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Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track reco

Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.

kajecounterhack 9y ago
Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. But autonomous driving is at its core a challenging software problem. No major car manufacturer outside of perhaps Tesla has a track record of shipping software at scale. They're hardware companies. Your sentiment here is like saying Samsung is great at making phones so they must be great at Mobile OS's. They're fundamentally separate things, and we frequently see that proficiency in one area doesn't necessarily translate to proficiency in another.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. No Toyota is fantastic at designing, building, marketing, managing logistics, integrating credit systems etc...for cars. Selling a Level 5 automated car is as much marketing as it is software. It could work perfectly but if nobody trusts it enough to buy, at a low enough price point, then it won't matter.
  - simonh 9y ago
    It's hard to sell something you don't have, and Toyota doesn't have competitive self driving tech or electric car tech. Arguing that they will be a leader in self driving cars because they are leader is selling legacy cars very much smacks of the "PC guys aren't going to just walk in" comment regarding smartphones. There's an old saying that goes something like: X + computer = computer So Teletype + computer = computer VDU + computer = computer Phone + computer = computer Computers and IT driven companies are eating whole industries.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
weaksauce 9y ago
Unless they have a huge cultural shift in engineering toward safety and best practices I certainly wouldn't trust them with my life. read through the Barr report on the acceleration incidents and you will see all the untrustworthy engineering going on there.
PeterisP 9y ago
Toyota presumably treats reliability differently. When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.
- 49para 9y ago
  http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-“spaghetti”-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... They might do better with hardware than software ...
  - alex_anglin 9y ago
    Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.
    - watwut 9y ago
      If drivers pedal errors lead to unintended acceleration in one car, but somehow don't cause unintended accelerations in all the other cars, then maybe there is something wring with how pedal reacts.
    - uep 9y ago
      I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments, and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti code? To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them. Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Change "Toyota" for "1982 IBM" and you'll see the mistake of thinking this is a hardware problem.
- nihonde 9y ago
  And yet the clear winner in the PC market is Apple, an incumbent that always did both hardware and software.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    Is that clear? For desktops, Apple's sales barely register. Servers? Nope. Laptops? Sure. But Chromebooks have outsold them. The only realm that Apple dominates is smartphones. They're great. I enjoy my iPhone. It also happens that iPhone sales are enough to be the biggest publicly-traded company in the world.
    - nihonde 9y ago
      In my mind, “PC market” means personal computing devices of all form factors. Any other definition is splitting hairs to serve your desired outcome. Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.
patrickaljord 9y ago
> Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. Sounds a lot like what people were saying about Nokia in 2007. It had near monopoly and was really good at executing pre-iphone smartphones, however they were never as invested in software as Apple or Google were and we all know how this ended.
- blahblab 9y ago
  Hell you can do an apples to apples comparison. Honda said the same thing about both autonomous driving and EV. They are waaaaaaay behind the curve and are hoping that FUD can keep people from buying their competitor's offerings.

kajecounterhack 9y ago

Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. But autonomous driving is at its core a challenging software problem. No major car manufacturer outside of perhaps Tesla has a track record of shipping software at scale. They're hardware companies. Your sentiment here is like saying Samsung is great at making phones so they must be great at Mobile OS's. They're fundamentally separate things, and we frequently see that proficiency in one area doesn't necessarily translate to proficiency in another.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. No Toyota is fantastic at designing, building, marketing, managing logistics, integrating credit systems etc...for cars. Selling a Level 5 automated car is as much marketing as it is software. It could work perfectly but if nobody trusts it enough to buy, at a low enough price point, then it won't matter.
- simonh 9y ago
  It's hard to sell something you don't have, and Toyota doesn't have competitive self driving tech or electric car tech. Arguing that they will be a leader in self driving cars because they are leader is selling legacy cars very much smacks of the "PC guys aren't going to just walk in" comment regarding smartphones. There's an old saying that goes something like: X + computer = computer So Teletype + computer = computer VDU + computer = computer Phone + computer = computer Computers and IT driven companies are eating whole industries.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

weaksauce 9y ago

Unless they have a huge cultural shift in engineering toward safety and best practices I certainly wouldn't trust them with my life. read through the Barr report on the acceleration incidents and you will see all the untrustworthy engineering going on there.

PeterisP 9y ago

Toyota presumably treats reliability differently. When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.

49para 9y ago
http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-“spaghetti”-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... They might do better with hardware than software ...
- alex_anglin 9y ago
  Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.
  - watwut 9y ago
    If drivers pedal errors lead to unintended acceleration in one car, but somehow don't cause unintended accelerations in all the other cars, then maybe there is something wring with how pedal reacts.
  - uep 9y ago
    I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments, and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti code? To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them. Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

Change "Toyota" for "1982 IBM" and you'll see the mistake of thinking this is a hardware problem.

nihonde 9y ago
And yet the clear winner in the PC market is Apple, an incumbent that always did both hardware and software.
- linkregister 9y ago
  Is that clear? For desktops, Apple's sales barely register. Servers? Nope. Laptops? Sure. But Chromebooks have outsold them. The only realm that Apple dominates is smartphones. They're great. I enjoy my iPhone. It also happens that iPhone sales are enough to be the biggest publicly-traded company in the world.
  - nihonde 9y ago
    In my mind, “PC market” means personal computing devices of all form factors. Any other definition is splitting hairs to serve your desired outcome. Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.

patrickaljord 9y ago

> Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. Sounds a lot like what people were saying about Nokia in 2007. It had near monopoly and was really good at executing pre-iphone smartphones, however they were never as invested in software as Apple or Google were and we all know how this ended.

blahblab 9y ago
Hell you can do an apples to apples comparison. Honda said the same thing about both autonomous driving and EV. They are waaaaaaay behind the curve and are hoping that FUD can keep people from buying their competitor's offerings.