8 ms·

Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like

by zyang 3y ago

Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.

livinglist 3y ago
> Many of them won't make the ev transition. What exactly makes u come to this conclusion?
- simonh 3y ago
  I think that's a little hyperbolic, but the Japanese are way behind. There was a decent analysis (as always) in the Economist recently. https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losing-the-global-electric-vehicle-race https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losin...
  - _hypx 3y ago
    No one needs to bother with that race. It is just a ploy by China to gain marketshare in the car industry. It won't work because it ultimately creates a massive new resource dependency. One that just happens to shift everyone's supply chain to China or Chinese controlled companies. I believe Western companies will eventually walk away from pursuing battery cars, at least in the sense of them being the only solution. it just has too many obvious problem.
    - feanaro 3y ago
      What are these obvious problems?
      - _hypx 3y ago
        Expensive, limited range, slow recharge times, huge dependency on a battery supply chain, etc. Right now, people are obsessed about them but I think this is just temporary phenomenon. Once people realize that there are cheaper forms of green transportation that avoid those above issues, the obsession with battery EVs will end.
        digging 3y ago
        Battery EVs probably won't go away, there would be too much backlash against politicians saying "Actually, let's not bother," even if/when the US finally understands and embraces sane intra- and inter-urban transportation modes.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Toyota in particular has wasted a ridiculous amount of time and money on consumer-level hydrogen tech. As a result competitors that focused on battery EVs over the last few years have a decent head start.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    The other companies are wasting their time. Battery EVs are a dead end and they will all have to move to hydrogen tech eventually. It is the other companies that are way behind.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      In EE terms, betting against batteries is like betting against CMOS. Progress will go where the industry's money goes, not where any one company's money goes. If I could say just one thing to Toyota's management, it would be, "Stop trying to make hydrogen happen. It's not going to happen. There are just too many technical and economic drawbacks." But any of their engineers could tell them the same thing, so what'd be the point?
      - _hypx 3y ago
        The most prominent alternative (fuel cell EV) are also EVs. There are no fundamental downsides in comparison either. To continue your EE analogy, you're betting against another kind of CMOS which also happens to be made of far cheaper materials. Like your CMOS is made of germanium but the competition is made of silicon.
badpun 3y ago
> Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's still not clear when (and if) the ev transition will happen. There are many unknowns.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I feel like it’s an architectural change, similar to how smartphone transition wasn’t just about touchscreens. Many flip phones in Japan gained touchscreen after iPhone like wings on a dragon, and died anyway.
- _hypx 3y ago
  If you mean battery EVs, it very likely won't happen. I would even go as far as saying it cannot happen. They are highly resource dependent and too expensive to make. Hydrogen EVs make significantly more sense once you realize renewable energy is going to be nearly free and "efficiency" is most a distraction.
skrtskrt 3y ago
Toyota's hybrid tech is and has been the best and most reliable for a very long time. I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions. PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so there would be 0 emissions.
- recursive 3y ago
  > They have basically zero downsides They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.
    - recursive 3y ago
      New Toyota Corollas don't have spare tires. They're not an outlier. Are there available (new) EVs other than the Nissan Leaf that doesn't have active thermal management? EVs do have downsides, but so do ICE and hybrid.
    - ezfe 3y ago
      My Hybrid Corolla didn't come with a spare tire but it has space to install one (and I did). The battery is under the rear seating.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      No battery thermal management?? I thought no one did that after the disaster that was the original Nissan leaf's battery
  - wolrah 3y ago
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I worked for Toyota Infotechnology Center in Sunnyvale in 2016/2017 on a robotics research project involving their HSR robot running ROS. The robot had odometry from the wheels, though it was a bit noisy due to the construction of the omnidirectional mechanism. They decided to ignore wheel odometry and use only an odometry module based on the planar lidar, essentially visual odometry. This worked fine in most circumstances, but basically completely failed in hallways as they lacked distinctive features. This interfered with my work which involved the robot navigating around the office. I had worked on this problem before, and ROS has an excellent sensor fusion library for dealing with multiple noisy sensor readings. You just need to combine wheel odometry and laser odometry with a kalmann filter, and the sensor fusion library makes this relatively easy. However even though I worked at a Toyota office with full time Toyota employees, and the code was pretty much off the shelf ROS code, and the robots were produced in very low volumes and only in use at Toyota, they wouldn't give me the source code. I think maybe they wouldn't even give me root access. Still, I was able to control the names of ROS topics using the ROS launch files (it has been a while since I worked with ROS and I forget some of the terms). I remapped the lidar odometry topic to an intermediary topic name instead of /odom, then directed the intermediary topic in to the sensor fusion module along with the wheel odometry, then mapped the sensor fusion output to /odom. The system got odometry information but now it did not come from the lidar odometry but from the sensor fusion module, so it was happy. The fix worked great. It had normal behavior when lidar was good, and had reliable odometry in long hallways. I was finally able to implement my office navigation code. I did my best to communicate these changes back to Toyota. They had not been very helpful when I was asking for help solving the issue, but I had hoped that since I had it working they would appreciate this. I asked where I could file a git issue or otherwise push the code to some private git repo. They were not using git. Ultimately I was instructed to email the raw code files I had used along with instructions for how to integrate it. I found this quite surprising. I have no idea if they ever implemented the changes I suggested, but I kind of doubt it. From what I have heard of japanese software practices, they basically do not accept code suggestions from the bottom up. I know of some people who worked for Toyota Research Institute who said they were trying to get the Toyota folks to integrate silicon valley coding rigor in to their systems. Maybe they had success, I don't know. But certainly 6 years ago things were a total mess.
inconceivable 3y ago
japan is a US protectorate. when china starts marketing their EV's abroad the US will just sanction them. don't worry, japan is safe.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  If the US blocks China, the Chinese government will just kick all the Americans out of the Chinese market and nationalize their Chinese plants. I'm sure the big three won't be happy about that. Since corporations run the US, they will give the US Govt its barking orders and the Chinese cars will be let into the US.
simonh 3y ago
Japan generally. They tried to pull a great leap forward move with AI a few decades ago, but just ended up wasting billions on dead end approaches right on the cusp of the AI winter. My personal opinion is that really top notch breakthrough software engineering and computer science is susceptible to an exponential cascade butterfly effect. Yes you need big teams to deliver huge projects. Operating systems, compilers, languages, etc all take huge investment to build out. The thing is though the initial conditions have a massive downstream effect. The core contributions by genius 10x computer scientists and software engineers set the pace for everyone else. Unix, C, Linux, Git, LLVM, Perl, Python, who knows what else. It's the individuals or small dedicated teams doing it the 'wrong' way, or going for a weird untested approach that starts a small speck that snowballs into huge multi-billion industries. The culture and economic conditions in the US are perfect for this to work. Japan, and for different reasons and certainly not the the same scale Europe, not so much.
bastardoperator 3y ago
Where are all these American companies getting their batteries from? Mostly Japan... Rivian, Tesla, Lucid, Gravity, Ford, GMC.
- zyang 3y ago
  Do you have any sources for that claim. Because the big 3 are CATL, LG, BYD. Panasonic is the only notable Japanese supplier but it's trending down fast.
- bdamm 3y ago
  Mostly China. But the Korean and American contributions are also very significant. Cell source is not a geopolitical monopoly at all.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
I would never bet against the Japanese or Korean auto makers lol

by zyang 3y ago

Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.

livinglist 3y ago

> Many of them won't make the ev transition. What exactly makes u come to this conclusion?

simonh 3y ago
I think that's a little hyperbolic, but the Japanese are way behind. There was a decent analysis (as always) in the Economist recently. https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losing-the-global-electric-vehicle-race https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losin...
- _hypx 3y ago
  No one needs to bother with that race. It is just a ploy by China to gain marketshare in the car industry. It won't work because it ultimately creates a massive new resource dependency. One that just happens to shift everyone's supply chain to China or Chinese controlled companies. I believe Western companies will eventually walk away from pursuing battery cars, at least in the sense of them being the only solution. it just has too many obvious problem.
  - feanaro 3y ago
    What are these obvious problems?
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Expensive, limited range, slow recharge times, huge dependency on a battery supply chain, etc. Right now, people are obsessed about them but I think this is just temporary phenomenon. Once people realize that there are cheaper forms of green transportation that avoid those above issues, the obsession with battery EVs will end.
      - digging 3y ago
        Battery EVs probably won't go away, there would be too much backlash against politicians saying "Actually, let's not bother," even if/when the US finally understands and embraces sane intra- and inter-urban transportation modes.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Toyota in particular has wasted a ridiculous amount of time and money on consumer-level hydrogen tech. As a result competitors that focused on battery EVs over the last few years have a decent head start.
- _hypx 3y ago
  The other companies are wasting their time. Battery EVs are a dead end and they will all have to move to hydrogen tech eventually. It is the other companies that are way behind.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    In EE terms, betting against batteries is like betting against CMOS. Progress will go where the industry's money goes, not where any one company's money goes. If I could say just one thing to Toyota's management, it would be, "Stop trying to make hydrogen happen. It's not going to happen. There are just too many technical and economic drawbacks." But any of their engineers could tell them the same thing, so what'd be the point?
    - _hypx 3y ago
      The most prominent alternative (fuel cell EV) are also EVs. There are no fundamental downsides in comparison either. To continue your EE analogy, you're betting against another kind of CMOS which also happens to be made of far cheaper materials. Like your CMOS is made of germanium but the competition is made of silicon.

badpun 3y ago

> Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's still not clear when (and if) the ev transition will happen. There are many unknowns.

numpad0 3y ago
I feel like it’s an architectural change, similar to how smartphone transition wasn’t just about touchscreens. Many flip phones in Japan gained touchscreen after iPhone like wings on a dragon, and died anyway.
_hypx 3y ago
If you mean battery EVs, it very likely won't happen. I would even go as far as saying it cannot happen. They are highly resource dependent and too expensive to make. Hydrogen EVs make significantly more sense once you realize renewable energy is going to be nearly free and "efficiency" is most a distraction.

skrtskrt 3y ago

Toyota's hybrid tech is and has been the best and most reliable for a very long time. I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions. PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so there would be 0 emissions.

recursive 3y ago
> They have basically zero downsides They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  They often have no spare tire to fit the battery. Quite a few don't have battery thermal management, so the packs will degrade much more quickly. It seems like they have all the downsides.
  - recursive 3y ago
    New Toyota Corollas don't have spare tires. They're not an outlier. Are there available (new) EVs other than the Nissan Leaf that doesn't have active thermal management? EVs do have downsides, but so do ICE and hybrid.
  - ezfe 3y ago
    My Hybrid Corolla didn't come with a spare tire but it has space to install one (and I did). The battery is under the rear seating.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    No battery thermal management?? I thought no one did that after the disaster that was the original Nissan leaf's battery
- wolrah 3y ago

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

I worked for Toyota Infotechnology Center in Sunnyvale in 2016/2017 on a robotics research project involving their HSR robot running ROS. The robot had odometry from the wheels, though it was a bit noisy due to the construction of the omnidirectional mechanism. They decided to ignore wheel odometry and use only an odometry module based on the planar lidar, essentially visual odometry. This worked fine in most circumstances, but basically completely failed in hallways as they lacked distinctive features. This interfered with my work which involved the robot navigating around the office. I had worked on this problem before, and ROS has an excellent sensor fusion library for dealing with multiple noisy sensor readings. You just need to combine wheel odometry and laser odometry with a kalmann filter, and the sensor fusion library makes this relatively easy. However even though I worked at a Toyota office with full time Toyota employees, and the code was pretty much off the shelf ROS code, and the robots were produced in very low volumes and only in use at Toyota, they wouldn't give me the source code. I think maybe they wouldn't even give me root access. Still, I was able to control the names of ROS topics using the ROS launch files (it has been a while since I worked with ROS and I forget some of the terms). I remapped the lidar odometry topic to an intermediary topic name instead of /odom, then directed the intermediary topic in to the sensor fusion module along with the wheel odometry, then mapped the sensor fusion output to /odom. The system got odometry information but now it did not come from the lidar odometry but from the sensor fusion module, so it was happy. The fix worked great. It had normal behavior when lidar was good, and had reliable odometry in long hallways. I was finally able to implement my office navigation code. I did my best to communicate these changes back to Toyota. They had not been very helpful when I was asking for help solving the issue, but I had hoped that since I had it working they would appreciate this. I asked where I could file a git issue or otherwise push the code to some private git repo. They were not using git. Ultimately I was instructed to email the raw code files I had used along with instructions for how to integrate it. I found this quite surprising. I have no idea if they ever implemented the changes I suggested, but I kind of doubt it. From what I have heard of japanese software practices, they basically do not accept code suggestions from the bottom up. I know of some people who worked for Toyota Research Institute who said they were trying to get the Toyota folks to integrate silicon valley coding rigor in to their systems. Maybe they had success, I don't know. But certainly 6 years ago things were a total mess.

inconceivable 3y ago

japan is a US protectorate. when china starts marketing their EV's abroad the US will just sanction them. don't worry, japan is safe.

nebula8804 3y ago
If the US blocks China, the Chinese government will just kick all the Americans out of the Chinese market and nationalize their Chinese plants. I'm sure the big three won't be happy about that. Since corporations run the US, they will give the US Govt its barking orders and the Chinese cars will be let into the US.

simonh 3y ago

Japan generally. They tried to pull a great leap forward move with AI a few decades ago, but just ended up wasting billions on dead end approaches right on the cusp of the AI winter. My personal opinion is that really top notch breakthrough software engineering and computer science is susceptible to an exponential cascade butterfly effect. Yes you need big teams to deliver huge projects. Operating systems, compilers, languages, etc all take huge investment to build out. The thing is though the initial conditions have a massive downstream effect. The core contributions by genius 10x computer scientists and software engineers set the pace for everyone else. Unix, C, Linux, Git, LLVM, Perl, Python, who knows what else. It's the individuals or small dedicated teams doing it the 'wrong' way, or going for a weird untested approach that starts a small speck that snowballs into huge multi-billion industries. The culture and economic conditions in the US are perfect for this to work. Japan, and for different reasons and certainly not the the same scale Europe, not so much.

bastardoperator 3y ago

Where are all these American companies getting their batteries from? Mostly Japan... Rivian, Tesla, Lucid, Gravity, Ford, GMC.

zyang 3y ago
Do you have any sources for that claim. Because the big 3 are CATL, LG, BYD. Panasonic is the only notable Japanese supplier but it's trending down fast.
bdamm 3y ago
Mostly China. But the Korean and American contributions are also very significant. Cell source is not a geopolitical monopoly at all.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

I would never bet against the Japanese or Korean auto makers lol