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I had this somewhat naive view as well. But there's actually some very good research and work done by traditional car manufacturers. Mercedes-Benz has done some
by kriro 10y ago
I had this somewhat naive view as well. But there's actually some very good research and work done by traditional car manufacturers. Mercedes-Benz has done some very good work in the trucking department for example (from talking to some trustworthy AI researchers at a conference).
I do feel that Google (and Apple) have an edge. Traditional car companies (at least in Germany) are driven by engineers and usually decision makers tend to be ex-engineers. They have a subtly different attitude towards programming and software (often only working with Matlab and the like) and I often feel like software isn't all that important to them. Alas software is eating the world is especially true in this segment.
I don't know how to succinctly say it without sounding like "ZOMG programmers > engineers haha" elitism but I think "software first" thinking and not "engineering first" thinking is the principle that will succeed in this space.
- uola 10y agoGenerally I would say that a company like Google is researching self-driving, while a company like Volvo is building self-driving cars. It's very likely that Google has the edge when it comes to something like autonomous taxis (i.e. pods), but that is still some years ahead and who knows how much of that will have been a relevant effort then. I guess they will have a lot of patents though.
- Retric 10y agoAndroid demonstrates Google is happy to have someone else build the physical hardware. The current auto industry is predicated on many independent suppliers and Google could easily become yet another one.
- uola 10y agoYes, but the technology they are researching (full autonomous) is still further down the road than something like highway autonomy only. Which would still give you most of the benefits of an autonomous car in boredom, accident and unproductive time reduction. While not requiring as expensive parts and as much research. If you do a self-driving pod then it's another story because then you share the cost between passengers and you can engineer it to only go city speeds for instance. What I'm essentially saying is that at the point Googles research becomes "a reality" the car becomes the weak part of the equation. When we have full autonomy, I might almost just take a train (that will probably always be much faster than cars because of physics) and catch another autonomous pod at the other station. This is of course what could/should happen in theory, not what will happen.
- Retric 10y agoA Smart car is already fairly close to the pod concept in terms of form factor. Google Pods biggest difference is moving the seats further back. IMO, if Google get's the software down most company's could put out a self driving car within 1 or 2 model years. However, people are going to take much longer before people are going to take much longer before buying cars that can't be driven.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- collyw 10y agoApple? I wonder why you say this? Thy haven't publicly announced anything to do with cars until now as far as I am aware. Admittedly they are very secretive about things like that, but I would be surprised if they had any sort of lead over the competition other than with the brand name.
- agumonkey 10y agoTo me Google had an edge because Thrun came from winning the DARPA challenge, after years of 'nobody finished the race'. Even if traditional car brands had unused research for SDV, I assumed it wouldn't be as advanced as the DARPA project.