Tag: self-driving

• The Derek Zoolander autonomous vehicle problem

  According to McKinsey, something like $100 billion has been invested in trying to get autonomous vehicles to work and yet the industry remains stuck with problems like this one here:

  State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”

  The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues.

  Right now certainly feels like an autonomous vehicle winter (we have many winters going on at the moment). The industry has spent a lot of time and money getting maybe 90% of the way there, but this last bit has proven to be a lot more challenging than I think most people anticipated.

  This has a lot of people thinking that it’s going to be many decades before we finally get full autonomy (if ever) and that, in the interim, all we will have are very specific use cases: trucks on highways, mining machines (the above article writes about this), and so on.

  This may very well be the case. Frankly, I don’t know. But it’s perhaps important to remember two things: (1) pessimists aren’t usually the ones who change the world and (2) there is something known as the Gartner hype cycle, which is a graphical representation of how new innovations typically get adopted.

  The Gartner hype cycle has five phases. The important ones for this discussion are the first three. First there is a technology trigger. Second there is an inflation of expectations (until it hits a peak). And then third, there is a trough of disillusionment. This is the moment where interest wanes and people begin to think it’ll never happen (until it does happen).

  That might be what we’re living through right now, or it might not be. But my gut tells me that it’s the former.

  2022.10.25

• The self-driving car arms race

  Earlier this month, I came across the following chart from USA today. 

  

  It was based on market caps as at July 29 and so the order wouldn’t look quite the same today. Still, here are the largest companies by market cap and the top 5 are US consumer-facing technology firms.

  Remember when it was a big deal that Apple had surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable company?

  We are living in a tech-driven world.

  Then yesterday, I was reading this New York Times article talking about Uber’s acquisition of Otto (a startup focused on self-driving truck technology) and its plans to allow riders in Pittsburgh to summon self-driving vehicles later this month.

  The vehicle will be a tricked out Volvo:

  

  These two snippets from the NY Times stood out for me:

  Suddenly, it seems, both Silicon Valley and Detroit are doubling down on their bets for autonomous vehicles. And in what could emerge as a self-driving-car arms race, the players are investing in, or partnering with, or buying outright the specialty companies most focused on the requisite hardware, software and artificial intelligence capabilities.

  “There’s an urgency to our mission about being part of the future,” Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said on Thursday in an interview. “This is not a side project. This is existential for us.”

  The way it will work in Pittsburgh this summer is that the self-driving Volvos will still arrive with a driver, in addition to a sidekick in the passenger seat taking notes about how the vehicle is performing. But the goal is to start weaning us off of human drivers. These pilot rides will be free to start.

  This is quite possibly the start of a general change in terms of the way cities operate (quote from Bloomberg):

  In the long run, Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car. “That could be seen as a threat,” says Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson. “We see it as an opportunity.”
  

  Uber is currently logging about 100 million miles per day. Hopefully it is clear at this point that this is not as simple as ride sharing vs. traditional taxis. Cities who are thinking about it in this way are thinking short-term and missing the bigger picture.

  Companies such as Uber, Tesla, and Google are aiming for a fundamental rethink of urban mobility. There is an arms race going on that I believe will completely eradicate the need for human drivers.

  2016.08.20

• How will self-driving vehicles change our cities and our habits?

  Last night
  I had a dream that I was driving around in a snowstorm and, for whatever
  reason, my tires had almost no tread on them. So I was all over the road.
  Strange. I have no idea what this means, if anything at all.

  But it did
  remind me that I can absolutely imagine a time when the thought of driving your
  own car (outside of it being maybe a hobby) will seem positively archaic. I
  mean, think about how messy our current system is. Roads are a chaotic and
  oftentimes dangerous place.

  The more
  interesting question for me though is: how will self-driving vehicles change
  our cities, our habits, and so on? In Elon Musk’s recently published Master
  Plan (Part Deux) he outlines 4 main goals for Tesla:

  1. Create stunning solar roofs with
     seamlessly integrated battery storage
     
  2. Expand the electric vehicle product
     line to address all major segments
     
  3. Develop a self-driving capability
     that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
     
  4. Enable your car to make money for
     you when you aren’t using it

  Let’s think
  about what these could mean.

  One
  translates into decentralized energy generation and storage. Now all of a
  sudden the cars on our roads will be roaming around our cities collecting and
  storing energy, eventually returning home at the end of the day to power our homes.
  I can already imagine fleets of sun worshipping cars chasing the light as it
  moves across our cities.

  Two is recognition
  that self-driving vehicles are going to have a meaningful impact on traditional
  public transit. (Elon reveals that Tesla is working on high passenger-density
  urban transport.)

  Three
  addresses the chaotic current state and the massive potential of networked
  cars.

  Four is particularly
  interesting to me. I wonder to what extent this income will simply subsidize
  car ownership or if it could actually transform cars into an investment (rather
  than purely an expense). Will people end up buying self-driving vehicles in the
  same way that people buy real estate for yield?

  Furthermore,
  how does this notion of a shared vehicle pool now completely change the way we
  think about parking requirements. For instance, today we think about parking in
  terms of individual usage. This tenant requires/wants X amount of parking. All
  2-bedroom apartments require Y amount of parking.

  But if we’re
  now all sharing our vehicles, parking requirements would then be based on some
  broader and collective demand curve. Parking would become less individualistic
  and instead become more of a yard where self-driving vehicles come to store
  themselves when not in use.

  Once again,
  we reach a point where utilization rates go up for each vehicle and overall
  parking demand goes down. Good thing we’re getting rid of parking minimums.

  What else could
  you see happening?

  2016.07.22

• The master plan

  I’m going through and dissecting Elon Musk’s second “Master Plan” this morning. 

  I love how he drops earth-shattering news in such a casual and honest way. Two days ago he tweeted that he was planning to pull an all-nighter to complete the “master product plan.” And then yesterday, he outlined his vision in a simple – and at times personal – blog post for how Tesla is going to change the world. It all feels very genuine.

  Will be working at Tesla on Autopilot & Model 3 today, then aiming to pull an all-nighter and complete the master product plan

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  There are so many interesting snippets from the master plan, that I’m simply going to quote them all here. There’s lots to think about and discuss.

  A reminder of the broader vision:

  The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That’s what “sustainable” means. It’s not some silly, hippy thing – it matters for everyone.

  By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

  The solar roof and other electric vehicles that Tesla has in the pipeline:

  Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.
  

  In addition to consumer vehicles, there are two other types of electric vehicle needed: heavy-duty trucks and high passenger-density urban transport. Both are in the early stages of development at Tesla and should be ready for unveiling next year.
  

  Thoughts on self-driving vehicles:

  Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day.
  

  The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.
  

  Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed.

  Why an even lower cost vehicle (compared to the Model 3) may never be necessary:

  You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

  And finally, Uber has a new competitor (that, to me, is a good thing):

  In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are.

  I’ll provide my thoughts on all of the above in a subsequent post. I’m out of writing time for today.

  2016.07.21