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VW, BMW and Daimler hold talks on cooperation in self-driving cars
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoI think this is great news. I think it’s a valid point that it’s hard to compete with Waymo (and probably Cruise from GM). I’d also worry what would happen if Silicon Valley cornered the market.
- DeonPenny 8y agoI think corning the market is exactly whats going to happen but GM will lease cruise abilities out.
- Sendotsh 8y ago> if Silicon Valley cornered the market. Your SelfDryv subscription has expired. Please renew via the SelfDryv app (available on iOS only) to continue using your car. Subscribe today for only $99/year (for our 5k Mile Package) + $20/year per each passenger. Notice: After an incredible 12 months, SelfDryv will be ceasing operations in 30 days due to unforeseen circumstances. Please use up any SelfDryv Mile Credits you have within those 30 days, before your SelfDryv vehicle stops functioning. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, but we are currently unable to offer refunds or credits for your vehicle. Please see the attached document for alternative vehicles you can purchase going forward.
- B-Con 8y agoWe apologize for the SelfDryv experience disruption experienced by some[0] customers earlier this week[1]. We experienced technical difficulties during a server migration that may[2] have degraded customer experience. The server migration exposed an incorrect dependency between the SelfDryv consumer hardware the the SelfDryv cloud services[3]. We have issued a fix[4] and offer 5 miles credits to any customer who was effected. [0] About 100% [1] 54 hours spanning Monday through Wednesday. [2] ^H absolutely most certainly did [3] Turns out part of the car's A/C UI dynamically fetches JavaScript on startup and our outage stopped serving JS, so A/C module failed to load. The worker thread that spawns the rest of the car's functionality freezes if the A/C module fails to respond. I guess we never tested that, I mean our internal network is pretty reliable, you know? [4] We moved the JavaScript to a CDN so that means 100% availability. Presumably eventually we'll rewrite the entire client stack anyway thus implicitly killing this horrible dependency.
- CPLX 8y agoAlso due to the fact that you forgot your password once and your last name sounds vaguely Ukrainian our AI has determined that your account should be shadowbanned, which means the app will appear to function as normal but the car will only drive in small circles around your home. When you contact customer support our reps will explain that it must be something in their system but they can’t see your account and will transfer you to a manager at which point the call will disconnect.
- mempko 8y agoThis gives me am idea for a horror story ...
- vezycash 8y agoLike some IOT devices, servers will be shutdown and cars will just stop working.
- eastendguy 8y agoFor $99/year I would subscribe to this service in a second. Where can I sign up for SelfDryv? ;-)
- crooked-v 8y agoThat's $99/year after buying the car from them.
- ghaff 8y agoPeople joke. But wouldn’t surprise me if whatever self-driving systems eventually come to the market will require subscriptions. And most likely subscriptions well in excess of $99 per year.
- rockinghigh 8y agoBMW started charging $80 a year just to plug your phone (CarPlay).
- dbuder 8y agoYou think they're going to sell the car to you?
- yitchelle 8y agoWhile this is said in jest, it might become the reality. Cars are designed for life time of more than 10 years, much longer for trucks, buses and commercial vehicles. Not 100% sure if any startups are planning this far ahead in the future.
- jacquesm 8y agoWe also apologize for remote-updating your car while you were driving on the highway and for the subsequent pile up but do note that we have disclaimed such events in your 238 page EULA that you clicked through after you purchased the subscription.
- natch 8y agoHar har. I do appreciate that this whole area is a rich vein to mine for humor, but I think remote updates will continue to be installed only when cars are in park.
- jacquesm 8y ago> Har Har I am not at all trying to be funny. > I think remote updates will continue to be installed only when cars are in park. What you think doesn't really matter, and you are wrong about the 'continue' bit. But it would be good if we had some laws around this stuff stipulating that software updates of moving vehicles are strictly forbidden, it seems like common sense, unfortunately not everybody has it.
- ivankolev 8y agoStandardizing on sensors and communication protocols can only be a good thing, and the talks about making an "open" self-driving platform are enouraging. Time will tell if it's going to pan out and whether the need for quotes around open.
- beerlord 8y agoWe are also going to need standardisation on reporting of car use to Governments. If we are no longer going to fund roads through fuel taxes, we need some other mechanism to do it. Proper charging of road use would unlock efficiencies for the road network overall.
- repsilat 8y agoDunno about other places, but in New Zealand commercial trucks mostly have voluntary GPS tracking/logging to estimate their road mileage for road levies. (IIRC because they can subtract mileage travelled on private roads, but the per-km rate might be lower too.) For most purposes though, a few linked to odometer reading, measured at mandatory "car health check-up" time and maybe amortised over the intervening period would be just fine, and require no new tech or tracking. Maybe tie it to insurance somehow?
- dehrmann 8y agoMy thought is tire taxes.
- abhinai 8y agoThese are seriously big and well funded companies. Why do they need to share development? If Cruise can build a working prototype as a startup so can BMW. What is going on? Part of me wonders if self driving tech ended up being harder than expected. These companies can't get it to work but also don't want to be left behind. Collaboration makes perfect sense. Pure speculation.
- bnt 8y agoCost control. They are already working together on various different things. In the high end market, it doesn’t matter if you have your own self-driving software or you co-develop. People who purchase a Mercedes vs BMW select base on different things like brand loyalty and perception. To me (personally), I would always pick BMW over an Audi or Mercedes, even if they all came from the same groupation / factory, because it’s the brand I care about.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago>In the high end market, it doesn’t matter if you have your own self-driving software or you co-develop. Maybe. But what if it turns out that everything other than the core intelligence, communication and software platform features turn out to be low margin components? What if these key functions turn out to be the only differentiator of any substance and the rest is just marketing blurb and a bit of component assembly?
- adrianN 8y agoThen companies that traditionally make their money with hardware will have a hard time accepting that. There are millions of lines of code in a modern car, but car manufacturers don't see themselves primarily as software companies.
- fauigerzigerk 8y agoExactly. And let's not forget that car makers are also losing their key powertrain competency to electrification. If they don't commit to really owning some of the new tech then there will be nothing left of them. In my view, these traditional car makers are a slow motion train wreck of epic proportion. How on earth can BWM and Daimler decide to pay more than 5% dividend instead of investing every last cent they earn into surviving the current technological revolution? Apparently they have decided to die and pay out what's left to shareholders. This may be a legit strategy for a private equity fund, but if I was a German polititician or trade union official I would be horrified.
- kome 8y ago...they are already working together on so many things, like lobbying and screwing the environment with their diesels. German automakers formed a secret cartel in the ‘90s to collude on diesel emissions: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/16021292/german-car-companies-cartel-diesel-emissions-90s https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/16021292/german-car-compa...
- samstave 8y agoImagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech for brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works. Or Boeing and Airbus competing on fundamental safety aspects of flight. Self driving should be a singular science with canonical baseline requirements and standards to how it should function and interact/react to the human environment. So - this shouldn't be "news" - it should be the requirement to even play in the space.
- fvdessen 8y ago> Imagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech for brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works. Except for the seatbelt, That’s how it went. Especially with Airbus and Boeing who have chosen completely different approaches to flight safety system.
- blastofrocks 8y agodifferent approaches ?
- fvdessen 8y agoIIRC, in Airbus planes the pilot has no direct control. He gives inputs which are then accepted or rejected depending on what the computer thinks is safe; at take off you can pull the stick as much as you want, the computer will not let the tail hit the ground. In Boeing you have direct control but with better feedback on what’s going to happen.
- Xixi 8y agoIt's an often repeated misconception, but in Airbus planes the pilot has full control of every single control surface of the plane. Disabling the flight enveloppe protection system is probably necessary if you want to tail strike, but it is perfectly doable.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoWhat's interesting is that modern crash-rate statistics for the two companies are essentially the same, meaning there doesn't seem to be a superior choice of the two approaches
- ascar 8y agoA big reason for this is probably to ease the way to government regulations. Germany is very strict on these regulations and compared to, e.g. Arizona, reluctant to give experimental technology a pass for the street. If they pull on the same string, they have a much better chance to lobby for the required legislation to actually test and finally sell their self-driving technology in the important domestic market.
- diminish 8y agoGermany can then enforce those regulations EU-wide. That will allow their brands to defend the EU market against US/China competition.
- Reason077 8y agoHistorically the German auto industry has held a lot of influence over politicians. They've successfully lobbied against things like a national speed limit and for weakened emissions rules in the past. More recently, they have blocked and delayed the EU's proposed emissions targets for 2025 and 2030 which would have required 40% fleet-wide CO2 reductions by 2030 and set minimum targets for zero emission vehicles. (It should be noted Sweden, France, and Spain - who also have significant auto industries - are in favour of the new rules).
- ileri62 8y agoNot to mention that germany did absolutely fucking nothing against VW when dieselgate happened. Still waiting to see Winterkorn & friends under the guillotine for scamming the entire world. What happened instead? Normal engineers got blamed instead of executives. Fucking capitalism and fucking CDU, SPD and FDP. The sole reason for their existence is to sack money from lobbyists. When you have people like Schäuble, a piece of shit that was convicted for corruption in 1999, who was the minister of finance for the past couple of years in germany, it makes sense that germany does nothing against big corporate.
- ahartmetz 8y agoWhile it is true that Germany has legalized and not so legalized corruption in politics, it makes no sense to single out VW. All large companies have "government affairs" departments which sadly provide great return on investment. If only the people had a government affairs department...
- krona 8y agoGiven that these companies have given up on competing with one another many years ago and have almost identical supply chains, wasn't this inevitable?
- NoblePublius 8y agoThree competitors conspire to not compete. Hmmmm. I’m glad thr EU anti-trust authorities are focused on Google!
- nabla9 8y agoLevel 3 autonomy works much better and level 4 becomes possible and scales faster earlier, if all carmakers cooperate and lobby for the same geofencing infrastructure and protocols in those roads where it's possible. Level 5 is far away pipedream and research project that would boost global productivity and car sales for everyone. Cooperating in basic research is good.
- mtgx 8y agoLevel 3 shouldn't exist. Multiple self-driving car makers have studied the issue and have concluded that Level 3 is too dangerous for humans, because human reaction is too slow to deal with the imperfections of a Level 3 system, all the while "expecting it to work flawlessly 90% of the time." You can't just tell humans, "Hey, this works 90% of the time - it's up to you to decide when to take over that 10% of the time. Oh, and we've legally covered in the ToS footnote, just in case you think about suing us later! Best of luck, though! Thoughts and prayers for you and your family."
- srkmno 8y agoThis can't be accurately called "collusion" since it's not a secret, it's still a cartel thought but lucky for them EU regulators have eyes only for US companies.
- hocuspocus 8y agoThere's been increasing consolidation in the automotive industry, nothing new here. Big challenges need big investments and it makes sense to work on open standards. Car makers don't want to become the next smartphone industry, with a race to the bottom among OEMs and Google reaping all the profits. German groups know very well that creating distrust in the industry is not a winning strategy when everyone works with the same suppliers. Disclosure: former HERE employee, executives always insisted on the fact staying neutral was key to long-term success and that we should welcome investments from other OEMs. I admit that European countries have conflicting interests in the matter, however I'd rather have them look at more pressing issue first, like measuring and enforcing emission standards. "Unfair" competition against Google and Uber... I can live with that.
- srkmno 8y agoYou're suggesting that the law shouldn't apply to the competitors of US companies because you worked for one of them and feel sympathetic?! That says a lot about the community makeup and voting pattern on HN.
- hocuspocus 8y agoI'm not suggesting anything, and I don't feel sympathetic towards my current or previous employers, this would be quite silly. I'm sure German car makers take part in cartel-like behavior, like all big companies. However I don't see how building an open platform and working together on setting open standards could be seen as one of them. By the very definition of open standards, competitors can adopt them.
- ineedasername 8y agoSelf-driving kind of seems like the type of thing that would benefit from a single standard protocol. It seems almost reckless to have a dozen or more organizations trying to invent it on their own, each discovering or missing pitfalls that can cost lives. The problem is that the asymetry of balkanized development leads to lucrative competetive advantages, at least in the short term as the first to "get it right" can reap a windfall. And I suppose they'd deserve it for the risk of the investment they spent. Is there an alternative they could compete on instead of the core tech? Maybe their coverage of localizations to different sets of traffic laws? Even with a dozen parallel developers, eventually the tech will become commoditized. When that happens to a technology, often the competition surrounding it focuses on services instead. What would those services be with self driving tech?
- godelmachine 8y agoNice question. Even I would like to know more about those services
- tim333 8y agoTrouble is no one has really cracked self driving yet so it's probably premature to focus on one flawed system. Even Waymo it seems can't merge with heavy traffic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011890. We may need better AI beyond current machine learning algorithms.
- viscanti 8y agoRight. If the solution was just to put more miles on their vehicles. We'd see them with 10x the number of vehicles out on the road. They're not just a few months of "learning" away from cracking full self driving. The financial incentive of getting there first is too great for them to not just throw money and hardware at the problem if that's all it took. That we see they're not doing that tells us they know they're missing some critical component. Which means all the cars out on the road now are mostly there for PR. Waymo is trying to get people comfortable with the change and to change regulations in states across the country, but they can't be "learning" anything (or they'd just scale that up and launch full self driving sooner).
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI work in automotive. These are the last three companies in the world you want defining industry standards / practices for anything.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]