Bit of an aside, but; I recently was talking to a engineering lead at Rolls Royce and asked why it seems like Silicon Valley is coming in and eating car manufacturers lunch on autopilot/auto-assist/driver-assist and he said they aren't really, none of them are very far along compared to the car companies. It's to do with the car companies engineering with an eye to redundant systems that all play harmoniously with each other rather than just tacking LIDAR onto a car and using TensorFlow to do image recognition.
He pointed me to GeorgeHotz YouTube channel who developed in the open for CommaAI (now shut down), this company got 8m in funding (small cheese to a VC, but still showed there was interest in the project) and he was just googling answers and training his model on one single video he downloaded of the internet.
The 'play loose and fast' with the rules approach won't fly with self-driving and the car companies are looking to build something that works in the field with as close to imperceptible failures as can be realistically allowed.
The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety
I always discount someone in a discussion, as you might w/ that engineering lead, when they point to the worst examples as the norm. Especially when they trivialize real efforts with things like "just tacking on X and using Y". There are arguments for methodical, and there are some methodical approaches happening outside the car industry, but to pretend that methodical is the same as opaque is folly. I think a more appropriate answer by that lead as to why it "seems" that way is due to the guardedness of the industry. Whether that manifests as safety or stagnation is a different discussion compared to what it appears like.
Until it's done correctly by any side, nobody is "right" and the way it seems or not is a PR thing. At the very least, one defending the traditional car manufacturers' approaches would at least concede the impetus might never had arisen, or not for a long time, with their closeted and often-unrealized research methods. Especially if it's counter to the traditional income funnel.
You can bet this is the kind of argument the car industry is making all over though. "They're doing it quick but we're doing it right".
The reality is that Silicon Valley is very very good at moving fast and building very high tech solutions very quickly. The car industry isn't exactly known for being fast movers and they were very slow to get on this bandwagon.
I'm sure Silicon Valley has a few things to learn from the incumbent car industry too but let's face it - the car industry is mostly just desperate not to have their lunch eaten at this point.
Waymo claims to have autonomously driven 8 million miles on public roads, and 5 billion miles in simulation. That doesn't seem "fast and loose". Has any commercial automaker conducted anywhere near that amount of testing?
And what is there go-to market strategy? Most cars that people can buy today have active safety features as an option or in the case of Toyota, a standard in all of their cars. How is google technology, which is so advanced, mitigating crashes and fatalities today?
And Tesla’s Autopilot has driven a bit over 1 billion miles autonomously, and a lot more than that in “shadow mode” where autopilot runs without doing anything while humans are in control.
Your entire comment is hinged on one person's opinion who works at Rolls Royce, basically a non-entity in the SDC world. Has he worked at Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, or any of the other actual players? What does he engineer specifically? What data is he basing his claims upon?
From every source I've read that's publicly available, SV IS eating the major automakers' lunch. An anecdotal claim with zero evidence isn't enough to convince me otherwise, nor should it convince you.
Cruise is owned by GM, Tesla has a decent level 2 system but only sells ~100,000 cars a year, and waymo has zero technology in consumers hands at this point. Also most of the automakers have offices and research facilities in SV, with hundreds of engineers working in them.
Tesla sold 90k cars in Q4 of last year. They sold 244,920 cars in 2018 and are now at a much higher rate of production than they were for the first 1/2 of the year. You’re off by quite a bit.
Tesla sold that many in the last two quarters because it was trying to fill a massive backlog of orders. Also VW, Toyota and Nissan/Renault each sold over 10 million vehicles in 2017, so my point that they are not a major automaker still holds.
This sounds completely out of character and in direct opposition to the actual history we know of the automotive industry. Remember the 'unintended acceleration' issue that Toyota cars featured a few years ago? During the court case it was revealed that Toyota firmware developers did not have access to even a bug tracker, and that out of 90+ 'suggested' or 'recommended' coding practices, Toyota's code followed only 4. While they might claim to engineer toward redundancy and safety, one thing is pretty clear about the automotive industry: They aren't talking about software when they say that.
Google:George Hotz as Rolls Royce: a Pinto. If you squint your eyes they both look the same, but comparing the two will offend pretty much anyone working on the left side of those comparisons, for good reason.
If I were in your shoes, I totally would have gone there.
That is colossally stupid statement, Toyota, Volvo and the big oems have been pushing ADAS features and safety since day 1, with the next logical step being this guardian type of system. Are you saying a company that builds 10 million cars a year has zero incentive to work on active safety?
If you phrased your colossally stupid argument in terms of ISP's....
Are you saying that Comcast, a company that has a monopoly on internet access, has zero incentive to work on increasing bandwidth speeds and lowering prices for end users?
You see how wrong and colossally stupid your argument is, saying that corporations with essentially a monopoly, without incentive, will just happily increase the quality of their product?
Your argument is so wrong and colossally stupid that I feel like Humanity as a whole, has taken a step back due to the ignorance that has happened here today.
Are you really comparing the ISP market to the automotive market?! The global auto market is one of the lowest margin, most competitive markets that exists. You can go out and pick from one of 20 brands in pretty much any segment (cars, trucks, hatchbacks, hybrids etc). Toyota has nowhere near a monopoly on any market except maybe the city that the HQ is in.
Sure his background is limited to jailbreaking multiple iphones and playstation, but geohot actually released a product, far from just using youtube vidya for training.
> The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety
Wait, are you serious? But I mean, I thought the whole point of driving a car in the first place was that you could "move fast and break things!" So, clearly Silicon Valley has the most appealing approach!
He pointed me to GeorgeHotz YouTube channel who developed in the open for CommaAI (now shut down), this company got 8m in funding (small cheese to a VC, but still showed there was interest in the project) and he was just googling answers and training his model on one single video he downloaded of the internet.
The 'play loose and fast' with the rules approach won't fly with self-driving and the car companies are looking to build something that works in the field with as close to imperceptible failures as can be realistically allowed.
The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety