Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway).
Of course, people won't like this, I'm not exactly enthused either, but the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That doesn't really make sense from a business perspective.
Agreed, it seems inevitable that autonomy and insurance are going to be bundled.
1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've already got some of the downsides of insurance (aka the payout) without the upside (the premium).
2. Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
3. It just seems like a much easier sell. I wouldn't pay $100/month for self-driving, but $150 a month for self-driving + insurance? That's more than I currently pay for insurance, but not a lot more. And I've got relatively cheap insurance: charging $250/month for insurance + self-driving will be cheaper than what some people pay for just insurance alone.
I don't think we need to hit 100% self-driving for the bundled insurance to be viable. 90% self-driving should still have a substantially lower accident rate if the Waymo data is accurate and extends.
1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
> Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
Google, AFAIK the only company with cars that are actually autonomous, has US$98 Billion in cash.
It'd have to be a hell of an accident to put a dent in that.
All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.
For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.
Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.
If it's cheaper for them to pay lawyers a few tens or hundreds of millions to bury any such case in court, in settlements, or putting the agitator through any of the myriad forms of living hell they can legally get away with, then they'll go that route.
You'd need an immensely rich or influential opponent to decide they wanted to march through hell in order to hold Google's feet to the fire. It'd have to be something deeply personal and they probably have things structured to limit any potential liability to a couple hundred million. They'll never be held to account for anything that goes seriously wrong.
> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.
This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.
Far be it from me to tell automakers how to roll out software but I would expect them to have relatively slow and gradual rollouts, segmented by region and environment (e.g., Phoenix might be first while downtown London might be last).
This is true, we had a bad hail storm come through in 2010 that dimpled an appreciable fraction of the cars in the city like golf balls. Most were deemed repairable write-offs. Went right over a couple of luxury car yards. A bunch of people at my work moved our cars undercover 10 minutes before it hit, and felt kind of silly… for 10 minutes, until it hit.
Car insurance premiums jumped by quite a lot that day, as far as I can tell permanently.
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.
My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.
Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
> High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.
I think parent might be implying that a 10 mph collision can total a car just as effectively as a 100 mph collision. There might be more left of the occupants, but the car itself might be still a total loss from a cost-to-repair perspective
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.
I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.
> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.
Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.
>Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.
Interesting theory, I would have assumed the exact opposite. People who want to drive fast and take risks will select manual driving because they'll find the autonomous cars too boring.
It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo.
Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so.
The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip.
If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it.
No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system.
No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space.
I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see.
One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.
Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking.
Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right.
It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc.
This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives.
This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart.
This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time.
This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic.
Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value.
Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more.
If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on.
This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this.
I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.
> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper
This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.
Even just paying for the roads for these cars to drive on is a challenge with the lack-of-density they require. So many suburbs with large lot sizes just learn to live with the potholes.
that is until autonomous pothole-fixers. Just the other way, looking at the Waymo driving by and with me doing small autonomy myself i was wondering what niche they leave for me, and looking at the road i thought that autonomous pothole-fixers is going to be multi-trillion business.
People writing in other comments about cost of roads, new and repair - it all will change with autonomous road paving hardware.
If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.
Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.
"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.
These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).
Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.
I agree with you but I don't believe the marketplace does. If you get rid of parking requirements in Houston I doubt you'd see a significantly different development pattern because ultimately people there actually do need to park their cars.
If you remove parking requirements then the marketplace can discover the right amount of parking. Parking minimums keep the amount of parking artificially high.
That's kind of eliding the whole point of parking minimums (which I also hate, by the way). Parking is a classic tragedy of the commons issue where each individual developer would prefer not to build any parking and externalize that cost onto nearby lots/public streets/following developers.
In fact developers did do this, and "the market" responded by creating regulations that prevent it. Which are obviously causing their own set of serious problems.
I realize "makes no sense" carries a double meaning here. I am speaking of the system-level decisions which end up actually producing infrastructure. You're right that sprawl is absolutely inhumane – we should absolutely nudge processes/incentives such that it's discouraged, but doing so is not as simple as just "get rid of zoning."
Average commute time in Houston is just under half an hour (depend on which source you read, varies from 26-29 in my quick search). Sure you can do commutes more than an hour long, but people generally don't - if they get a new job more than about half an hour away they will move.
> It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back.
Much easier to do with self driving cars though. Remember the promise? “Take a nap in your car and arrive at your destination” or “be productive on your commute”.
I live well out of Boston/Cambridge. These days, I rarely drive in. (Mostly for flights or the occasional theater). I would absolutely go in more if someone/something were driving me for a reasonable cost. I'm actually fairly convenient to commuter rail but doesn't really work except for commuting during the day which I very rarely do.
At this point it is more because they have always been that way and people don't think about it anymore. in 1920-1950 when they were first enacted they were for those reasons, but now people are more afraid of change.
I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.
Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.
I can't speak to NYC - best case it would take me 4 hours to get there (.5 to the airport, 1 hour security, 2 hours on the plane, .5 from ny airport to the city). Meanwhile I can get to nearly anywhere in my entire MSA in less than an hour, both city and suburbs (and even a few farms). Within that the majority of ethnic food is in suburbs, though the largest concentration is still downtown.
I live in Baltimore, and if you ask after Chinese, Korean, Indian, or Vietnamese, without specifying city limits, you will be directed to a place in the suburbs with a parking lot (I think this is essentially true of DC as well).
Well, there are some rural staples like BBQ, and Mexican to a degree.
But, yes. The sort of ... enduring narrative is that rural areas and suburbs have chain restaurants, diners, and fast food, because immigrants go to cities and open restaurants from their native cuisine, and that suburbanites think black pepper is spicy and sushi is gross.
In actuality I think immigrants are increasingly (a) enamored of the American big-car / big-house lifestyle (makes sense, they choose to come here) and (b) bought-in to the notion that cities are dangerous, with bad schools. So immigrants rent a place in a strip mall near the suburban school district some other immigrant said was good online and start restaurants there. Google maps exists, suburbanites think nothing of a 25 minute drive, so they ask around online after the best examples of a particular ethnic cuisine, and they drive there.
In Maryland, where I live, it's certainly true that the highly-regarded Chinese and Korean dining is in suburbs. Latin Americans, specifically Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are the only immigrant group moving in to Baltimore (where I live) with any sort of enthusiasm.
While it’s true that there is food and shopping in suburbs, I think it’s also true that suburbs are still food and culture deserts, since the food and other amenities is typically far away from most houses.
Not really. Get in a car and you can be at all. For many in the city walking it is about as long to get to those things - the distance is less, but the time is similar and time is what counts.(which isn't very many!) the city is the food desert - there are bars and restaurants, but zero grocery stories. If you want to cook a meal you have to get to the suburbs to buy the supplies.
True. One other people you find in cities in the old world is people who are not in that weird place between college and kids where they can afford to eat out all the time and alcohol hasn't started catching up to their health
I very much hope that this doesn't happen. So much wasted energy for so little benefit. What's one to do in this world if they don't have the money to own a car that constantly drives them around? What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by? What's one to do if they want to build relationships with the other humans in the world?
How? There would be a huge increase in demand on the roads. You said it yourself, you’d have to build more roads.
Unless you meant, no more [suffering] traffic, since you could just take a nap.
The only way I see self driving to be a true win if it is so efficient that you can remove all the roads and they become part of the mass transit system.
I would demand personal vehicles to pay a premium (cost plus) as they take up more space per person and add to infrastructure maintenance cost
There are a bunch of it depends. A large part of traffic is because someone messes up - accidents cause large delays, but even a small mistake in merging can slow down several others. Though human drivers regularly tailgate, if self driving cars maintain their proper 3 second following distance we could need a lot more space. (though perhaps self driving can safely maintain even a closer distance than humans do - I don't know)
This would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens.
> No sharing space with people on public transit.
If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).
This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.
Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.
Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.
cars are barely efficient in terms of time. In cost terms, cars are incredibly expensive once you add in infrastructure costs, insurance, fuel, the cost of land use, etc.
Public transit is efficient even outside areas of high density - see suburban Europe or India. Why are so many people here utterly car-brained?
Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.
This is my observation as well, it's also true in the USA. Places like Chicago and NYC have good public transit. You can easily live there without a car, in fact it's easier and certainly cheaper to not have to deal with owning a car. If you visted NYC and formed your impression of public transit in the USA based on that, it would be very wrong. Likewise you cannot assume that because Copenhagen has great public transit and bicycle infrastructure that all of Europe is like that. Get out to the smaller cities and towns and you'll find that many more people own cars and drive everywhere.
I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).
Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.
Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.
I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference.
Speak for yourself. I love my cars. For a relatively modest expense they allow me to go wherever, whenever I want and bring all my stuff with me. This is a miracle of modern civilization.
In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.
What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around
The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).
Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.
China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.
As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)
Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.
The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.
Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.
We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.
Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.
Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.
The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.
Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.
> The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
You have this narrative precisely backwards.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.
Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.
US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.
Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.
Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.
(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)
Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.
Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.
At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.
This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
> This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.
These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.
Within a convoy, yes. Between convoys, a dispatcher service could be beneficial, distributed and federated, again, like air traffic controllers and railway dispatchers. The same self-driving car companies that produce the software and require subscription could offer it.
> Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
Thanks to massive lobbying by car manufacturers that did their best to destroy all traces of public transit infrastructure that existed in the US before the country moved to car dependency.
It is true. The US has great car infrastructure. The US has a lot of airplanes. For longer distances both work very well.
We have terrible transit though, and there are many short trips where transit should work better than it doesn't work at all. However the subject here is vast distances and the US has those and does well.
Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)
Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.
California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).
I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.
Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Hell yeah man screw all of those people breathing the outside air from the car brakes. What losers. We'll just dump the pollution everywhere all the time instead of in specific areas where mitigation for everyone is easier and cheaper.
> Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.
Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.
Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.
A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.
I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.
Why wouldn’t it be 500 times greater? Gasoline is combusted for energy, converting most of it into mostly harmless byproducts; tire tread is just released as is.
The best evidence that tyre tread is significantly less consequential than gasoline consumption is that such criticisms overwhelmingly arise in discussions of electric cars.
I'm lost on why you fantasies this so much and don't just buy an RV or something?
Do you really hate driving that much?
I don't think this would change the world as you imagine it. I don't mind driving long i will just make sure i get entertainment for the purpose. Like an audio book. My wife doesn't say 'Lets go soemwere you can drive me around and i can finally do that many things in parallel'.
And plenty of family drive today with RVs while the parents are in the front and the kids are in the back. No one is showering while the parents drive. Do you know how slow Cars now would need to drive to make this suddenly that much more comftable than what we have today?
You would need to rebuild the car and streets to get to this point.
human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.
My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.
That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"
The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.
Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.
You must be a lot more comfortable as a passenger than I am, because that honestly sounds like my personal hell. I don't mind driving, but I hate being in any vehicle for extended periods. Have you considered a chauffeur?
George Hotz has done some interesting work, but Comma is far too indie/hacker. It's not at a scale where it can be 100% autonomous.
I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.
This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.
And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.
I would hope geohot is exploring options to partner with one of the automakers. Because it sure looks like the future is not bright for their device. Cars are steadily switching to encrypted canbus and don't work with Comma. It's a dead end unless they work a deal with someone to be allowed on the bus.
Autonomy + insurance is an interesting way to arrive at what the insurers are already trying to push with their tracker dongles, where they encourage you to drive like a mouse by putting bits of carrot in front of you.
I had been worried that non-tracked insurance would become increasingly expensive once we reached a tipping point where more and more drivers accepted the devil's bargain, but likely the trackers will be obsoleted by autonomy.
I think there will actually be a couple interesting adjustments/market forces acting in the car companies' favor.
First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties.
Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.
In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month
This is terrible.
In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years).
Price is for full coverage with low excess.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
Yes but when I tried to switch to liability only it was $20 cheaper. What I pay seems to be the floor, it’s definitely the lowest of anyone I know so far who isn’t claiming to live outside of NYC. Meanwhile my motorcycle insurance, liability only, for an older sport bike was only $400/year with Progressive.
Wow.That a bit high even for NYC. Are you male?
I have a join policy with my wife with Geico for $166 a month.
This includes upgraded $100,000 liability limit roadside assistance and windshield insurance.
I have a crossover/wagon 330 horsepower V6 engine.
I guess males wreck more. I pay double now for myself as a single man with a car than I did for both me and my spouse and our two cars. Went from $100/month to $200/month overnight.
Similar here. In Atlanta, have never had an at-fault accident in my life. I pay just under $400/mo for full coverage on my 2019 coupe and my wife's 2015 crossover.
I always chuckle when discussions start comparing insurance premiums without defining the insurance itself.
Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations.
These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.
Why would you forego bodily injury liability coverage? Most states require it, and it makes sense if you have even modest assets.
The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.
Sorry, I meant I forego Personal Injury Protection, not Bodily Injury. I purchase the maximum amount of bodily injury (I forget if it’s $250k or $500k, but it’s up there).
Sounds like insurance in Canada is very cheap. Here in California we pay about $400/month. This is for a couple with no accidents in 30 years, in the sweet spot of old enough to have plenty of driving record with zero accidents but not too old to have any age-based penalties, so that's about as cheap as it gets.
Apparently when our child reaches driving age we should expect to be paying about $1000/month for insurace. We'll see when the time comes.
The average car insurance premium in the US is over $2000/year, and over $2500/year for full coverage. I imagine that has an outlier effect and the median is lower, but I'd be surprised if the median was under $100/month. I'm paying just under $1000/year (and yes, in Ontario).
It depends where you live and how much coverage you get. The real kicker these day is uninsured motorist coverage, because so many people are driving without insurance and they are much more likely to get into accidents.
You must own your vehicle in its entirety to be able to downgrade to liability-only. If you are still making payments on your car (which most people are), your lender requires that you maintain full coverage.
I actually I'd be even willing to downgrade my car one level if I'm not driving and just sitting in the back seat. Will likely be cheaper for me to own even with the increased subscription.
Maybe, but it might just push many would-be car owners to just use a service and forego buying a car altogether. What's the point of paying the capital expense, and a subscription expense for a car vs just calling up a Waymo. The traditional car makers should really be wary as they've historically been terrible at service offerings.
In the next step, somebody will notice that many people drive to the same destination (like a large shopping mall or an airport) and try to offer to take them in the same self-driving car for a discount. Over time those vehicles might grow to seat as may as 30-100 people and stop at multiple destinations
If you rarely drive using a service might be worth it. However if you drive more often it will be worth having your own car because it is ready when you want to go. I have a second car that I rarely use - but if I got rid of it a uber is 15 minutes away when I want to go, and the local rental car place is always sold out if I didn't reserve a week in advance.
Even if I'm using a service, someone needs to make the cars the service uses - the car manufactures are not going anywhere, they just get a different customer.
Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here.
What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?
Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.
>> Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.
I think you're in the minority. I can't find the reference, but I believe more customers are willing to pay $100/month for Tesla FSD than are willing to pay $10K once.
That's not surprising, the nominal break-even time (e.g. not accounting for the time value of money) is over eight years if you blow 10K on FSD as a one-time purchase. And when Tesla isn't feeling desperate to convince people to upgrade, the 10K license you bought stays with the car. The average new car owner would spend less with the monthly option.
And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run.
I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.
And today only fools pay the 10K one time cost. Tesla even priced the monthly amount to encourage you to go monthly. There's lots of reasons, including that they're not going to be able to upgrade people who got cars with the previous hardware, so endless lawsuits trying to get a promised but never provided upgrade from 3 to 4.
While that is true, that’s only a small percentage of drivers. Most Tesla drivers do not pay for FSD at all. About 12% of Tesla owners pay for FSD in one form or another [0].
So even though paying monthly is more amenable, the vast majority don’t want to pay anything.
> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck.
That's one alternative.
Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
"Continuous development" isn't always a selling point when it's something with your life in its hands. A great example is Tesla. There are plenty of people who are thrilled with the continuous updates and changes to everything, and there are plenty of people that mock Tesla for it. Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
> Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
More likely, one group is a large market that companies will cater to and the other group is a small market that will be very loud about their displeasure on the internet.
Like with Bethesda and paid-for game mods, the issue wasn't the functionality or the feature, but when it was introduced. Next time they do it, probably it'll blow over fast enough for them to just continue, rather than go back.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
Doubt that is a politically tenable model.
"You're telling me my son Bobby died in a crash that could have been prevented with finished software but they only roll it out to people who have the money for a new car despite no technical limitation?" -- yeah, good luck
Think about how many hoopties are already on the road with broken lights, bad alignment, bald tires, no ABS/ESP/TC, dangerous suspension geometry like semi trailing arms, no oil changes, etc. Why don’t we start handwringing about poor vehicle maintenance?
If it is a self-driving software update that the manufacturer could push but chooses not to (or could trivially port), I think it becomes much more difficult liability-wise and legally for them. I'm not saying that is the correct way, but I think it is how it would work in practice.
We do in some places. Where I live (Iowa) we don't - but most people take better care of their car than that so it is pointless. As a kid I remember parts of MN requiring inspection and a few years latter dropping it when they realized nearly every car was passing so there was no point (this was emissions only not safety). In Texas there are regular inspections - but if you go to border towns you see a lot of those poorly maintained cars on the road (despite the inspection) and so people see more need for them and they keep them.
Relying on crappy lane keeping and crappy self driving are equally dangerous. If poor software drives you off the road, why does it matter what the feature was named?
Anything before L4 is "driver assist", which means at the end of the day, the buck stops at the driver. Anything beyond L4, the car itself drives without requiring supervision, which makes a big difference. It's your responsibility to use lane assist in a reasonable way, it's not your responsibility to control how an L4 drives anymore. That's the point of self-driving, the "self" is responsible.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
We can always choose. The subscriptions aren't mandatory? And there's an alternative to the subscription where they offer it to you for a one time cost.
If the choice is offered. But with the way the markets are today, I wouldn't be surprised if we both paid at time of purchase, and then had to pay a subscription fee still.
After all, heated seats are still installed and baked in to the MSRP, even if you're not subscribing to make them work.
The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.
That's definitely the attitude I hear from the Tesla-can-do-no-wrong crowd, but in reality most of the people I meet in the Tesla-mocking crowd are under 40- younger on average than the other group.
The non-Tesla manufacturers have noticed this and positioned products accordingly. Tesla does Musk-driven-development so only caters to the one group.
Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle.
Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers.
What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming.
Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted.
You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
Have you ever looked at how humans drive? Not the drunks, but the average person - they are terrible. You are not better. Self driving doesn't have to be very good to be better than humans.
The _average_ person drives just fine. It's specifically the idiots who either should never have been allowed to pass a driver's test in the first place (i.e. lack the motor skills and/ or mental capacity) and the idiots who are so addicted to their phones they can't go 2 minutes without looking at it. I have a very hard time believing those are the majority or even average based on all my time driving.
Which, these issues can be reduced if we stop giving people small slaps on the wrist for driving in ways that greatly endanger others. Hefty fines, temporary/ permanent driving bans, etc. Make people actually pause to consider their actions for once in their lives.
Wow, an improvement we can start doing _today_, that doesn't involve forking over billions of dollars to tech companies to pump out half-baked "self-driving" capabilities. These companies' mission isn't to save lives, in case that's not obvious, it's to _make money_. They are not and have never been interested in potentially simpler/ better solutions if they don't lead to sucking the consumer dry of their money.
I know a lot of people who work on medical device software and think Teslas approach to updates is insane. A safety critical system simply should not have routine updates that affect UX or major performance characteristics.
Which should not be that surprising. Teslas were priced as premium vehicles initially, and then dropped as competitors appeared and to take advantage of tax credits. Teslas also benefit dramatically from owning a garage and adding a charger to it, which mostly homeowners can do.
A homeowner buying an expensive car is very likely older and richer.
Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
I'm 31 and I'm very excited by the '86 Chevy truck I just got. You know why? It's _not_ "smart". The smartest thing on it is the old-school AM/FM radio. There's no software updates, there's nothing (built-in) tracking my every move. It's just a simple, repairable truck, for, you know, _driving_.
People have this strange obsession with over-complicating everything they possibly can.
Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The more (ideally expensive) components, the more they get to mark up as the middleman, the more they get to gouge the customer. 2) The more challenging it is to repair the car, the more likely you _must_ come back to the manufacturer (i.e. dealer) and pay them exorbitant fees to fix problems only they know how and have the parts to fix.
I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
I am also very suspect of the origins of some of these regulations as well. Modern airbags are wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it's not unreasonable to question, in the US at least, whether auto manufacturers and their lobbyists have been causing new rules to be invented that coincidentally both require fancy, expensive technology AND increase the difficulty/ cost of meeting the standards as a mean to prevent new competitors from starting up in auto manufacturing. Rear-view cameras, eye tracking, and drunk-driving detection all come to mind.
Emissions regulations should come to mind first. Eye tracking is a lot cheaper than getting an ICE to pass modern emissions (a multi-billion dollar project).
Of course any of the above if they work are a good thing. We are debating cost/benefit here though.
I've been keeping an eye on Slate lately. They _supposedly_ will be selling their trucks for sub $30k late 2026. Presumably they will meet every modern safety standard.
3) The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence, forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.
4) The "smarter" the vehicle, the more they get to track you and sell your data. You'd think "oh in that case I'm sure it'll be like google where I'd pay a reduced price that's offset by the ad money". No, they will obviously happily rip you off on the vehicle itself AND by selling your data. edit: Because guess what? It's working! People are more than happy to fall for this stuff apparently. I mean hell, it's worked for the phone market too, as one other example.
I'd be ecstatic to see the entire industry wiped out by a newcomer on the scene.
> The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.
This makes it harder not easier!. Cars can only see for $50-100k because they last for many years. When the person who wouldn't caught dead in a car more than 3 years old trades in for a new one it gets sold. If the car only lasted 5-7 years that used car buyer would factor that in and be unwilling to pay nearly as much - they would have no choice because banks won't give you a 6 year loan on a car that only has 2-4 years left.
Planned obsolesce exists, but they are thinking of 12-20 year old cars need to go. Any car that makes it to 25 though is a collectors item and they want you to show it off at car shows (preferably not a daily driver though) so people think you can make cars that go that long.
The bank loans are a fair point; insurance likely wouldn't insure them either. The CyberTruck, as a notable example.
I will say it _can_ be difficult to keep up though, you don't necessarily find out a particular model is a lemon until it's too late, so it can take some years for everyone to learn and adjust. I mean a buddy of mine only found out in 2024 that his 2016 Explorer had a common/ known engine flaw (the water pump frequently goes bad and requires an engine rebuild). And so how do you reconcile that against for example some of Ford's other accomplishments? I mean, there's loads of F150s that have lasted forever (or at least used to).
In theory banks/ insurers would have enough data today to be able to map the general trend; so I don't think you're wrong, but at the same time I will counter that we may not yet be fully experiencing the effects of any obsolescence being implemented today.
I guess my larger/ real point is that I just foresee this industry heading the same way as phones, and many computers.
I'm not sure what the threshold is for a house to be smart. But I just had to get some fairly extensive work done and all my light switches and so forth are just traditional toggles. I'm not sure what's absurd about that.
A lot of walls were open after a kitchen fire. Electrician was redoing a lot of knob and tube and other older wiring. I had previously had a limited amount of DIY wireless switching (originally X10 but then a couple of voice-controlled switches) but basically everything was being redone anyway. And I basically just now have some dimmers and a simple programmable thermostat I haven't even programmed.
The parent point was that it's silly not to have a smart house (whatever that means exactly) and I disagree. It may make sense to do selectively rather than get an electrician in unless you have some other reason to do so.
As for threshold probably all the safety stuff: power metering, water leak sensors, smoke alarm monitoring. Then all the energy related stuff - heating, hot water controls - if you are on TOU pays itself in months. Then it's smart entry - probably one thing that you can actually experience and it's the best.
Let's be real. A staggering amount of drivers are incapable to switch on Automatic Cruise Control or trigger automatic parking. They know how to start the car, how to switch lights and wipers on/off and that's about it.
Paying subscription for something what they are never going to use is going to be a hard sell.
And to be even more real, a staggering amount of drivers won't be able to afford an autonomous driving subscription even if they wanted to. Or a car new enough or in good enough condition to have functional self driving.
For all of the Musky wank chat about the future, with FSD, robots, and popping over to Australia on a Starship ... a vanishingly small amount of people will actually be able to afford it once they "get the pricing right".
We're talking about some impressive technology ... doused in snake oil from the top.
Probably a big chunk of these tried ACC a few times, found that ACC sucks unless you're on perfectly clean empty highway, and said "screw it I'll drive it myself".
I've played with it a little bit. Seems useful in principle. But a lot of roads I tend to be on--even highways--have a fair bit of traffic and speed limits that change on a pretty regular basis. Hasn't been as useful as I expected it to be.
I have auto parking and never use it, it came with the advanced parking sensors that I do use heavily. I forget how to use auto cruise because I drive outside of the city so rarely, it takes me awhile to “trust it” again when I do some highway driving.
> Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go
In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers are already treating self driving as table stakes. If I have a choice between a subscription car and one that just works, I’m buying the latter.
> continuous development and operations/support
ICE vehicles require continuous servicing and manufacturer support.
I agree with you. Subscription revenue has explicitly been part of Tesla's strategy for years. I'm not sure when this statement first appeared in their SEC findings, but this is from their 2021 10-K:
"As our vehicles are capable of being updated remotely over-the-air, our customers may purchase additional paid options and features through the Tesla app or through the in-vehicle user interface. We expect that this functionality will also allow us to offer certain options and features on a subscription basis in the future."
Agreed, autonomy is a service and not a feature of the car. It has to be. There is inherent cost as you use it and associated liabilities, legal requirements for auditing, technical need for maintenance and dealing with updates in a timely fashion.
You could make the point that owning the car is a lot less important if you don't drive it yourself. If Uber didn't have to pay drivers, they could expand their area of operation to basically everywhere. Drivers need to be paid so having them drive long distance is relatively expensive. That constrains the area of operation. But otherwise, cost per mile is very low. So, orchestrating pickups in the country side becomes possible.
It's going to enable night time travel as well. Nap/sleep while traveling. Wake up at your destination. That's going to revolutionize commutes as well and enable people to live much further away from work. A four hour commute is much less of a problem if you can spend the time working or napping.
That in turn is going to do wonders for real estate prices. Because there are a lot of nice places to live that are currently far away from cities and therefore still relatively affordable. We got a preview of that during the lock downs when people figured out that remote working is a thing.
The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not.
At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just about every way except as a status symbol.
The monopolist providing this service would be de-incentivized from ever equipping for all the demand, and the last 10% of capacity being bid on by the last 20% of demand would make this a constant stress and struggle.
Meanwhile it's an excuse for another century of more car lanes and less mass transit infrastructure.
There used to be a service like this, called Car2Go. Not autonomous, but more like how scooter/bike rentals work. It was fantastic, and in no way profitable.
Subscriptions are how things are going to go in general. This is just one example of the larger trend. Companies find it very annoying that they have to keep coming up with ways to provide new value in order to keep getting money from people.
Some car companies are already trying out subscriptions for stuff that requires zero ongoing support, like seat heaters. Outside of cars, so much software is switching to subscriptions, whether or not it makes sense. The software for my security cameras has become completely infested by ads, but you can pay for a subscription to make them go away. I own the cameras outright, but not really, since the software needed to use them is basically rented, either with cash or with my eyeballs. Most paid apps I come across these days want a monthly fee to keep using it, they're not content to just sell me a copy.
I love it because I have exactly zero interest in using this and wouldn’t want to pay for it anyways- and I’d rather more of the drivers around me were actually driving as well.
Maybe if the tech gets better, but right now these systems do not handle unusual or unexpected events well and are basically just a glorified cruise control, yet are marketed as autonomy and encourage people to stop paying attention.
Having driven in SF very recently, the current state of Waymo is an obstacle to the smooth flow of traffic. They drive like a hesitant confused person that is worried they just passed their destination but isn't quite sure.
However, that is during 100% normal expected conditions on specific stretches of road they're heavily pre-trained on. My concern was more about their ability to adapt to the unexpectedly dangerous and unanticipated situation.
If that’s the way things go, subscription, there aught to be insurance coverage built into that. It’s required anyway and the extent to which a driver relies on SD, and has to pay a sub, then it’s the SD responsible for accidents, not in full but part, and insurance can reflect that as well. But if the two are inextricable as a requirement anyway, there should be baked in standardized procedures for “things have gone wrong, which was a known inevitability, and this is the framework for handling it.”
Counter counter point. Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500 and they basically rely on people upgrading every year or two. Almost like a ........subscription.
Rather than a car which a person may keep for 20 years at a one time huge purchase. Its not really reasonable to expect a company to support something longer than even lifer employees will be there to work on it.
I do really really hate the idea of automotive subscription services though.
Because if you own your car you leave your golf clubs in there just in case you get invited for a round.
If you are the type who is willing to be seen in a used car you can save a lot of money since the rental car needs to be newer cars just in case someone who wouldn't be seen in a used car wants one - and this adds a lot of cost.
Having your stuff in it already, it's always available immediately (for you), not needing to worry as much about getting it dirty at the beach or with a dog, going to remote places where calling a Waymo may be infeasible or would take a really long time. Probably also cheaper if you drive really frequently.
I don't know you or your situation, but many people (including the idealized version of Rivian's target market) like going places that Waymo currently doesn't. There's also tradeoffs with cost, wait time, # of passengers, cargo, etc. Some people may also want to automate "boring" driving while still having the option to do "fun" driving
My cars are more than just transportation. They're mobile storage lockers where I can keep my stuff reasonably secure. They're a place to sit warm and dry while I wait for something else. They're (semi) private changing rooms where I can put on my cycling kit. Regardless of who does the driving I'll never give up owning (or at least leasing) my own private cars.
> pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc.
If you use a car you are paying for those costs. There is no getting around it. If you uber it is indirect, but part of your costs per ride is going to those things. Renting a car gets someone else to do them - but you are paying them to do that somehow. (self driving make trade parking for gas where parking is expensive, so in the densits areas this can make sense, but only because the car is driving empty out to the suburbs in the morning and empty back into the city in the evening - so it increases traffic)
If you own your car you can choose to not keep it clean. The rental will not allow that choice and so you pay for it.
It won't be much if any difference. Rush hour is when most people are trying to get around. Worse, they are all trying to get to the same place, so if you are thinking two trips downtown - that means there is an unoccupied trip back out to the suburbs every morning (and again in the evening) - perhaps more if we are also parking in the suburbs where parking is cheap (though this is probably offset by the cost of parking downtown)
This is better solved by leveraging more traditional forms of transportation. Making biking, walking, and various forms of transit easier, safer, and more effective. Cars, whether self-driving or not, are in direct opposition to this.
I'm sure they could be useful to folks that have the specific use-case for it, but the vast vast majority of trips in a person's day-to-day are better solved by robust multi-modal options and public transit. The benefit there is that less drivers means that traffic is actually better for everyone.
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
Unrealistic for 99% of the world, billions live where they earn such sum for more than a week. Not all of those have cars, but many do. This is just some little SV + maybe NY bubble thinking. Also EU would show a big fat finger to such predatory pricing.
There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end (regardless of the horsepower). That's what autonomous driving is for imo.
There is a lot of fun in driving a high-hp car on track or offroad or in some not-much-populated area or in plenty of other scenarios. That's where using autonomous driving mode would feel preposterous to me.
> There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end
And I wish this would be more broadly recognized. Every time there's a story about someone important freaking out about something related to autonomous driving, I'm at least somewhat afraid they'll use it as justification to deny me access to it for those specific use cases.
And honestly, those are the only use cases I really care about or feel comfortable with right now. Of course my car is also too old to support much more than that.
First, no, it wasn't solved. In fact, many tech companies that previously allowed remote work went back on it. Technically yes, I can "solve my commute" by taking a very significant pay cut (more than 50%), in addition to limiting my career prospects overall (or get lucky to get hired by the few competitively-paying top tech companies that still stand by remote work, which would still significantly limit my career just to those few companies). That's a proposal/trade-off that a lot of people would reasonably consider unacceptable.
Second, do you realize that remote work isn't an option for a significant majority of types of jobs? In fact, even if we lived in some magical world where every single software dev suddenly switched to remote work, it would barely make a dent. Janitors, doctors/nurses, school teachers, etc., those jobs just by nature don't allow for remote work.
How much fun is it actually to drive around doing daily errands or commuting?
Personally, I look at the 40,000 people killed each year in traffic crashes in the US, and I think, the sooner we all stop driving (on public roads) the better.
What evidence is there that we can train people to be better drivers? We've got a century of effort and it seems the bulk of road death prevention has come from improved, and more expensive, design.
Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:
> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
What about several mini ipads, each dedicated to a single function? We could use OLED displays and pre-burn-in their function at the factory as a label, and leave the display off, except for maybe a single LED, to save power. We could also add some sort of haptic feedback on user interaction with each mini ipad...
make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!
You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.
I prefer Google Maps. Apple Maps lead me astray too often and though they are better than they used to be they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).
CarPlay would be a complete non-issue for me, its absence would even be a positive. I just use my phone anyway; integrating it with the car is just added hassle and one less thing I have to worry about remaining compatible 5-10 years from now.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
You'll need to spend an additional $1500 over 10 years for Rivian Connect+ to use music streaming services on their infotainment system. No additional cellular costs for using CarPlay or Android Auto.
Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in.
They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use.
And I write this as someone with a Model Y who does not miss Carplay (although it would be nice to have).
It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.
We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.
And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.
Could they? I've been told Apple certifies every car before they allow carplay and this costs a lot. I can't verify (the people who tell me this are under NDA and so won't speak on the record)
Car companies are notorious for having awful software, awful update systems, and awful software teams. So much so that people have come to think that if a car doesn't have CarPlay, that it probably sucks to interface with (which is a safe assumption). Even Tesla is working on adding CarPlay, despite having good software. A lot of people refuse to even consider the idea of a car without CarPlay, and the car companies are to blame
I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.
I’ll start off by saying that the model Y is one of the best mid-level cars I’ve driven so the issues I mention below are worth the tradeoffs to me.
In my experience, Tesla navigation can be pretty bad when navigating my large urban city. During peak traffic times it often tries to send me down roads that are notoriously known for traffic backing up. Most times when I end up following those suggested routes, my ETA essentially becomes meaningless.
I’ve found Google, Waze, and Apple maps to be a lot better in this respect.
I do miss having CarPlay. That’s not to say I think the music integration you mentioned is bad, but I find the overall UI in my model Y to be a bit confusing - and the lower icons seem to sometimes randomly change from what I have them set as.
Same. I love the tesla model y, but it's not perfect. The screen UI is pretty good for the most part, enough that I don't think about carplay too often.
But I do tend to stream audio from my phone more than from the tesla UI, and so I do miss carplay when I think about it.
> Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD)
I got a loaner with fsd and tried it out.
There was this one trip I took to a store and for some reason, the nav route detoured off the road to the next street over, then joined back with the route.
I think this is a thing nav systems do and people just ignore it and go the right way.
In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.
Where I live I am often surrounded by Waymo vehicles... is Lidar 100% safe for people to be around? I ask because I read an article about how Lidar on one of the new Volvos could destroy your phone camera if you pointed it at it? If Lidar can do that to a phone camera, can it hurt your eyes?
Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).
Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.
However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.
The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.
Why wouldn’t your eye lens focus LIDAR photons from the same source onto a small region of your retina in the same way that a phone camera lens focuses same-origin photos to a few pixels?
Sorry if this is a silly question, I honestly don’t have the greatest understanding of EM.
It's incredibly important to understand that eyes and glass have different optical properties at these wavelengths. It's hard to conceptualize because to us clear is clear, but that's only at visible light. The same way that x-rays and infrared and other spectra can show things human eyes can't see, or can't see things visible light can see, it's a 2 dimensional problem. The medium and the wavelength are both at play. So, when you have the eye which is known to absorb such light, and artificial optics which are known to pass it without much obstruction, they're going to behave like opposites. Imagine if the glass/plastic they used in the car blocked the light. Wouldn't really work.
There is a flip side to this though. Quick searches show that the safety of being absorbed and then dissipated by the water in the eye also makes that wavelength perform worse in rain and fog. I think a scarier concept is a laser that can penetrate through water (remember humans are mostly bags of salt water) which could, maybe, potentially, cause bad effects.
Depends on the wavelength of lidar. Near IR lidars (850 nm to 940 nm, like Ouster, Waymo, Hesai) will be focused to your retina whereas 1550 nm lidars (like Luminar, Seyond) will not be focused and have trouble penetrating water, but they are a lot more powerful so they instead heat up your cornea. To quote my other comment [1]:
> If you have many lidars around, the beams from each 905 nm lidar will be focused to a different spot on your retina, and you are no worse off than if there was a single lidar. But if there are many 1550 nm lidars around, their beams will have a cumulative effect at heating up your cornea, potentially exceeding the safety threshold.
Follow up question that you might know: would multiple LIDAR sensor actually be additive like that? If you can stand a foot away from a car's LIDAR sensor and be unharmed, then can't you have:
x^2 sensors at x feet from you and have the same total energy delivered? If sensors are actually safe to look at from 6in or 3in, then multiple the above table by 4 or 16.
It seems like, due to the inverse square law, the main issue is how close you can get your eye to a LIDAR sensor under normal operation, not how many sensors are scattered across the environment. The one exception I can think of is a car that puts multiple LIDAR arrays next to each other (within a foot or two). But maybe I'm misunderstanding something!
Do you if there has been any work how lasers affect other animals and insects?
Am I being catastrophically pessimistic to think that in addition to swatting insects as it moves forward, the cars lidar is blinding insects in a several hundred meter path ?
I’m very optimistic about automated cars being better than most humans but wonder about side effects.
If we have automated anti-mosquito vehicles just roaming around, the world would be a better place. There might be some second order effects from removing mosquitoes that we haven't predicted, but fuck mosquitoes.
Unfortunately not all insects are mosquitoes, and one reason we have many fewer birds in (e.g.) the UK than when I was young, is the decline of insect life.
GP is slightly wrong. IIRC those problematic LIDARs are operating at higher power than traditionally allowed, with the justification that the wavelength being used is significantly less efficient at damaging human eyes, therefore it's safe enough at those powers, which is likely true enough. But it turned out that camera lenses are generally more transparent than our eyes and therefore the justification don't apply to them.
Amusingly the lenses are worse than silicon at transmitting that wavelength.
1550nm might be worse for sensors because a good portion of the light is only being dumped into the metal layers - pure silicon is mostly transparent to 1550nm. Not sure how doped silicon would work. I can tell you that 1070nm barely works on an IQ3 Achromatic back…
A point source in the visual field will create a point image on the retina. The "sensor area" you're referring is what's necessary to capture the entire visual field simultaneously.
I looked this up for a laser-based projector, Class 2 is "blink reflex should protect you" and "don't be a doofus and stare into it for a long time". Look up the classifications on the google and you'll see other things like "don't look into the rays with a set of binoculars" and stuff.
Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.
I have a Class 1 Makita (green) laser level, wide strong beam, excellent tool for landscaping. I accidentally looked into it from a 10 cm distance. It did not leave permanent damage, but for a few days I had the dot burned on my retina. And yes, I almost immediately closed my eye - within a few hundred ms's.
What about if you're walking or biking next to congested motorway and most of the vehicles have LiDAR running at the same time? That's a lot of photons.
This is inconsistent with the basic concept. It’s projecting and reading lasers . By default some emissions will hit people in the eye. Even invisible light can damage tissue , especially in the eye
Depends on the type of LIDAR. LIDAR rated for vehicle use is at a wavelength opaque to the eyes so it hits the surface and fluid of your eye and reflects back rather than going through to your cones and rods.
It isn't however opaque for optical glass (since the LIDAR has to shine through optical glass in the first place) so it hits your camera lens, goes straight through, and slams the sensor.
You seem to be implying that all automotive lidar are 1550 nm but that's not true. While there are lots of 1550 nm automotive lidars (Luminar on Volvo, Seyond on NIO) there are also plenty of 850 nm to 940 nm lidars are used in cars (Hesai, Robosense, etc). Those can pass through water and get focused to your retina, but they are also a lot lower power so they do not damage cameras.
Also although that energy longer than 1400nm is generally absorbed by the cornea and lens, it is still energy, and it is not a hard bandpass filter per se. Safety is relative at higher wattages.
NGL I thought sub 1550nm LIDAR had been banned for use in new automotive applications already? I clearly must be mistaken but I had thought that was the case.
Not banned. In addition to the Chinese lidars I mentioned, the Valeo Scala on Audi cars is 905 nm, and then there are also Ouster (865 nm), Innoviz (905 nm), Livox (905 nm) etc. The large spinning lidar on top of the Waymo Jaguar I-Pace is also purportedly 905 nm, although in the past they also had a swivelling 1550 nm lidar in the dome of the Chrysler Pacifica cars (situated just underneath a smaller spinning 905 nm one).
The eye safety threshold for 850/905 nm is a lot lower than 1550 nm, so they output way less power, but the much better sensitivity of silicon sensors makes up for it partially. You can also squeeze out more range using clever signal processing and a large optical aperture (which allows you to output more light, but since the light is spread out across the aperture, the intensity doesn't exceed the threshold). Typically, the range of 850/905 nm lidars is less than that of 1550 nm lidars though.
On the bright side, due to lower power, there hasn't been any instances (to my knowledge) of 850 nm and 905 nm lidars damaging cameras, whereas at least two different 1550 nm lidars have been known to destroy cameras (Luminar and AEye).
On the Luminar lidar website [1] they proudly advertise "1,000,000x pulse energy of 905nm".
I watched the livestream and they said their hardware is "Camera Safe". I am not sure if camera safe and eye safe are correlated, but I would hope/expect that they would not release something that isn't known to be eye safe. I guess it's possible that the long term effects could prove bad, and we will all end up getting "Lidar Eye" dead spots in our vision.
Digital camera sensors are much more sensitive than eyeballs, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that it won't leave a permanent line across your eyeball like it can to a camera sensor
When it becomes a widespread issue they'll just release Meta Glasses 5/Apple Vision 3 with the appropriate eye protection, and vision will be very affordable.
To date I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use. Most consumer facing lasers are either class 1 but hidden (CD-ROM), or class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader).
The lack of accessible certification/testing docs for the lidars is also worrying. Where is the proof that it was even tested? Was it tested just via simulation, via a dummy eye stand-in, or with a real biological substitute?
What if there are biological concerns other than simply peak power involved with shining NIR into the eye? (For instance, it seems deep red light has some (beneficial) biological effects on mitochondria. How do we know that a pulsed NIR laser won't have similar but negative effects, even if it doesn't burn a hole in your retina.)
> class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader)
TIL barcode readers can cause serious eye damage when misused. You'd think they'd have warning labels on these things given how common self-checkout is nowadays and how curious/stupid children can be
They're not always class 2, some are class 1. I'd maybe suspect the self-checkout ones are class 1 since the object is pressed right against it, while handheld barcode scanners are class 2.
If it's like everything else, it's "move fast, break things". I'm sure if it turns out to be harmful, we'll find out decades before regulation catches up
In terms of plain wattage, it cannot be dangerous. Unless, of course, you were to stand with your eye up against the sensor and maybe stare at it for a few minutes.
it seems like car-makers themselves feel burdened to make their own self-driving tech, as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party.
Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…it seems like having a handful of companies focused on getting the self-driving part right without the need to also specialize in manufacturing would be beneficial.
My first inclination was to be bullish on Rivian, and there’s no question that their vehicles are beautiful. But is there anything to suggest they have an advantage over Tesla or other automakers when it comes to self-driving?
Most traditional OEMs in the automotive industry are integrators. They write a specification, and a Tier 1 supplier provides a black box matching that spec. (Tier 1 in turn provides a spec to its suppliers and integrates their parts)
This has several consequences
- Tier 1 suppliers are waiting on input/approval from OEM before proceeding with projects
- Tier 1 suppliers don't necessarily have the capital to do work "at risk", even if they could build the part without approval/specifications. (TBH - some do)
- Each layer of the supply chain lacks context on the whole project and product line and cannot achieve efficiencies outside of the scope of its contract.
These haven't really been a problem for mechanical parts and E/E parts that have well-defined functions and interfaces and have a lot of re-use from previous generations. It works really well with Kaizen (incremental innovation).
To outsource it, a traditional OEM would need to completely specify the behaviour of said self-driving system, baseline the specification, put out the requests for quotation, etc. Tier 1 then needs to analyse the spec, estimate it, break it down in to sub work packages, work with its suppliers, etc. From an optimisation point of view, this is really inefficient partitioning of the problem space. For greenfields development, an emergent specification via experimentation may be better - but that won't fit in traditional V-model sub-contract OEMs/Tier 1s use.
That flow doesn't need to be followed; the suppliers could raise/allocate capital and build the self-driving stack "at risk" - and this seems to be done (Tier IV, Waymo, etc). But as it's new technology, I assume Rivian think they can do better by themselves and can get the capital for the development as part of an integrated solution while they are smaller it might seem they should not waste limited capitial that way - but integration will save a lot of inefficiency in sharing specifications across boundaries, full system integration and deriving emergent specification via experimentation rather than some MBSE folly.
Not only is Rivian betting on an integrated platform being important for their own cars long term, they’ve also essentially sold that portion of their business to VW. They are investing in the software platform for a lot more cars than just the rivian branded ones.
Level 2 is simpler and more mature, so it should be easier to specify, package and integrate.
It can follow the traditional OEM outsourcing route, where OEM has high-level models and gets suppliers to implement the details.
e.g. I can find public information that Subaru use Veoneer cameras, Xilinx chipsets, but defines their own algorithms. I would speculate they have an outsourced company convert algorithms to FPGA netlists/embedded code.
(On the other hand, I know other OEMs have a more complex mesh of joint ventures)
Aside from Mercedes-Benz, level 2 is the best we have, though?
Edit: Re-reading your post, you were talking about the future. You make good points; I will be interested to see how it plays out. Probably as long as the technology remains radar and cameras, it will continue to be easily outsourced.
HP did write their own operating system: HP RTE. It wasn't until decades later, after the platform became commodified and they stopped designing their own chips, that they went with someone else's.
And of course, Microsoft made their own cards back in the day, and they still make the XBox as integrated hardware.
This technology is way too early for commodification. Right now, Rivian is a data play.
Their platform means they have consistency other providers don't have. They have data from the existing trucks on the road, and they'll roll out these sensors long before they roll out self-driving. Cleverly they've also pitched these as "adventure" vehicles, which means they'll have some data from rarer situations, not just highways. Off-road performance, for example, will add anomalies that they can use to stress-test self-driving code. If a car could handle areas without roads, it is less likely to kill people if a mudslide happens. Or a shadow falls across the bridge.
> as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party.
All about margins and data protection
> Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…
They come from an era where this style of thinking didn't really exist and now they're in an era where market share almost entirely prevents new players/ideas from entering. If it was 2025 and OS market share wasn't static and the PC was just taking off, we'd probably see far more attempts at OS development to better monetize the PC products the vendors sell.
It’s probably a sensible concern that if they use someone else’s tech, they’ll be subsidizing that company’s eventual mastery of the self-driving space, who will then be able to control pricing. The only long game, I imagine, is to create your own self-driving tech, so that your own customers are investing in your own long term success, not someone else’s.
One aspect is that Tesla is all cameras, whereas Rivian sees it as important to have multi-sensor suites (cameras, ultrasonic, radar, and in Gen 3: lidar). TBH as a customer I prefer to know that the latter is protecting me instead of just cameras.
They could have a better driving assistance package than 99% of other cars on the road for 1/10 the price by using OpenPilot as the LKAS, or installing a Comma in the car.
Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork
Comma had made essentially no efforts to meet the requirements of automotive systems the last time I looked at them. They would be an incredibly risky supplier for systems that could easily come under regulatory scrutiny.
It's an... interesting approach, They essentially reduce the surface area as much as possible. I don't buy that it's enough, but, again, interesting to see what they do.
Besides, a big OEM could pour an army of developers and turn the Comma approach into an ASIL D, it would be quite a lot of work but within the realm of possibility.
I recently ordered a Comma Four, which I will install BluePilot on and use with my Lightning. I'm looking forward to seeing how competent it is. Gets good reviews, at least, so I'm hoping.
I do wonder if there will be many more iterations, though, with so many manufacturers switching over to an encrypted canbus and locking out the control method comma uses.
I loved to see that they plan on running the Rivian Assistant LLM onboard using their new Gen 3 hardware. Great that they see that as a valuable feature and I hope to see the industry move that way.
These companies are only surviving because of US protectionism. This tech is more expensive than then Chinese equivalent from 2-3 years ago (look at what Xiaomi or BYD released as their 2024 models).
While the software is indeed behind - e.g. Nio already had all of this in 2022/2023, and a much better UI, I'm sure the upcoming Rivian R2 and R3 would sell very well in Europe.
Europe will probably be the largest market where US EVs will try to compete with Chinese cars. BYD is already selling better spec’d models for less than this Rivian, and Xiaomi will enter the market late 2026.
I don’t see how Rivian can compete, either on price or features.
Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.
But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.
Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:
* Doors refuse to open
* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls
* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows
Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership
Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack
Service can’t do anything about the state machine being wrong.
The Rivian app does not permit you to send a command to the car while the app thinks the car is processing a command. Trunk opening? You can’t unlock the door. On top of this, if you try to open the trunk while outside Bluetooth range and then Bluetooth connects, you are still stuck waiting for the pending command to complete.
Oh, and the ridiculous “hey let’s always remind you that you own a Rivian” Live Activity seems to synchronize on a schedule that involves being hours and hours out of date.
I agree that the app leaves something to be desired - my personal pet peeve is that it shows stale or cached data while waiting to do some async update, leading to just outright fabricated charge or lock state. Never had those kinds of problems with the truck's software proper though
Presumably, but you don't really known until you pay to take it in for service and they tell you there is nothing wrong but they don't have a fix (gee, great experience). On the "know it's software" side e.g. I had what appeared to be random issues with audio crackling on my PC I assumed was software/driver related, it turned out there was a faulty USB hub causing an issues for the whole bus but it was just most apparent in the audio device.
Stuff like "Doors refuse to open" is vague enough it could be a similar kind of issue which needs physical service/replacement rather than just a software update, especially if other buttons are triggering completely separate actions with the windows. Or it could very well be 100% software issues, which could be more apparent with additional details like "only does it after transitioning from this screen or pressing things in this order" type problems.
As a car guy you should know that there's tech in cars these days. Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
If something's wrong with your car's head unit firmware or android auto connection or whatever, of course you'd have a technician look at it?
> Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
Pretty much, yeah. I race SCCA and build race cars. Exactly why I want nothing to do with these, you don’t own it. You’re leasing the hardware that’s hogtied to the software.
Oh man, you're in for a bad time then, as pretty much everything - yes even amateur racing cars - has software in it now, and you don't own any of it.
As a car guy, it surprises me you weren't aware of this trend yet but I guess we all find out sooner or later. But hey - maybe that '89 Carrera will keep on trucking for a few more decades though - good luck!
one funny one is that periodically you can trigger the "more cowbell" rainbow road easter egg. You can cancel the road animation, but you can't cancel the easter egg music or control the volume.
I was just in a discussion on this very topic. It's the build vs buy equation applied to silicon. Early in the tech boom the entire silicon stack was proprietary and required a lot of time and investment to train up people who could design the circuitry, we got our first "ASICS" which was basically a bunch of circuitry on a die and you then added your own metal layer so it was like having a bunch of components glued to a board and you could "customize" it by putting wires between the parts. Then we had fabs that needed more wafer starts so they started doing other peoples designs which required they standardize their cells and provide integration services (you brought a design and they mapped it to their standard cells and process). And as the density kept going up they kept having loots of free space they needed to fill up. The 'fabless' chip companies continued to invest in making new parts until the pipeline was pretty smooth. And at that point the level of training you needed a the origin to get it into silicon dropped to nearly zero, you just needed the designs. And into that space people who were neither 'chip' companies, nor were they 'fabless' OEMs, realized they could get their integration needs met by asking a company to make them a chip that did exactly what they wanted.
One the business side, the economics are fabulous, your competitors can't "clone" your product if they don't have your special sauce components. So in many ways it becomes a strategic advantage to maintaining your market position.
But all of that because the all up cost to go from specification to parts meeting the specification dropped into the range where you could build special parts and still price at the market for your finished product.
A really interesting illustration is to look at disk drive controller boards from the Shugart Associates ST-506 (5MB) drive, to Seagate's current offerings.
It is illustrative because disk drives are a product that has been ruthlessly economized because of low margins. The ST-506 is all TTL logic and standard analog parts, and yet current products have semiconductor parts that are made exactly to Seagate's design specs and aren't sold to anyone else.
So to answer your question; apparently the economics work out. The costs associated with designing, testing, and packaging your own silicon appears to be cost effective even on products with exceptionally tight margins, it is likely a clear winner on a product that enjoys the margins that electric vehicles offer.
I would wager that's because there isn't a lot of existing silicon that fits the bill. What COTS equipment is there that has all the CPU/Tensor horsepower these systems need... AND is reasonably power efficient AND is rated for a vehicle (wild temp extremes like -20F to 150F+, constant vibration, slams and impacts... and will keep working for 15 years).
Yea, Tesla has some. But they aren't sharing their secret sauce. You can't just throw a desktop computer in a car and expect it to survive for the duration. Ford et all aren't anywhere close to having "premium silicon".
So you're only option right now is to build your own. And hope maybe that you can sell/license your designs to others later and make bucks.
Isn't that risk balanced by a healthy reward of controlling their verticals and possible secret sauce?
And their chips give "1600 sparse INT8 TOPS" vs the Orin's "more than 1,000 INT8 TOPS" -- so comparable enough? And going forward they can tailor it to exactly what they want?
Orin is Nvidia's last generation. Current gen is Thor at 1k TOPS. Rivian's announcement specifies TOPS at the module level. The actual chip is more like 800 and probably doubled. Throw two Thors on a similar board and you're looking at 2000 sparse int8 TOPS.
I've been involved with similar efforts on both sides before. Making your own hardware is not a clear cut win even if you hit timelines and performance. I wish them luck (not least because I might need a new job someday), but this is an incredibly difficult space.
Mostly it costs hundreds of millions to develop a chip; it relies on volume to recover the cost.
NVIDIA also tailor their chips to customers. It's a more scalable platform than their marketing hints at... Not to mention that they also iterate fairly quickly.
So far anyway, being on a specialised architecture is a disadvantage; it's much easier to use the advances that come from research and competitors. Unless you really think that you are ahead of the completion, and can sell some fairly inflexible solution for a while.
I share your skepticism. This feels like an attempt to tap the trainloads of money piling into "AI", for a company that is in pretty desperate need of more cash to stay alive.
In a vacuum there are potentially some advantages to doing your own silicon, especially if your goal is to sell the platform to other automakers as an OEM.
But custom silicon is pricey as hell (if you're doing anything non-trivial, at least), and the payoffs have a long lead time. For a company that's bleeding cash aggressively, with a short runway, to engage in this seems iffy. This sort of move makes a lot more sense if Rivian was an established maker that's cash-flow positive and is looking to cement their long-term lead with free cash flow. Buuuuut they aren't that.
I have the same question. It makes sense that they might need bespoke software, but how could they possibly be more efficient at creating chips than an AMD/Nvidia?
Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in replacement FPGAs of lower cost (The Rigol MHO98 replaced the Xilinx FPGA of the previous generation with a substitute from Fudan). If you're shipping a lot of hardware, that sort of thing becomes worthwhile.
Probably a lot of overlap in the venn diagram of people who would like the two
things. Mostly the "Early Adopter" circle.
Also a lot of cars have a lot of limitations with comma.ai. Yes, you can install it on all sorts but there are limitations like: above 32mph, cannot resume from stop, cannot take tight corners, cannot do stop light detection, requires additional car upgrades/features, only known to support model year 2021. Etc.
Rivian supports everything, it has a customer base who LOVE technology, are willing to try new things, and ... have disposable income for a $1k extra gadget.
It is nice to see a car company investing in a sensor platform that could actually safely self-drive.
It is unfortunate that the existing market participants seem hell-bent on destroying consumer confidence in self-driving before this will make it to market.
We desperately need a safety regimen for self-driving cars that takes it as seriously as airplane safety.
How many hours have you spent with the latest Tesla FSD in congested neighborhoods or unprotected left turns at sunset? It may be "good," but it's not even remotely close to the current Waymo experience, especially when it comes to abnormal situations. I am continually blown away by how Waymo behaves (spent 3 hours in them this past week). I'm rooting for Tesla, but it is nowhere near Waymo as of today.
I think it makes sense to do an ASIC later, but not now. Chip development is expensive and risky. They ought to at least start selling a product with positive gross margin first.
Its possible that they have tried that and the market isn’t giving them what they need at the price they want. I do mostly agree with you though; its the economics of the car thats gonna supercharge adoption.
EDIT: another commenter mentioned that their platform is used by other companies (VW perhaps?). With that information, it might make more sense to do this.
CarPlay and affordability. I was totally smitten last year with the R1S during a test drive. I'm not a car person but felt that spark people must feel when they obsess over their vehicles.
But it wasn't pushing-six-figures smitten, which is where you're at when you get a new one with customizations.
Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
Instead, we are getting these boutique, expensive vehicles packed full of tech, but in the end, they still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives, especially hybrid. I got a Prius Prime for my wife last year, the car is way better than any EV on the market in terms of usability. Driving to work and back can all be done in EV mode easily, and then when you wanna go somewhere, you can keep the car above 80 mph easily and get there faster without worrying about where to charge.
The only part an EV doesn't have is the engine and gearbox. Admittedly, these are pretty major components, but it's a technology mature enough to be extremely reliable if the manufacturer cares to make it so.
But what an EV has instead is a massive battery, charging electronics, a DC-DC converter keeping the 12V battery charged, and various electric motors and actuators for the air conditioning and coolant loops. These are significant more reliable than oily engines in lab environments, but the automotive environment tests the mettle of seemingly resilient components.
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
I think this is more or less the pitch behind Slate (https://www.slate.auto/en), though it's more of a truck/SUV form factor.
> still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives
i can assure you my expensive EV does not suck as a car compared to gas alternatives, its better in almost every way. insane performance compared to any gas car, superb handling, way better driving UX tech, silent, clean. & 400mil range is just fine for me thanks. Yes it cost a lot.
The cost of the entertainment cluster comes from the integration work. If it was just a backup camera and a carplay/aa head unit and absolutely nothing else then maybe it could be OEMed from the same companies who sell aftermarket systems for $100 or so.
Yep. I certainly wanted an R1S, but ended up in an EV9 due to CarPlay plus huge lease incentives. No regrets, and will probably get another after this lease is up.
Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.
For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
It's maddening that $100k purchases get totally nerfed by bad software. Absolutely crazy to me that I can go out find a super nice car I want and have to walk away because of bad software or no carplay support.
I hear this a lot and it's surprising to me. We have three cars in our family (two with carplay and the Rivian) and carplay always feels like such a downgraded experience compared to that of the Rivian.
I have a plex server and use Prologue for audio books. What would my experience on Rivian be like? I am guessing I would have to connect to the infotainment system as a bluetooth speaker? Would I be able to easily skip forward/backward and see the current chapter?
I've been using car play for the better part of the past decade and don't know what it looks like in vehicles without it.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll take a car infotainment system that doesn't need CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable (and lacks it) over one that requires a phone attached via CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable.
I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.
My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.
If the software has the same library as your phone, then I could why you see it as on par.
Android Automotive has a much smaller library than Android Auto, so the selection for audio apps, such as podcasts and music, are much more limited. The options for map software is smaller too. Also Android Automotive doesn't necessarily use your phone's existing internet connection. Depending on the maker, you have to subscribe to a separate data plan.
I've only rented Teslas but I can see how most people would consider CP/AA to be unnecessary given the quality of their integrated software. But for me, the two things Tesla can't do (and CP/AA can) is
This is really poor execution. You're taking a complex, low margin vehicle and introducing even more cost and supply chain complexity. On top of that, you're essentially making a proxy bet that more expensive hardware (LIDAR) will beat Tesla's software bet.
It's absolutely fair to criticize Elon for his ridiculous FSD timeline claims, but here we are now evaluating the market: if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet.
> if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet
I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this.
Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection.
The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet.
And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
Waymo operates on guardrails, with a lot more human-in-the-loop (remotely) help than most people seem aware of.
Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture.
They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.
> Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years
Iff cameras only works. With threshold for "works" beig set by Waymo, since a Robotaxi that's would have been acceptable per se may not be if it's statistically less safe compared to an existing solution.
Waymo also sets the timeline. If cameras only would work, but Waymo scales before it does, Tesla may be forced by regulators to integrate radars and lidars. This nukes their cost advantage, at least in part, though Tesla maintains its manufacturing lead and vertical integration.)
Tesla has a good hand. But Rivian's play makes sense. If cameras only fails, they win on licensing and a temporary monopoly. If cameras only work, they are a less-threatening partner for other car companies than Waymo.
In the increasingly rare instances where Tesla's solution is making mistakes, it's pretty much never to do with a failure of spatial awareness (sensing) but rather a failure of path planning (decision-making).
The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth, and if it turns out sensing depth using cameras is a solved problem, adding LIDAR doesn't help. It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines. It can't tell if a traffic light is red or green. And it certainly doesn't improve predictions of human drivers.
Which begs me the question why Tesla took so long to get here? It's only since v12 it starting to look bearable for supervised use.
The only answer I see is their goal to create global model that works in every part of the world vs single city which is vastly more difficult. After all most drivers really only know how to drive well in their own town and make a lot of mistakes when driving somewhere else.
It was only about 2 years ago that they switched from hard coded logic to machine learning (video in, car control out), and this was the beginning of their final path they are committed to now. (building out manufacturing for Cybercab while still finalizing the FSD software is a pretty insane risk that no other company would take)
Path planning (decision-making) is by far the most complicated part of self-driving. Waymo vehicles were making plenty of comically stupid mistakes early on, because having sufficient spatial accuracy was never the truly hard part.
In "scenarios where vision fails" the car should not be driving. Period. End of story. It doesn't matter how good radar is in fog, because radar alone is not enough.
Too bad conditions can change instantly. You can't stop the car at an alpine tunnel exit just because there's heavy fog on the other side of the mountain.
If the fog is thick enough that you literally can't see the road, you absolutely can and should stop. Most of the time there's still some visibility through fog, and so your speed should be appropriate to the conditions. As the saying goes, "don't drive faster than your headlights."
It seems you’re misinformed about how this sensor is used. The point clouds (plus camera and radar data) are all fed to the models for detection. That makes their detectors much more robust in different lighting and weather conditions than cameras alone.
It's just "sensing depth" the same way cameras provide just "pixels". A fused cameras+radars+lidar input provides more robust coverage in a variety of conditions.
You know it would be even more robust under even more conditions? Putting 80 cameras and 20 LIDAR sensors on the car. Also a dozen infrared heat sensors, a spectrophotometer, and a Doppler radar. More is surely always better. Waymo should do that.
Remarkable. You managed to both misunderstand my point and, in drafting your witty riposte, accidentally understand it and adopt it as your own. More isn't objectively better, less isn't objectively better. There's only different strategies and actual real world outcomes.
> More isn't objectively better, less isn't objectively better.
Great, you finally got there. All it took was one round of correcting misinformation about LiDAR and another round of completely useless back-and-forth about sensor count.
The words you’re looking for are necessary and sufficient. Cameras are necessary, but not sufficient.
> There's only different strategies and actual real world outcomes.
Thanks for making my point. Actual real world outcomes are exactly what matter: 125M+ fully autonomous miles versus 0 fully autonomous miles.
Highly ironic considering you started this comment chain with a bunch of fanboy talking points and misinformation. Clearly, you’re not interested in being factual. Bye.
Tesla literally has a human in the driver seat for each and every mile. Their robotaxi which operates on geofenced “guardrails” has a human in the driver seat or passenger seat depending on area of its operation, and also has active remote supervision. That’s direct supervision 100% of the time. It is in no way similar in capability to Waymo.
We’ve been hearing Tesla will “surpass Waymo in the next 1-2 years” from the past 8 years, yet they are nowhere close. It’s always future tense with Tesla and never about the current state.
My first instinct is also that Rivian's strategy doesn't make sense. Self-driving is a monumentally hard problem, to be successful you need a world-class engineering and research team, resources and time.
I suspect that when Rivian has an L3 product, Waymo will be already offering an L4 package to car manufacturers.
Waymo's AI so far has been narrowly focused few cities. Good start, but remains to be seen who will scale out quicker. IMO both will succeed.
Right now if you want a personal car Tesla's FSD is the only option and will remain so for likely a decade. Waymo doesn't seem to be excited about their mission at all. If it moves to Google's graveyard they'll be like "meh" while it's mission critical for Tesla.
This is such a wild take. Waymo is expanding to cities across the country, doing millions of paid rides every month. Meanwhile Tesla's "Robotaxi" is tooling around Austin with a few cars, every one of which has a driver in the front seat. On the personal vehicle side, Tesla hasn't done anything new or interesting in years, and sales are slumping. FSD never seems to actually become good enough to actually be "full self driving", it's just year after year of Tesla stans coming in here to tell us how "the latest version is incredible, actual full self driving is just around the corner!"
Waymo is delivering millions of paid rides per month all over the country with no one in the driver's seat. Tesla still can't manage that in one small city without a backup driver in the front.
But yes, just like the dozens of other times I've read this comment for years now, I'm sure "the latest version of FSD" is so groundbreaking, and it's all about to change!
Your statement on more expensive hardware likely isn't true if you factor in full costs. Lidar gives you things for free with little extra processing (or power) that optical takes extra work to do poorly with higher latency.
Also LIDAR has just plain dropped in price, well over 10x, while nVidia hardware (even the automotive specific variants) have not.
Taxi services are not low margin. A taxi typically does about 500,000 miles over its lifetime; adding $10,000 to that cost is 2 cents per mile, increasing price by about 1%.
I can't find how it will operate. Will it detect a situation where lines are not painted sufficiently clearly, warn you, and disengage? Or will you need to detect where it begins to operate wonky because lines aren't painted sufficiently clearly and to take over? I guess it's the second. It's hands-off, not eyes-off.
Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.
The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.
I've been saying that it's semi-solved, in the sense that we have a decent idea of how to get there without requiring major breakthroughs. (By "we" I mean Waymo.)
I notice that tesla seems to choose (highlight in blue) the left and/or right lane lines or the car in front of you. But it still seems to work without lines.
The endless list of "exception" cases is why I'm continuous skeptical about any sort of full-self-driving claims.
Sure, you can cover everything they can think of. But there are so many cases you can't predict, or which don't have an obvious solution, and it often comes down to a human judgement call that doesn't always have a programmatically-clear right answer.
That was specifically for their existing Gen2 highway assist expansion. Not the Gen3 custom silicon full autonomy that they were discussing for the rest of the presentation.
In the future, we could use some sort of traffic management system, were cars which conform to a standard are able to 'link-up' and move as one unit like a train, it would relieve alot of the stop and go and improve flow on congested roads, possibly with denser traffic. I'd bet alot of daily commuters woild subscribe to something like that.
I don’t think that the production model will look like that, I believe it’s a wrap. Also suspect it’s a bit of a joke on the model being called the R2 (the colors and patterns are reminiscent of R2-D2).
Less mass will yield longer range. I know you're referring to the battery accounting for a large percentage of the weight, but a smaller vehicle will get the same range with a smaller battery, and the weight savings compound. If the vehicle weighs less, then all the components supporting that weight can weigh less as well. Unsprung mass can be reduced significantly. Acceleration, braking, handling, and top speed all improve as a result. Components will also generally cost less, reducing the price of the vehicle and making it cheaper to maintain.
Is there some tight coupling on autonomy + electric cars? Seems the only 2 viable hands-free car companies are Tesla and Rivian. I don't see myself ever getting an electric car, but it doesn't seem like the big car companies are anywhere near this.
I know this ain't a bitch-about-bluecruise thread but it's crazy to me they shipped it as is, it disengages silently as a matter of course - only indication is an animation on the speedometer. You basically have to keep your hands in the wheel just in case, not to mention shouting at you to pay attention when you glance over at the radio. Handsfree but keep your eyeballs facing front !
> Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.
"DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone." [0]
The range is fine today, the problem is charging infrastructure now. There aren't enough high speed chargers, and we can't build more because of the same reasons we can't build more AI datacenters: power. Tesla can build tons of them because they're backed by large grid batteries that suck up the power peaks from fast charging so that they can install their charging stations anywhere that has somewhat reliable power. If you don't have the batteries to act as a peak shaver, then it's really hard to install high speed charging where people need it most in residential and commercial areas that are already oversubscribed.
It's not fine for all use cases. There are many people who are holding out because it's either not fine for their main use case, or even just a use case that occurs infrequently, but still important to them.
I'd like to see data on the distances people drive on a regular basis. For America where I am from, I think that a vast majority of people could use EVs today with the ranges they have today. I didn't see any EVs with ranges below 200+ miles and most had 260+. If you have to go further than that on a regular basis, I think that most cars won't work for your specific needs, let alone EVs. The whole range argument seems like some FUD to me that was made up by the ICE industry, honestly, because EVs have had these same ranges for a decade now.
I'm speaking out of personal experience as an EV owner in Los Angeles that takes occasional road trips. It's those occasional road trips that are preventing me from going full EV. And I'm like 99% certain I'm not a tiny minority.
Worthless comment. Of course it's not an issue for city driving. It's an issue for long trips and rural driving. No one said EVs don't serve many use cases. I have one myself.
Worthless human. More range is not needed and mark my words, mainstream EVs will not bother going beyond ~300 miles. Even the 400mi in a model s is a lot. More charging stations maybe, though we have plenty here in CA so roadtrips in a Tesla have never been a problem.
appreciate the compliment. I'm one of those Californians with a Tesla, and we keep a gas car for certain trips that would be very difficult with a Tesla. I'm not just making something up here. But whatever you say.
The coupling is more with cost than drive train, but consumers most likely to pay extra for autonomy are the same ones willing to pay extra for electric.
Which is why you see it on the Mercedes ICE vehicle. Because it's a high cost vehicle to start with.
The reason for this is Rivian and Tesla bet big on software defined platforms… ie every piece of hardware talks to a small number of central computers instead of many independent systems. This gives them a huge leg up in developing software than can actually take all the available input and use it to control all aspects of the vehicle.
Downside is all the buttons are on a screen. But I’ve grudgingly decided it’s worth it for software upgrades.
It's not real L3, it's marketing department L3. Two years after launch it's still only supported in two US states. Now that Mercedes got their headline, it's effectively abandonware.
If it was real L3, Drive Pilot would be considered the vehicle operator for legal purposes. Mercedes would take full responsibility for any driving infringements or collisions that occur during its use. In reality, Mercedes cannot indemnify you from driving infringements, and for collisions they only promise to cover "insurance costs" which probably doesn't include any downstream reputational consequences of making an insurance claim.
Why do people what self driving cars at all? I certainly hate the thought of having to pay for any of this. Even if the end product is subscription based, all these feature cost money up front making new cars super expensive.
I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
Also, at some point, I'm probably going to be too old to drive safely, which will restrict my travels. Not if self driving gets to the point where that doesn't matter anymore.
Yeah. The tech isn't there yet. The question I was responding to was "Why do people what self driving cars at all". I responded why I want a self driving car.
Cool and all, but up until companies started putting this stuff in cars they cost $30k. Now the average car is 50k. The average car is now more expensive than my BMW 3 series with the premium package from a few years back. I don't want to pay for your fantasy of going to sleep in your car and waking up someplace new. I dont want to pay for the ability of my car to self park or be summoned to me. Most new features of cars dont interest me in the slightest.
You're suggesting that the only alternative to autonomous self-driving cars is public transit?
By the way, I do vote with my wallet. I won't buy a car that has these features. I won't buy a car that serves me ads. I won't buy a car that charges a subscription fee. However, this is becoming increasingly challenging. Most luxury vehicle manufacturers want to pad their bottom lines by charging a premium or worse a subscription for things I (and I suspect many people) don't want.
These premium features ultimately trickle down so every new car must have a rear-view camera and many have LED lighting. Examples of two premium features that now everyone must pay for. My eldest daughter failed her driving test because she used the rear view camera when parallel parking. Yes these cameras are mandated but you fail if you use them. The tail light on an F-150 can cost upwards of $3,000 to replace. A tail light!
My first car, a jeep, came with a bikini top, no doors. the windshield actually folded down without a special tool, and I used a kerosene heater in between the seats when it was cold. Now wranglers come with touch screens, heated steering wheels and cruise control. Apparently they are difficult to find with a manual transmission. I loved mine back in the day but as you say I'll vote with my wallet and will not buy from Stellantis.
I'll happily get my kids a Slate. Of course your mileage may vary and if you want to pay for these premiums then power to you. I just don't want to subsidize your choice.
> You're suggesting that the only alternative to autonomous self-driving cars is public transit?
No. But hopefully one day. I don't mind if you want to subsidise my choice or not. I want self driving tech to get to the point that it is safer than manually driven cars, and I then want people who want to still drive manually to be slowly priced off the roads and then outright banned from doing it.
My preference is that you stop being allowed to drive manually, and as far as I can see, that's the future, as long as the technology works out.
Average includes trucks and other stuff which are very above the average and pull it up, because god forbid the avg joe from getting a Honda civic instead of a f150 or above.
Also, inflation is a thing.
You can get a new Honda civic for less than 30k$ today, as well as other sedans and small cars.
If you don't like sharing space with other people, you want a private room on a train.
These cars and their supporting infrastructure should cost more than a private room on a train because they are less efficient and have more negative externalities than a private room on a train.
A train can't take me to the beach. It can't take me camping away from civilization. It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
I love trains, but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
You must be an American, because plenty of trains exist to bring people to nature elsewhere. You know, when you drive a car to a nature place, you put it into a parking lot, then you are no longer in the car, right? Same works for trains.
Man I love this silly debate. The original comment just wanted to travel 500 miles to "somewhere" and most instances of "somewhere" that people travel to could be accessed by train.
Also no one has said that no one is allowed to drive ever again anywhere. I'm trying to be generous but the victim complex is crazy.
> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:
> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.
My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
> Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer
Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination.
Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
This isn’t strictly directed at you, but I’m saddened that HN is immediately ready to dream big when it comes to solving hard problems and making the world a better place in spaces like AI, crypto, and technology in general. But suddenly shuts down over things as simple as trains, buses, and bike lanes.
There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.
> waaaaay more rail routes
It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.
Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.
The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.
Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
I live in Manhattan, and don't own a car, so I get where you're coming from. The reality here is that America doesn't like trains and isn't going to build trains in any kind of a timeframe that's helpful to me. I'm about to move to Westchester, but I need to get to the Upper West Side every day. Yes, I can take the train from Westchester, but it goes into Grand Central, so then I need to take another train from there. And I'll have my kid with me.
So my options are:
1. Drive, walk, or bike with my kid to the train station in Westchester, ride to grand central, switch to subway, drop her off at school, then take the subway to my office. Total time about 90 mins.
or
2. Drive 35-45 mins.
I'll be driving.
There's talk of having one of the train lines go into Penn instead of Grand Central, with stops on the Upper West Side! But that'll be a decade or more, if it ever happens, and it won't be relevant to me anymore at that point.
It remains to be seen, but there is reason to believe that self driving cars will be enough safer than regular cars that I as a citizen want everyone to have them if you have a car.
I have kids who walk, ride bikes, and I do the same. There are a lot of terrible drivers out there - the average driver who thinks they are better than everyone else is still terrible (yes this includes me - I'm one of the few honest enough to admit I'm not good, but I'm about equal to everyone else)
One day, all personal transport will be AI, and lunatics like me who enjoy performance driving will have special vehicles we drive at a track. Self driving cars are great. That you can’t afford one is just a matter of time.
Could happen. But we still allow horse-drawn carriages on some roads. I think I'll be long dead (and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in this discussion will be long dead as well) before we kick human drivers off the road.
If we really gave a shit about driving-related fatalities, there is a lot of fruit hanging way lower than replacing the average sober driver.
I like approaching it from an accessibility standpoint. I don't need it and I enjoy the act of driving. That said, if I had vision impairment and wanted freedom to travel further from home with no assistance self driving cars make a lot more sense.
The product isn't necessarily "for me", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
I'm extremely visually impaired. I'd rather see (ha) good public transport. I also sincerely doubt (and hope so) that I'd be legally able to drive a car simply because it has "self-driving" - what if I need to take control of it? What happens if someone gets hurt because of it? Am I liable, even though I don't have a license?
Driving can be annoying. I like it in some cases, but it's no fun when there's a ton of traffic, lots of stop lights, etc. I'd love to be able to push a button and let it handle the grunt work in those cases.
Sometimes I want to do something else. Maybe adjust my music, or send a text. If the car can keep me going while I do that, it would be nice.
I live with two people who can't drive. Often I have to take them to things. Tonight I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going, waiting, and coming back, so one of them can do something. It would be great if I could just put them in the car and say, have fun, see you later, and stay home while the car takes them there and back.
Anecdotally, whenever I have to tote someone around who cannot drive, it is nearly universally true that they also cannot get in and out of the car without help, too. So that has to be arranged, a self-driving car won't be able to solve it.
There are reasons other than physical disability for people to be unable to drive. For example, the person I’m driving tonight can’t drive themselves because they’re too young to have a license.
Doing long highway drives is effortless. Think cruise control, but you can let go of the wheel.
The hardware necessary for level 2 autonomy is estimated to cost about US$400 in a Tesla. Much higher for companies using Lidar though prices are coming down as well.
I would like self-driving car for myself, but more so, I would like it for all the other drivers on the road who regularly try to kill me or destroy my car.
I don't think so. My financial situation isn't hers though, and I don't even own one. I borrowed a friend's for a 550 mile road trip this past weekend and then for a few days after. It's there enough to do the usual daily trips with minimal interaction, so while road trips is the obvious situation for it it's also really nice to have the rest of the time. It sucks that it costs so much when it could be free, but we still live under capitalism so that's just how that one goes.
The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars:
- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars
- Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof)
- Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc.
- There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)
What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).
Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.
Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.
Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
> What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
There’s plenty of evidence that traffic is almost exclusively induced demand and that as you build other facilities and expand existing ones that more people use them. “Just one more lane bro”, etc.
America tends to be car-centric because that’s the only perceived option.
People that want more public transit probably never did public transit. It took me a few horrible interactions on a public transit and some disgusting experience in car share to never support anything “communist”. Specially when you get kids.
I think it helps you drive. It takes away the tedium of driving and reduces your workload.
Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips
infrequent but just as important - emergency braking
That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)
As an aside, IIRC they put the turn signal stalk back in a recent update. It saves them a few bucks per car to use buttons instead, but there are people who will not buy a Tesla without a turn-signal stalk -- and the loss on that is probably 500x what is saved by not putting in a stalk.
Out of all things I'm actually surprised they went straight to custom silicon, but gotta respect that decision. It's likely the only way to compete with Tesla right now.
Rivian coming for Teslas crown? I honestly think Rivians are unattractive. Like if a jeep and scion had a drunken tryst. Haven’t seen the interior before though.
But I’d be glad if somebody was competitive enough to force Elon to behave again.
No, Waymo is just going to license their tech to normal automakers, like Toyota, and those licensees will win. Rivian is run by a Musk-wannabe but even this stock pump isn’t going to help with his sociopath, multibillion dollar compensation package.
The market wants them to sell the $40k cars asap. All the other side quests are distractions. When they spun off their electric bike side project, the stock went up.
Incendiary language aside, this does seem pretty likely to me. Waymo has already talked about wanting to license their driver for personally owned cars eventually; it just doesn't make sense for them to do so until they can cover more of the country (or countries). The more areas they cover, and especially when they can cover various popular freeways connecting different metro areas, the more it'll make sense for them to start partnering with automakers to sell the technology to consumers.
I hold some RIVN and I'm wondering why they're spending resources on custom silicon instead of using something off-the-shelf. What is their advantage here? Can they hire the right people? Can they ship enough units to pay for it?
Those are my bearish questions. On the bullish side, the VW deal shows that they're willing and able to license part of their platform, so possibly have a big chance to recoup costs and maybe turn a profit just on that side, which justifies a big software + autonomy investment.
If their idea is both novel and useful, and if it actually works, and they can actually produce it, then: They can sell it to other automakers.
(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.
Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.
It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)
Oh, I think everyone missed this. Rivian is betting Elon made a big mistake by designing FSD to be strictly for Tesla. Rivian are doing FSD to license it out to other manufacturers. They're planning to open a new market.
Frankly, the "need" for custom silicon seems self-imposed, with the idea of appearing to be a technology company first rather than a car / vehicle company.
Cruise automation was also for years working on custom silicon, I knew people there. Many people working on the custom devices didn't really believe in the mission statement either, but they were paid well, and got to do fun work, so they took the job.
What makes Rivian, or Tesla better at making the "normal" car pieces compared to Toyota, or Honda? The answer is they're really not better at those things and quite worse typically ; bad fit and finish, rattles, corroding suspension components, difficult to buy replacement parts, etc.
If these companies were truly about making electric cars available to all, a partnership with a car company that knows how to do the "regular car stuff" makes a LOT more sense.
Instead you have these companies that might be innovative in the drive train, electronics, batteries, and co-packaging who have to learn all the "hard" stuff normal car companies have been doing for a 100-years.
Now, instead of moving into a partnership with a regular car company, they're becoming hardware/software organizations making custom silicon with custom software.
Even doing custom silicon and the associated software takes YEARS of expertise to do it and not have a 1000 warts, not withtsanding going into a MOVING VEHICLE where the risks of making mistakes is life and limb.
So, my conclusion is this is more fancy smoke and mirrors to impress investors and the general public, but not in the best interest of end-users (people who buy vehicles to use as transportation).
Watching this unfold... I keep thinking about the supply chain... how many rare minerals go into this custom silicon?
ALSO what happens when the first generation hits end-of-life... will there be a clear path to recycling? I want to believe these platforms will last more than a subscription cycle...
BUT I guess we won't know until we see a teardown...
Rivians have been spotted with giant Velodyne VLS-128 "Alpha Puck"s since several years ago [1]. But from last I checked, Rivian's ADAS is still struggling with ping-ponging in lanes on curved stretches, and it only works on a small set of pre-mapped highways. Highly doubtful that "universal hands free" is coming.
The ping-ponging is certainly a Gen1 problem. (My Gen1 does this.) Gen1 was essentially an off-the-shelf Mobileye unit, and the performance was, as expected, not good.
Gen2 autonomy stack is completely unrelated to Gen1, and from what I hear is a completely different level of reliability.
(also - this presentation covered yet another, unrelated, gen3 autonomy stack, which shares none of the hardware or models with the existing gen2 stack, either.)
The big lidars are for ground truth collection. They get used in projects ranging from autonomous development all the way down to budget adaptive cruise control or parking sensor benchmarking.
Any company adding fancy hardware (beyond good cameras and inference chips) to achieve self driving is on the wrong track at this point. Software is what will win this game.
Of course, Waymo has achieved good results with A LOT of fancy hardware. But it's hard to see how they stand a chance against Cybercab mass production (probably behind schedule, but eventually).
I think Rivian has the best-looking line of EVs out there. Maybe they will be able to come from behind in self-driving tech. But this big reveal is not that promising, IMO.
The "fancy" hardware is going to get dirt cheap, and in a game where you're asking your customer to trust you with their lives, reliability is going to win. Combine that with time to market, and Tesla feels like a pretty clear "risky bet" at best... Maybe they make it work, but they have to do it before the other companies make lidar cheap, and prices have fallen dramatically over the past 10 years, for much better hardware.
Yeah, that is all reasonable. I think the jury is still out on if sensor fusion can really get far enough up the march of nines (will it work in 99.99 percent of scenarios)? Karpathy has given some good interviews about why Tesla ditched the sensor fusion approach and switched to vision-only.
Same can be said for vision-only, of course. Maybe it won't every quite get to 99.99.
Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway).
Of course, people won't like this, I'm not exactly enthused either, but the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That doesn't really make sense from a business perspective.
Agreed, it seems inevitable that autonomy and insurance are going to be bundled.
1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've already got some of the downsides of insurance (aka the payout) without the upside (the premium).
2. Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
3. It just seems like a much easier sell. I wouldn't pay $100/month for self-driving, but $150 a month for self-driving + insurance? That's more than I currently pay for insurance, but not a lot more. And I've got relatively cheap insurance: charging $250/month for insurance + self-driving will be cheaper than what some people pay for just insurance alone.
I don't think we need to hit 100% self-driving for the bundled insurance to be viable. 90% self-driving should still have a substantially lower accident rate if the Waymo data is accurate and extends.
History suggests it won't be that clean.
1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
> Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.
Google, AFAIK the only company with cars that are actually autonomous, has US$98 Billion in cash.
It'd have to be a hell of an accident to put a dent in that.
They'd still at least buy reinsurance etc anyway.
All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.
For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.
Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.
I believe google/waymo uses Swiss Re for reinsurance, so you are correct.
If it's cheaper for them to pay lawyers a few tens or hundreds of millions to bury any such case in court, in settlements, or putting the agitator through any of the myriad forms of living hell they can legally get away with, then they'll go that route.
You'd need an immensely rich or influential opponent to decide they wanted to march through hell in order to hold Google's feet to the fire. It'd have to be something deeply personal and they probably have things structured to limit any potential liability to a couple hundred million. They'll never be held to account for anything that goes seriously wrong.
The provider of the insurance can always insure itself for that catastrophic case. It's called Reinsurance.
They know it’s cheaper to buy/lobby congress to limit their liability and will do so long before they payout real money.
Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.
This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.
This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.
Far be it from me to tell automakers how to roll out software but I would expect them to have relatively slow and gradual rollouts, segmented by region and environment (e.g., Phoenix might be first while downtown London might be last).
That process itself could still break. (Unlikely though it may be)
Tesla certainly does it this way today. This is also the norm for IoT that I'm aware of. Nobody wants fleet-wide flag days anyway.
> Nobody wants fleet-wide flag days anyway.
Crowdstike raises their hand..
aionescu, CTIO of CrowdStrike, is here.
I think you’re right, but this thread did bring to mind the LA Northridge quake (1994):
https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/a553905/2147483...
I can easily imagine auto insurers facing exactly that kind of liability if a self-driving car release is bad enough.
A bad hail storm comes close. Hail damage can total a car.
Cars are the cheap part of auto insurance claims.
Only when you are looking at one claim. If all the cars in a city get hail damage the total costs exceed the typical daily claim losses.
I think the point is that it’s much less than all the cars.
And a hailstorm that knocks out 10,000 cars is very rare. But hurricanes or fires that knock out billions in homes happen almost every year.
Exactly this; damaging a building or causing the death of a person can be 10x+ more costly for the insurer.
This is why insurance companies pay cloud seeders to move thunderstorms and reduce the probability of massive hail claims.
Would auto insurers have enough insured cars within the area of a hailstorm to matter though?
This is true, we had a bad hail storm come through in 2010 that dimpled an appreciable fraction of the cars in the city like golf balls. Most were deemed repairable write-offs. Went right over a couple of luxury car yards. A bunch of people at my work moved our cars undercover 10 minutes before it hit, and felt kind of silly… for 10 minutes, until it hit.
Car insurance premiums jumped by quite a lot that day, as far as I can tell permanently.
Euro importers love hail damaged Copart cars, very cheap to fix here.
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.
My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.
Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
> Auto companies have long had financing arms
I have in fact heard it said that VW group is a financing company with a automobile arm. From some points of view, that seems correct.
Auto companies, yes. As I understand it, airline credit cards are mostly just co-branded cards with existing banks like Chase.
Frequent flyer programs are basically banks if you consider miles/points are currency.
That's different from the credit cards themselves--given the points degrade in value. (And which I should really start to use more.)
> High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
This seems like it can be solved with a deductible.
I think parent might be implying that a 10 mph collision can total a car just as effectively as a 100 mph collision. There might be more left of the occupants, but the car itself might be still a total loss from a cost-to-repair perspective
True, but another thought I would have is these modern cars should have sufficient sensors to be able to stop and avoid collisions at low speed.
> Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.
It doesn't prevent chaos, but it does provide ubiquitous cameras. That will be used against people.
I'm ambivalent about that and mostly in a negative direction. On the one hand, I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
On the other hand, the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving. Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.
Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.
> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.
Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.
I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.
>Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.
Interesting theory, I would have assumed the exact opposite. People who want to drive fast and take risks will select manual driving because they'll find the autonomous cars too boring.
It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
I hope this forces insurance companies to deal with the lenient driver licensing problem that the government refuses to deal with
Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.
I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo.
Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so.
The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip.
If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it.
No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system.
No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space.
I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see.
One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.
Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking.
Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right.
It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc.
This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives.
This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart.
This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time.
This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic.
Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value.
Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more.
If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on.
This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this.
I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.
> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper
This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.
Even just paying for the roads for these cars to drive on is a challenge with the lack-of-density they require. So many suburbs with large lot sizes just learn to live with the potholes.
that is until autonomous pothole-fixers. Just the other way, looking at the Waymo driving by and with me doing small autonomy myself i was wondering what niche they leave for me, and looking at the road i thought that autonomous pothole-fixers is going to be multi-trillion business.
People writing in other comments about cost of roads, new and repair - it all will change with autonomous road paving hardware.
I'm really doubting this is the case. It seems much more likely to be due to zoning laws.
It's not really.
If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.
Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.
"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.
Houston doesn't have zoning laws, but it does have private deed covenants enforced by the city which effectively work as zoning laws. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.h...
These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).
Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.
I agree with you but I don't believe the marketplace does. If you get rid of parking requirements in Houston I doubt you'd see a significantly different development pattern because ultimately people there actually do need to park their cars.
If you remove parking requirements then the marketplace can discover the right amount of parking. Parking minimums keep the amount of parking artificially high.
That's kind of eliding the whole point of parking minimums (which I also hate, by the way). Parking is a classic tragedy of the commons issue where each individual developer would prefer not to build any parking and externalize that cost onto nearby lots/public streets/following developers.
In fact developers did do this, and "the market" responded by creating regulations that prevent it. Which are obviously causing their own set of serious problems.
It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back. Or if you can't afford anything better.
Ask well-paid people who keep renting apartments in Manhattan, or in downtown SF, to say nothing of Tokyo or Seoul.
I realize "makes no sense" carries a double meaning here. I am speaking of the system-level decisions which end up actually producing infrastructure. You're right that sprawl is absolutely inhumane – we should absolutely nudge processes/incentives such that it's discouraged, but doing so is not as simple as just "get rid of zoning."
Average commute time in Houston is just under half an hour (depend on which source you read, varies from 26-29 in my quick search). Sure you can do commutes more than an hour long, but people generally don't - if they get a new job more than about half an hour away they will move.
> It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back.
Much easier to do with self driving cars though. Remember the promise? “Take a nap in your car and arrive at your destination” or “be productive on your commute”.
I live well out of Boston/Cambridge. These days, I rarely drive in. (Mostly for flights or the occasional theater). I would absolutely go in more if someone/something were driving me for a reasonable cost. I'm actually fairly convenient to commuter rail but doesn't really work except for commuting during the day which I very rarely do.
And further why are zoning laws the way they are? It's exactly because the suburbs people don't want a bunch of hippie trailer park riffraff around.
At this point it is more because they have always been that way and people don't think about it anymore. in 1920-1950 when they were first enacted they were for those reasons, but now people are more afraid of change.
What if it's both? People drive everywhere because zoning forces car infrastructure everywhere. There's few to no safe places to walk/bike anymore.
It already has!
Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.
I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.
Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.
I can't speak to NYC - best case it would take me 4 hours to get there (.5 to the airport, 1 hour security, 2 hours on the plane, .5 from ny airport to the city). Meanwhile I can get to nearly anywhere in my entire MSA in less than an hour, both city and suburbs (and even a few farms). Within that the majority of ethnic food is in suburbs, though the largest concentration is still downtown.
Well, NYC is NYC.
I live in Baltimore, and if you ask after Chinese, Korean, Indian, or Vietnamese, without specifying city limits, you will be directed to a place in the suburbs with a parking lot (I think this is essentially true of DC as well).
Same in Atlanta. Best ethnic food is in the suburbs.
If you think that culture is strictly a matter of consumption this is a reasonable clap back, but it belies its own shallow premise
What's ethnic food?
If you're in America, it's Italian/Greek/Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai/Japanese/Ethiopian/Moroccan/Brazilian/Indian food. Etc.
So basically any non-diner non-fastfood.
Well, there are some rural staples like BBQ, and Mexican to a degree.
But, yes. The sort of ... enduring narrative is that rural areas and suburbs have chain restaurants, diners, and fast food, because immigrants go to cities and open restaurants from their native cuisine, and that suburbanites think black pepper is spicy and sushi is gross.
In actuality I think immigrants are increasingly (a) enamored of the American big-car / big-house lifestyle (makes sense, they choose to come here) and (b) bought-in to the notion that cities are dangerous, with bad schools. So immigrants rent a place in a strip mall near the suburban school district some other immigrant said was good online and start restaurants there. Google maps exists, suburbanites think nothing of a 25 minute drive, so they ask around online after the best examples of a particular ethnic cuisine, and they drive there.
In Maryland, where I live, it's certainly true that the highly-regarded Chinese and Korean dining is in suburbs. Latin Americans, specifically Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are the only immigrant group moving in to Baltimore (where I live) with any sort of enthusiasm.
While it’s true that there is food and shopping in suburbs, I think it’s also true that suburbs are still food and culture deserts, since the food and other amenities is typically far away from most houses.
Not really. Get in a car and you can be at all. For many in the city walking it is about as long to get to those things - the distance is less, but the time is similar and time is what counts.(which isn't very many!) the city is the food desert - there are bars and restaurants, but zero grocery stories. If you want to cook a meal you have to get to the suburbs to buy the supplies.
i take it you are not from the old world? Only in north america will you find dense cities without small, normal grocery stores.
These are incredibly common in all of the old world.
True. One other people you find in cities in the old world is people who are not in that weird place between college and kids where they can afford to eat out all the time and alcohol hasn't started catching up to their health
I very much hope that this doesn't happen. So much wasted energy for so little benefit. What's one to do in this world if they don't have the money to own a car that constantly drives them around? What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by? What's one to do if they want to build relationships with the other humans in the world?
> What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by?
They stop at that place and become familiar with it?
Doing it on a highway is not as easy as if you were walking past it.
> no more traffic
How? There would be a huge increase in demand on the roads. You said it yourself, you’d have to build more roads.
Unless you meant, no more [suffering] traffic, since you could just take a nap.
The only way I see self driving to be a true win if it is so efficient that you can remove all the roads and they become part of the mass transit system.
I would demand personal vehicles to pay a premium (cost plus) as they take up more space per person and add to infrastructure maintenance cost
There are a bunch of it depends. A large part of traffic is because someone messes up - accidents cause large delays, but even a small mistake in merging can slow down several others. Though human drivers regularly tailgate, if self driving cars maintain their proper 3 second following distance we could need a lot more space. (though perhaps self driving can safely maintain even a closer distance than humans do - I don't know)
>> no more traffic
> How?
There would be no more traffic for the driver, who would be sleeping or watching Netflix
This would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens.
> No sharing space with people on public transit.
If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollution is actually worse in many ways and is made worse with heavier EVs).
This will not fix food deserts, it will make them worse. If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.
Roads are awful. We should be trying to minimize them, not expand them.
Whatever ungodly sum you are prepared to pay, I'm certain the actual cost is yet higher.
> If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.
Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.
In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.
There are a few low density places around the world where public transit is efficient for the average person.
cars are barely efficient in terms of time. In cost terms, cars are incredibly expensive once you add in infrastructure costs, insurance, fuel, the cost of land use, etc.
Public transit is efficient even outside areas of high density - see suburban Europe or India. Why are so many people here utterly car-brained?
Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.
This is my observation as well, it's also true in the USA. Places like Chicago and NYC have good public transit. You can easily live there without a car, in fact it's easier and certainly cheaper to not have to deal with owning a car. If you visted NYC and formed your impression of public transit in the USA based on that, it would be very wrong. Likewise you cannot assume that because Copenhagen has great public transit and bicycle infrastructure that all of Europe is like that. Get out to the smaller cities and towns and you'll find that many more people own cars and drive everywhere.
are you familiar with population distributions and the fact that more of the word lives in urban areas than rural?
>So everyone drives
Citation needed, because this is obviously false.
>Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere
What a horrible thing to say.
Horrible how? I'm telling you that's the reality, not that it's a good thing. Unlike you I've actually been to those places and talked to the locals.
> I hope to god this never ever happens.
Then I'll never buy an autonomous vehicle.
I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).
Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.
"we" here is a minority of the population in any developed country. The vast majority of people - almost globally - live in dense areas.
Rubbish.
Population density varies, and your cutoff between "dense" and "not dense" must be tautological.
Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
That's one opinion. My opinion is public transport is phenomenal. It's relatively reliable (very in some places), generally clean and safe, low cost, encourages urban/high efficiency development, protects greenspace, and employees people.
I'm not sure where you live, but that doesn't match my experience at all. And I think most people agree given the overwhelming majority of people who choose to drive, notwithstanding traffic and parking. The declining public transit ridership in most metropolitan areas over time is well documented.[1] It's because in most places -- but evidently not where you live -- public transit sucks relative to private transportation and ride-hailing services. As discussed above, EV autonomy will only increase the difference.
[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/fta-transit-ridership-p...
most people in the US are forced to drive, they don't willingly choose to sink large sums of money into a rolling metal cage.
Speak for yourself. I love my cars. For a relatively modest expense they allow me to go wherever, whenever I want and bring all my stuff with me. This is a miracle of modern civilization.
as is the consequent traffic, pollution and inefficiency that choices like yours add up to.
Well I guess it beats having horse manure in the streets.
> It's relatively reliable
In most places it is not, which is a big drawback. Every week I hear on the news how the train shut down some stations or got massively delayed for random reasons. I couldn't possibly rely on that if I need to be at work at a specific time.
What are you talking about? In most cities public transport sucks, hardly goes anywhere, gets more expensive year after year, makes housing prices go up, and is slow and inflexible enough that people still end up needing cars to go around
It's interesting to read such an opposite opinions on public transport from Americans and Europeans.
Worth noting that only 17% of passenger transport activity in the EU is public transit (trains and buses).
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/share-of-bu...
> Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years
*In the United States. For reasons we have avoided in much of the rest of the world...
The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
We do have dense pockets. NYC, in particular, has a nice metro (it just needs to be cleaner and more modernized - but it's great otherwise).
Most countries are small. Their dense cities are well-served by public transit. America is just too spread out. Insanely spread out.
China is an exception in that, while a huge landmass, its large cities emerged as the country was wholesale industrializing. It was easy for them to allocate lots of points to infrastructure. And given their unmatched population size and density, it makes a lot of sense.
As much as I envy China's infrastructure (I've been on their metros - they're amazing!), it would be a supreme malinvestment here in the United States to try to follow in their footsteps. The situation we have here is optimal for our density and the preferences of our citizens. (As much as people love to complain about cars, even more people than those that complain really love their cars.)
Public transit in the US is probably going to wind down as autonomous driving picks up the slack. Our road infrastructure is the very best in the world - it's more expansive, comprehensive, and well-maintained than any nation on the planet. We'd be wise to double down. It can turn into a super power once the machines take over driving for us.
The fact that we have this extent of totally unmatched road infrastructure might actually turn out to be hugely advantageous over countries that opted for static, expensive heavy rail. Our system is flexible, last mile, to every address in the country. With multiple routes, re-routes, detours. Roads are America's central nervous system.
Our interstate system is flexible, and when cars turn into IP packets, we'll have the thickest and most flexible infrastructure in the world.
We've shit on cars for the last 15 years under the guise that "strong towns" are correct and that cars are bad. But as it may turn out, these sleeping pieces of infrastructure might actually be the best investment we've ever made.
Going to call this now: in 20 years' time, cars will make America OP.
Those things everything complains about - they'll be America's superpower.
The rest of the world with their heavy rail trains and public transit will be jealous. Our highways will turn into smart logistics corridors that get people and goods P2P at high speed and low cost to every inch of the country.
Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
I'm so stoked for this. I once fell for the "we need more trains meme" - that was a suboptima anachronism, and our peak will be 100x higher than expensive, inflexible heavy rail.
> The United States is freaking huge. By the time modern transportation arrived, people were already living all over the country in pockets every which where. We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these - and in vast quantities.
You have this narrative precisely backwards.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the great sprawl that made us dependent on cars happened after cars got popularized.
Yes, the cities were already spread out relative to each other, but that distance can be covered with trains well enough. What made us need cars, and what cars encouraged, was a huge amount of spread within a city or metro area. If you sprawl out over a city such that population density is constantly low, then public transit and walking can't work effectively anymore, and everyone needs to own a car.
US cities that were already large and well populated before the advent of cars tend to be densely built. Their cores, at least, are walkable as a result. This is true even for non-major cities -- just google "streetcar suburbs" as an example.
No, GP is right. Check out the urban/rural populations in 1900 [0].
Cars allowed for suburban sprawl but the country was already really spread out before cars.
Maybe if cars didn’t exist we would have eventually consolidated into dense population centers.
You’re right that US cities were large and well populated, but that’s not where most people (60%) of Americans were.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
> The United States is freaking huge.
Completely irrelevant. I'm not interested in public transport across vast areas from city to city, I can drive or fly for those (very rare) occasions.
Public transport is most useful for the hyper-local day-to-day movement. I'd just want good reliable public transport within my town and neighboring areas.
(Actually I'd prefer to just bike, which requires secure bike parking in all destinations. I can already bike anywhere in town, but my bike will get stolen if I stop anywhere to shop or eat, so I can't do that.)
In a way, a fusion of both is possible
Autonomous cars that move largely along the same route could form temporary "trains", or rather convoys, moving in a coordinated fashion. That would simplify navigation, reduce chances of accidents, reduce energy consumption, and definitely give the passengers more peace of mind during the commute.
Such convoys would split when needed, join together when needed, notify other convoys and drivers about their route and timing. This would alleviate traffic jams considerably even under heavy load.
At the same time, they would consist of cars and trucks that would be capable of moving completely separately outside highways.
This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
> This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.
Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.
These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.
Within a convoy, yes. Between convoys, a dispatcher service could be beneficial, distributed and federated, again, like air traffic controllers and railway dispatchers. The same self-driving car companies that produce the software and require subscription could offer it.
> Roads are truly America's circulatory and nervous system.
Thanks to massive lobbying by car manufacturers that did their best to destroy all traces of public transit infrastructure that existed in the US before the country moved to car dependency.
> We opted for cars and planes to cover the vast distances. And as it turns out, we have some of the best in the world of both of these
You actually believe that?!
It is true. The US has great car infrastructure. The US has a lot of airplanes. For longer distances both work very well.
We have terrible transit though, and there are many short trips where transit should work better than it doesn't work at all. However the subject here is vast distances and the US has those and does well.
> I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.
Will you enthusiastically support the taxes on you needed to entirely offset this negative externality?
Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)
Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.
California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).
Can we solve the poisoning of fish while we're at it?
California is just uniquely dysfunctional in many ways.
> You'll survive the tire pollution.
I tend to expect better from HN commenters. I don't have an interest in having a discussion with such a callous and dismissive comment. I hope your day gets better.
Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
Have you thought about how much brake dust subway riders breathe in? At least I can buy a car with a hepa filter
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-07/new-york-...
Hell yeah man screw all of those people breathing the outside air from the car brakes. What losers. We'll just dump the pollution everywhere all the time instead of in specific areas where mitigation for everyone is easier and cheaper.
> Tire pollution is worse than tailpipe emissions and the full effects aren't known. You're dismissive of other people's and the environment's health and you're wrong.
Tire pollution is now as large or larger than tailpipe particulate pollution, but it’s not a complete apples-to-apples comparison.
Tail pipe pollution includes CO₂, NOx, SO₂, CO, and fine particulates (PM2.5 + PM10) and is strongly linked to asthma, heart disease, climate change.
Tire pollution on the other hand is microplastics, synthetic rubber particles, zinc, and volatile organic compounds. Toxic to aquatic life; long-term human health effects still being studied.
A typical ICE car will consume at least 500 gallons of petrol (gasoline) per 1 gallon of tire tread worn. The environmental impact per volume of tire is certainly greater, but it's not remotely five hundred times greater.
I'm not saying we should disregard the issue of tire pollution. But if it was as serious as you suggest, it would be making more headlines than it is.
Why wouldn’t it be 500 times greater? Gasoline is combusted for energy, converting most of it into mostly harmless byproducts; tire tread is just released as is.
The best evidence that tyre tread is significantly less consequential than gasoline consumption is that such criticisms overwhelmingly arise in discussions of electric cars.
> People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.
I think this is the plot of Kamakiriad.
I'm lost on why you fantasies this so much and don't just buy an RV or something?
Do you really hate driving that much?
I don't think this would change the world as you imagine it. I don't mind driving long i will just make sure i get entertainment for the purpose. Like an audio book. My wife doesn't say 'Lets go soemwere you can drive me around and i can finally do that many things in parallel'.
And plenty of family drive today with RVs while the parents are in the front and the kids are in the back. No one is showering while the parents drive. Do you know how slow Cars now would need to drive to make this suddenly that much more comftable than what we have today?
You would need to rebuild the car and streets to get to this point.
How much would you pay? Why not hire an actual human driver?
human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.
This.
My car is my property. I own it. It does everything I want it to. It is an extension of me.
That question is like asking, "Why own a computer? Why not hire a mathematician to do all your computation for you?"
The problems a self-driving problem solves are 100x deeper than a human, and the second order effects to greater society are enormous. When everyone and everything is self-driving, the roads aren't roads any more - they're TCP/IP and logistics super highways. Anything can go anywhere for any reason at any time. This is a huge societal unlock.
Even thinking about how frictionful ordering an Uber is is exhausting when thinking about the idyllic future of simply jumping into my own car - my own space - and having it do exactly what I want.
This future is magical and I want it now.
You must be a lot more comfortable as a passenger than I am, because that honestly sounds like my personal hell. I don't mind driving, but I hate being in any vehicle for extended periods. Have you considered a chauffeur?
Have a look at comma ai
George Hotz has done some interesting work, but Comma is far too indie/hacker. It's not at a scale where it can be 100% autonomous.
I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.
This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.
And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.
I would hope geohot is exploring options to partner with one of the automakers. Because it sure looks like the future is not bright for their device. Cars are steadily switching to encrypted canbus and don't work with Comma. It's a dead end unless they work a deal with someone to be allowed on the bus.
Absolutely wild to me how a dystopian hell world scenario for me can be someone else's utopia.
Get a Model Y or even a Cybertruck. It's not there quite yet but holy shit it's almost there.
Your dream sounds like a nightmare for everyone else in America. I hope it never comes to fruition.
Autonomy + insurance is an interesting way to arrive at what the insurers are already trying to push with their tracker dongles, where they encourage you to drive like a mouse by putting bits of carrot in front of you.
I had been worried that non-tracked insurance would become increasingly expensive once we reached a tipping point where more and more drivers accepted the devil's bargain, but likely the trackers will be obsoleted by autonomy.
I think there will actually be a couple interesting adjustments/market forces acting in the car companies' favor.
First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties.
Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.
Curious where you live? The only place I ever paid insurance premiums that high (and not quite that high) was in Ontario. I pay $70.
In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month
This is terrible. In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years). Price is for full coverage with low excess.
This price is probably driven by higher prevalence of uninsured motorists
> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
You're taking about full coverage, right?
Yes but when I tried to switch to liability only it was $20 cheaper. What I pay seems to be the floor, it’s definitely the lowest of anyone I know so far who isn’t claiming to live outside of NYC. Meanwhile my motorcycle insurance, liability only, for an older sport bike was only $400/year with Progressive.
Wow.That a bit high even for NYC. Are you male? I have a join policy with my wife with Geico for $166 a month. This includes upgraded $100,000 liability limit roadside assistance and windshield insurance.
I have a crossover/wagon 330 horsepower V6 engine.
I guess males wreck more. I pay double now for myself as a single man with a car than I did for both me and my spouse and our two cars. Went from $100/month to $200/month overnight.
Similar here. In Atlanta, have never had an at-fault accident in my life. I pay just under $400/mo for full coverage on my 2019 coupe and my wife's 2015 crossover.
Wow that is crazy, also in the US my wife & I pay about $30/each a month.
I always chuckle when discussions start comparing insurance premiums without defining the insurance itself.
Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations.
These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.
Why would you forego bodily injury liability coverage? Most states require it, and it makes sense if you have even modest assets.
The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.
Sorry, I meant I forego Personal Injury Protection, not Bodily Injury. I purchase the maximum amount of bodily injury (I forget if it’s $250k or $500k, but it’s up there).
Sounds like insurance in Canada is very cheap. Here in California we pay about $400/month. This is for a couple with no accidents in 30 years, in the sweet spot of old enough to have plenty of driving record with zero accidents but not too old to have any age-based penalties, so that's about as cheap as it gets.
Apparently when our child reaches driving age we should expect to be paying about $1000/month for insurace. We'll see when the time comes.
The average car insurance premium in the US is over $2000/year, and over $2500/year for full coverage. I imagine that has an outlier effect and the median is lower, but I'd be surprised if the median was under $100/month. I'm paying just under $1000/year (and yes, in Ontario).
The liability-only insurance is around $70 a month.
It depends where you live and how much coverage you get. The real kicker these day is uninsured motorist coverage, because so many people are driving without insurance and they are much more likely to get into accidents.
You must own your vehicle in its entirety to be able to downgrade to liability-only. If you are still making payments on your car (which most people are), your lender requires that you maintain full coverage.
I actually I'd be even willing to downgrade my car one level if I'm not driving and just sitting in the back seat. Will likely be cheaper for me to own even with the increased subscription.
Maybe, but it might just push many would-be car owners to just use a service and forego buying a car altogether. What's the point of paying the capital expense, and a subscription expense for a car vs just calling up a Waymo. The traditional car makers should really be wary as they've historically been terrible at service offerings.
In the next step, somebody will notice that many people drive to the same destination (like a large shopping mall or an airport) and try to offer to take them in the same self-driving car for a discount. Over time those vehicles might grow to seat as may as 30-100 people and stop at multiple destinations
Incredible startup idea. While we wait for the self driving tech, maybe we could pay specially trained people to drive these vehicles?
Labour is over 50% of the cost for the MTA, we could run more routes and shorter headways with autonomy
Who am I kidding, the NYC unions would rather burn down waymos than accept autonomy
I get your joke. But I like paying more to ride by myself.
It’s the driving I don’t like.
If you rarely drive using a service might be worth it. However if you drive more often it will be worth having your own car because it is ready when you want to go. I have a second car that I rarely use - but if I got rid of it a uber is 15 minutes away when I want to go, and the local rental car place is always sold out if I didn't reserve a week in advance.
Even if I'm using a service, someone needs to make the cars the service uses - the car manufactures are not going anywhere, they just get a different customer.
People said this about Uber 15 years ago, and well, that didn’t happen.
15 years ago we were supposed to have self driving cars in three years
Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here.
What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?
Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.
>> Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.
If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.
I think you're in the minority. I can't find the reference, but I believe more customers are willing to pay $100/month for Tesla FSD than are willing to pay $10K once.
That's not surprising, the nominal break-even time (e.g. not accounting for the time value of money) is over eight years if you blow 10K on FSD as a one-time purchase. And when Tesla isn't feeling desperate to convince people to upgrade, the 10K license you bought stays with the car. The average new car owner would spend less with the monthly option.
And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run.
I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.
Tesla fsd is far from complete enough to be a data point; people who pay the 10k are gambling that when fsd is improved the cost will be much higher.
And today only fools pay the 10K one time cost. Tesla even priced the monthly amount to encourage you to go monthly. There's lots of reasons, including that they're not going to be able to upgrade people who got cars with the previous hardware, so endless lawsuits trying to get a promised but never provided upgrade from 3 to 4.
While that is true, that’s only a small percentage of drivers. Most Tesla drivers do not pay for FSD at all. About 12% of Tesla owners pay for FSD in one form or another [0].
So even though paying monthly is more amenable, the vast majority don’t want to pay anything.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-full-self-driving-sale...
The $10k price exists to make the $100/mo seem like a good deal.
> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck.
That's one alternative.
Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
"Continuous development" isn't always a selling point when it's something with your life in its hands. A great example is Tesla. There are plenty of people who are thrilled with the continuous updates and changes to everything, and there are plenty of people that mock Tesla for it. Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
> Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.
More likely, one group is a large market that companies will cater to and the other group is a small market that will be very loud about their displeasure on the internet.
It's not as if every subscription works out for the company. Remember the heated seats subscriptions?
Like with Bethesda and paid-for game mods, the issue wasn't the functionality or the feature, but when it was introduced. Next time they do it, probably it'll blow over fast enough for them to just continue, rather than go back.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
Doubt that is a politically tenable model.
"You're telling me my son Bobby died in a crash that could have been prevented with finished software but they only roll it out to people who have the money for a new car despite no technical limitation?" -- yeah, good luck
Think about how many hoopties are already on the road with broken lights, bad alignment, bald tires, no ABS/ESP/TC, dangerous suspension geometry like semi trailing arms, no oil changes, etc. Why don’t we start handwringing about poor vehicle maintenance?
If it is a self-driving software update that the manufacturer could push but chooses not to (or could trivially port), I think it becomes much more difficult liability-wise and legally for them. I'm not saying that is the correct way, but I think it is how it would work in practice.
We do in some places. Where I live (Iowa) we don't - but most people take better care of their car than that so it is pointless. As a kid I remember parts of MN requiring inspection and a few years latter dropping it when they realized nearly every car was passing so there was no point (this was emissions only not safety). In Texas there are regular inspections - but if you go to border towns you see a lot of those poorly maintained cars on the road (despite the inspection) and so people see more need for them and they keep them.
See this is why people in iowa don't deserve a senator
I mean that's basically how every car with half-assed barely-functional auto lane keeping sold in the last 7 years has worked.
i think self-driving changes the calculus
Relying on crappy lane keeping and crappy self driving are equally dangerous. If poor software drives you off the road, why does it matter what the feature was named?
I don't disagree on the practical level, but I think that optically it is significantly different.
Anything before L4 is "driver assist", which means at the end of the day, the buck stops at the driver. Anything beyond L4, the car itself drives without requiring supervision, which makes a big difference. It's your responsibility to use lane assist in a reasonable way, it's not your responsibility to control how an L4 drives anymore. That's the point of self-driving, the "self" is responsible.
I'm getting up there in age and I'm getting a bit tired of designers moving things around.
It's taking longer to update my muscle memory each time.
I still get pissed off at the Play Store app regularly for moving the search bar AND not focusing keyboard input on it when I click the search icon.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
We can always choose. The subscriptions aren't mandatory? And there's an alternative to the subscription where they offer it to you for a one time cost.
If the choice is offered. But with the way the markets are today, I wouldn't be surprised if we both paid at time of purchase, and then had to pay a subscription fee still.
After all, heated seats are still installed and baked in to the MSRP, even if you're not subscribing to make them work.
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update.
The Mercedes-Benz model.
The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.
That's definitely the attitude I hear from the Tesla-can-do-no-wrong crowd, but in reality most of the people I meet in the Tesla-mocking crowd are under 40- younger on average than the other group.
The non-Tesla manufacturers have noticed this and positioned products accordingly. Tesla does Musk-driven-development so only caters to the one group.
Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle.
Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers.
What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming.
Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted.
You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
Have you ever looked at how humans drive? Not the drunks, but the average person - they are terrible. You are not better. Self driving doesn't have to be very good to be better than humans.
The _average_ person drives just fine. It's specifically the idiots who either should never have been allowed to pass a driver's test in the first place (i.e. lack the motor skills and/ or mental capacity) and the idiots who are so addicted to their phones they can't go 2 minutes without looking at it. I have a very hard time believing those are the majority or even average based on all my time driving.
Which, these issues can be reduced if we stop giving people small slaps on the wrist for driving in ways that greatly endanger others. Hefty fines, temporary/ permanent driving bans, etc. Make people actually pause to consider their actions for once in their lives.
Wow, an improvement we can start doing _today_, that doesn't involve forking over billions of dollars to tech companies to pump out half-baked "self-driving" capabilities. These companies' mission isn't to save lives, in case that's not obvious, it's to _make money_. They are not and have never been interested in potentially simpler/ better solutions if they don't lead to sucking the consumer dry of their money.
I know a lot of people who work on medical device software and think Teslas approach to updates is insane. A safety critical system simply should not have routine updates that affect UX or major performance characteristics.
Tesla owners aren't that young.
This site claims the average age of Tesla owners is 48 (updated for 2025):
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demograph...
Which should not be that surprising. Teslas were priced as premium vehicles initially, and then dropped as competitors appeared and to take advantage of tax credits. Teslas also benefit dramatically from owning a garage and adding a charger to it, which mostly homeowners can do.
A homeowner buying an expensive car is very likely older and richer.
Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
>>Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
Exactly.
That's my impression too. You'd need to be 80 years old to be excited by a toyota.
Says someone who seems to have absolutely no idea about 'car culture' and no realisation about just how un-cool Tesla's have become.
I associate them with their wanker of a CEO, Uber drivers, and parents complaining about being stung on EV depreciation.
My friends who already owned Teslas are doubling down on it (upgrading).
Others are buying cars from actual fascist regimes (BYD).
If that doesn’t raise alarm bells to you, you might be suffering from EDS.
Oh please ... I guess we're going to ignore Gigafactory Shanghai and the parts Tesla sources from China.
Enjoy your fascist Uber, son.
Everyone sources parts from China. Tesla does least of it.
p.s. if you buy cars by “coolness” and not by specs and features - you are part of the problem.
I'm 31 and I'm very excited by the '86 Chevy truck I just got. You know why? It's _not_ "smart". The smartest thing on it is the old-school AM/FM radio. There's no software updates, there's nothing (built-in) tracking my every move. It's just a simple, repairable truck, for, you know, _driving_.
People have this strange obsession with over-complicating everything they possibly can.
Car and house are usually most expensive persons purchases. It is absurd to not make them smart.
Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The more (ideally expensive) components, the more they get to mark up as the middleman, the more they get to gouge the customer. 2) The more challenging it is to repair the car, the more likely you _must_ come back to the manufacturer (i.e. dealer) and pay them exorbitant fees to fix problems only they know how and have the parts to fix.
I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
I am also very suspect of the origins of some of these regulations as well. Modern airbags are wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it's not unreasonable to question, in the US at least, whether auto manufacturers and their lobbyists have been causing new rules to be invented that coincidentally both require fancy, expensive technology AND increase the difficulty/ cost of meeting the standards as a mean to prevent new competitors from starting up in auto manufacturing. Rear-view cameras, eye tracking, and drunk-driving detection all come to mind.
Emissions regulations should come to mind first. Eye tracking is a lot cheaper than getting an ICE to pass modern emissions (a multi-billion dollar project).
Of course any of the above if they work are a good thing. We are debating cost/benefit here though.
I've been keeping an eye on Slate lately. They _supposedly_ will be selling their trucks for sub $30k late 2026. Presumably they will meet every modern safety standard.
3) The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence, forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.
4) The "smarter" the vehicle, the more they get to track you and sell your data. You'd think "oh in that case I'm sure it'll be like google where I'd pay a reduced price that's offset by the ad money". No, they will obviously happily rip you off on the vehicle itself AND by selling your data. edit: Because guess what? It's working! People are more than happy to fall for this stuff apparently. I mean hell, it's worked for the phone market too, as one other example.
I'd be ecstatic to see the entire industry wiped out by a newcomer on the scene.
> The "smarter"/ more unnecessarily complex the vehicle, the easier it becomes to enact planned obsolescence forcing you to forever buy a new vehicle every 5-7 years, if not more frequent.
This makes it harder not easier!. Cars can only see for $50-100k because they last for many years. When the person who wouldn't caught dead in a car more than 3 years old trades in for a new one it gets sold. If the car only lasted 5-7 years that used car buyer would factor that in and be unwilling to pay nearly as much - they would have no choice because banks won't give you a 6 year loan on a car that only has 2-4 years left.
Planned obsolesce exists, but they are thinking of 12-20 year old cars need to go. Any car that makes it to 25 though is a collectors item and they want you to show it off at car shows (preferably not a daily driver though) so people think you can make cars that go that long.
The bank loans are a fair point; insurance likely wouldn't insure them either. The CyberTruck, as a notable example.
I will say it _can_ be difficult to keep up though, you don't necessarily find out a particular model is a lemon until it's too late, so it can take some years for everyone to learn and adjust. I mean a buddy of mine only found out in 2024 that his 2016 Explorer had a common/ known engine flaw (the water pump frequently goes bad and requires an engine rebuild). And so how do you reconcile that against for example some of Ford's other accomplishments? I mean, there's loads of F150s that have lasted forever (or at least used to).
In theory banks/ insurers would have enough data today to be able to map the general trend; so I don't think you're wrong, but at the same time I will counter that we may not yet be fully experiencing the effects of any obsolescence being implemented today.
I guess my larger/ real point is that I just foresee this industry heading the same way as phones, and many computers.
I'm not sure what the threshold is for a house to be smart. But I just had to get some fairly extensive work done and all my light switches and so forth are just traditional toggles. I'm not sure what's absurd about that.
Admittedly light switch automation is nice but not that useful. Wireless switches are probably cheaper than running cables tho.
I’ve recently posted items about my smart home. Point of DIY it doesn’t need to suck, cost a lot or hold you captive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999721
A lot of walls were open after a kitchen fire. Electrician was redoing a lot of knob and tube and other older wiring. I had previously had a limited amount of DIY wireless switching (originally X10 but then a couple of voice-controlled switches) but basically everything was being redone anyway. And I basically just now have some dimmers and a simple programmable thermostat I haven't even programmed.
The parent point was that it's silly not to have a smart house (whatever that means exactly) and I disagree. It may make sense to do selectively rather than get an electrician in unless you have some other reason to do so.
As for threshold probably all the safety stuff: power metering, water leak sensors, smoke alarm monitoring. Then all the energy related stuff - heating, hot water controls - if you are on TOU pays itself in months. Then it's smart entry - probably one thing that you can actually experience and it's the best.
Basically don't have any of that stuff except a keypad door which I don't really use.
Let's be real. A staggering amount of drivers are incapable to switch on Automatic Cruise Control or trigger automatic parking. They know how to start the car, how to switch lights and wipers on/off and that's about it.
Paying subscription for something what they are never going to use is going to be a hard sell.
And to be even more real, a staggering amount of drivers won't be able to afford an autonomous driving subscription even if they wanted to. Or a car new enough or in good enough condition to have functional self driving.
This is the real truth.
For all of the Musky wank chat about the future, with FSD, robots, and popping over to Australia on a Starship ... a vanishingly small amount of people will actually be able to afford it once they "get the pricing right".
We're talking about some impressive technology ... doused in snake oil from the top.
Probably a big chunk of these tried ACC a few times, found that ACC sucks unless you're on perfectly clean empty highway, and said "screw it I'll drive it myself".
I've played with it a little bit. Seems useful in principle. But a lot of roads I tend to be on--even highways--have a fair bit of traffic and speed limits that change on a pretty regular basis. Hasn't been as useful as I expected it to be.
It's mostly fine but it has no idea of proper positioning on road. It always puts the car in other cars' blind zones, near to trucks etc.
I have auto parking and never use it, it came with the advanced parking sensors that I do use heavily. I forget how to use auto cruise because I drive outside of the city so rarely, it takes me awhile to “trust it” again when I do some highway driving.
> Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go
In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers are already treating self driving as table stakes. If I have a choice between a subscription car and one that just works, I’m buying the latter.
> continuous development and operations/support
ICE vehicles require continuous servicing and manufacturer support.
> In America, maybe. Chinese manufacturers
Let's revisit this conversation after China's cutthroat automotive competition is resolved. That era passed a long time ago in the US.
> a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support
Corporations could decide to only advertise shipped features, not beta tests.
I agree with you. Subscription revenue has explicitly been part of Tesla's strategy for years. I'm not sure when this statement first appeared in their SEC findings, but this is from their 2021 10-K:
"As our vehicles are capable of being updated remotely over-the-air, our customers may purchase additional paid options and features through the Tesla app or through the in-vehicle user interface. We expect that this functionality will also allow us to offer certain options and features on a subscription basis in the future."
Agreed, autonomy is a service and not a feature of the car. It has to be. There is inherent cost as you use it and associated liabilities, legal requirements for auditing, technical need for maintenance and dealing with updates in a timely fashion.
You could make the point that owning the car is a lot less important if you don't drive it yourself. If Uber didn't have to pay drivers, they could expand their area of operation to basically everywhere. Drivers need to be paid so having them drive long distance is relatively expensive. That constrains the area of operation. But otherwise, cost per mile is very low. So, orchestrating pickups in the country side becomes possible.
It's going to enable night time travel as well. Nap/sleep while traveling. Wake up at your destination. That's going to revolutionize commutes as well and enable people to live much further away from work. A four hour commute is much less of a problem if you can spend the time working or napping.
That in turn is going to do wonders for real estate prices. Because there are a lot of nice places to live that are currently far away from cities and therefore still relatively affordable. We got a preview of that during the lock downs when people figured out that remote working is a thing.
The other possible future is you rent the car for exactly when you need it and don’t pay a monthly bill— or your monthly bill pays for a certain number of rides/minutes/miles per month. In which case the subscription costs are managed by the provider, who might be the manufacturer and might not.
At least in cities, a fully-functioning, on-demand autonomous fleet would probably be superior to car ownership in just about every way except as a status symbol.
The monopolist providing this service would be de-incentivized from ever equipping for all the demand, and the last 10% of capacity being bid on by the last 20% of demand would make this a constant stress and struggle.
Meanwhile it's an excuse for another century of more car lanes and less mass transit infrastructure.
There used to be a service like this, called Car2Go. Not autonomous, but more like how scooter/bike rentals work. It was fantastic, and in no way profitable.
There are still services like that. Miles, for example, or Bolt I think have cars, too.
Yeah, its called taxi
we already have those
Subscriptions are how things are going to go in general. This is just one example of the larger trend. Companies find it very annoying that they have to keep coming up with ways to provide new value in order to keep getting money from people.
Some car companies are already trying out subscriptions for stuff that requires zero ongoing support, like seat heaters. Outside of cars, so much software is switching to subscriptions, whether or not it makes sense. The software for my security cameras has become completely infested by ads, but you can pay for a subscription to make them go away. I own the cameras outright, but not really, since the software needed to use them is basically rented, either with cash or with my eyeballs. Most paid apps I come across these days want a monthly fee to keep using it, they're not content to just sell me a copy.
> Of course, people won't like this
I love it because I have exactly zero interest in using this and wouldn’t want to pay for it anyways- and I’d rather more of the drivers around me were actually driving as well.
I'd rather the other cars around me are attentive, polite and robotic. It's better than people looking at their phones.
Maybe if the tech gets better, but right now these systems do not handle unusual or unexpected events well and are basically just a glorified cruise control, yet are marketed as autonomy and encourage people to stop paying attention.
I mean Waymo et al.
Having driven in SF very recently, the current state of Waymo is an obstacle to the smooth flow of traffic. They drive like a hesitant confused person that is worried they just passed their destination but isn't quite sure.
However, that is during 100% normal expected conditions on specific stretches of road they're heavily pre-trained on. My concern was more about their ability to adapt to the unexpectedly dangerous and unanticipated situation.
If that’s the way things go, subscription, there aught to be insurance coverage built into that. It’s required anyway and the extent to which a driver relies on SD, and has to pay a sub, then it’s the SD responsible for accidents, not in full but part, and insurance can reflect that as well. But if the two are inextricable as a requirement anyway, there should be baked in standardized procedures for “things have gone wrong, which was a known inevitability, and this is the framework for handling it.”
Or isn’t the alternative a local AI that runs autonomously?
We’d may for updates and new models, but no need for a subscription.
Of course the manufacturer makes more money with a subscription and this is the reason they want it.
And therefore opens up other features to subscription models as well. We've already seen it in some cars, tested in others, etc.
Apple products are good counter examples to your point. The cost of the basic software and OS w/ updates is included in the hardware
Counter counter point. Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500 and they basically rely on people upgrading every year or two. Almost like a ........subscription.
Rather than a car which a person may keep for 20 years at a one time huge purchase. Its not really reasonable to expect a company to support something longer than even lifer employees will be there to work on it.
I do really really hate the idea of automotive subscription services though.
> Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500
Same with Samsung, S25 Ultra ($1100 to $1460) [1], with the fold starting at $2k [2].
[1] S25 Ultra https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s25-ultra/buy/...
[2] Z fold, $2000 to $2500 https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-fold7/buy/ga...
Why would I own my own car in this scenario (vs paying one of the autonomous driving companies to send a car my way when I need one)?
Because if you own your car you leave your golf clubs in there just in case you get invited for a round.
If you are the type who is willing to be seen in a used car you can save a lot of money since the rental car needs to be newer cars just in case someone who wouldn't be seen in a used car wants one - and this adds a lot of cost.
Why would I own a car when I can Waymo one?
Having your stuff in it already, it's always available immediately (for you), not needing to worry as much about getting it dirty at the beach or with a dog, going to remote places where calling a Waymo may be infeasible or would take a really long time. Probably also cheaper if you drive really frequently.
I don't know you or your situation, but many people (including the idealized version of Rivian's target market) like going places that Waymo currently doesn't. There's also tradeoffs with cost, wait time, # of passengers, cargo, etc. Some people may also want to automate "boring" driving while still having the option to do "fun" driving
My cars are more than just transportation. They're mobile storage lockers where I can keep my stuff reasonably secure. They're a place to sit warm and dry while I wait for something else. They're (semi) private changing rooms where I can put on my cycling kit. Regardless of who does the driving I'll never give up owning (or at least leasing) my own private cars.
Because lugging around two child seats when you get out at the other end fucking sucks.
Why do people own cars when they can just Uber?
Because it’s not convenient enough, and too expensive.
Fix those two and personal car ownership will plummet in many places.
Many people don’t want to own a car, pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc.
Car ownership sucks horribly for most people, it’s just currently the best option. That will change.
> pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc.
If you use a car you are paying for those costs. There is no getting around it. If you uber it is indirect, but part of your costs per ride is going to those things. Renting a car gets someone else to do them - but you are paying them to do that somehow. (self driving make trade parking for gas where parking is expensive, so in the densits areas this can make sense, but only because the car is driving empty out to the suburbs in the morning and empty back into the city in the evening - so it increases traffic)
If you own your car you can choose to not keep it clean. The rental will not allow that choice and so you pay for it.
> If you use a car you are paying for those costs
Yes, but I don’t use my car 24/7.
Soon I won’t have to pay for it when I’m not using it.
It won't be much if any difference. Rush hour is when most people are trying to get around. Worse, they are all trying to get to the same place, so if you are thinking two trips downtown - that means there is an unoccupied trip back out to the suburbs every morning (and again in the evening) - perhaps more if we are also parking in the suburbs where parking is cheap (though this is probably offset by the cost of parking downtown)
And why do you think Waymo will fix all of this?
This is better solved by leveraging more traditional forms of transportation. Making biking, walking, and various forms of transit easier, safer, and more effective. Cars, whether self-driving or not, are in direct opposition to this.
I'm sure they could be useful to folks that have the specific use-case for it, but the vast vast majority of trips in a person's day-to-day are better solved by robust multi-modal options and public transit. The benefit there is that less drivers means that traffic is actually better for everyone.
I agree with you broadly in principle, but sadly cities in North America have been built for cars, and so they are by far the best way to get around
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
Agree. But nobody is going to walk or ride in Calgary or Dallas no matter how many lanes you take away.
Too much sprawl, too severe weather. There are hundreds of cities like that sadly.
Never heard of DART I guess
obviously there are still TONS of cars. Just look at the highway infrastructure and traffic.
55 million and change rides a year on dart. It isn’t nobody riding
I don’t particularly think that.
Someone will, I don’t know who. Soon.
Almost all these points apply ride hailing with or without driver-less.
How do Waymo prices compare to Uber where Waymo exists?
I’m with you but there are plenty of places where public transit is superior to driving and people still drive.
If you want to leave the waymo boundaries?
Can you waimo to another city or to camping?
Uber charges like $100 per hour the customers. I feel once we reach autonomy this will be the baseline.
Unrealistic for 99% of the world, billions live where they earn such sum for more than a week. Not all of those have cars, but many do. This is just some little SV + maybe NY bubble thinking. Also EU would show a big fat finger to such predatory pricing.
You assume it will be priced same elsewhere. It's definitely going to be priced by region (Tesla's FSD already is).
yeah but what if comma.ai or something cannibalizes this with open source tech?
if we talking about future, its where self driving AI is actually better than 99.9% of the human and human driving manually would void insurance
Eh they are offering a one time payment for autonomy for $2500 which is equal to 4.1 years of paying $50/mo.
It's not a unreasonable cost for development but also maintenance of the self driving system.
Imagine having a vehicle with +680 hp (or 1000 hp in case of Rivian quad) and then drive it autonomously... sigh where's the fun in that?
There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end (regardless of the horsepower). That's what autonomous driving is for imo.
There is a lot of fun in driving a high-hp car on track or offroad or in some not-much-populated area or in plenty of other scenarios. That's where using autonomous driving mode would feel preposterous to me.
> There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end
And I wish this would be more broadly recognized. Every time there's a story about someone important freaking out about something related to autonomous driving, I'm at least somewhat afraid they'll use it as justification to deny me access to it for those specific use cases.
And honestly, those are the only use cases I really care about or feel comfortable with right now. Of course my car is also too old to support much more than that.
Miserable commutes were already solved with remote work for all who can and want. Fewer drivers makes for a better commute for those remaining
First, no, it wasn't solved. In fact, many tech companies that previously allowed remote work went back on it. Technically yes, I can "solve my commute" by taking a very significant pay cut (more than 50%), in addition to limiting my career prospects overall (or get lucky to get hired by the few competitively-paying top tech companies that still stand by remote work, which would still significantly limit my career just to those few companies). That's a proposal/trade-off that a lot of people would reasonably consider unacceptable.
Second, do you realize that remote work isn't an option for a significant majority of types of jobs? In fact, even if we lived in some magical world where every single software dev suddenly switched to remote work, it would barely make a dent. Janitors, doctors/nurses, school teachers, etc., those jobs just by nature don't allow for remote work.
How much fun is it actually to drive around doing daily errands or commuting?
Personally, I look at the 40,000 people killed each year in traffic crashes in the US, and I think, the sooner we all stop driving (on public roads) the better.
Yeah, let's not train people properly, better give techbros more money
What evidence is there that we can train people to be better drivers? We've got a century of effort and it seems the bulk of road death prevention has come from improved, and more expensive, design.
Other countries.
You make a good argument in favor of not allowing 680hp light vehicles on public roads.
[dead]
Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?
Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian:
> This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So we have Apple Music integration, we have a bunch of Apple integrations that are yet to come, we have a great relationship with the team at Apple. But it was more to say, we just felt and continue to feel very strongly about creating a consistent, fully integrated digital experience where you're not jumping between apps, let's say from a CarPlay app back to the vehicle app. And it's quite jarring when you don't have, let's say vehicle level controls when you're in the CarPlay environment. That view we've had since the early, early days. I think that's going to become even more important and more true in a world of integrated AI.
https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/14/transcript
I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.
Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.
What about several mini ipads, each dedicated to a single function? We could use OLED displays and pre-burn-in their function at the factory as a label, and leave the display off, except for maybe a single LED, to save power. We could also add some sort of haptic feedback on user interaction with each mini ipad...
make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!
You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.
Rivian's infotainment system uses Google Maps which I am not a big fan of. I wish they would support CarPlay in addition to everything else, so that I wouldn't lose my maps.
Ah that was actually my main concern. I don’t think a lack of CarPlay would be a dealbreaker for me if they have inbuilt Google Maps.
I prefer Google Maps. Apple Maps lead me astray too often and though they are better than they used to be they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).
CarPlay would be a complete non-issue for me, its absence would even be a positive. I just use my phone anyway; integrating it with the car is just added hassle and one less thing I have to worry about remaining compatible 5-10 years from now.
> they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).
In my experience, Apple Maps gives the names from the signs. It could be that the signs in your area are using those obscure state route names?
All of the mentioned issues are mostly solved with Apple CarPlay Ultra though so this doesn't explain to me why they don't offer that.
I see CarPlay (and CarPlay Ultra) as being for auto makers who don't want to put in all the effort to design and drive a good proprietary UI (CarPlay is a godsend in cars with crappy UI, i.e. most of them).
Rivian is a luxury vehicle brand with a first-class UI/UX. I imagine going with their own first-class UI and CarPlay Ultra would be a mess; two separate interfaces for the same controls, but laid out differently. Makes a lot more sense they'd be working with Apple to integrate more Apple features into their own UI, rather than having to maintain two separate first-class UIs that are bound to have discrepancies.
And there's the more obvious answer that they want the entire driving experience to feel like a Rivian experience, given how important that's been for luxury EVs on the software side. Supporting a canned OS would make the vehicle "feel" the same as every other car that also supports it.
Because the real reason is they don't want you using somebody else's software.
You'll need to spend an additional $1500 over 10 years for Rivian Connect+ to use music streaming services on their infotainment system. No additional cellular costs for using CarPlay or Android Auto.
Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in.
They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use.
And I write this as someone with a Model Y who does not miss Carplay (although it would be nice to have).
It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.
We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.
And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.
Could they? I've been told Apple certifies every car before they allow carplay and this costs a lot. I can't verify (the people who tell me this are under NDA and so won't speak on the record)
You ain't covered by the NDA so why not name the manufacturer if you ain't trying to talk shit?
Because they shouldn't have talked to me off the record and it could get back that they did.
Car companies are notorious for having awful software, awful update systems, and awful software teams. So much so that people have come to think that if a car doesn't have CarPlay, that it probably sucks to interface with (which is a safe assumption). Even Tesla is working on adding CarPlay, despite having good software. A lot of people refuse to even consider the idea of a car without CarPlay, and the car companies are to blame
I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.
I’ll start off by saying that the model Y is one of the best mid-level cars I’ve driven so the issues I mention below are worth the tradeoffs to me.
In my experience, Tesla navigation can be pretty bad when navigating my large urban city. During peak traffic times it often tries to send me down roads that are notoriously known for traffic backing up. Most times when I end up following those suggested routes, my ETA essentially becomes meaningless.
I’ve found Google, Waze, and Apple maps to be a lot better in this respect.
I do miss having CarPlay. That’s not to say I think the music integration you mentioned is bad, but I find the overall UI in my model Y to be a bit confusing - and the lower icons seem to sometimes randomly change from what I have them set as.
Same. I love the tesla model y, but it's not perfect. The screen UI is pretty good for the most part, enough that I don't think about carplay too often.
But I do tend to stream audio from my phone more than from the tesla UI, and so I do miss carplay when I think about it.
> Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD)
I got a loaner with fsd and tried it out.
There was this one trip I took to a store and for some reason, the nav route detoured off the road to the next street over, then joined back with the route.
I think this is a thing nav systems do and people just ignore it and go the right way.
except the tesla tried to drive the dumb route.
lol
In 6 years I don’t want your laggy legacy system with unsupported apps. I want my new phone to power the experience. Most of my experience in a car is digital, the physical needs to do its best to get out of the way. I hope Rivian fails for missing this obvious point.
> Most of my experience in a car is digital
What do you mean? My experience in a budget car from the early 2010s is entirely the opposite, so I don't understand fully.
I drive a 2013 VW diesel and literally every aspect of vehicle ownership today is inferior except for emissions.
You know 5 years from now Apple and Google will charge the car manufacturers millions to enable CarPlay / Android Auto.
Enshitiffication has one end, they will screw everyone long term.
I don't blame any manufacturer who bows out.
Where I live I am often surrounded by Waymo vehicles... is Lidar 100% safe for people to be around? I ask because I read an article about how Lidar on one of the new Volvos could destroy your phone camera if you pointed it at it? If Lidar can do that to a phone camera, can it hurt your eyes?
Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).
Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.
However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.
The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.
Why wouldn’t your eye lens focus LIDAR photons from the same source onto a small region of your retina in the same way that a phone camera lens focuses same-origin photos to a few pixels?
Sorry if this is a silly question, I honestly don’t have the greatest understanding of EM.
It's incredibly important to understand that eyes and glass have different optical properties at these wavelengths. It's hard to conceptualize because to us clear is clear, but that's only at visible light. The same way that x-rays and infrared and other spectra can show things human eyes can't see, or can't see things visible light can see, it's a 2 dimensional problem. The medium and the wavelength are both at play. So, when you have the eye which is known to absorb such light, and artificial optics which are known to pass it without much obstruction, they're going to behave like opposites. Imagine if the glass/plastic they used in the car blocked the light. Wouldn't really work.
There is a flip side to this though. Quick searches show that the safety of being absorbed and then dissipated by the water in the eye also makes that wavelength perform worse in rain and fog. I think a scarier concept is a laser that can penetrate through water (remember humans are mostly bags of salt water) which could, maybe, potentially, cause bad effects.
Depends on the wavelength of lidar. Near IR lidars (850 nm to 940 nm, like Ouster, Waymo, Hesai) will be focused to your retina whereas 1550 nm lidars (like Luminar, Seyond) will not be focused and have trouble penetrating water, but they are a lot more powerful so they instead heat up your cornea. To quote my other comment [1]:
> If you have many lidars around, the beams from each 905 nm lidar will be focused to a different spot on your retina, and you are no worse off than if there was a single lidar. But if there are many 1550 nm lidars around, their beams will have a cumulative effect at heating up your cornea, potentially exceeding the safety threshold.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127479
Follow up question that you might know: would multiple LIDAR sensor actually be additive like that? If you can stand a foot away from a car's LIDAR sensor and be unharmed, then can't you have:
x^2 sensors at x feet from you and have the same total energy delivered? If sensors are actually safe to look at from 6in or 3in, then multiple the above table by 4 or 16.It seems like, due to the inverse square law, the main issue is how close you can get your eye to a LIDAR sensor under normal operation, not how many sensors are scattered across the environment. The one exception I can think of is a car that puts multiple LIDAR arrays next to each other (within a foot or two). But maybe I'm misunderstanding something!
Do you if there has been any work how lasers affect other animals and insects?
Am I being catastrophically pessimistic to think that in addition to swatting insects as it moves forward, the cars lidar is blinding insects in a several hundred meter path ?
I’m very optimistic about automated cars being better than most humans but wonder about side effects.
If we have automated anti-mosquito vehicles just roaming around, the world would be a better place. There might be some second order effects from removing mosquitoes that we haven't predicted, but fuck mosquitoes.
Unfortunately not all insects are mosquitoes, and one reason we have many fewer birds in (e.g.) the UK than when I was young, is the decline of insect life.
GP is slightly wrong. IIRC those problematic LIDARs are operating at higher power than traditionally allowed, with the justification that the wavelength being used is significantly less efficient at damaging human eyes, therefore it's safe enough at those powers, which is likely true enough. But it turned out that camera lenses are generally more transparent than our eyes and therefore the justification don't apply to them.
Amusingly the lenses are worse than silicon at transmitting that wavelength.
1550nm might be worse for sensors because a good portion of the light is only being dumped into the metal layers - pure silicon is mostly transparent to 1550nm. Not sure how doped silicon would work. I can tell you that 1070nm barely works on an IQ3 Achromatic back…
https://www.pmoptics.com/silicon.html
Your eyes a much larger sensor area than the opening, they do the opposite of concentrating light in a small area.
A point source in the visual field will create a point image on the retina. The "sensor area" you're referring is what's necessary to capture the entire visual field simultaneously.
I disagree that it’s a point source at distances of peak concern.
Also, it’s something of a nitpick but physically point sources still end up as a circle.
That's fair, strictly speaking, but I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference to be made.
Wasn't sure what level of knowledge you were coming from re: PSFs, so I was keeping it basic.
I looked this up for a laser-based projector, Class 2 is "blink reflex should protect you" and "don't be a doofus and stare into it for a long time". Look up the classifications on the google and you'll see other things like "don't look into the rays with a set of binoculars" and stuff.
Class 1 is pretty darned safe, but if you're continually bathed by 50 passing cars an hour while walking on a sidewalk... pitch it to a PhD student you know as something they should find or run a study on.
I have a Class 1 Makita (green) laser level, wide strong beam, excellent tool for landscaping. I accidentally looked into it from a 10 cm distance. It did not leave permanent damage, but for a few days I had the dot burned on my retina. And yes, I almost immediately closed my eye - within a few hundred ms's.
Don't look into the laser with the remaining eye
What about if you're walking or biking next to congested motorway and most of the vehicles have LiDAR running at the same time? That's a lot of photons.
This is inconsistent with the basic concept. It’s projecting and reading lasers . By default some emissions will hit people in the eye. Even invisible light can damage tissue , especially in the eye
Depends on the type of LIDAR. LIDAR rated for vehicle use is at a wavelength opaque to the eyes so it hits the surface and fluid of your eye and reflects back rather than going through to your cones and rods.
It isn't however opaque for optical glass (since the LIDAR has to shine through optical glass in the first place) so it hits your camera lens, goes straight through, and slams the sensor.
You seem to be implying that all automotive lidar are 1550 nm but that's not true. While there are lots of 1550 nm automotive lidars (Luminar on Volvo, Seyond on NIO) there are also plenty of 850 nm to 940 nm lidars are used in cars (Hesai, Robosense, etc). Those can pass through water and get focused to your retina, but they are also a lot lower power so they do not damage cameras.
Also although that energy longer than 1400nm is generally absorbed by the cornea and lens, it is still energy, and it is not a hard bandpass filter per se. Safety is relative at higher wattages.
NGL I thought sub 1550nm LIDAR had been banned for use in new automotive applications already? I clearly must be mistaken but I had thought that was the case.
Not banned. In addition to the Chinese lidars I mentioned, the Valeo Scala on Audi cars is 905 nm, and then there are also Ouster (865 nm), Innoviz (905 nm), Livox (905 nm) etc. The large spinning lidar on top of the Waymo Jaguar I-Pace is also purportedly 905 nm, although in the past they also had a swivelling 1550 nm lidar in the dome of the Chrysler Pacifica cars (situated just underneath a smaller spinning 905 nm one).
The eye safety threshold for 850/905 nm is a lot lower than 1550 nm, so they output way less power, but the much better sensitivity of silicon sensors makes up for it partially. You can also squeeze out more range using clever signal processing and a large optical aperture (which allows you to output more light, but since the light is spread out across the aperture, the intensity doesn't exceed the threshold). Typically, the range of 850/905 nm lidars is less than that of 1550 nm lidars though.
On the bright side, due to lower power, there hasn't been any instances (to my knowledge) of 850 nm and 905 nm lidars damaging cameras, whereas at least two different 1550 nm lidars have been known to destroy cameras (Luminar and AEye).
On the Luminar lidar website [1] they proudly advertise "1,000,000x pulse energy of 905nm".
[1] https://www.luminartech.com/technology
During the presentation, Rivian speaker specifically said it is safe for your camera sensors. Check the youtube video of their presentation
Ah. Theirs may be then. In which case they are probably using a different wavelength and a different glass.
I was just speaking in terms of the commonplace LIDAR solutions for road use.
There are two kinds of safe. Safe when it's working as intended, and safe when it breaks.
But yes there are lidar sensors out there where if broken in the right way could burn out your retinas permanently.
I watched the livestream and they said their hardware is "Camera Safe". I am not sure if camera safe and eye safe are correlated, but I would hope/expect that they would not release something that isn't known to be eye safe. I guess it's possible that the long term effects could prove bad, and we will all end up getting "Lidar Eye" dead spots in our vision.
Digital camera sensors are much more sensitive than eyeballs, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that it won't leave a permanent line across your eyeball like it can to a camera sensor
Lidar Eye? No, how the heck would that happen? I mean, there is a dangerous source of light outside (we call it the "sun"), and yet we manage fine.
Your body has signs to knock it off when you're staring at the sun, does it do the same thing for Lidar?
I mean, technically the Sun is "above" us and the LIDARs are at...eye level? So not exactly the same, at least to my layman eyes
When it becomes a widespread issue they'll just release Meta Glasses 5/Apple Vision 3 with the appropriate eye protection, and vision will be very affordable.
The existing regulations here might be insufficient. There is definitely risk if the devices are not carefully designed to be safe.
To date I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use. Most consumer facing lasers are either class 1 but hidden (CD-ROM), or class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader).
There was another discussion a week back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126780
The lack of accessible certification/testing docs for the lidars is also worrying. Where is the proof that it was even tested? Was it tested just via simulation, via a dummy eye stand-in, or with a real biological substitute?
What if there are biological concerns other than simply peak power involved with shining NIR into the eye? (For instance, it seems deep red light has some (beneficial) biological effects on mitochondria. How do we know that a pulsed NIR laser won't have similar but negative effects, even if it doesn't burn a hole in your retina.)
> class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader)
TIL barcode readers can cause serious eye damage when misused. You'd think they'd have warning labels on these things given how common self-checkout is nowadays and how curious/stupid children can be
They're not always class 2, some are class 1. I'd maybe suspect the self-checkout ones are class 1 since the object is pressed right against it, while handheld barcode scanners are class 2.
If it's like everything else, it's "move fast, break things". I'm sure if it turns out to be harmful, we'll find out decades before regulation catches up
>I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use
Iphone face unlock users lidar to scan your face when you look at it.
In terms of plain wattage, it cannot be dangerous. Unless, of course, you were to stand with your eye up against the sensor and maybe stare at it for a few minutes.
Lidars use pulsed lasers with peak powers up to the kW range.
Yes but failure cases are still possible. A stuck mirror or frozen phased array can result in a continuous beam.
Engineers should design in a way where the worst case possible is the assumption not the exception
it seems like car-makers themselves feel burdened to make their own self-driving tech, as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party.
Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…it seems like having a handful of companies focused on getting the self-driving part right without the need to also specialize in manufacturing would be beneficial.
My first inclination was to be bullish on Rivian, and there’s no question that their vehicles are beautiful. But is there anything to suggest they have an advantage over Tesla or other automakers when it comes to self-driving?
Most traditional OEMs in the automotive industry are integrators. They write a specification, and a Tier 1 supplier provides a black box matching that spec. (Tier 1 in turn provides a spec to its suppliers and integrates their parts)
This has several consequences - Tier 1 suppliers are waiting on input/approval from OEM before proceeding with projects - Tier 1 suppliers don't necessarily have the capital to do work "at risk", even if they could build the part without approval/specifications. (TBH - some do) - Each layer of the supply chain lacks context on the whole project and product line and cannot achieve efficiencies outside of the scope of its contract.
These haven't really been a problem for mechanical parts and E/E parts that have well-defined functions and interfaces and have a lot of re-use from previous generations. It works really well with Kaizen (incremental innovation).
To outsource it, a traditional OEM would need to completely specify the behaviour of said self-driving system, baseline the specification, put out the requests for quotation, etc. Tier 1 then needs to analyse the spec, estimate it, break it down in to sub work packages, work with its suppliers, etc. From an optimisation point of view, this is really inefficient partitioning of the problem space. For greenfields development, an emergent specification via experimentation may be better - but that won't fit in traditional V-model sub-contract OEMs/Tier 1s use.
That flow doesn't need to be followed; the suppliers could raise/allocate capital and build the self-driving stack "at risk" - and this seems to be done (Tier IV, Waymo, etc). But as it's new technology, I assume Rivian think they can do better by themselves and can get the capital for the development as part of an integrated solution while they are smaller it might seem they should not waste limited capitial that way - but integration will save a lot of inefficiency in sharing specifications across boundaries, full system integration and deriving emergent specification via experimentation rather than some MBSE folly.
Not only is Rivian betting on an integrated platform being important for their own cars long term, they’ve also essentially sold that portion of their business to VW. They are investing in the software platform for a lot more cars than just the rivian branded ones.
Don't many automakers outsource level 2 driving aids these days? Typically someone like Mobileye?
Level 2 is simpler and more mature, so it should be easier to specify, package and integrate.
It can follow the traditional OEM outsourcing route, where OEM has high-level models and gets suppliers to implement the details. e.g. I can find public information that Subaru use Veoneer cameras, Xilinx chipsets, but defines their own algorithms. I would speculate they have an outsourced company convert algorithms to FPGA netlists/embedded code. (On the other hand, I know other OEMs have a more complex mesh of joint ventures)
Aside from Mercedes-Benz, level 2 is the best we have, though?
Edit: Re-reading your post, you were talking about the future. You make good points; I will be interested to see how it plays out. Probably as long as the technology remains radar and cameras, it will continue to be easily outsourced.
Have you ever heard of comma.ai? What do you think about it?
HP did write their own operating system: HP RTE. It wasn't until decades later, after the platform became commodified and they stopped designing their own chips, that they went with someone else's.
And of course, Microsoft made their own cards back in the day, and they still make the XBox as integrated hardware.
This technology is way too early for commodification. Right now, Rivian is a data play.
Their platform means they have consistency other providers don't have. They have data from the existing trucks on the road, and they'll roll out these sensors long before they roll out self-driving. Cleverly they've also pitched these as "adventure" vehicles, which means they'll have some data from rarer situations, not just highways. Off-road performance, for example, will add anomalies that they can use to stress-test self-driving code. If a car could handle areas without roads, it is less likely to kill people if a mudslide happens. Or a shadow falls across the bridge.
> as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party.
All about margins and data protection
> Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…
They come from an era where this style of thinking didn't really exist and now they're in an era where market share almost entirely prevents new players/ideas from entering. If it was 2025 and OS market share wasn't static and the PC was just taking off, we'd probably see far more attempts at OS development to better monetize the PC products the vendors sell.
It’s probably a sensible concern that if they use someone else’s tech, they’ll be subsidizing that company’s eventual mastery of the self-driving space, who will then be able to control pricing. The only long game, I imagine, is to create your own self-driving tech, so that your own customers are investing in your own long term success, not someone else’s.
One aspect is that Tesla is all cameras, whereas Rivian sees it as important to have multi-sensor suites (cameras, ultrasonic, radar, and in Gen 3: lidar). TBH as a customer I prefer to know that the latter is protecting me instead of just cameras.
It also suggests to me a more-professionalized R&D culture.
Tesla claiming it planned to implement self-driving with just cameras has always meant I don't trust anything they touch.
They could have a better driving assistance package than 99% of other cars on the road for 1/10 the price by using OpenPilot as the LKAS, or installing a Comma in the car.
Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork
Comma had made essentially no efforts to meet the requirements of automotive systems the last time I looked at them. They would be an incredibly risky supplier for systems that could easily come under regulatory scrutiny.
That's not completely true.
https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/docs/SAFETY...
It's an... interesting approach, They essentially reduce the surface area as much as possible. I don't buy that it's enough, but, again, interesting to see what they do.
Besides, a big OEM could pour an army of developers and turn the Comma approach into an ASIL D, it would be quite a lot of work but within the realm of possibility.
Aptera has: https://aptera.us/openpilot-release
I recently ordered a Comma Four, which I will install BluePilot on and use with my Lightning. I'm looking forward to seeing how competent it is. Gets good reviews, at least, so I'm hoping.
I do wonder if there will be many more iterations, though, with so many manufacturers switching over to an encrypted canbus and locking out the control method comma uses.
HP-UX?
I loved to see that they plan on running the Rivian Assistant LLM onboard using their new Gen 3 hardware. Great that they see that as a valuable feature and I hope to see the industry move that way.
These companies are only surviving because of US protectionism. This tech is more expensive than then Chinese equivalent from 2-3 years ago (look at what Xiaomi or BYD released as their 2024 models).
These cars will not sell well outside of the US.
While the software is indeed behind - e.g. Nio already had all of this in 2022/2023, and a much better UI, I'm sure the upcoming Rivian R2 and R3 would sell very well in Europe.
Europe will probably be the largest market where US EVs will try to compete with Chinese cars. BYD is already selling better spec’d models for less than this Rivian, and Xiaomi will enter the market late 2026.
I don’t see how Rivian can compete, either on price or features.
is everyone designing their own silicon getting so much additional them-specific utility out of it that it's actually worth it?
Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla.
But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being able to sell custom chips and “AI” capabilities, whatever that means.
Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples:
* Doors refuse to open
* Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls
* Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows
Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a very hostile emf environment. But if any project I worked on had bugs like this, fixed at the rate they're fixed on Rivian, I would assume a badly flawed architecture or non existent technical leadership
Yet VW paid billions for this very software. I can't imagine how bad it must've been on their own stack that they gave up and bought this other seemingly broken stack
This sounds nothing like my experience, you should get that vehicle serviced.
Service can’t do anything about the state machine being wrong.
The Rivian app does not permit you to send a command to the car while the app thinks the car is processing a command. Trunk opening? You can’t unlock the door. On top of this, if you try to open the trunk while outside Bluetooth range and then Bluetooth connects, you are still stuck waiting for the pending command to complete.
Oh, and the ridiculous “hey let’s always remind you that you own a Rivian” Live Activity seems to synchronize on a schedule that involves being hours and hours out of date.
The Rivian app sucks.
I agree that the app leaves something to be desired - my personal pet peeve is that it shows stale or cached data while waiting to do some async update, leading to just outright fabricated charge or lock state. Never had those kinds of problems with the truck's software proper though
Why can’t they just copy Tesla? Chinese manufacturers do just that and skip the hard steps
Same, I've had mine for a couple of years now with no notable software issues at all.
This comment is pretty funny to me, as a car guy. What’s there to service? It’s a software issue.
Presumably, but you don't really known until you pay to take it in for service and they tell you there is nothing wrong but they don't have a fix (gee, great experience). On the "know it's software" side e.g. I had what appeared to be random issues with audio crackling on my PC I assumed was software/driver related, it turned out there was a faulty USB hub causing an issues for the whole bus but it was just most apparent in the audio device.
Stuff like "Doors refuse to open" is vague enough it could be a similar kind of issue which needs physical service/replacement rather than just a software update, especially if other buttons are triggering completely separate actions with the windows. Or it could very well be 100% software issues, which could be more apparent with additional details like "only does it after transitioning from this screen or pressing things in this order" type problems.
As a car guy you should know that there's tech in cars these days. Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
If something's wrong with your car's head unit firmware or android auto connection or whatever, of course you'd have a technician look at it?
> Or do you calibrate everything from tpms monitors to re pointing/tunes in your garage?
Pretty much, yeah. I race SCCA and build race cars. Exactly why I want nothing to do with these, you don’t own it. You’re leasing the hardware that’s hogtied to the software.
Oh man, you're in for a bad time then, as pretty much everything - yes even amateur racing cars - has software in it now, and you don't own any of it.
As a car guy, it surprises me you weren't aware of this trend yet but I guess we all find out sooner or later. But hey - maybe that '89 Carrera will keep on trucking for a few more decades though - good luck!
I own a Rivian too, and previously owned a Tesla. While I too have my gripes about the UX on the Rivian, it still beats the cr*p out of a Tesla.
Just curious in what ways, since you've actually owned both. I've only had Teslas, but I like the looks of Rivians.
stuff like that happens with tesla.
one funny one is that periodically you can trigger the "more cowbell" rainbow road easter egg. You can cancel the road animation, but you can't cancel the easter egg music or control the volume.
I was just in a discussion on this very topic. It's the build vs buy equation applied to silicon. Early in the tech boom the entire silicon stack was proprietary and required a lot of time and investment to train up people who could design the circuitry, we got our first "ASICS" which was basically a bunch of circuitry on a die and you then added your own metal layer so it was like having a bunch of components glued to a board and you could "customize" it by putting wires between the parts. Then we had fabs that needed more wafer starts so they started doing other peoples designs which required they standardize their cells and provide integration services (you brought a design and they mapped it to their standard cells and process). And as the density kept going up they kept having loots of free space they needed to fill up. The 'fabless' chip companies continued to invest in making new parts until the pipeline was pretty smooth. And at that point the level of training you needed a the origin to get it into silicon dropped to nearly zero, you just needed the designs. And into that space people who were neither 'chip' companies, nor were they 'fabless' OEMs, realized they could get their integration needs met by asking a company to make them a chip that did exactly what they wanted.
One the business side, the economics are fabulous, your competitors can't "clone" your product if they don't have your special sauce components. So in many ways it becomes a strategic advantage to maintaining your market position.
But all of that because the all up cost to go from specification to parts meeting the specification dropped into the range where you could build special parts and still price at the market for your finished product.
A really interesting illustration is to look at disk drive controller boards from the Shugart Associates ST-506 (5MB) drive, to Seagate's current offerings. It is illustrative because disk drives are a product that has been ruthlessly economized because of low margins. The ST-506 is all TTL logic and standard analog parts, and yet current products have semiconductor parts that are made exactly to Seagate's design specs and aren't sold to anyone else.
So to answer your question; apparently the economics work out. The costs associated with designing, testing, and packaging your own silicon appears to be cost effective even on products with exceptionally tight margins, it is likely a clear winner on a product that enjoys the margins that electric vehicles offer.
very interesting. thanks for sharing!
I would wager that's because there isn't a lot of existing silicon that fits the bill. What COTS equipment is there that has all the CPU/Tensor horsepower these systems need... AND is reasonably power efficient AND is rated for a vehicle (wild temp extremes like -20F to 150F+, constant vibration, slams and impacts... and will keep working for 15 years).
Yea, Tesla has some. But they aren't sharing their secret sauce. You can't just throw a desktop computer in a car and expect it to survive for the duration. Ford et all aren't anywhere close to having "premium silicon".
So you're only option right now is to build your own. And hope maybe that you can sell/license your designs to others later and make bucks.
NVIDIA orin series is the big one for tensor horsepower. Horizon robotics and Qualcomm also have competitive automotive packages.
They are all expensive, but less than the risk adjusted cost of developing a chip.
Having to work with Qualcomm is enough reason to not buy Qualcomm
Isn't that risk balanced by a healthy reward of controlling their verticals and possible secret sauce?
And their chips give "1600 sparse INT8 TOPS" vs the Orin's "more than 1,000 INT8 TOPS" -- so comparable enough? And going forward they can tailor it to exactly what they want?
Orin is Nvidia's last generation. Current gen is Thor at 1k TOPS. Rivian's announcement specifies TOPS at the module level. The actual chip is more like 800 and probably doubled. Throw two Thors on a similar board and you're looking at 2000 sparse int8 TOPS.
I've been involved with similar efforts on both sides before. Making your own hardware is not a clear cut win even if you hit timelines and performance. I wish them luck (not least because I might need a new job someday), but this is an incredibly difficult space.
Mostly it costs hundreds of millions to develop a chip; it relies on volume to recover the cost.
NVIDIA also tailor their chips to customers. It's a more scalable platform than their marketing hints at... Not to mention that they also iterate fairly quickly.
So far anyway, being on a specialised architecture is a disadvantage; it's much easier to use the advances that come from research and competitors. Unless you really think that you are ahead of the completion, and can sell some fairly inflexible solution for a while.
I share your skepticism. This feels like an attempt to tap the trainloads of money piling into "AI", for a company that is in pretty desperate need of more cash to stay alive.
In a vacuum there are potentially some advantages to doing your own silicon, especially if your goal is to sell the platform to other automakers as an OEM.
But custom silicon is pricey as hell (if you're doing anything non-trivial, at least), and the payoffs have a long lead time. For a company that's bleeding cash aggressively, with a short runway, to engage in this seems iffy. This sort of move makes a lot more sense if Rivian was an established maker that's cash-flow positive and is looking to cement their long-term lead with free cash flow. Buuuuut they aren't that.
I have the same question. It makes sense that they might need bespoke software, but how could they possibly be more efficient at creating chips than an AMD/Nvidia?
Well, if AMD and/or Nvidia were to invest on a chip for an auto, maybe you might have a point.
NVIDIA has been selling automotive-specific silicon for a decade.
Both AMD and Nvidia have strong automotive offerings.
Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in replacement FPGAs of lower cost (The Rigol MHO98 replaced the Xilinx FPGA of the previous generation with a substitute from Fudan). If you're shipping a lot of hardware, that sort of thing becomes worthwhile.
Nope, it's replacing Orin.
I hear many Rivian customers really love Comma.ai, so much that they are #1 on Comma dash.
Probably a lot of overlap in the venn diagram of people who would like the two things. Mostly the "Early Adopter" circle.
Also a lot of cars have a lot of limitations with comma.ai. Yes, you can install it on all sorts but there are limitations like: above 32mph, cannot resume from stop, cannot take tight corners, cannot do stop light detection, requires additional car upgrades/features, only known to support model year 2021. Etc.
Rivian supports everything, it has a customer base who LOVE technology, are willing to try new things, and ... have disposable income for a $1k extra gadget.
I’ve seen videos of massive touch screen stuttering, is it still a thing on rivian?
a lot of the gen1 users will likely swap over to it though. They basically have dropped improvements for gen1 autonomy which is rug-pullish :(
It is nice to see a car company investing in a sensor platform that could actually safely self-drive.
It is unfortunate that the existing market participants seem hell-bent on destroying consumer confidence in self-driving before this will make it to market.
We desperately need a safety regimen for self-driving cars that takes it as seriously as airplane safety.
Have you driven in Tesla FSD 14 yet? I've been in both Waymo and the latest version of FSD from Tesla. They are very, very good.
How many hours have you spent with the latest Tesla FSD in congested neighborhoods or unprotected left turns at sunset? It may be "good," but it's not even remotely close to the current Waymo experience, especially when it comes to abnormal situations. I am continually blown away by how Waymo behaves (spent 3 hours in them this past week). I'm rooting for Tesla, but it is nowhere near Waymo as of today.
I think it makes sense to do an ASIC later, but not now. Chip development is expensive and risky. They ought to at least start selling a product with positive gross margin first.
Its possible that they have tried that and the market isn’t giving them what they need at the price they want. I do mostly agree with you though; its the economics of the car thats gonna supercharge adoption.
EDIT: another commenter mentioned that their platform is used by other companies (VW perhaps?). With that information, it might make more sense to do this.
Meanwhile, the only thing people really want from Rivian is CarPlay / Android Auto support, lol.
CarPlay and affordability. I was totally smitten last year with the R1S during a test drive. I'm not a car person but felt that spark people must feel when they obsess over their vehicles.
But it wasn't pushing-six-figures smitten, which is where you're at when you get a new one with customizations.
>afforadbility
This 1000%.
Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
Instead, we are getting these boutique, expensive vehicles packed full of tech, but in the end, they still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives, especially hybrid. I got a Prius Prime for my wife last year, the car is way better than any EV on the market in terms of usability. Driving to work and back can all be done in EV mode easily, and then when you wanna go somewhere, you can keep the car above 80 mph easily and get there faster without worrying about where to charge.
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple.
The only part an EV doesn't have is the engine and gearbox. Admittedly, these are pretty major components, but it's a technology mature enough to be extremely reliable if the manufacturer cares to make it so.
But what an EV has instead is a massive battery, charging electronics, a DC-DC converter keeping the 12V battery charged, and various electric motors and actuators for the air conditioning and coolant loops. These are significant more reliable than oily engines in lab environments, but the automotive environment tests the mettle of seemingly resilient components.
> Electric cars are supposed to be simple. Give me something in a shape of a Civic, with the engine replaced with a motor and a battery good for 150 miles, and sell it for $10-12k new. Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
I think this is more or less the pitch behind Slate (https://www.slate.auto/en), though it's more of a truck/SUV form factor.
Also the Dacia Spring is exactly that.
Slate is nowhere near cheap. Base 27k with hand crank windows? No thanks.
> still fundamentally suck as cars compared to gas alternatives
i can assure you my expensive EV does not suck as a car compared to gas alternatives, its better in almost every way. insane performance compared to any gas car, superb handling, way better driving UX tech, silent, clean. & 400mil range is just fine for me thanks. Yes it cost a lot.
Sounds like you want a Nissan Leaf? They exist.
Nissan Leaf is the same price as a Camry. Its not cheap.
This sounds a lot like some of the BYD offerings which, regrettably, aren't available in USA.
Unfortunately federal standards now require the backup camera, so the entertainment cluster comes along basically for free from that.
The cost of the entertainment cluster comes from the integration work. If it was just a backup camera and a carplay/aa head unit and absolutely nothing else then maybe it could be OEMed from the same companies who sell aftermarket systems for $100 or so.
This.
> Don't even need an entertainment cluster, give me a place to put a tablet or a phone and just have a bluetooth speaker.
Illegal - backup camera is required. Speakers probably too for alerts. Also you are super naive if you think that's where actual cost is.
Most of the cost is in development and prototyping that the company has to make up for, followed by battery as those have a set $/kwh price.
This is why the rest of the car has to be an already proven platform that is cheap to make.
Yep. I certainly wanted an R1S, but ended up in an EV9 due to CarPlay plus huge lease incentives. No regrets, and will probably get another after this lease is up.
I get where carmakers are coming from though.
Cars used to compete on distinctions between driving experience/fuel economy/reliability/etc. In comparison, differences between electric cars is mostly superfluous. They're very interchangeable.
For the next generation of car buyers, infotainment and features are going to be the main features. And if you are handing all of that away to the tech companies, your entire company is going to just become another captive hardware partner of the tech giants.
I don't know. I would argue that driving experience and reliability are still very much going to be things in the electric car market. I'm an EV9 owner and we have issues w/ the suspension making it feel sloppy over some bumps. There's going to be a ton of nuance in terms of how all of these different electric vehicles drive, ride, and are experienced. And those are all going to come down to the vehicle manufacturers themselves, not just the technology partner for screens.
If they actually planned to compete on it they could just offer Carplay support as an option, no?
... So the answer is to make a series of worse products?
I dunno - some of the manufacturers have legitimately good UIs now.
It's maddening that $100k purchases get totally nerfed by bad software. Absolutely crazy to me that I can go out find a super nice car I want and have to walk away because of bad software or no carplay support.
I hear this a lot and it's surprising to me. We have three cars in our family (two with carplay and the Rivian) and carplay always feels like such a downgraded experience compared to that of the Rivian.
I have a plex server and use Prologue for audio books. What would my experience on Rivian be like? I am guessing I would have to connect to the infotainment system as a bluetooth speaker? Would I be able to easily skip forward/backward and see the current chapter?
I've been using car play for the better part of the past decade and don't know what it looks like in vehicles without it.
I think the revenue source times number of people using Plex for audiobooks as a total market value for Rivian is approximately zero.
It’s not just plex, it’s the long tail of iPhone apps that work with CarPlay but don’t with rivian.
It’s the reason I always seek out CarPlay and why Tesla has reportedly decided it’s worth adding CarPlay to capture people like me.
What if you listen to audio books with a 3rd party app that you really like, but it's not on rivian?
I would expect you can still skip forward and back, and read titles. So as long as you start before you drive you might be gucci?
I don't know about Rivian, but last time I used bluetooth in a car you could see current title, play/pause and skip forward and back.
But that is all, no playlists control.
And real door handles. And real buttons. And better customer service.
Who was this announcement for? I’m at a point where I think Rivian’s real customers are investors.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'll take a car infotainment system that doesn't need CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable (and lacks it) over one that requires a phone attached via CarPlay/AndroidAuto to be usable.
I use Android Auto on rental cars all the time.
My daily driver is a Tesla (Model S /w MCU v2) that doesn't have it. And doesn't need it to provide a usable experience.
If the software has the same library as your phone, then I could why you see it as on par.
Android Automotive has a much smaller library than Android Auto, so the selection for audio apps, such as podcasts and music, are much more limited. The options for map software is smaller too. Also Android Automotive doesn't necessarily use your phone's existing internet connection. Depending on the maker, you have to subscribe to a separate data plan.
I've only rented Teslas but I can see how most people would consider CP/AA to be unnecessary given the quality of their integrated software. But for me, the two things Tesla can't do (and CP/AA can) is
1. Waze;
2. My preferred third-party podcasting app.
I want the smaller size and cost of the R2
What, no. I'd buy a Rivian R2 right now to replace my Model Y if it 1) existed and 2) matched FSD features.
I'm in the same boat. My Model Y has to last until the R2 with lidar comes out. Hopefully it'll have some value left in it.
Not investors, though
This is really poor execution. You're taking a complex, low margin vehicle and introducing even more cost and supply chain complexity. On top of that, you're essentially making a proxy bet that more expensive hardware (LIDAR) will beat Tesla's software bet.
It's absolutely fair to criticize Elon for his ridiculous FSD timeline claims, but here we are now evaluating the market: if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet.
> if you have experienced the latest FSD, Waymo's and now Rivian's bet is just so obviously the exact wrong bet
I have. It’s wild for anyone to say this.
Waymo works. FSD mostly works, and I seriously considered getting a Tesla after borrowing one last week. But it needs to be supervised—this is apparent both in its attention requirement and the one time last week it tried to bolt into a red-lit intersection.
The state of the art is Waymo. The jury is still out on whether cameras only can replicate its success. If it can’t, that safety margin could mean game over for FSD on the insurance or regulatory levels. In that case, Rivian could be No. 2 to Waymo (which will be No. 1 if cameras only doesn’t pan out, given they have infinite money from Google). That’s a good bet.
And if cameras only works, you’ll still have the ultra premium segment Tesla seems to have abandoned and which may be wary of licensing from Waymo.
Waymo operates on guardrails, with a lot more human-in-the-loop (remotely) help than most people seem aware of.
Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture.
They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.
> Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years
Iff cameras only works. With threshold for "works" beig set by Waymo, since a Robotaxi that's would have been acceptable per se may not be if it's statistically less safe compared to an existing solution.
Waymo also sets the timeline. If cameras only would work, but Waymo scales before it does, Tesla may be forced by regulators to integrate radars and lidars. This nukes their cost advantage, at least in part, though Tesla maintains its manufacturing lead and vertical integration.)
Tesla has a good hand. But Rivian's play makes sense. If cameras only fails, they win on licensing and a temporary monopoly. If cameras only work, they are a less-threatening partner for other car companies than Waymo.
In the increasingly rare instances where Tesla's solution is making mistakes, it's pretty much never to do with a failure of spatial awareness (sensing) but rather a failure of path planning (decision-making).
The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth, and if it turns out sensing depth using cameras is a solved problem, adding LIDAR doesn't help. It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines. It can't tell if a traffic light is red or green. And it certainly doesn't improve predictions of human drivers.
Which begs me the question why Tesla took so long to get here? It's only since v12 it starting to look bearable for supervised use.
The only answer I see is their goal to create global model that works in every part of the world vs single city which is vastly more difficult. After all most drivers really only know how to drive well in their own town and make a lot of mistakes when driving somewhere else.
It was only about 2 years ago that they switched from hard coded logic to machine learning (video in, car control out), and this was the beginning of their final path they are committed to now. (building out manufacturing for Cybercab while still finalizing the FSD software is a pretty insane risk that no other company would take)
That’s the switch for controls, the machine vision was nn from the start.
Path planning (decision-making) is by far the most complicated part of self-driving. Waymo vehicles were making plenty of comically stupid mistakes early on, because having sufficient spatial accuracy was never the truly hard part.
Sensing depth is pretty important though. Especially in scenarios where vision fails, radar for example works perfectly fine in the thickest of fog.
In "scenarios where vision fails" the car should not be driving. Period. End of story. It doesn't matter how good radar is in fog, because radar alone is not enough.
Too bad conditions can change instantly. You can't stop the car at an alpine tunnel exit just because there's heavy fog on the other side of the mountain.
If the fog is thick enough that you literally can't see the road, you absolutely can and should stop. Most of the time there's still some visibility through fog, and so your speed should be appropriate to the conditions. As the saying goes, "don't drive faster than your headlights."
> The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth
This is absolutely false. LiDAR is used heavily in object detection. There’s plenty of literature on this. Here’s a few from Waymo:
https://waymo.com/research/streaming-object-detection-for-3-...
https://waymo.com/research/lef-late-to-early-temporal-fusion...
https://waymo.com/research/3d-human-keypoints-estimation-fro...
In fact, LiDAR is a key component for detecting pedestrian keypoints and pose estimation. See https://waymo.com/blog/2022/02/utilizing-key-point-and-pose-...
Here’s an actual example of LiDAR picking up people in the dark well before cameras: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/U8eq8BEaGA
Not to mention they’re also highly critical for simulation.
> It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines.
Also false. Here’s Waymo’s 5th-gen LiDAR raw point clouds that can even read a logo on a semi truck: https://youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11600s
It seems you’re misinformed about how this sensor is used. The point clouds (plus camera and radar data) are all fed to the models for detection. That makes their detectors much more robust in different lighting and weather conditions than cameras alone.
I think "sensing depth" and "object detection" are the same things in this debate though
It's just "sensing depth" the same way cameras provide just "pixels". A fused cameras+radars+lidar input provides more robust coverage in a variety of conditions.
You know it would be even more robust under even more conditions? Putting 80 cameras and 20 LIDAR sensors on the car. Also a dozen infrared heat sensors, a spectrophotometer, and a Doppler radar. More is surely always better. Waymo should do that.
Maybe Tesla should reduce their camera count from 8 to 2 and put them on a swivel like human eyes. Less is surely always better.
I can also make “clever” arguments that are useless.
Remarkable. You managed to both misunderstand my point and, in drafting your witty riposte, accidentally understand it and adopt it as your own. More isn't objectively better, less isn't objectively better. There's only different strategies and actual real world outcomes.
> More isn't objectively better, less isn't objectively better.
Great, you finally got there. All it took was one round of correcting misinformation about LiDAR and another round of completely useless back-and-forth about sensor count.
The words you’re looking for are necessary and sufficient. Cameras are necessary, but not sufficient.
> There's only different strategies and actual real world outcomes.
Thanks for making my point. Actual real world outcomes are exactly what matter: 125M+ fully autonomous miles versus 0 fully autonomous miles.
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you think you’re in a battle of fanboy talking points. Never mind. Not interested.
Highly ironic considering you started this comment chain with a bunch of fanboy talking points and misinformation. Clearly, you’re not interested in being factual. Bye.
Tesla literally has a human in the driver seat for each and every mile. Their robotaxi which operates on geofenced “guardrails” has a human in the driver seat or passenger seat depending on area of its operation, and also has active remote supervision. That’s direct supervision 100% of the time. It is in no way similar in capability to Waymo.
We’ve been hearing Tesla will “surpass Waymo in the next 1-2 years” from the past 8 years, yet they are nowhere close. It’s always future tense with Tesla and never about the current state.
My first instinct is also that Rivian's strategy doesn't make sense. Self-driving is a monumentally hard problem, to be successful you need a world-class engineering and research team, resources and time.
I suspect that when Rivian has an L3 product, Waymo will be already offering an L4 package to car manufacturers.
It's not camera vs lidar, it's AI vs AI.
Waymo's AI so far has been narrowly focused few cities. Good start, but remains to be seen who will scale out quicker. IMO both will succeed.
Right now if you want a personal car Tesla's FSD is the only option and will remain so for likely a decade. Waymo doesn't seem to be excited about their mission at all. If it moves to Google's graveyard they'll be like "meh" while it's mission critical for Tesla.
This is such a wild take. Waymo is expanding to cities across the country, doing millions of paid rides every month. Meanwhile Tesla's "Robotaxi" is tooling around Austin with a few cars, every one of which has a driver in the front seat. On the personal vehicle side, Tesla hasn't done anything new or interesting in years, and sales are slumping. FSD never seems to actually become good enough to actually be "full self driving", it's just year after year of Tesla stans coming in here to tell us how "the latest version is incredible, actual full self driving is just around the corner!"
I see you are here to discuss politics, not technology. Good luck!
Given that I said nothing about politics, I think this is what the kids call telling on yourself.
Waymo is delivering millions of paid rides per month all over the country with no one in the driver's seat. Tesla still can't manage that in one small city without a backup driver in the front.
But yes, just like the dozens of other times I've read this comment for years now, I'm sure "the latest version of FSD" is so groundbreaking, and it's all about to change!
Your statement on more expensive hardware likely isn't true if you factor in full costs. Lidar gives you things for free with little extra processing (or power) that optical takes extra work to do poorly with higher latency.
Also LIDAR has just plain dropped in price, well over 10x, while nVidia hardware (even the automotive specific variants) have not.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop...
> You're taking a complex, low margin vehicle
Taxi services are not low margin. A taxi typically does about 500,000 miles over its lifetime; adding $10,000 to that cost is 2 cents per mile, increasing price by about 1%.
I own FSD, its no where near autonomy.
Quite the qualification for self-driving: "as long as there are clearly painted lane lines."
Fully autonomous driving in all conditions in all locations is clearly a hard problem that's still not solved.
I'm very happy with any company that clearly spells out the situations where their tech works, and the situations where it doesn't yet work.
I can't find how it will operate. Will it detect a situation where lines are not painted sufficiently clearly, warn you, and disengage? Or will you need to detect where it begins to operate wonky because lines aren't painted sufficiently clearly and to take over? I guess it's the second. It's hands-off, not eyes-off.
Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.
The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.
I've been saying that it's semi-solved, in the sense that we have a decent idea of how to get there without requiring major breakthroughs. (By "we" I mean Waymo.)
I notice that tesla seems to choose (highlight in blue) the left and/or right lane lines or the car in front of you. But it still seems to work without lines.
The endless list of "exception" cases is why I'm continuous skeptical about any sort of full-self-driving claims.
Sure, you can cover everything they can think of. But there are so many cases you can't predict, or which don't have an obvious solution, and it often comes down to a human judgement call that doesn't always have a programmatically-clear right answer.
That was specifically for their existing Gen2 highway assist expansion. Not the Gen3 custom silicon full autonomy that they were discussing for the rest of the presentation.
+3.5 million miles out of ~4.x million miles of existing roads -- not too shabby.
Seems like a good start to me, and I'd rather they approach as cautiously as possible.
In the future, we could use some sort of traffic management system, were cars which conform to a standard are able to 'link-up' and move as one unit like a train, it would relieve alot of the stop and go and improve flow on congested roads, possibly with denser traffic. I'd bet alot of daily commuters woild subscribe to something like that.
That was planned a very long time ago. It was too early, and we completely squandered it. Now the spectrum allocated for V2V it is gone.
https://www.butzel.com/alert-The-Latest-Development-in-the-S...
Yeah, I saw a demo of this in a robotics lab at my local university like 20+ years ago and thought full self-driving was right around the corner.
It will probably EVENTUALLY show up, but I'm thinking it's more like decades away at this point.
Those blue stripes look amazing in a retro-future kind of way. About time cars started getting back some personality.
I don’t think that the production model will look like that, I believe it’s a wrap. Also suspect it’s a bit of a joke on the model being called the R2 (the colors and patterns are reminiscent of R2-D2).
As opposed to more tech, I'd prefer (significantly) less mass.
You probably don't want a long range EV then?
Less mass will yield longer range. I know you're referring to the battery accounting for a large percentage of the weight, but a smaller vehicle will get the same range with a smaller battery, and the weight savings compound. If the vehicle weighs less, then all the components supporting that weight can weigh less as well. Unsprung mass can be reduced significantly. Acceleration, braking, handling, and top speed all improve as a result. Components will also generally cost less, reducing the price of the vehicle and making it cheaper to maintain.
Interesting, yeah, my instinct is that the sensor weight delta would be negligible but perhaps not.
Fair enough, I guess I'm speaking too generally.
Is there some tight coupling on autonomy + electric cars? Seems the only 2 viable hands-free car companies are Tesla and Rivian. I don't see myself ever getting an electric car, but it doesn't seem like the big car companies are anywhere near this.
No, there is no coupling between EVs and automation.
Ford BlueCruise and Mercedes Drive Pilot are equipped on some ICE vehicles, and are hands-free driving on (some) highways.
Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.
> Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.
Try to find videos where people actually use it. A handful of 1 minute long promotional and car reviewers' videos. It's mostly a marketing move.
I know this ain't a bitch-about-bluecruise thread but it's crazy to me they shipped it as is, it disengages silently as a matter of course - only indication is an animation on the speedometer. You basically have to keep your hands in the wheel just in case, not to mention shouting at you to pay attention when you glance over at the radio. Handsfree but keep your eyeballs facing front !
They just announced eyes-free bluecruise
> Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.
"DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone." [0]
[0]: https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot#2
I think the shift to EV is inevitable.
I agree, but it won't happen until EVs get more range.
The range is fine today, the problem is charging infrastructure now. There aren't enough high speed chargers, and we can't build more because of the same reasons we can't build more AI datacenters: power. Tesla can build tons of them because they're backed by large grid batteries that suck up the power peaks from fast charging so that they can install their charging stations anywhere that has somewhat reliable power. If you don't have the batteries to act as a peak shaver, then it's really hard to install high speed charging where people need it most in residential and commercial areas that are already oversubscribed.
It's not fine for all use cases. There are many people who are holding out because it's either not fine for their main use case, or even just a use case that occurs infrequently, but still important to them.
I'd like to see data on the distances people drive on a regular basis. For America where I am from, I think that a vast majority of people could use EVs today with the ranges they have today. I didn't see any EVs with ranges below 200+ miles and most had 260+. If you have to go further than that on a regular basis, I think that most cars won't work for your specific needs, let alone EVs. The whole range argument seems like some FUD to me that was made up by the ICE industry, honestly, because EVs have had these same ranges for a decade now.
I'm speaking out of personal experience as an EV owner in Los Angeles that takes occasional road trips. It's those occasional road trips that are preventing me from going full EV. And I'm like 99% certain I'm not a tiny minority.
I wonder if there is data out there for this kind of thing. I'd like to see it to see which one of us is correct or if we're both wrong (or right).
It already happened. 1/3rd of the global car market is EV. Range is not an issue.
Worthless comment. Of course it's not an issue for city driving. It's an issue for long trips and rural driving. No one said EVs don't serve many use cases. I have one myself.
Worthless human. More range is not needed and mark my words, mainstream EVs will not bother going beyond ~300 miles. Even the 400mi in a model s is a lot. More charging stations maybe, though we have plenty here in CA so roadtrips in a Tesla have never been a problem.
appreciate the compliment. I'm one of those Californians with a Tesla, and we keep a gas car for certain trips that would be very difficult with a Tesla. I'm not just making something up here. But whatever you say.
That has been happening consistently for almost 15 years. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1323-janu...
Better charging infrastructure and faster charging batteries will mitigate some of that.
The coupling is more with cost than drive train, but consumers most likely to pay extra for autonomy are the same ones willing to pay extra for electric.
Which is why you see it on the Mercedes ICE vehicle. Because it's a high cost vehicle to start with.
The reason for this is Rivian and Tesla bet big on software defined platforms… ie every piece of hardware talks to a small number of central computers instead of many independent systems. This gives them a huge leg up in developing software than can actually take all the available input and use it to control all aspects of the vehicle.
Downside is all the buttons are on a screen. But I’ve grudgingly decided it’s worth it for software upgrades.
No, the only Level 3 self-driving system is Drive Pilot by Mercedes. They have it on the S-Class and EQS sedans, so one ICE/hybrid and one EV.
It even comes with legal liability for the car manufacturer, that's how confident they are in the tech. None of this kind of hopium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
It's not real L3, it's marketing department L3. Two years after launch it's still only supported in two US states. Now that Mercedes got their headline, it's effectively abandonware.
If it was real L3, Drive Pilot would be considered the vehicle operator for legal purposes. Mercedes would take full responsibility for any driving infringements or collisions that occur during its use. In reality, Mercedes cannot indemnify you from driving infringements, and for collisions they only promise to cover "insurance costs" which probably doesn't include any downstream reputational consequences of making an insurance claim.
So confident that it only works with a lead car to follow, on select stretches of freeways, below a certain speed, on sunny days
The R2(-D2) livery is a fun touch
Why do people what self driving cars at all? I certainly hate the thought of having to pay for any of this. Even if the end product is subscription based, all these feature cost money up front making new cars super expensive.
I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
Also, at some point, I'm probably going to be too old to drive safely, which will restrict my travels. Not if self driving gets to the point where that doesn't matter anymore.
Too bad the law says you can’t do this
Yeah. The tech isn't there yet. The question I was responding to was "Why do people what self driving cars at all". I responded why I want a self driving car.
Cool and all, but up until companies started putting this stuff in cars they cost $30k. Now the average car is 50k. The average car is now more expensive than my BMW 3 series with the premium package from a few years back. I don't want to pay for your fantasy of going to sleep in your car and waking up someplace new. I dont want to pay for the ability of my car to self park or be summoned to me. Most new features of cars dont interest me in the slightest.
> I don't want to pay for your fantasy of going to sleep in your car and waking up someplace new
So vote with your wallet. And take a bus.
You're suggesting that the only alternative to autonomous self-driving cars is public transit?
By the way, I do vote with my wallet. I won't buy a car that has these features. I won't buy a car that serves me ads. I won't buy a car that charges a subscription fee. However, this is becoming increasingly challenging. Most luxury vehicle manufacturers want to pad their bottom lines by charging a premium or worse a subscription for things I (and I suspect many people) don't want.
These premium features ultimately trickle down so every new car must have a rear-view camera and many have LED lighting. Examples of two premium features that now everyone must pay for. My eldest daughter failed her driving test because she used the rear view camera when parallel parking. Yes these cameras are mandated but you fail if you use them. The tail light on an F-150 can cost upwards of $3,000 to replace. A tail light!
My first car, a jeep, came with a bikini top, no doors. the windshield actually folded down without a special tool, and I used a kerosene heater in between the seats when it was cold. Now wranglers come with touch screens, heated steering wheels and cruise control. Apparently they are difficult to find with a manual transmission. I loved mine back in the day but as you say I'll vote with my wallet and will not buy from Stellantis.
I'll happily get my kids a Slate. Of course your mileage may vary and if you want to pay for these premiums then power to you. I just don't want to subsidize your choice.
> You're suggesting that the only alternative to autonomous self-driving cars is public transit?
No. But hopefully one day. I don't mind if you want to subsidise my choice or not. I want self driving tech to get to the point that it is safer than manually driven cars, and I then want people who want to still drive manually to be slowly priced off the roads and then outright banned from doing it.
My preference is that you stop being allowed to drive manually, and as far as I can see, that's the future, as long as the technology works out.
Average includes trucks and other stuff which are very above the average and pull it up, because god forbid the avg joe from getting a Honda civic instead of a f150 or above.
Also, inflation is a thing. You can get a new Honda civic for less than 30k$ today, as well as other sedans and small cars.
This is a train.
You want a train.
If you don't like sharing space with other people, you want a private room on a train.
These cars and their supporting infrastructure should cost more than a private room on a train because they are less efficient and have more negative externalities than a private room on a train.
A train can't take me to the beach. It can't take me camping away from civilization. It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
I love trains, but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
Trains can take you to the beach and away from civilization. Build a station where you want to go. At one point trains were the most practical way to get to national parks.
How often are you building treehouses that you need to pay hundreds of dollars extra a month to justify the cost, versus a one-time delivery fee?
If you build train station away from civilization pretty quickly it will be filled with civilization.
Trains are ok for mass transit. Rest of world is for cars.
You must be an American, because plenty of trains exist to bring people to nature elsewhere. You know, when you drive a car to a nature place, you put it into a parking lot, then you are no longer in the car, right? Same works for trains.
Low density places exist outside america. You should check them out.
I have. A lot of them have trains!
A lot of them don’t. What is your point? How should one visit places without train access like this one?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kgjVaPRdi6zGDQeu6?g_st=ic
Man I love this silly debate. The original comment just wanted to travel 500 miles to "somewhere" and most instances of "somewhere" that people travel to could be accessed by train.
Also no one has said that no one is allowed to drive ever again anywhere. I'm trying to be generous but the victim complex is crazy.
Sorry but train-people scare me more than orange-man.
> A train can't take me to the beach
Yes it can!! Why can't a train take you to the beach?
https://www.amtrak.com/top-beach-destinations-by-train
> It can't take me camping away from civilization.
How many vehicle miles do you travel every year? How many of those are to go camping?
> It can't haul lumber from a hardware store so I can build a treehouse.
Have you tried? Like really tried? https://philsturgeon.com/carry-shit-olympics/
> but let's not pretend there is a perfect Venn diagram of overlap between what their use cases are.
I never said anything of the sort and I'm not pretending that at all. You're creating a strawman. The comment I was responding to said this:
> I'd love to get in my car and go to sleep for a couple of hours or read a book whilst it drives me somewhere. Imagine if it could even pull over and charge up without any kind of intervention too. You could get in your car, and get a full nights sleep whilst it drive you somewhere 500 miles away.
That's a train. Most instances of "somewhere" can be accessed by train. Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer.
My overall stance is that there's a lot more overlap between why folks want a super expensive self-driving car and more robust public transit and better support for multi-modal transit. I've not pretended anything like you've claimed.
> Or by a train to do the long miles and then other modes of transit once you're closer
Of your many points in various posts, this is maybe the only point I'm really on board with. Amtrak already supports this, even. My car can drive me to the train and then the train can do the long haul, and at the other end my car will drive me off the train and to the destination.
Still need waaaay more rail routes than we have now, though, so this is a dream for a century from now, not something in my lifetime.
This isn’t strictly directed at you, but I’m saddened that HN is immediately ready to dream big when it comes to solving hard problems and making the world a better place in spaces like AI, crypto, and technology in general. But suddenly shuts down over things as simple as trains, buses, and bike lanes.
There’s plenty of examples of guerrilla urbanism that I think align closely to the hacker ethos. Even more these problems are very solvable and can net huge gains in metrics without having to “dream for a century”.
> waaaaay more rail routes
It’s actually much simpler, Amtrak just needs right of way along with some other straight forward regulations to help balance freight and transit on America’s railroads.
Amtrak has also been doing great at incremental expansion and brining back (or increasing!) ridership just in the 5 years since the pandemic in a number of areas like Chicago to Milwaukee, and in the PNW.
The defeatist attitude isn’t what I expect from HN. You already found the best piece of actionable advice which is to look for incremental ways you can adjust your life to be different. My wife and I hardly drive anymore. Most of our trips: her work, groceries, restaurants, most leisure activities, etc are now by bike. We live in the suburbs too, a full 10 miles (20-30min drive and across an interstate) from the city’s downtown.
Cars are only perceived as necessary in America bc it is assumed that they are. There are many small and safe ways to shed the car dependence and they’ve all been huge positives to my life. We’re happier, healthier, building more community, spending less money on gas and maintenance. It’s nice.
I live in Manhattan, and don't own a car, so I get where you're coming from. The reality here is that America doesn't like trains and isn't going to build trains in any kind of a timeframe that's helpful to me. I'm about to move to Westchester, but I need to get to the Upper West Side every day. Yes, I can take the train from Westchester, but it goes into Grand Central, so then I need to take another train from there. And I'll have my kid with me.
So my options are:
1. Drive, walk, or bike with my kid to the train station in Westchester, ride to grand central, switch to subway, drop her off at school, then take the subway to my office. Total time about 90 mins.
or
2. Drive 35-45 mins.
I'll be driving.
There's talk of having one of the train lines go into Penn instead of Grand Central, with stops on the Upper West Side! But that'll be a decade or more, if it ever happens, and it won't be relevant to me anymore at that point.
Are you suggesting that you cant get to Home Depot without a self driving smart car?
Not even close
It remains to be seen, but there is reason to believe that self driving cars will be enough safer than regular cars that I as a citizen want everyone to have them if you have a car.
I have kids who walk, ride bikes, and I do the same. There are a lot of terrible drivers out there - the average driver who thinks they are better than everyone else is still terrible (yes this includes me - I'm one of the few honest enough to admit I'm not good, but I'm about equal to everyone else)
One day, all personal transport will be AI, and lunatics like me who enjoy performance driving will have special vehicles we drive at a track. Self driving cars are great. That you can’t afford one is just a matter of time.
Could happen. But we still allow horse-drawn carriages on some roads. I think I'll be long dead (and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone in this discussion will be long dead as well) before we kick human drivers off the road.
If we really gave a shit about driving-related fatalities, there is a lot of fruit hanging way lower than replacing the average sober driver.
I like approaching it from an accessibility standpoint. I don't need it and I enjoy the act of driving. That said, if I had vision impairment and wanted freedom to travel further from home with no assistance self driving cars make a lot more sense.
The product isn't necessarily "for me", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
I'm extremely visually impaired. I'd rather see (ha) good public transport. I also sincerely doubt (and hope so) that I'd be legally able to drive a car simply because it has "self-driving" - what if I need to take control of it? What happens if someone gets hurt because of it? Am I liable, even though I don't have a license?
Driving can be annoying. I like it in some cases, but it's no fun when there's a ton of traffic, lots of stop lights, etc. I'd love to be able to push a button and let it handle the grunt work in those cases.
Sometimes I want to do something else. Maybe adjust my music, or send a text. If the car can keep me going while I do that, it would be nice.
I live with two people who can't drive. Often I have to take them to things. Tonight I'm going to spend about 90 minutes going, waiting, and coming back, so one of them can do something. It would be great if I could just put them in the car and say, have fun, see you later, and stay home while the car takes them there and back.
Anecdotally, whenever I have to tote someone around who cannot drive, it is nearly universally true that they also cannot get in and out of the car without help, too. So that has to be arranged, a self-driving car won't be able to solve it.
There are reasons other than physical disability for people to be unable to drive. For example, the person I’m driving tonight can’t drive themselves because they’re too young to have a license.
Doing long highway drives is effortless. Think cruise control, but you can let go of the wheel.
The hardware necessary for level 2 autonomy is estimated to cost about US$400 in a Tesla. Much higher for companies using Lidar though prices are coming down as well.
Driving is already effortless. It’s not like you actively think about steering.
Because you haven’t tried it. I want to buy Cadilac ev but the biggest downside is the lack of FSD. Once you go FSD you never go back.
I would like self-driving car for myself, but more so, I would like it for all the other drivers on the road who regularly try to kill me or destroy my car.
My sister plans to just buy the self driving subscription for the month they go on road trips and thats it. Far better than buying it up front.
I don't think so. My financial situation isn't hers though, and I don't even own one. I borrowed a friend's for a 550 mile road trip this past weekend and then for a few days after. It's there enough to do the usual daily trips with minimal interaction, so while road trips is the obvious situation for it it's also really nice to have the rest of the time. It sucks that it costs so much when it could be free, but we still live under capitalism so that's just how that one goes.
You sound like someone who doesn't spend 1+ hour every day commuting in traffic. :)
The replies to this comment are very telling. Everyone is highlighting various desires and issues with cars:
- Cars are dangerous to people not in cars - Cars require your undivided attention (and even that isn't fool-proof) - Cars are inaccessible: age, eyesight, control operation, etc. - There's a lot of traffic (iow there's a lot of cars)
What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
The best way to solve all of these problems, totally ignoring self-driving for a moment, is to reduce the total number of vehicle miles traveled. Reduce the number of car trips. Reduce the length of car trips. If there are less cars, there is less danger from cars. If there are less cars, there is less traffic. The only way to have less cars is to provide alternatives: street cars, bike trails, pedestrian facilities, sub-regional buses and trains, inter-regional trains (or buses).
Literally all of these problems get significantly better when there are less drivers on the road. Trains can provide the inter-regional travel that allows you to work, read, hangout, sleep, etc. without the constant danger of having to watch the road the entire time.
Self-driving cars will certainly be useful, but I think people are really missing the point that the root of the problem is cars specifically. They can (and will!) still be available for people that truly want or need them, but harm reduction is the name of the game. Even changing a portion of your trip from car to something else can make a huge difference! It doesn't have to be door-to-door, it could be that you drive to a park-n-ride. Or you stop driving to the local downtown in the spring, summer, and fall.
Most of the people in this comment section want better public transit. It can be made to work even if the goal is to go skiing or mountain biking once you arrive. Cars need to stop being the default and become the exception. It's cheaper, more efficient, safer, and healthier.
> What people are expressing a desire for is more robust public transit and transportation facilities that protect everyone: peds, drivers, cyclists, etc.
I'm going to take a guess here that you're in a bubble. Most people don't give more than a passing thought to protecting anybody else on the road but themselves and their own loved ones. You could say enlightened self interest means this should extend to random strangers, but I bet that as a practical matter it does not. I'd even go farther and suggest that the largest plurality of people who support public transit want it so that it will take other people off the road, not them.
Citation needed.
There’s plenty of evidence that traffic is almost exclusively induced demand and that as you build other facilities and expand existing ones that more people use them. “Just one more lane bro”, etc.
America tends to be car-centric because that’s the only perceived option.
People that want more public transit probably never did public transit. It took me a few horrible interactions on a public transit and some disgusting experience in car share to never support anything “communist”. Specially when you get kids.
I think it helps you drive. It takes away the tedium of driving and reduces your workload.
Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips
infrequent but just as important - emergency braking
That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)
As an aside, IIRC they put the turn signal stalk back in a recent update. It saves them a few bucks per car to use buttons instead, but there are people who will not buy a Tesla without a turn-signal stalk -- and the loss on that is probably 500x what is saved by not putting in a stalk.
do they do this for all cars? S/X, truck, 3/Y?
EDIT: looks like model 3 only and they didn't remove it from the y?
Gotta hand it to Rivian. Solid progress. Not having those features is why I didn’t buy one before. These advances make it a bit more attractive.
What I'm wondering is that the stack up of licensed processor IP looks like.
Out of all things I'm actually surprised they went straight to custom silicon, but gotta respect that decision. It's likely the only way to compete with Tesla right now.
That all sounds great but with CARIAD now being involved at Rivian I won’t hold my breath on that roadmap being executed.
acquiring steradian semiconductors was a quite good move.
Rivian coming for Teslas crown? I honestly think Rivians are unattractive. Like if a jeep and scion had a drunken tryst. Haven’t seen the interior before though.
But I’d be glad if somebody was competitive enough to force Elon to behave again.
Yeah, but does it have CarPlay yet?
RIVN doing quite well today.
Is the paint job supposed to resemble R2-D2?
If only they had a good designer. They have the ugliest frames.
They also like to indulge in massive post purchase UX changes so if you like it now there is a good chance you won't in a year.
I cannot give a shit about hands free driving. If I have to pay attention I may as well just drive the damn car.
I will care when they sell the cars without steering wheels.
I'm getting real tired of seeing Silicon Valley reinvent trains.
how about they try to make their cars profitably first....
looks like they're profitable already if counting cars and software on them.
https://rivian.com/newsroom/article/rivian-releases-third-qu...
They'd rather make their board and CEO profitable first...
No, Waymo is just going to license their tech to normal automakers, like Toyota, and those licensees will win. Rivian is run by a Musk-wannabe but even this stock pump isn’t going to help with his sociopath, multibillion dollar compensation package.
The CEO is different from Musk in a few key ways
1. He has a STEM PhD (from MIT)
2. He is conservative in what he discloses
3. Not outspoken or political
IMO one of Rivian’s benefits is its image as the anti-Tesla
What stock pump, its cratered on the news.
That is curious. The market must not have faith in their ability to execute on their plans
The market wants them to sell the $40k cars asap. All the other side quests are distractions. When they spun off their electric bike side project, the stock went up.
Adding LIDAR would probably turn a $40k car a $70k car as well.
Incendiary language aside, this does seem pretty likely to me. Waymo has already talked about wanting to license their driver for personally owned cars eventually; it just doesn't make sense for them to do so until they can cover more of the country (or countries). The more areas they cover, and especially when they can cover various popular freeways connecting different metro areas, the more it'll make sense for them to start partnering with automakers to sell the technology to consumers.
Yet no AndoidAuto. Pass.
Can anyone explain why RIVN is down 8% after this announcement? Were investors expecting hands free handjobs or something?
I hold some RIVN and I'm wondering why they're spending resources on custom silicon instead of using something off-the-shelf. What is their advantage here? Can they hire the right people? Can they ship enough units to pay for it?
Those are my bearish questions. On the bullish side, the VW deal shows that they're willing and able to license part of their platform, so possibly have a big chance to recoup costs and maybe turn a profit just on that side, which justifies a big software + autonomy investment.
If their idea is both novel and useful, and if it actually works, and they can actually produce it, then: They can sell it to other automakers.
(GM has made a lot of cars with their own transmissions. And at various times, they've supplied -lots- of them to other automakers all over the world. They've made a lot of money doing this.
Someone's gotta build the machine vision/control systems for all of these self-driving cars; that someone may well be Rivian.
It's not as sexy as something like a new convertible might be, or a $40k self-driving electric car, and a consumer might not even know that the new car in their driveway has expensive Rivian parts buried inside, but that future can be very profitable for them.)
>On the bullish side, the VW deal
Oh, I think everyone missed this. Rivian is betting Elon made a big mistake by designing FSD to be strictly for Tesla. Rivian are doing FSD to license it out to other manufacturers. They're planning to open a new market.
But how could they beat Waymo or Tesla? At some point, these companies will offer an L4 package to car makers.
I was just thinking about this recently. It doesn’t seem to make sense for each brand to have its own self driving implementation.
Who cares about Tesla, the comparison here is Waymo who has already been doing this for much longer.
Frankly, the "need" for custom silicon seems self-imposed, with the idea of appearing to be a technology company first rather than a car / vehicle company.
Cruise automation was also for years working on custom silicon, I knew people there. Many people working on the custom devices didn't really believe in the mission statement either, but they were paid well, and got to do fun work, so they took the job.
What makes Rivian, or Tesla better at making the "normal" car pieces compared to Toyota, or Honda? The answer is they're really not better at those things and quite worse typically ; bad fit and finish, rattles, corroding suspension components, difficult to buy replacement parts, etc.
If these companies were truly about making electric cars available to all, a partnership with a car company that knows how to do the "regular car stuff" makes a LOT more sense.
Instead you have these companies that might be innovative in the drive train, electronics, batteries, and co-packaging who have to learn all the "hard" stuff normal car companies have been doing for a 100-years.
Now, instead of moving into a partnership with a regular car company, they're becoming hardware/software organizations making custom silicon with custom software.
Even doing custom silicon and the associated software takes YEARS of expertise to do it and not have a 1000 warts, not withtsanding going into a MOVING VEHICLE where the risks of making mistakes is life and limb.
So, my conclusion is this is more fancy smoke and mirrors to impress investors and the general public, but not in the best interest of end-users (people who buy vehicles to use as transportation).
Fair point. I think they wanted to sound super futuristic (they often borrow a page from Apple's book) but they forgot they're not Apple.
Maybe they think custom silicon is biting off more than they can chew, coming at a time when they need to focus on R2 production and scale-up.
They just told potential buyers to not buy an outdated Gen2 or an early R2, assuming it is not delayed.
It could be that Gen 3 shipping late 2026 is a concession that R2 might be delayed until then.
Personally I think they will ship R2 Gen 2 vehicles to the early adopters that are less concerned with ADAS.
My R2 reservation is very late (I had to redo it for reasons) so I probably won't be able to order one until it's available anyways.
Excessive hype leading up to selling the news, happens all the time.
“Buy the rumors and sell the news.” Just typical market stuff.
Now it almost reached $20 lol.
Watching this unfold... I keep thinking about the supply chain... how many rare minerals go into this custom silicon?
ALSO what happens when the first generation hits end-of-life... will there be a clear path to recycling? I want to believe these platforms will last more than a subscription cycle...
BUT I guess we won't know until we see a teardown...
Why would more minerals go into custom silicon than off-the-shelf silicon? How would recycling be any different?
not "more"
typical automotive 905 nm lidars are just CMOS chips similar to cameras and regular computer chips
Rivians have been spotted with giant Velodyne VLS-128 "Alpha Puck"s since several years ago [1]. But from last I checked, Rivian's ADAS is still struggling with ping-ponging in lanes on curved stretches, and it only works on a small set of pre-mapped highways. Highly doubtful that "universal hands free" is coming.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/mqijd2/riv...
The ping-ponging is certainly a Gen1 problem. (My Gen1 does this.) Gen1 was essentially an off-the-shelf Mobileye unit, and the performance was, as expected, not good.
Gen2 autonomy stack is completely unrelated to Gen1, and from what I hear is a completely different level of reliability.
(also - this presentation covered yet another, unrelated, gen3 autonomy stack, which shares none of the hardware or models with the existing gen2 stack, either.)
The big lidars are for ground truth collection. They get used in projects ranging from autonomous development all the way down to budget adaptive cruise control or parking sensor benchmarking.
Any company adding fancy hardware (beyond good cameras and inference chips) to achieve self driving is on the wrong track at this point. Software is what will win this game.
Of course, Waymo has achieved good results with A LOT of fancy hardware. But it's hard to see how they stand a chance against Cybercab mass production (probably behind schedule, but eventually).
I think Rivian has the best-looking line of EVs out there. Maybe they will be able to come from behind in self-driving tech. But this big reveal is not that promising, IMO.
An alternate take here:
The "fancy" hardware is going to get dirt cheap, and in a game where you're asking your customer to trust you with their lives, reliability is going to win. Combine that with time to market, and Tesla feels like a pretty clear "risky bet" at best... Maybe they make it work, but they have to do it before the other companies make lidar cheap, and prices have fallen dramatically over the past 10 years, for much better hardware.
Yeah, that is all reasonable. I think the jury is still out on if sensor fusion can really get far enough up the march of nines (will it work in 99.99 percent of scenarios)? Karpathy has given some good interviews about why Tesla ditched the sensor fusion approach and switched to vision-only.
Same can be said for vision-only, of course. Maybe it won't every quite get to 99.99.