Autonomous Vehicles

[lascavarian]

So one of the demand points for AVs is the older populations that feels a little uneasy at night. Night vision tends to diminish with age and AVs could become very popular by addressing that concern with increased safety.

This is also a large demographic that has disposable income. I think AVs could add a point of reassurance that would become popular in certain groups. This is also a group that can be a more happy with having their own vehicle rather than using ride sharing.

This also goes with reaction time. AVs are likely to have better reactions than that best human.

 

[Kmartyn]

Looks like Tesla’s move to keep robo taxis in house, was another smart move. Waymo and others will need to share a big chunk of the profits with ride hailing services like Lyft.

“The news that 10 Waymo self-driving vehicle prototypes will be made available to customers of Lyft in suburban Phoenix “in the next few months” likely will get blown out of proportion as a big win for Lyft. On its face, it shows how Lyft could extract a rent from vehicle developers such as Waymo, Aptiv, and others. It’s actually more meaningful from a Waymo point of view—an admission that the leading self-driving vehicle developers likely will need to tap into customers of ride hailing networks like Lyft and Uber to generate meaningful revenue in the future, rather than rely on their own robotaxi apps. Waymo currently operates its own standalone app, but it’s only available to several hundred customers.

Given that self-driving car prototypes won’t be able to handle most scenarios on their own for a long time, it makes sense that they be made available through Lyft or Uber so that customers who need transportation on a route that prototypes can handle will be matched with those vehicles. However, Waymo’s vehicles have human “safety drivers” in them and are nowhere near ready to be driverless—and even with human overseers, there have been plenty of problems recently, as The Information has reported in detail. So Lyft shareholders shouldn’t get too excited. “

 

[Kmartyn]

On the GM Cruise front...

“More Froth for Self-Driving Cars as Mutual Fund Invests in GM Cruise

Source: The Information

The move today by General Motors’ Cruise division to raise $1.15 billion in equity funding from institutional investors including mutual fund T. Rowe Price and existing investors at a $19 billion valuation means two things: First, the disconnect between valuations in the self-driving car field and the commercial viability of vehicles that don’t yet exist is bigger than ever. Second, SoftBank’s investments in self-driving car developers have helped make other strategic and financial investors more comfortable in placing a bet on established developers in the field.

SoftBank put $900 million into Cruise last year, prompting Honda to put in $750 million with a promise of more in the future. Now comes T. Rowe Price, though Cruise did not say how much the fund is contributing. (Cruise also counted General Motors, which owns the vast majority of Cruise, among the latest investors. It is unclear why that was necessary, and spokesmen for Cruise and SoftBank declined to comment on the deals’ terms.)

Two weeks ago SoftBank, an existing investor in Uber, helped facilitate a $667 million investment by Toyota and Denso into Uber’s self-driving car division, with SoftBank contributing $333 million. Waymo also has been looking for outside investors, and Ford, which owns Argo AI, has been too. More money does not necessarily make the road to fully autonomous cars a lot easier for Cruise. But it’s always better to raise money when a company doesn’t need it rather than when it does. —“

 

[Eno Deb]

The world's biggest carmaker apparently doesn't believe that full autonomous driving will happen soon. Here's what VW said during the Q&A part of their ID preorder event:

The car is equipped with capabilities that reach to level 3 in the future. We are actually quite skeptical on timelines to get to full autonomous drive level 5 systems, and I think all the deadlines that we have seen so far have been broken. There is a huge amount of investments going into this scheme of autonomous drive, but we believe it will take longer and will be much more costly than people believe to offer to our customers. The car is physically equipped for level 3 and as software develops and evolves we will be able to put it into the cars and offer it to our customers.

 

[boonedocks]

The world's biggest carmaker apparently doesn't believe that full autonomous driving will happen soon. Here's what VW said during the Q&A part of their ID preorder event:

They couldn’t even make an acceptable Diesel engine without cheating the testing systems so I’m not sure how much “words” actually mean from them. They have a long way to go to be believable in any competitive way...

 

[ZeApelido]

Hilarious. Who cares what VW thinks about autonomous driving? They have no expertise. Let me know when they do OTA updates first.

 

[Eno Deb]

Hilarious. Who cares what VW thinks about autonomous driving? They have no expertise. Let me know when they do OTA updates first.

True about the software expertise (whatever ADAS they will offer will probably come from a supplier like Mobileye or Bosch anyway), but I suspect they are right about L5 autonomy. Nobody is even close at this point.