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Failure of Self-Driving Truck Co Tells You All You Need About Self-Driving Vehs

15 points by ourmandave 7y ago

mywittyname 7y ago
I bet a lot of investors were backing out because they don't see any money to be made in this space. With the economy turning south, none of the major automakers are going to be dumping billions in to acquiring self-driving startups for at least another decade, at best. Worst case, Starsky Robotics won't able to even keep up with what the major automakers or suppliers are doing. I used to work for a major supplier in the automotive space and these companies do have some world-class software engineering talent. I'm a daily reader of Jalopnik, but we have to be honest: they are the tabloid news of auto journalism. A lot of their articles are poorly researched and they pander heavily to their readership (unfortunately, IMHO, the author of this piece is the site's worst offender in this respect). Most of their good writers left a long while ago, so the only informative articles I see on there anymore are about motorsports. I would recommend skipping right past the sensationalized Jalopnik regurgitation and reading the actual blog post from Starsky [0]. [0] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5 https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.md/pqTsy http://archive.md/pqTsy
ramzyo 7y ago
It seems short-sighted to have focused all efforts on safety engineering, which is inherently boring to investors regardless of whether it’s the correct approach (I believe there’s a strong argument that it is). Unfortunately it seems like they found this out the hard way. Would be genuinely interested to understand why they didn’t do some split, say 60/40, safety/flashy new AI features. If the goal was to extend runway, this may have just done the trick. Or perhaps the headwinds are just too strong and they would’ve crumbled around 2021/2022 anyway like they predict most others will. Wish them the best, not easy to go down when you’ve given it your all, especially in this environment.
numpad0 7y ago
What's the investment money has to do with SDC anyways? It pays rents, buys food, keeps GPU hot but I still can't imagine the capital accelerating time-to-market all that much. People talk expensive gears made cheap, as if they make AI smarter or as if that "enables". The reality is there's no such AI that can steer or clear path to develop something that could, no?
- heyitsguay 7y ago
  As far as i can tell, investment helps with getting bigger, better research and engineering teams together.
redis_mlc 7y ago
VCs are fad-driven - they're sheep. It was amusing to see at least one major VC, Kleiner Perkins, implode funding clean tech in the last hype cycle, and now we have self-driving vehicles. https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/ https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/ What both categories have in common was that investors thought they could make money from something they couldn't even explain.

15 points by ourmandave 7y ago

I bet a lot of investors were backing out because they don't see any money to be made in this space. With the economy turning south, none of the major automakers are going to be dumping billions in to acquiring self-driving startups for at least another decade, at best. Worst case, Starsky Robotics won't able to even keep up with what the major automakers or suppliers are doing. I used to work for a major supplier in the automotive space and these companies do have some world-class software engineering talent. I'm a daily reader of Jalopnik, but we have to be honest: they are the tabloid news of auto journalism. A lot of their articles are poorly researched and they pander heavily to their readership (unfortunately, IMHO, the author of this piece is the site's worst offender in this respect). Most of their good writers left a long while ago, so the only informative articles I see on there anymore are about motorsports. I would recommend skipping right past the sensationalized Jalopnik regurgitation and reading the actual blog post from Starsky [0]. [0] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5 https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.md/pqTsy http://archive.md/pqTsy

ramzyo 7y ago

It seems short-sighted to have focused all efforts on safety engineering, which is inherently boring to investors regardless of whether it’s the correct approach (I believe there’s a strong argument that it is). Unfortunately it seems like they found this out the hard way. Would be genuinely interested to understand why they didn’t do some split, say 60/40, safety/flashy new AI features. If the goal was to extend runway, this may have just done the trick. Or perhaps the headwinds are just too strong and they would’ve crumbled around 2021/2022 anyway like they predict most others will. Wish them the best, not easy to go down when you’ve given it your all, especially in this environment.

numpad0 7y ago

What's the investment money has to do with SDC anyways? It pays rents, buys food, keeps GPU hot but I still can't imagine the capital accelerating time-to-market all that much. People talk expensive gears made cheap, as if they make AI smarter or as if that "enables". The reality is there's no such AI that can steer or clear path to develop something that could, no?

heyitsguay 7y ago
As far as i can tell, investment helps with getting bigger, better research and engineering teams together.

redis_mlc 7y ago

VCs are fad-driven - they're sheep. It was amusing to see at least one major VC, Kleiner Perkins, implode funding clean tech in the last hype cycle, and now we have self-driving vehicles. https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/ https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/ What both categories have in common was that investors thought they could make money from something they couldn't even explain.