Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway).
Of course, people won't like this, I'm not exactly enthused either, but the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That doesn't really make sense from a business perspective.
Agreed, it seems inevitable that autonomy and insurance are going to be bundled.
1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've already got some of the downsides of insurance (aka the payout) without the upside (the premium).
2. Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
3. It just seems like a much easier sell. I wouldn't pay $100/month for self-driving, but $150 a month for self-driving + insurance? That's more than I currently pay for insurance, but not a lot more. And I've got relatively cheap insurance: charging $250/month for insurance + self-driving will be cheaper than what some people pay for just insurance alone.
I don't think we need to hit 100% self-driving for the bundled insurance to be viable. 90% self-driving should still have a substantially lower accident rate if the Waymo data is accurate and extends.
1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
> Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
Google, AFAIK the only company with cars that are actually autonomous, has US$98 Billion in cash.
It'd have to be a hell of an accident to put a dent in that.
All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.
For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.
Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.
> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.
This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.
My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.
Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
> High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.
I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.
> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.
Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
I think there will actually be a couple interesting adjustments/market forces acting in the car companies' favor.
First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties.
Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.
I actually I'd be even willing to downgrade my car one level if I'm not driving and just sitting in the back seat. Will likely be cheaper for me to own even with the increased subscription.
I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo.
Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so.
The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip.
If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it.
No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system.
No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space.
I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see.
One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.
Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking.
Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right.
It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc.
This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives.
This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart.
This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time.
This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic.
Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value.
Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more.
If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on.
This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this.
I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.
> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper
This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.
If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.
Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.
"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.
While it’s true that there is food and shopping in suburbs, I think it’s also true that suburbs are still food and culture deserts, since the food and other amenities is typically far away from most houses.
I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.
Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.
I very much hope that this doesn't happen. So much wasted energy for so little benefit. What's one to do in this world if they don't have the money to own a car that constantly drives them around? What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by? What's one to do if they want to build relationships with the other humans in the world?
How? There would be a huge increase in demand on the roads. You said it yourself, you’d have to build more roads.
Unless you meant, no more [suffering] traffic, since you could just take a nap.
The only way I see self driving to be a true win if it is so efficient that you can remove all the roads and they become part of the mass transit system.
I would demand personal vehicles to pay a premium (cost plus) as they take up more space per person and add to infrastructure maintenance cost
This would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens.
> No sharing space with people on public transit.
If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).
This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.
Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.
Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.
I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).
Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.
Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).
Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.
China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.
As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)
Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.
The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.
Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.
We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.
Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.
Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.
The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.
Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.
Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.
Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.
(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)
> The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
You have this narrative precisely backwards.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.
Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.
US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.
Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.
Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.
At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.
This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.
I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference.
In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.
What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around
Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)
Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.
California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).
I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.
Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.
I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.
Why wouldn’t it be 500 times greater? Gasoline is combusted for energy, converting most of it into mostly harmless byproducts; tire tread is just released as is.
The best evidence that tyre tread is significantly less consequential than gasoline consumption is that such criticisms overwhelmingly arise in discussions of electric cars. I'm not arguing that tire particulate isn't a problem. It surely is. But I think there's a way to go before it can be considered remotely comparable to the problem of combustion engines.
> Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.
Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.
Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.
human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.
My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.
That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"
The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.
Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.
I would hope geohot is exploring options to partner with one of the automakers. Because it sure looks like the future is not bright for their device. Cars are steadily switching to encrypted canbus and don't work with Comma. It's a dead end unless they work a deal with someone to be allowed on the bus.
George Hotz has done some interesting work, but Comma is far too indie/hacker. It's not at a scale where it can be 100% autonomous.
I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.
This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.
And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.
You must be a lot more comfortable as a passenger than I am, because that honestly sounds like my personal hell. I don't mind driving, but I hate being in any vehicle for extended periods. Have you considered a chauffeur?
Sounds like insurance in Canada is very cheap. Here in California we pay about $400/month. This is for a couple with no accidents in 30 years, in the sweet spot of old enough to have plenty of driving record with zero accidents but not too old to have any age-based penalties, so that's about as cheap as it gets.
Apparently when our child reaches driving age we should expect to be paying about $1000/month for insurace. We'll see when the time comes.
In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month
This is terrible.
In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years).
Price is for full coverage with low excess.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
Yes but when I tried to switch to liability only it was $20 cheaper. What I pay seems to be the floor, it’s definitely the lowest of anyone I know so far who isn’t claiming to live outside of NYC. Meanwhile my motorcycle insurance, liability only, for an older sport bike was only $400/year with Progressive.
Similar here. In Atlanta, have never had an at-fault accident in my life. I pay just under $400/mo for full coverage on my 2019 coupe and my wife's 2015 crossover.
The average car insurance premium in the US is over $2000/year, and over $2500/year for full coverage. I imagine that has an outlier effect and the median is lower, but I'd be surprised if the median was under $100/month. I'm paying just under $1000/year (and yes, in Ontario).
It depends where you live and how much coverage you get. The real kicker these day is uninsured motorist coverage, because so many people are driving without insurance and they are much more likely to get into accidents.
You must own your vehicle in its entirety to be able to downgrade to liability-only. If you are still making payments on your car (which most people are), your lender requires that you maintain full coverage.
I always chuckle when discussions start comparing insurance premiums without defining the insurance itself.
Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations.
These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.
Why would you forego bodily injury liability coverage? Most states require it, and it makes sense if you have even modest assets.
The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.
Sorry, I meant I forego Personal Injury Protection, not Bodily Injury. I purchase the maximum amount of bodily injury (I forget if it’s $250k or $500k, but it’s up there).
>> Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.
I think you're in the minority. I can't find the reference, but I believe more customers are willing to pay $100/month for Tesla FSD than are willing to pay $10K once.
That's not surprising, the nominal break-even time (e.g. not accounting for the time value of money) is over eight years if you blow 10K on FSD as a one-time purchase. And when Tesla isn't feeling desperate to convince people to upgrade, the 10K license you bought stays with the car. The average new car owner would spend less with the monthly option.
And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run.
I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.
And today only fools pay the 10K one time cost. Tesla even priced the monthly amount to encourage you to go monthly. There's lots of reasons, including that they're not going to be able to upgrade people who got cars with the previous hardware, so endless lawsuits trying to get a promised but never provided upgrade from 3 to 4.
> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck.
That's one alternative.
Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
"Continuous development" isn't always a selling point when it's something with your life in its hands. A great example is Tesla. There are plenty of people who are thrilled with the continuous updates and changes to everything, and there are plenty of people that mock Tesla for it. Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
> Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
More likely, one group is a large market that companies will cater to and the other group is a small market that will be very loud about their displeasure on the internet.
Like with Bethesda and paid-for game mods, the issue wasn't the functionality or the feature, but when it was introduced. Next time they do it, probably it'll blow over fast enough for them to just continue, rather than go back.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
Doubt that is a politically tenable model.
"You're telling me my son Bobby died in a crash that could have been prevented with finished software but they only roll it out to people who have the money for a new car despite no technical limitation?" -- yeah, good luck
Think about how many hoopties are already on the road with broken lights, bad alignment, bald tires, no ABS/ESP/TC, dangerous suspension geometry like semi trailing arms, no oil changes, etc. Why don’t we start handwringing about poor vehicle maintenance?
If it is a self-driving software update that the manufacturer could push but chooses not to (or could trivially port), I think it becomes much more difficult liability-wise and legally for them. I'm not saying that is the correct way, but I think it is how it would work in practice.
Relying on crappy lane keeping and crappy self driving are equally dangerous. If poor software drives you off the road, why does it matter what the feature was named?
Anything before L4 is "driver assist", which means at the end of the day, the buck stops at the driver. Anything beyond L4, the car itself drives without requiring supervision, which makes a big difference. It's your responsibility to use lane assist in a reasonable way, it's not your responsibility to control how an L4 drives anymore. That's the point of self-driving, the "self" is responsible.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
We can always choose. The subscriptions aren't mandatory? And there's an alternative to the subscription where they offer it to you for a one time cost.
If the choice is offered. But with the way the markets are today, I wouldn't be surprised if we both paid at time of purchase, and then had to pay a subscription fee still.
After all, heated seats are still installed and baked in to the MSRP, even if you're not subscribing to make them work.
The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.
That's definitely the attitude I hear from the Tesla-can-do-no-wrong crowd, but in reality most of the people I meet in the Tesla-mocking crowd are under 40- younger on average than the other group.
The non-Tesla manufacturers have noticed this and positioned products accordingly. Tesla does Musk-driven-development so only caters to the one group.
Which should not be that surprising. Teslas were priced as premium vehicles initially, and then dropped as competitors appeared and to take advantage of tax credits. Teslas also benefit dramatically from owning a garage and adding a charger to it, which mostly homeowners can do.
A homeowner buying an expensive car is very likely older and richer.
Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle.
Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers.
What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming.
Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted.
You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
I know a lot of people who work on medical device software and think Teslas approach to updates is insane. A safety critical system simply should not have routine updates that affect UX or major performance characteristics.
I'm 31 and I'm very excited by the '86 Chevy truck I just got. You know why? It's _not_ "smart". The smartest thing on it is the old-school AM/FM radio. There's no software updates, there's nothing (built-in) tracking my every move. It's just a simple, repairable truck, for, you know, _driving_.
People have this strange obsession with over-complicating everything they possibly can.
Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The more (ideally expensive) components, the more they get to mark up as the middleman, the more they get to gouge the customer. 2) The more challenging it is to repair the car, the more likely you _must_ come back to the manufacturer (i.e. dealer) and pay them exorbitant fees to fix problems only they know how and have the parts to fix.
I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
I am also very suspect of the origins of some of these regulations as well. Modern airbags are wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it's not unreasonable to question, in the US at least, whether auto manufacturers and their lobbyists have been causing new rules to be invented that coincidentally both require fancy, expensive technology AND increase the difficulty/ cost of meeting the standards as a mean to prevent new competitors from starting up in auto manufacturing. Rear-view cameras, eye tracking, and drunk-driving detection all come to mind.
I've been keeping an eye on Slate lately. They _supposedly_ will be selling their trucks for sub $30k late 2026. Presumably they will meet every modern safety standard.
3) The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence, forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.
4) The "smarter" the vehicle, the more they get to track you and sell your data. You'd think "oh in that case I'm sure it'll be like google where I'd pay a reduced price that's offset by the ad money". No, they will obviously happily rip you off on the vehicle itself AND by selling your data. edit: Because guess what? It's working! People are more than happy to fall for this stuff apparently. I mean hell, it's worked for the phone market too, as one other example.
I'd be ecstatic to see the entire industry wiped out by a newcomer on the scene.
Agreed, autonomy is a service and not a feature of the car. It has to be. There is inherent cost as you use it and associated liabilities, legal requirements for auditing, technical need for maintenance and dealing with updates in a timely fashion.
You could make the point that owning the car is a lot less important if you don't drive it yourself. If Uber didn't have to pay drivers, they could expand their area of operation to basically everywhere. Drivers need to be paid so having them drive long distance is relatively expensive. That constrains the area of operation. But otherwise, cost per mile is very low. So, orchestrating pickups in the country side becomes possible.
It's going to enable night time travel as well. Nap/sleep while traveling. Wake up at your destination. That's going to revolutionize commutes as well and enable people to live much further away from work. A four hour commute is much less of a problem if you can spend the time working or napping.
That in turn is going to do wonders for real estate prices. Because there are a lot of nice places to live that are currently far away from cities and therefore still relatively affordable. We got a preview of that during the lock downs when people figured out that remote working is a thing.
Let's be real. A staggering amount of drivers are incapable to switch on Automatic Cruise Control or trigger automatic parking. They know how to start the car, how to switch lights and wipers on/off and that's about it.
Paying subscription for something what they are never going to use is going to be a hard sell.
And to be even more real, a staggering amount of drivers won't be able to afford an autonomous driving subscription even if they wanted to. Or a car new enough or in good enough condition to have functional self driving.
I have auto parking and never use it, it came with the advanced parking sensors that I do use heavily. I forget how to use auto cruise because I drive outside of the city so rarely, it takes me awhile to “trust it” again when I do some highway driving.
> Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go
In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers are already treating self driving as table stakes. If I have a choice between a subscription car and one that just works, I’m buying the latter.
> continuous development and operations/support
ICE vehicles require continuous servicing and manufacturer support.
The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not.
At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just about every way except as a status symbol.
The monopolist providing this service would be de-incentivized from ever equipping for all the demand, and the last 10% of capacity being bid on by the last 20% of demand would make this a constant stress and struggle.
Meanwhile it's an excuse for another century of more car lanes and less mass transit infrastructure.
There used to be a service like this, called Car2Go. Not autonomous, but more like how scooter/bike rentals work. It was fantastic, and in no way profitable.
Counter counter point. Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500 and they basically rely on people upgrading every year or two. Almost like a ........subscription.
Rather than a car which a person may keep for 20 years at a one time huge purchase. Its not really reasonable to expect a company to support something longer than even lifer employees will be there to work on it.
I do really really hate the idea of automotive subscription services though.
Unrealistic for 99% of the world, billions live where they earn such sum for more than a week. Not all of those have cars, but many do. This is just some little SV + maybe NY bubble thinking. Also EU would show a big fat finger to such predatory pricing.
Having your stuff in it already, it's always available immediately (for you), not needing to worry as much about getting it dirty at the beach or with a dog, going to remote places where calling a Waymo may be infeasible or would take a really long time. Probably also cheaper if you drive really frequently.
I don't know you or your situation, but many people (including the idealized version of Rivian's target market) like going places that Waymo currently doesn't. There's also tradeoffs with cost, wait time, # of passengers, cargo, etc. Some people may also want to automate "boring" driving while still having the option to do "fun" driving
My cars are more than just transportation. They're mobile storage lockers where I can keep my stuff reasonably secure. They're a place to sit warm and dry while I wait for something else. They're (semi) private changing rooms where I can put on my cycling kit. Regardless of who does the driving I'll never give up owning (or at least leasing) my own private cars.
This is better solved by leveraging more traditional forms of transportation. Making biking, walking, and various forms of transit easier, safer, and more effective. Cars, whether self-driving or not, are in direct opposition to this.
I'm sure they could be useful to folks that have the specific use-case for it, but the vast vast majority of trips in a person's day-to-day are better solved by robust multi-modal options and public transit. The benefit there is that less drivers means that traffic is actually better for everyone.
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
Subscriptions are how things are going to go in general. This is just one example of the larger trend. Companies find it very annoying that they have to keep coming up with ways to provide new value in order to keep getting money from people.
Some car companies are already trying out subscriptions for stuff that requires zero ongoing support, like seat heaters. Outside of cars, so much software is switching to subscriptions, whether or not it makes sense. The software for my security cameras has become completely infested by ads, but you can pay for a subscription to make them go away. I own the cameras outright, but not really, since the software needed to use them is basically rented, either with cash or with my eyeballs. Most paid apps I come across these days want a monthly fee to keep using it, they're not content to just sell me a copy.
There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end (regardless of the horsepower). That's what autonomous driving is for imo.
There is a lot of fun in driving a high-hp car on track or offroad or in some not-much-populated area or in plenty of other scenarios. That's where using autonomous driving mode would feel preposterous to me.
> There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end
And I wish this would be more broadly recognized. Every time there's a story about someone important freaking out about something related to autonomous driving, I'm at least somewhat afraid they'll use it as justification to deny me access to it for those specific use cases.
And honestly, those are the only use cases I really care about or feel comfortable with right now. Of course my car is also too old to support much more than that.
How much fun is it actually to drive around doing daily errands or commuting?
Personally, I look at the 40,000 people killed each year in traffic crashes in the US, and I think, the sooner we all stop driving (on public roads) the better.
What evidence is there that we can train people to be better drivers? We've got a century of effort and it seems the bulk of road death prevention has come from improved, and more expensive, design.
Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:
> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!
You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.
Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in.
They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use.
And I write this as someone with a Model Y who does not miss Carplay (although it would be nice to have).
It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.
We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.
And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.
I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.
> Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD)
I got a loaner with fsd and tried it out.
There was this one trip I took to a store and for some reason, the nav route detoured off the road to the next street over, then joined back with the route.
I think this is a thing nav systems do and people just ignore it and go the right way.
In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.
Where I live I am often surrounded by Waymo vehicles... is Lidar 100% safe for people to be around? I ask because I read an article about how Lidar on one of the new Volvos could destroy your phone camera if you pointed it at it? If Lidar can do that to a phone camera, can it hurt your eyes?
Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).
Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.
However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.
The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.
Why wouldn’t your eye lens focus LIDAR photons from the same source onto a small region of your retina in the same way that a phone camera lens focuses same-origin photos to a few pixels?
Sorry if this is a silly question, I honestly don’t have the greatest understanding of EM.
It's incredibly important to understand that eyes and glass have different optical properties at these wavelengths. It's hard to conceptualize because to us clear is clear, but that's only at visible light. The same way that x-rays and infrared and other spectra can show things human eyes can't see, or can't see things visible light can see, it's a 2 dimensional problem. The medium and the wavelength are both at play. So, when you have the eye which is known to absorb such light, and artificial optics which are known to pass it without much obstruction, they're going to behave like opposites. Imagine if the glass/plastic they used in the car blocked the light. Wouldn't really work.
There is a flip side to this though. Quick searches show that the safety of being absorbed and then dissipated by the water in the eye also makes that wavelength perform worse in rain and fog. I think a scarier concept is a laser that can penetrate through water (remember humans are mostly bags of salt water) which could, maybe, potentially, cause bad effects.
Depends on the wavelength of lidar. Near IR lidars (850 nm to 940 nm, like Ouster, Waymo, Hesai) will be focused to your retina whereas 1550 nm lidars (like Luminar, Seyond) will not be focused and have trouble penetrating water, but they are a lot more powerful so they instead heat up your cornea. To quote my other comment [1]:
> If you have many lidars around, the beams from each 905 nm lidar will be focused to a different spot on your retina, and you are no worse off than if there was a single lidar. But if there are many 1550 nm lidars around, their beams will have a cumulative effect at heating up your cornea, potentially exceeding the safety threshold.
Follow up question that you might know: would multiple LIDAR sensor actually be additive like that? If you can stand a foot away from a car's LIDAR sensor and be unharmed, then can't you have:
x^2 sensors at x feet from you and have the same total energy delivered? If sensors are actually safe to look at from 6in or 3in, then multiple the above table by 4 or 16.
It seems like, due to the inverse square law, the main issue is how close you can get your eye to a LIDAR sensor under normal operation, not how many sensors are scattered across the environment. The one exception I can think of is a car that puts multiple LIDAR arrays next to each other (within a foot or two). But maybe I'm misunderstanding something!
Do you if there has been any work how lasers affect other animals and insects?
Am I being catastrophically pessimistic to think that in addition to swatting insects as it moves forward, the cars lidar is blinding insects in a several hundred meter path ?
I’m very optimistic about automated cars being better than most humans but wonder about side effects.
If we have automated anti-mosquito vehicles just roaming around, the world would be a better place. There might be some second order effects from removing mosquitoes that we haven't predicted, but fuck mosquitoes.
Unfortunately not all insects are mosquitoes, and one reason we have many fewer birds in (e.g.) the UK than when I was young, is the decline of insect life.
GP is slightly wrong. IIRC those problematic LIDARs are operating at higher power than traditionally allowed, with the justification that the wavelength being used is significantly less efficient at damaging human eyes, therefore it's safe enough at those powers, which is likely true enough. But it turned out that camera lenses are generally more transparent than our eyes and therefore the justification don't apply to them.
Amusingly the lenses are worse than silicon at transmitting that wavelength.
1550nm might be worse for sensors because a good portion of the light is only being dumped into the metal layers - pure silicon is mostly transparent to 1550nm. Not sure how doped silicon would work. I can tell you that 1070nm barely works on an IQ3 Achromatic back…
A point source in the visual field will create a point image on the retina. The "sensor area" you're referring is what's necessary to capture the entire visual field simultaneously.
I looked this up for a laser-based projector, Class 2 is "blink reflex should protect you" and "don't be a doofus and stare into it for a long time". Look up the classifications on the google and you'll see other things like "don't look into the rays with a set of binoculars" and stuff.
Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.
What about if you're walking or biking next to congested motorway and most of the vehicles have LiDAR running at the same time? That's a lot of photons.
This is inconsistent with the basic concept. It’s projecting and reading lasers . By default some emissions will hit people in the eye. Even invisible light can damage tissue , especially in the eye
Depends on the type of LIDAR. LIDAR rated for vehicle use is at a wavelength opaque to the eyes so it hits the surface and fluid of your eye and reflects back rather than going through to your cones and rods.
It isn't however opaque for optical glass (since the LIDAR has to shine through optical glass in the first place) so it hits your camera lens, goes straight through, and slams the sensor.
You seem to be implying that all automotive lidar are 1550 nm but that's not true. While there are lots of 1550 nm automotive lidars (Luminar on Volvo, Seyond on NIO) there are also plenty of 850 nm to 940 nm lidars are used in cars (Hesai, Robosense, etc). Those can pass through water and get focused to your retina, but they are also a lot lower power so they do not damage cameras.
I watched the livestream and they said their hardware is "Camera Safe". I am not sure if camera safe and eye safe are correlated, but I would hope/expect that they would not release something that isn't known to be eye safe. I guess it's possible that the long term effects could prove bad, and we will all end up getting "Lidar Eye" dead spots in our vision.
Digital camera sensors are much more sensitive than eyeballs, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that it won't leave a permanent line across your eyeball like it can to a camera sensor
To date I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use. Most consumer facing lasers are either class 1 but hidden (CD-ROM), or class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader).
The lack of accessible certification/testing docs for the lidars is also worrying. Where is the proof that it was even tested? Was it tested just via simulation, via a dummy eye stand-in, or with a real biological substitute?
What if there are biological concerns other than simply peak power involved with shining NIR into the eye? (For instance, it seems deep red light has some (beneficial) biological effects on mitochondria. How do we know that a pulsed NIR laser won't have similar but negative effects, even if it doesn't burn a hole in your retina.)
In terms of plain wattage, it cannot be dangerous. Unless, of course, you were to stand with your eye up against the sensor and maybe stare at it for a few minutes.
I think it makes sense to do an ASIC later, but not now. Chip development is expensive and risky. They ought to at least start selling a product with positive gross margin first.
Its possible that they have tried that and the market isn’t giving them what they need at the price they want. I do mostly agree with you though; its the economics of the car thats gonna supercharge adoption.
EDIT: another commenter mentioned that their platform is used by other companies (VW perhaps?). With that information, it might make more sense to do this.
it seems like car-makers themselves feel burdened to make their own self-driving tech, as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party.
Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…it seems like having a handful of companies focused on getting the self-driving part right without the need to also specialize in manufacturing would be beneficial.
My first inclination was to be bullish on Rivian, and there’s no question that their vehicles are beautiful. But is there anything to suggest they have an advantage over Tesla or other automakers when it comes to self-driving?
Most traditional OEMs in the automotive industry are integrators. They write a specification, and a Tier 1 supplier provides a black box matching that spec. (Tier 1 in turn provides a spec to its suppliers and integrates their parts)
This has several consequences
- Tier 1 suppliers are waiting on input/approval from OEM before proceeding with projects
- Tier 1 suppliers don't necessarily have the capital to do work "at risk", even if they could build the part without approval/specifications. (TBH - some do)
- Each layer of the supply chain lacks context on the whole project and product line and cannot achieve efficiencies outside of the scope of its contract.
These haven't really been a problem for mechanical parts and E/E parts that have well-defined functions and interfaces and have a lot of re-use from previous generations. It works really well with Kaizen (incremental innovation).
To outsource it, a traditional OEM would need to completely specify the behaviour of said self-driving system, baseline the specification, put out the requests for quotation, etc. Tier 1 then needs to analyse the spec, estimate it, break it down in to sub work packages, work with its suppliers, etc. From an optimisation point of view, this is really inefficient partitioning of the problem space. For greenfields development, an emergent specification via experimentation may be better - but that won't fit in traditional V-model sub-contract OEMs/Tier 1s use.
That flow doesn't need to be followed; the suppliers could raise/allocate capital and build the self-driving stack "at risk" - and this seems to be done (Tier IV, Waymo, etc). But as it's new technology, I assume Rivian think they can do better by themselves and can get the capital for the development as part of an integrated solution while they are smaller it might seem they should not waste limited capitial that way - but integration will save a lot of inefficiency in sharing specifications across boundaries, full system integration and deriving emergent specification via experimentation rather than some MBSE folly.
Not only is Rivian betting on an integrated platform being important for their own cars long term, they’ve also essentially sold that portion of their business to VW. They are investing in the software platform for a lot more cars than just the rivian branded ones.
Level 2 is simpler and more mature, so it should be easier to specify, package and integrate.
It can follow the traditional OEM outsourcing route, where OEM has high-level models and gets suppliers to implement the details.
e.g. I can find public information that Subaru use Veoneer cameras, Xilinx chipsets, but defines their own algorithms. I would speculate they have an outsourced company convert algorithms to FPGA netlists/embedded code.
(On the other hand, I know other OEMs have a more complex mesh of joint ventures)
It’s probably a sensible concern that if they use someone else’s tech, they’ll be subsidizing that company’s eventual mastery of the self-driving space, who will then be able to control pricing. The only long game, I imagine, is to create your own self-driving tech, so that your own customers are investing in your own long term success, not someone else’s.
They could have a better driving assistance package than 99% of other cars on the road for 1/10 the price by using OpenPilot as the LKAS, or installing a Comma in the car.
Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork
Comma had made essentially no efforts to meet the requirements of automotive systems the last time I looked at them. They would be an incredibly risky supplier for systems that could easily come under regulatory scrutiny.
It's an... interesting approach, They essentially reduce the surface area as much as possible. I don't buy that it's enough, but, again, interesting to see what they do.
Besides, a big OEM could pour an army of developers and turn the Comma approach into an ASIL D, it would be quite a lot of work but within the realm of possibility.
I recently ordered a Comma Four, which I will install BluePilot on and use with my Lightning. I'm looking forward to seeing how competent it is. Gets good reviews, at least, so I'm hoping.
I do wonder if there will be many more iterations, though, with so many manufacturers switching over to an encrypted canbus and locking out the control method comma uses.
Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.
But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.
Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:
* Doors refuse to open
* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls
* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows
Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership
Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack
Service can’t do anything about the state machine being wrong.
The Rivian app does not permit you to send a command to the car while the app thinks the car is processing a command. Trunk opening? You can’t unlock the door. On top of this, if you try to open the trunk while outside Bluetooth range and then Bluetooth connects, you are still stuck waiting for the pending command to complete.
Oh, and the ridiculous “hey let’s always remind you that you own a Rivian” Live Activity seems to synchronize on a schedule that involves being hours and hours out of date.
I agree that the app leaves something to be desired - my personal pet peeve is that it shows stale or cached data while waiting to do some async update, leading to just outright fabricated charge or lock state. Never had those kinds of problems with the truck's software proper though
one funny one is that periodically you can trigger the "more cowbell" rainbow road easter egg. You can cancel the road animation, but you can't cancel the easter egg music or control the volume.
I would wager that's because there isn't a lot of existing silicon that fits the bill. What COTS equipment is there that has all the CPU/Tensor horsepower these systems need... AND is reasonably power efficient AND is rated for a vehicle (wild temp extremes like -20F to 150F+, constant vibration, slams and impacts... and will keep working for 15 years).
Yea, Tesla has some. But they aren't sharing their secret sauce. You can't just throw a desktop computer in a car and expect it to survive for the duration. Ford et all aren't anywhere close to having "premium silicon".
So you're only option right now is to build your own. And hope maybe that you can sell/license your designs to others later and make bucks.
Isn't that risk balanced by a healthy reward of controlling their verticals and possible secret sauce?
And their chips give "1600 sparse INT8 TOPS" vs the Orin's "more than 1,000 INT8 TOPS" -- so comparable enough? And going forward they can tailor it to exactly what they want?
Orin is Nvidia's last generation. Current gen is Thor at 1k TOPS. Rivian's announcement specifies TOPS at the module level. The actual chip is more like 800 and probably doubled. Throw two Thors on a similar board and you're looking at 2000 sparse int8 TOPS.
I've been involved with similar efforts on both sides before. Making your own hardware is not a clear cut win even if you hit timelines and performance. I wish them luck (not least because I might need a new job someday), but this is an incredibly difficult space.
Mostly it costs hundreds of millions to develop a chip; it relies on volume to recover the cost.
NVIDIA also tailor their chips to customers. It's a more scalable platform than their marketing hints at... Not to mention that they also iterate fairly quickly.
So far anyway, being on a specialised architecture is a disadvantage; it's much easier to use the advances that come from research and competitors. Unless you really think that you are ahead of the completion, and can sell some fairly inflexible solution for a while.
I was just in a discussion on this very topic. It's the build vs buy equation applied to silicon. Early in the tech boom the entire silicon stack was proprietary and required a lot of time and investment to train up people who could design the circuitry, we got our first "ASICS" which was basically a bunch of circuitry on a die and you then added your own metal layer so it was like having a bunch of components glued to a board and you could "customize" it by putting wires between the parts. Then we had fabs that needed more wafer starts so they started doing other peoples designs which required they standardize their cells and provide integration services (you brought a design and they mapped it to their standard cells and process). And as the density kept going up they kept having loots of free space they needed to fill up. The 'fabless' chip companies continued to invest in making new parts until the pipeline was pretty smooth. And at that point the level of training you needed a the origin to get it into silicon dropped to nearly zero, you just needed the designs. And into that space people who were neither 'chip' companies, nor were they 'fabless' OEMs, realized they could get their integration needs met by asking a company to make them a chip that did exactly what they wanted.
One the business side, the economics are fabulous, your competitors can't "clone" your product if they don't have your special sauce components. So in many ways it becomes a strategic advantage to maintaining your market position.
But all of that because the all up cost to go from specification to parts meeting the specification dropped into the range where you could build special parts and still price at the market for your finished product.
A really interesting illustration is to look at disk drive controller boards from the Shugart Associates ST-506 (5MB) drive, to Seagate's current offerings.
It is illustrative because disk drives are a product that has been ruthlessly economized because of low margins. The ST-506 is all TTL logic and standard analog parts, and yet current products have semiconductor parts that are made exactly to Seagate's design specs and aren't sold to anyone else.
So to answer your question; apparently the economics work out. The costs associated with designing, testing, and packaging your own silicon appears to be cost effective even on products with exceptionally tight margins, it is likely a clear winner on a product that enjoys the margins that electric vehicles offer.
I share your skepticism. This feels like an attempt to tap the trainloads of money piling into "AI", for a company that is in pretty desperate need of more cash to stay alive.
In a vacuum there are potentially some advantages to doing your own silicon, especially if your goal is to sell the platform to other automakers as an OEM.
But custom silicon is pricey as hell (if you're doing anything non-trivial, at least), and the payoffs have a long lead time. For a company that's bleeding cash aggressively, with a short runway, to engage in this seems iffy. This sort of move makes a lot more sense if Rivian was an established maker that's cash-flow positive and is looking to cement their long-term lead with free cash flow. Buuuuut they aren't that.
I have the same question. It makes sense that they might need bespoke software, but how could they possibly be more efficient at creating chips than an AMD/Nvidia?
Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in replacement FPGAs of lower cost (The Rigol MHO98 replaced the Xilinx FPGA of the previous generation with a substitute from Fudan). If you're shipping a lot of hardware, that sort of thing becomes worthwhile.
Probably a lot of overlap in the venn diagram of people who would like the two
things. Mostly the "Early Adopter" circle.
Also a lot of cars have a lot of limitations with comma.ai. Yes, you can install it on all sorts but there are limitations like: above 32mph, cannot resume from stop, cannot take tight corners, cannot do stop light detection, requires additional car upgrades/features, only known to support model year 2021. Etc.
Rivian supports everything, it has a customer base who LOVE technology, are willing to try new things, and ... have disposable income for a $1k extra gadget.
I loved to see that they plan on running the Rivian Assistant LLM onboard using their new Gen 3 hardware. Great that they see that as a valuable feature and I hope to see the industry move that way.
CarPlay and affordability. I was totally smitten last year with the R1S during a test drive. I'm not a car person but felt that spark people must feel when they obsess over their vehicles.
But it wasn't pushing-six-figures smitten, which is where you're at when you get a new one with customizations.
Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
Instead, we are getting these boutique, expensive vehicles packed full of tech, but in the end, they still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives, especially hybrid. I got a Prius Prime for my wife last year, the car is way better than any EV on the market in terms of usability. Driving to work and back can all be done in EV mode easily, and then when you wanna go somewhere, you can keep the car above 80 mph easily and get there faster without worrying about where to charge.
The only part an EV doesn't have is the engine and gearbox. Admittedly, these are pretty major components, but it's a technology mature enough to be extremely reliable if the manufacturer cares to make it so.
But what an EV has instead is a massive battery, charging electronics, a DC-DC converter keeping the 12V battery charged, and various electric motors and actuators for the air conditioning and coolant loops. These are significant more reliable than oily engines in lab environments, but the automotive environment tests the mettle of seemingly resilient components.
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
I think this is more or less the pitch behind Slate (https://www.slate.auto/en), though it's more of a truck/SUV form factor.
The cost of the entertainment cluster comes from the integration work. If it was just a backup camera and a carplay/aa head unit and absolutely nothing else then maybe it could be OEMed from the same companies who sell aftermarket systems for $100 or so.
Yep. I certainly wanted an R1S, but ended up in an EV9 due to CarPlay plus huge lease incentives. No regrets, and will probably get another after this lease is up.
Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.
For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
It's maddening that $100k purchases get totally nerfed by bad software. Absolutely crazy to me that I can go out find a super nice car I want and have to walk away because of bad software or no carplay support.
I hear this a lot and it's surprising to me. We have three cars in our family (two with carplay and the Rivian) and carplay always feels like such a downgraded experience compared to that of the Rivian.
I have a plex server and use Prologue for audio books. What would my experience on Rivian be like? I am guessing I would have to connect to the infotainment system as a bluetooth speaker? Would I be able to easily skip forward/backward and see the current chapter?
I've been using car play for the better part of the past decade and don't know what it looks like in vehicles without it.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll take a car infotainment system that doesn't need CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable (and lacks it) over one that requires a phone attached via CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable.
I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.
My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.
I've only rented Teslas but I can see how most people would consider CP/AA to be unnecessary given the quality of their integrated software. But for me, the two things Tesla can't do (and CP/AA can) is
Why do people what self driving cars at all? I certainly hate the thought of having to pay for any of this. Even if the end product is subscription based, all these feature cost money up front making new cars super expensive.
I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
Also, at some point, I'm probably going to be too old to drive safely, which will restrict my travels. Not if self driving gets to the point where that doesn't matter anymore.
Cool and all, but up until companies started putting this stuff in cars they cost $30k. Now the average car is 50k. The average car is now more expensive than my BMW 3 series with the premium package from a few years back. I don't want to pay for your fantasy of going to sleep in your car and waking up someplace new. I dont want to pay for the ability of my car to self park or be summoned to me. Most new features of cars dont interest me in the slightest.
If you don't like sharing space with other people, you want a private room on a train.
These cars and their supporting infrastructure should cost more than a private room on a train because they are less efficient and have more negative externalities than a private room on a train.
A train can't take me to the beach. It can't take me camping away from civilization. It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
I love trains, but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
You must be an American, because plenty of trains exist to bring people to nature elsewhere. You know, when you drive a car to a nature place, you put it into a parking lot, then you are no longer in the car, right? Same works for trains.
> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:
> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.
My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
> Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer
Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination.
Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
This isn’t strictly directed at you, but I’m saddened that HN is immediately ready to dream big when it comes to solving hard problems and making the world a better place in spaces like AI, crypto, and technology in general. But suddenly shuts down over things as simple as trains, buses, and bike lanes.
There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.
> waaaaay more rail routes
It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.
Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.
The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.
Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
It remains to be seen, but there is reason to believe that self driving cars will be enough safer than regular cars that I as a citizen want everyone to have them if you have a car.
I have kids who walk, ride bikes, and I do the same. There are a lot of terrible drivers out there - the average driver who thinks they are better than everyone else is still terrible (yes this includes me - I'm one of the few honest enough to admit I'm not good, but I'm about equal to everyone else)
I like approaching it from an accessibility standpoint. I don't need it and I enjoy the act of driving. That said, if I had vision impairment and wanted freedom to travel further from home with no assistance self driving cars make a lot more sense.
The product isn't necessarily "for me", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
I'm extremely visually impaired. I'd rather see (ha) good public transport. I also sincerely doubt (and hope so) that I'd be legally able to drive a car simply because it has "self-driving" - what if I need to take control of it? What happens if someone gets hurt because of it? Am I liable, even though I don't have a license?
Doing long highway drives is effortless. Think cruise control, but you can let go of the wheel.
The hardware necessary for level 2 autonomy is estimated to cost about US$400 in a Tesla. Much higher for companies using Lidar though prices are coming down as well.
I don't think so. My financial situation isn't hers though, and I don't even own one. I borrowed a friend's for a 550 mile road trip this past weekend and then for a few days after. It's there enough to do the usual daily trips with minimal interaction, so while road trips is the obvious situation for it it's also really nice to have the rest of the time. It sucks that it costs so much when it could be free, but we still live under capitalism so that's just how that one goes.
One day, all personal transport will be AI, and lunatics like me who enjoy performance driving will have special vehicles we drive at a track. Self driving cars are great. That you can’t afford one is just a matter of time.
Could happen. But we still allow horse-drawn carriages on some roads. I think I'll be long dead (and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in this discussion will be long dead as well) before we kick human drivers off the road.
If we really gave a shit about driving-related fatalities, there is a lot of fruit hanging way lower than replacing the average sober driver.
The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars:
- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars
- Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof)
- Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc.
- There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)
What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).
Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.
Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.
Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
> What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
There’s plenty of evidence that traffic is almost exclusively induced demand and that as you build other facilities and expand existing ones that more people use them. “Just one more lane bro”, etc.
America tends to be car-centric because that’s the only perceived option.
I would like self-driving car for myself, but more so, I would like it for all the other drivers on the road who regularly try to kill me or destroy my car.
I think it helps you drive. It takes away the tedium of driving and reduces your workload.
Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips
infrequent but just as important - emergency braking
That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)
As an aside, IIRC they put the turn signal stalk back in a recent update. It saves them a few bucks per car to use buttons instead, but there are people who will not buy a Tesla without a turn-signal stalk -- and the loss on that is probably 500x what is saved by not putting in a stalk.
Driving can be annoying. I like it in some cases, but it's no fun when there's a ton of traffic, lots of stop lights, etc. I'd love to be able to push a button and let it handle the grunt work in those cases.
Sometimes I want to do something else. Maybe adjust my music, or send a text. If the car can keep me going while I do that, it would be nice.
I live with two people who can't drive. Often I have to take them to things. Tonight I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going, waiting, and coming back, so one of them can do something. It would be great if I could just put them in the car and say, have fun, see you later, and stay home while the car takes them there and back.
Anecdotally, whenever I have to tote someone around who cannot drive, it is nearly universally true that they also cannot get in and out of the car without help, too. So that has to be arranged, a self-driving car won't be able to solve it.
There are reasons other than physical disability for people to be unable to drive. For example, the person I’m driving tonight can’t drive themselves because they’re too young to have a license.
In the future, we could use some sort of traffic management system, were cars which conform to a standard are able to 'link-up' and move as one unit like a train, it would relieve alot of the stop and go and improve flow on congested roads, possibly with denser traffic. I'd bet alot of daily commuters woild subscribe to something like that.
I don’t think that the production model will look like that, I believe it’s a wrap. Also suspect it’s a bit of a joke on the model being called the R2 (the colors and patterns are reminiscent of R2-D2).
These companies are only surviving because of US protectionism. This tech is more expensive than then Chinese equivalent from 2-3 years ago (look at what Xiaomi or BYD released as their 2024 models).
While the software is indeed behind - e.g. Nio already had all of this in 2022/2023, and a much better UI, I'm sure the upcoming Rivian R2 and R3 would sell very well in Europe.
Out of all things I'm actually surprised they went straight to custom silicon, but gotta respect that decision. It's likely the only way to compete with Tesla right now.
Is there some tight coupling on autonomy + electric cars? Seems the only 2 viable hands-free car companies are Tesla and Rivian. I don't see myself ever getting an electric car, but it doesn't seem like the big car companies are anywhere near this.
I know this ain't a bitch-about-bluecruise thread but it's crazy to me they shipped it as is, it disengages silently as a matter of course - only indication is an animation on the speedometer. You basically have to keep your hands in the wheel just in case, not to mention shouting at you to pay attention when you glance over at the radio. Handsfree but keep your eyeballs facing front !
The reason for this is Rivian and Tesla bet big on software defined platforms… ie every piece of hardware talks to a small number of central computers instead of many independent systems. This gives them a huge leg up in developing software than can actually take all the available input and use it to control all aspects of the vehicle.
Downside is all the buttons are on a screen. But I’ve grudgingly decided it’s worth it for software upgrades.
The coupling is more with cost than drive train, but consumers most likely to pay extra for autonomy are the same ones willing to pay extra for electric.
Which is why you see it on the Mercedes ICE vehicle. Because it's a high cost vehicle to start with.
The range is fine today, the problem is charging infrastructure now. There aren't enough high speed chargers, and we can't build more because of the same reasons we can't build more AI datacenters: power. Tesla can build tons of them because they're backed by large grid batteries that suck up the power peaks from fast charging so that they can install their charging stations anywhere that has somewhat reliable power. If you don't have the batteries to act as a peak shaver, then it's really hard to install high speed charging where people need it most in residential and commercial areas that are already oversubscribed.
It's not fine for all use cases. There are many people who are holding out because it's either not fine for their main use case, or even just a use case that occurs infrequently, but still important to them.
I'd like to see data on the distances people drive on a regular basis. For America where I am from, I think that a vast majority of people could use EVs today with the ranges they have today. I didn't see any EVs with ranges below 200+ miles and most had 260+. If you have to go further than that on a regular basis, I think that most cars won't work for your specific needs, let alone EVs. The whole range argument seems like some FUD to me that was made up by the ICE industry, honestly, because EVs have had these same ranges for a decade now.
I'm speaking out of personal experience as an EV owner in Los Angeles that takes occasional road trips. It's those occasional road trips that are preventing me from going full EV. And I'm like 99% certain I'm not a tiny minority.
Worthless comment. Of course it's not an issue for city driving. It's an issue for long trips and rural driving. No one said EVs don't serve many use cases. I have one myself.
Worthless human. More range is not needed and mark my words, mainstream EVs will not bother going beyond ~300 miles. Even the 400mi in a model s is a lot. More charging stations maybe, though we have plenty here in CA so roadtrips in a Tesla have never been a problem.
appreciate the compliment. I'm one of those Californians with a Tesla, and we keep a gas car for certain trips that would be very difficult with a Tesla. I'm not just making something up here. But whatever you say.
It's not real L3, it's marketing department L3. Two years after launch it's still only supported in two US states. Now that Mercedes got their headline, it's effectively abandonware.
If it was real L3, Drive Pilot would be considered the vehicle operator for legal purposes. Mercedes would take full responsibility for any driving infringements or collisions that occur during its use. In reality, Mercedes cannot indemnify you from driving infringements, and for collisions they only promise to cover "insurance costs" which probably doesn't include any downstream reputational consequences of making an insurance claim.
Rivian coming for Teslas crown? I honestly think Rivians are unattractive. Like if a jeep and scion had a drunken tryst. Haven’t seen the interior before though.
But I’d be glad if somebody was competitive enough to force Elon to behave again.
I can't find how it will operate. Will it detect a situation where lines are not painted sufficiently clearly, warn you, and disengage? Or will you need to detect where it begins to operate wonky because lines aren't painted sufficiently clearly and to take over? I guess it's the second. It's hands-off, not eyes-off.
Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.
The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.
I've been saying that it's semi-solved, in the sense that we have a decent idea of how to get there without requiring major breakthroughs. (By "we" I mean Waymo.)
I notice that tesla seems to choose (highlight in blue) the left and/or right lane lines or the car in front of you. But it still seems to work without lines.
The endless list of "exception" cases is why I'm continuous skeptical about any sort of full-self-driving claims.
Sure, you can cover everything they can think of. But there are so many cases you can't predict, or which don't have an obvious solution, and it often comes down to a human judgement call that doesn't always have a programmatically-clear right answer.
That was specifically for their existing Gen2 highway assist expansion. Not the Gen3 custom silicon full autonomy that they were discussing for the rest of the presentation.
This is really poor execution. You're taking a complex, low margin vehicle and introducing even more cost and supply chain complexity. On top of that, you're essentially making a proxy bet that more expensive hardware (LIDAR) will beat Tesla's software bet.
It's absolutely fair to criticize Elon for his ridiculous FSD timeline claims, but here we are now evaluating the market: if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet.
> if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet
I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this.
Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection.
The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet.
And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
Waymo operates on guardrails, with a lot more human-in-the-loop (remotely) help than most people seem aware of.
Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture.
They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.
> Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years
Iff cameras only works. With threshold for "works" beig set by Waymo, since a Robotaxi that's would have been acceptable per se may not be if it's statistically less safe compared to an existing solution.
Waymo also sets the timeline. If cameras only would work, but Waymo scales before it does, Tesla may be forced by regulators to integrate radars and lidars. This nukes their cost advantage, at least in part, though Tesla maintains its manufacturing lead and vertical integration.)
Tesla has a good hand. But Rivian's play makes sense. If cameras only fails, they win on licensing and a temporary monopoly. If cameras only work, they are a less-threatening partner for other car companies than Waymo.
In the increasingly rare instances where Tesla's solution is making mistakes, it's pretty much never to do with a failure of spatial awareness (sensing) but rather a failure of path planning (decision-making).
The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth, and if it turns out sensing depth using cameras is a solved problem, adding LIDAR doesn't help. It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines. It can't tell if a traffic light is red or green. And it certainly doesn't improve predictions of human drivers.
Which begs me the question why Tesla took so long to get here? It's only since v12 it starting to look bearable for supervised use.
The only answer I see is their goal to create global model that works in every part of the world vs single city which is vastly more difficult. After all most drivers really only know how to drive well in their own town and make a lot of mistakes when driving somewhere else.
Tesla literally has a human in the driver seat for each and every mile. Their robotaxi which operates on geofenced “guardrails” has a human in the driver seat or passenger seat depending on area of its operation, and also has active remote supervision. That’s direct supervision 100% of the time. It is in no way similar in capability to Waymo.
We’ve been hearing Tesla will “surpass Waymo in the next 1-2 years” from the past 8 years, yet they are nowhere close. It’s always future tense with Tesla and never about the current state.
My first instinct is also that Rivian's strategy doesn't make sense. Self-driving is a monumentally hard problem, to be successful you need a world-class engineering and research team, resources and time.
I suspect that when Rivian has an L3 product, Waymo will be already offering an L4 package to car manufacturers.
Waymo's AI so far has been narrowly focused few cities. Good start, but remains to be seen who will scale out quicker. IMO both will succeed.
Right now if you want a personal car Tesla's FSD is the only option and will remain so for likely a decade. Waymo doesn't seem to be excited about their mission at all. If it moves to Google's graveyard they'll be like "meh" while it's mission critical for Tesla.
Your statement on more expensive hardware likely isn't true if you factor in full costs. Lidar gives you things for free with little extra processing (or power) that optical takes extra work to do poorly with higher latency.
Also LIDAR has just plain dropped in price, well over 10x, while nVidia hardware (even the automotive specific variants) have not.
Waymo is delivering millions of paid rides per month all over the country with no one in the driver's seat. Tesla still can't manage that in one small city without a backup driver in the front.
But yes, just like the dozens of other times I've read this comment for years now, I'm sure "the latest version of FSD" is so groundbreaking, and it's all about to change!
Taxi services are not low margin. A taxi typically does about 500,000 miles over its lifetime; adding $10,000 to that cost is 2 cents per mile, increasing price by about 1%.
No, Waymo is just going to license their tech to normal automakers, like Toyota, and those licensees will win. Rivian is run by a Musk-wannabe but even this stock pump isn’t going to help with his sociopath, multibillion dollar compensation package.
The market wants them to sell the $40k cars asap. All the other side quests are distractions. When they spun off their electric bike side project, the stock went up.
Incendiary language aside, this does seem pretty likely to me. Waymo has already talked about wanting to license their driver for personally owned cars eventually; it just doesn't make sense for them to do so until they can cover more of the country (or countries). The more areas they cover, and especially when they can cover various popular freeways connecting different metro areas, the more it'll make sense for them to start partnering with automakers to sell the technology to consumers.
I hold some RIVN and I'm wondering why they're spending resources on custom silicon instead of using something off-the-shelf. What is their advantage here? Can they hire the right people? Can they ship enough units to pay for it?
Those are my bearish questions. On the bullish side, the VW deal shows that they're willing and able to license part of their platform, so possibly have a big chance to recoup costs and maybe turn a profit just on that side, which justifies a big software + autonomy investment.
If their idea is both novel and useful, and if it actually works, and they can actually produce it, then: They can sell it to other automakers.
(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.
Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.
It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)
Oh, I think everyone missed this. Rivian is betting Elon made a big mistake by designing FSD to be strictly for Tesla. Rivian are doing FSD to license it out to other manufacturers. They're planning to open a new market.
Watching this unfold... I keep thinking about the supply chain... how many rare minerals go into this custom silicon?
ALSO what happens when the first generation hits end-of-life... will there be a clear path to recycling? I want to believe these platforms will last more than a subscription cycle...
BUT I guess we won't know until we see a teardown...
Rivians have been spotted with giant Velodyne VLS-128 "Alpha Puck"s since several years ago [1]. But from last I checked, Rivian's ADAS is still struggling with ping-ponging in lanes on curved stretches, and it only works on a small set of pre-mapped highways. Highly doubtful that "universal hands free" is coming.
The ping-ponging is certainly a Gen1 problem. (My Gen1 does this.) Gen1 was essentially an off-the-shelf Mobileye unit, and the performance was, as expected, not good.
Gen2 autonomy stack is completely unrelated to Gen1, and from what I hear is a completely different level of reliability.
(also - this presentation covered yet another, unrelated, gen3 autonomy stack, which shares none of the hardware or models with the existing gen2 stack, either.)
The big lidars are for ground truth collection. They get used in projects ranging from autonomous development all the way down to budget adaptive cruise control or parking sensor benchmarking.
Of course, people won't like this, I'm not exactly enthused either, but the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That doesn't really make sense from a business perspective.
reply