4 ms·
Dear falcolas, If you really need to understand why car companies will not take your advice, you should look at their sales numbers. Car companies don't sell m
by awalton 10y ago
Dear falcolas,
If you really need to understand why car companies will not take your advice, you should look at their sales numbers. Car companies don't sell many cars in Montana. They sell a lot of cars in urban concrete jungles and suburbs like those that exist in California and basically every major city. Solve one major city (especially one with hills like San Francisco), and you've likely solved most major cities, worldwide.
California has 14.5 million cars registered and 2 million new cars are sold in the state each year. There aren't even 14.5 million people in Montana. It's an incredibly easy market to "disrupt" as it were, and they have people in California that are known early adopters to lean on for buying, testing and validating their product. The people of countryside and similar locales are recalcitrant and will see products like these as extraneous, "taking their jobs" and "killing their freedom of driving."
So once they've tackled the low hanging fruit market of California, maybe they might consider expanding into the harsher wilds. But, similar to public transit, the infrastructure worth investing in is infrastructure most people will use, and unfortunately that is not a self-driving Ford F-150.
Signed,
Common Business Sense.
- selectodude 10y agoCar companies sell plenty of cars in Chicago, New York, Toronto, Boston, Montreal, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh.
- ewalk153 10y agoExactly! And Montana is a safe place to develop the tech in a lower density/risk environment.
- dmix 10y agoIt is not necessary for them to operate at full Montana conditions to have a successful initial business. The nice thing about machine learning is that it gets better and better as more data is collected. So the rational path here is to launch in moderate temperature areas with beta software and eventually refine the tech to operate in adverse condition areas. Pushing or expecting perfection from the beginning is how thousands of products have died before launching. The best way to do product development is getting it out of the door as early as possible (in a reasonably safe state) with a competent subset of early adopter users and if possible in an idealized environment/use case. From there you expand and heavily capitalize marketing. This is what Facebook did when they launched in Harvard and restricted it to only Ivy-league schools. Before slowly expanding to other universities and then the public at large. They called it the bowling pin strategy. "If your project doesn't experiment first your entire project will be an experiment" - Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang)
- komali2 10y agoMost major cities in the world? All those major cities that don't get snow and icy roads? Major cities like Chicago, new York, Moscow? Any big city in northern Europe? What about Canada? I think the snow question is a good one.
- wsinks 10y ago18-30 million people in Moscow... That's a big market!
- dmix 10y agoFacebook succeeded for years by starting with Ivy league schools before expanding to other US universities, then all western mainstream users, then expanded internationally. Expecting them to get it right everywhere at launch time is a bad idea.
- Const-me 10y agoAverage salary in Moscow is $14000/year.
- komali2 10y agoNever said they had to own the smart driving car. Lots of people riding public transit out there.
- Tepix 10y agoUS cities are easy. Try Naples, Italy.
- dmix 10y agoThey can try Naples after they make a billion dollars in US cities. That's always how this stuff works. I've learned that the hard way living in Canada kilometres from the US but having totally different timelines for access to technology. Sometimes it's out of company ignorance but sometimes it makes sense from both a business and marketing perspective.