations have been bending backwards for self-driving c

      • No it's not. I've spent a big chunk of my career navigating "regulatory hoops". Whenever I would bring up this as being a future problem for self driving cars, I'd always be labeled as a troll. Having worked in both fields, consumer electronics and safety critical systems, they really are quite different.

        Here's a good description of the problem [fastcompany.com].

    • Great answer BBF_BBF! Add to that, the endless payments for lawyers, and extra accountants to keep up with them. I don't think that Silicon Valley has time for such foolishness. They build real stuff!!

  • SV thinks like Bill Gates (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 n

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        Even if it is done in house the patents that the tech industry can create now can help them have a nice cut of that pie.

  • 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'd guess that people are starting to realize that the autopilot tech that's been hyped as just around the corner isn't really going to happen, and in the meantime the auto industry will continue with it's incremental improvements and that maybe one day, with the some combination of 'smart cars' and 'smart roads', we'll start to see vehicles that can actually be referred to as self piloting.

  • 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.

  • Were they ever in it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @01:10PM (#53933793)

    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?

    • Yes. Many people really thought that Apple was going to manufacture their own car. Realistically, though, I think you are right. Car companies will end up shopping around for the best software.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      That was my thought.

      Ford has $60 billion in fixed assets on their balance sheet, Apple less than half that. I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants nor doing the work to line up thousands of supplier relationships necessary to actually build an entire car.

      I don't follow the auto industry, but my sense has always been that while they have a deep parts supply chain there really aren't contract manufacturers who build whole cars based on third party designs the way smartphones or co

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheSync ( 5291 )

        I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants

        Apple doesn't own iPhone assembly plants either...

        Many business models are possible. For example, Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. manufactures Hyundai and Mercedes-branded autos for sale on the Chinese market.

    • 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?

      I'd classify Tesla as a tech company and they're certainly giving it a go.

      I think Apple might have gone for it if Steve Jobs was still around, I think he would be a lot more aggressive in entering new product categories, and car sales are fundamentally about style and marketing, Jobs' strong suit.

      It would be very tough to break in but a company like Apple has enough cash to make a bet, note they wouldn't be going head-to-head in dealerships but would aim for the luxury market where margins are higher and th

      • I'd classify Tesla as a tech company...

        And you would be wrong because Tesla Motors was a car company from day one. The entire point was to put electric cars on the market.

  • What we want is cheaper electric cars, not self-driving cars.

    • We want self driving electric cars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      You're saying what *you* want. *I* want a self-driving car.

      (I'ld rather like it to be similar to a Prius, so I don't need to figure out how to charge it. The garage attached to this house is designed to hold a wagon without the horse, and to assume that on-coming vehicles are similar in speed and accident aversion. So the car would need to park on the street, and there isn't any electricity in the garage anyway. But even if there were I'd need a flagman to get the car in and out.)

      I *do* keep hoping that

      • Do the physics. Not going to happen.

        • Why not? Put supercapacitors in the house too, slowly charge them when you're away with the car.

          • Calculate the force on the plates of a capacitor when holding enough charge to move a car 300km. E=1/2Cv^2, C = eA/d, q=integral[I, dt], F=(1/4pi e)qq/d^2 should get you started.

            • I'll never let math get in the way of my dreams!

              I can fly! I can flyyyyyyyyyy (SPLAT!)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by HiThere ( 15173 )

              IIUC, supercapacitors don't exactly use plates, but rather in multiple tree-ish nets. So the charges are distributed through a volume. So I'm not sure your argument is convincing. (This is also why they can accept a large charge quickly.) I'm no expert in that area, of course, but few are.

  • 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.

  • ...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.

  • Broom as a verb? Arse off, David.

  • Elon Musk is on record for saying that Tesla cars would drive themselves by the end of 2017 [fortune.com], 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

    • 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 proble

  • The real barrier to tech companies (Score:3)

    by Cytotoxic ( 245301 ) on Sunday February 26, 2017 @04:33PM (#53934703)

    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.

  • 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 comp

  • 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 (100

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by b0bby ( 201198 )

      Fors is still claiming it plans to hold to that 5 year timeframe (2021), and Nissan is aiming for 2020. I think you're underestimating the amount of work the big manufacturers and parts suppliers have been putting into this.

      I am cautiously optimistic that I'll be able buy a car in 2021 that I can hand over control to for 95% of most of the trips I do.

      • Fors is still claiming it plans to hold to that 5 year timeframe (2021), and Nissan is aiming for 2020. I think you're underestimating the amount of work the big manufacturers and parts suppliers have been putting into this.

        In some cases the amount of effort put into something is irrelevant.

        For example, the amount of work put into solving the halting problem doesn't mean that a solution will be found (or that it exists). In this case quite a lot of folk are working on the assumption that SDC's can be done without general AI. Personally I doubt it, but even my most optimistic predictions for AI smart enough to drive a car in the conditions that humans do place it several decades out (general purpose AI).

        Brute-forcing a problem

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by b0bby ( 201198 )

          I don't know, since I'm not an expert. But it seems that the advances in sensor packages, and the ability to test various scenarios in both simulation and real life, are going to get us where we need to be fairly quickly. The fact that you can take a Civic, a cheap cellphone, and Comma.ai software and hack together a roughly functional self driving car today makes me think that what we'll be seeing in 2021 will be at least as good as most drivers are already, and as long as it can hand over control to me gr

  • 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

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