Company / division: Carmakers
Musk Goes Back to Wall Street to Bring the Model 3 to Market – Bloomberg (Mar 15, 2017)
I think it’s safe to say that Tesla’s plans for Model 3 manufacturing represent the biggest test the company and Elon Musk have faced by a long way. The ramp contemplated is so rapid and takes the company so far beyond its historical production rate that it seems almost impossible for it to meet its targets. And yet here it is raising more money to fund what’s going to be a massive capital spend in the first half of the year to prepare for that production run that’s scheduled to begin in July. In the first half of last year, the company spent around half a billion dollars on capex, and it plans to spend $2-2.5 billion in the first half of 2017, which gives some sense of just how big the leap is from anything the company has done in the past. That’s going to cause a massive cash drain, hence the new funding. Musk continues to execute extremely well on his long-term plans eventually, but hitting short-term targets continues to be his big weakness, and it feels like the Model 3 is either going to be the worst example of that flaw or the biggest possible exception to the pattern. I’m betting it’s the former.
via Bloomberg
California DMV: Humans soon no longer required in self-driving cars – San Francisco Chronicle (Mar 10, 2017)
Michigan’s autonomous driving laws already allow testing of cars without drivers, and given that these two states are home to much of the testing going on, California clearly feels it needs to keep up. Those Michigan laws assume that carmakers are going to comply with all applicable regulations, and therefore require that any testing is done by or in partnership with those carmakers, while the proposed California law has no such restrictions (logical given the biggest local testers are tech companies and now legacy automakers). In both cases, the states are deferring somewhat to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set the overall rules and to some extent approve cars for autonomous driving without a driver. This Chronicle piece quotes a spokesperson from Consumer Watchdog, which has been particularly harsh (perhaps deservedly so) on Uber/Otto, but also seems to be one of the main organizations demanding tougher regulation of autonomous driving in general in California. What’s interesting is that there are so few voices on the other side of this rapid push towards autonomous driving.
Self-driving car numbers double on California roads – Financial Times (Mar 9, 2017)
California and Michigan have to be the two states where the most testing of autonomous vehicle technology is being done, with the former home to most of the tech companies in the space and the latter the home of several legacy automakers. The FT is here citing data from the California DMV, which you can see in its raw form here. What’s fascinating is the mix of companies here, as I’ve said before – there are several traditional carmakers (VW, Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Honda, Ford, and Subaru), several big names from the tech world (Waymo, Tesla, Uber, Baidu, Faraday Future, and Cruise [now part of GM]), and a variety of other smaller companies. But Waymo has by far the largest number of cars and miles driven (and most accidents). But the California DMV is certainly the source of some of the most interesting data on self-driving testing anywhere in the world right now.
via Financial Times
This Insurance Startup Wants to Cover Tomorrow’s Self-Driving Cars – Backchannel (Mar 9, 2017)
Pay-as-you-drive insurance isn’t a brand new concept – indeed, I remember a colleague writing a report on this about five years ago when I was at Ovum. The basic concept is that the insurance company finds a way to measure actual driving behavior and then offers lower rates to those drivers who drive most safely. There are a number of pilots and active programs underway already, and this Tesla program just takes it a step further by focusing on drivers who turn on the Autopilot feature. Outside of this program, Root measures actual driving behavior through an app, but with Autopilot-enabled Teslas, there’s apparently no such hurdle to overcome. That’s great validation for Tesla (especially given the recent worries over its latest software), and also for autonomous driving technology as a whole – a key argument made by essentially all of its proponents is that it will be safer than human drivers. I’ll be curious to see if this program eventually gets expanded to cover other ADAS systems (since Autopilot is technically ADAS rather than autonomous technology), and whether Root’s data backs up Tesla’s claims about safety over time.
via Backchannel
Self-driving cars are watching us and recording our data whether or not we’re watching the road — Quartz (Mar 7, 2017)
This article is part good reporting, part opinion, and comes with a clear point of view (which I’d articulate as “carmakers are collecting too much data on us and our driving behavior with insufficient transparency and opt-outs”). But the reporting is well worth reading whether or not you agree with that point of view: the piece does a good job of spelling out all the data that’s being collected by various automakers old and new, and what it’s being used for. And indeed, this data is critical for developing both ADAS and autonomous driving systems, because it’s only by measuring real-world human driver behavior at massive scale that cars can be taught both how to drive like human beings (which is important for trust and comfort) and how to drive better than human beings (which is important for safety). The legacy carmakers obviously have a big advantage here because they have many more cars on the road and hitting the road each year than newcomers like Tesla, let alone non-carmakers like Uber and Google. But it’s how that data is collected and used that makes all the difference here – putting advanced sensors in cars is critical to getting the rich data needed, but it also raises big privacy concerns which I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more about in the coming years.
via Quartz
Tesla Drivers Are Paying Big Bucks to Test Flawed Self-Driving Software – Backchannel (Mar 7, 2017)
It’s impossible to imagine any major car manufacturer putting out an ADAS system or autonomous driving technology that was as unready (and as apparently unsafe) as Tesla’s Autopilot software currently appears to be – it would be catastrophic for their brands and reputations. That’s probably the single biggest difference between Tesla and the major legacy automakers at this point, and it’s simultaneously what allows Tesla to move so much faster and what may end up causing major image, safety, and regulatory problems for the company as well. Moving fast and breaking things may be a fine motto for a social network, but it’s clearly not the right approach for a car. The very fact that the current feature set is said to be in beta feels like completely the wrong model for this environment. Tesla seems to be being helped by the fact that many of its drivers are early adopter types and eager to test even technology that isn’t completely ready, but I’m guessing they will feel differently if they or family members are hurt or killed in an accident because of this faulty steering and other erratic behavior. Tesla really ought to pull these updates and roll cars back to previous versions until it fixes the problems.
via Backchannel
Toyota’s billion-dollar AI research center has a new self-driving car – The Verge (Mar 6, 2017)
Toyota’s approach to autonomous driving strikes me as exactly the right one – as this article briefly explains, it’s approaching the problem from two different perspectives, one of which is about improving existing ADAS systems within the cars we’re driving today and in the near future, with the other being focused on Level 4 and 5 autonomy. I continue to be very skeptical that any car company is going to work its way incrementally and smoothly through the levels from 2 to 3 to 4, and believe much more strongly that we’re going to see a Big Bang shift from Level 2 to Level 4, which means that transition is likely to take quite some time. That doesn’t mean things like cruise control, self parking and so on aren’t going to get a lot smarter in the meantime, and that’s a good thing, but it does mean that true autonomy is both a long way away and likely to arrive all at once rather than incrementally. And of course because companies like Toyota have tens of millions of cars on the road already, they’re able to capture lots of data that will help with both the incremental ADAS and eventually autonomous technologies.
via The Verge
General Motors’ Maven launches monthly car plan – VentureBeat (Mar 3, 2017)
I’ve argued that the big car companies are actually participating pretty actively in the three big shifts occurring in their industry at this point, rather than just sitting idly by, and GM’s Maven business is a good example of some of that engagement, albeit on a fairly small scale. This new model doesn’t seem all that compelling – at over $1000 per month (including insurance, gas, and parking) it’s a little steep for a month’s Volt rental, which would cost you a fraction of that on a longer-term basis. But at least the company is experimenting. Other Maven services are a lot more interesting, and I had an interesting conversation with some of the team at the Detroit Auto Show in January. Maven Home is designed for high-end apartment complexes, for example, where owners get access to cars on an on-demand basis through their building, and GM is also doing interesting things with both Uber and Lyft separately.
via VentureBeat
GM First to Offer Unlimited Data Option for Car Owners – DSLReports (Mar 3, 2017)
This is an interesting but not altogether unexpected step. There’s an analogy here to Amazon’s discounted Echo-only music service, which takes advantage of the same limitations to offer a lower price for something that would normally cost more. GM is now offering $20 for unlimited data, which is the same as it used to charge for 2GB of in-car WiFi data. AT&T continues to sell in-car connectivity to carmakers at a rapid rate – about a million subs per quarter – but these subs are mostly extremely basic at the outset, covering just in-car telematics for a few dollars a month. Only if subscribers actually start buying the additional features such as OnStar and this kind of in-car WiFi does AT&T start to generate a more meaningful revenue per user, so being more aggressive about the pricing, especially as AT&T reintroduces unlimited plans for its own services, makes a lot of sense. And of course since GM gets a cut, it’s strongly incentivized to sell these services too.
via DSLReports
Self-driving Nissan car takes to Europe’s streets for first time – Reuters (Feb 28, 2017)
This piece is a good reminder of three things: not all testing of autonomous vehicles is being done in California (or even the US), not all testing is being done by tech companies and startups, and countries, states, and cities are competing to be friendly to this testing. Old established carmakers are a long way down this road too – something that was borne out to me by conversations I had with a lot of them at the Detroit Auto Show in January – and they’re testing in their home markets as well as others. And cities like London are competing to be attractive to this testing, because it brings economic activity as well as a reputation for being friendly to technology in general. I learned to drive in central London, and wouldn’t really wish that on anyone, human or machine, but it sounds like the testing is mostly taking place in some of the less busy parts of the city, which makes a lot of sense.
via Reuters
Tesla Reports Q4 2016 Financial Results (Feb 22, 2017)
The last in our trio of financial results today comes from Tesla. This Wall Street Journal piece from this morning does a great job highlighting some of the investor enthusiasm about Tesla in the face of its continued failure to hit expectations and deliver on its own production and other promises. In the end, today’s results were a mixed bag – both production and deliveries in Q4 were down slightly on Q3 but well up on Q4 last year, revenue was up almost double year on year, and the Solar City business looks to be breaking even on gross margin. But overall, the company had big net losses, ate massive amounts of cash in the quarter, and continues to be a long way from its production targets for the Model 3 which is supposed to start shipping in July. It’s also about to embark on a huge increase in battery production, with three additional Gigafactories being planned for construction starting later this year. Meanwhile, the company’s valuation is now ahead of Nissan’s, despite producing losses and massively fewer cars – the power of trajectory and belief in a disruptive business model.
via Tesla (PDF)
BMW, Mobileye, and HERE Partner to use Car Data to Update Maps (Feb 21, 2017)
I’ve seen this announcement referred to as being about crowdsourcing in at least one place, and that’s exactly the wrong word to use, because this isn’t about a crowd of people at all, but about real-time data from vehicles. In contrast to crowd-sourced map data, which can easily be manipulated for humorous or nefarious ends, this is a closed-loop system in which anonymized data from BMW cars will help update HERE’s increasingly detailed and real-time maps. And that kind of up-to-the-minute map data will be critical for autonomous driving in future – it’s no good knowing what the road looked like six months ago (or even yesterday) if there’s construction, an accident, or a roadblock today. Putting this technology into one manufacturer’s new cars by itself isn’t going to generate that much data – there simply aren’t enough brand-new BMWs to be useful. But if HERE strikes similar partnerships with other carmakers, then over time it could end up with some of the best real-time map data out there. It’s a little hard to tell from HERE’s release, but the BMW/Mobileye release certainly suggests that the latter will also get to aggregate and use the data. This announcement also highlights the fact that, no matter how clever the technology from Silicon Valley startups, the companies with by far the most and best data will be the car companies and those that partner with them.
via HERE and BMW/Mobileye
Samsung’s reputation nosedives in the US after Galaxy Note 7 snafu – The Verge (Feb 20, 2017)
As usual, it would be great to understand in more detail the methodology behind this survey, but it’s not available. The Verge seems to have got the rankings wrong – from what I can tell, Samsung was 7th and not 3rd last year – but it’s also worth noting that Samsung’s score dropped from 80.44 to 75.17, which sounds a lot less dramatic than dropping from 3rd (or even 7th) to 49th. The fact is that there are a lot of companies clustered together between 75 and 87 points and so a small drop in the score produces a big drop in rankings. Since the survey was also conducted in November and December last year, when the Note7 debacle was still very fresh in people’s minds, I’m guessing it would score a lot better just a few months from now. Though the Verge picked up on Samsung’s drop as their headline, it’s worth noting where other tech companies sit too: Amazon is #1 (score 86.27), Apple #5 (82.07), Google #8 (82.00), Tesla #9 (81.70), Netflix #18 (79.86), and Microsoft #20 (79.29), all of which classify as either very good or excellent. It’s also worth noting that big cable companies like Comcast and Charter score in the low 60s, which qualifies as “poor”, while the major wireless carriers score 66-72 (“fair” to “good”), with T-Mobile top and Sprint bottom.
via The Verge (official release here)
GM plans to build, test thousands of self-driving Bolts in 2018 – Reuters (Feb 18, 2017)
That’s two major carmakers who now plan to deploy their first autonomous vehicles in ride sharing fleets, with Ford already committed to rolling out its first self-driving cars in a similar scenario. This makes lots of sense – two of the biggest limitations of early AVs are going to be cost and restricted geographic use, so deploying them in ride sharing fleets where they can be limited to a narrow area and driven almost constantly creates conditions in which they can still be both effective and cost effective. I’m still skeptical that we’ll see these cars roll out in more than one or two markets in the timeframes mentioned here, and even then I think it’s quite likely they’ll require human drivers for quite some time. But all this also reinforces the sense that it will be many years until we see universally autonomous vehicles (rather than cars able to be autonomous within narrow confines), and also somewhat undermines Lyft’s claims of getting to 50% autonomous in its fleet by 2021.
via Reuters
Ford’s Dozing Engineers Side With Google in Full Autonomy Push – Bloomberg (Feb 17, 2017)
This is a really important aspect of autonomous driving that’s not talked about nearly enough. In the SAE levels system for describing autonomy in vehicles, all the layers between 0 and 5 require the driver and vehicle to work together at least to some extent, which means that even when the car has taken over a task, the driver is supposed to remain ready to take over when the car requests him or her to re-engage. The problem here is that we tend to switch off, whether deliberately or merely passively, when our focus isn’t actively required, and that means that machines have to give us an awful lot of notice when we need to take over. In practical terms, that’s often impossible, and that can actually make cars operating at levels 3-4 in particular less safe rather than safer than human drivers. That has important implications for those manufacturers which seem to be trying to work incrementally up from Level 2 to Level 4 or 5 over time, like Tesla, because there seems to be an increasing consensus that we may need to skip those middle levels entirely. And it also means, as I’ve pointed out a couple of times before, that lots of experience operating test or production vehicles at Level 2 or 3 is not nearly the same as being ready to produce a Level 4 or 5 vehicle.
via Bloomberg (we discussed this topic in depth during this episode of the Beyond Devices Podcast and this talk by Gill Pratt, head Toyota’s Research Institute, is also very illuminating on the same topic)
GM, Toyota say U.S. rules limiting self-driving cars need to be eased – Reuters (Feb 13, 2017)
I linked to a news item a while back about a Massachusetts bill which was intended to find ways to tax autonomous and electric vehicles, and in doing so talked about the competition that’s emerged between states and municipalities over autonomous driving – some have been welcoming, while some seem determined only to see trials of the technology as a tax revenue opportunity. But the patchwork of regulations and policies across the US is also a major barrier to the launch of production autonomous vehicles, because any vehicle sold in the US needs to be able to drive across state lines. As such, major carmakers are today asking the federal government to do what it can to create a harmonized rather than fragmented regulatory approach across the US. It’s interesting that it’s the major legacy manufacturers rather than newcomers like Tesla, Uber, or Waymo making this request, but they would certainly all benefit if the government listened.
via Reuters
Thirty Additional Companies Join Tech Amicus Brief on Immigration Ban – USA Today (Feb 7, 2017)
This is really just an addendum to yesterday’s item about the amicus brief filed by (then) 97 tech companies, as some 30 additional companies added their names to the brief yesterday afternoon. Among them were some of the Elon Musk-controlled holdouts from the initial set, Tesla and SpaceX as well as a number of smaller companies which simply don’t seem to have been looped in to the initial effort. The remaining holdouts are increasingly conspicuous by their absence, though it remains more consumer- than enterprise-focused as a group (HP did sign on later in the day, but IBM, Oracle, and other enterprise heavyweights are still missing), and the telecoms carriers and cable companies are all missing as a group too.
via TechCrunch
Tesla Is Testing Self Driving Cars on California Roads – Bloomberg (Feb 1, 2017)
The headline is news, I guess, but far more interesting are the detailed reports each company testing autonomous vehicles in California has submitted for 2016. These reports lay out – in some cases in quite a bit of detail – the results of testing during the year, including the miles driven and the number of disengagements. This is a great counterpoint to the article last year which suggested Tesla had an edge over others in autonomous driving because its cars had driven many more miles – the reality is that Tesla’s truly autonomous cars drove just 550 miles on California roads, while Google/Waymo’s drove 636,000, or over a thousand times as many miles. What’s more, Waymo’s vehicles required just 0.2 driver interventions per thousand miles relative to Tesla’s 0.33 per mile. It’s also notable that the vast majority of Tesla’s disengagements were on wet roads – road conditions continue to be a major factor in the ability of many autonomous driving systems to function correctly, which obviously puts them a very long way from mass production and release to customers. I’m planning to dig into all these numbers some more.
via Bloomberg (see also this blog post from Waymo)
Elon Musk’s Tesla Drops ‘Motors’ From Name – WSJ (Feb 1, 2017)
Corporate name changes are always interesting, especially when they’re mostly about cutting things from the name – Apple dropped the Computer from its name ten years ago the same month as it announced the iPhone, and Snapchat changed its name to Snapchat to coincide with its announcement of Spectacles. In both those cases and Tesla’s, the name change reflects a broadening of the company’s scope – Apple had added the iPod and was adding the iPhone, and perhaps already recognized that traditional computers wouldn’t provide the majority of revenue ever again, Snap was expanding beyond just its previously eponymous app, and Tesla is expanding into both solar power and home energy storage. It’s an entirely symbolic change, but also sets Tesla further apart as a carmaker in the breadth of its ambitions. I can’t see GM changing its name for the same reason anytime soon, but Tesla’s identity is always been more about innovation and change than simply making cars.
via WSJ
Uber, Daimler Strike Partnership for Self-Driving Vehicles – Bloomberg (Jan 31, 2017)
This is Uber’s second partnership with a carmaker around autonomous driving – it already has one with Volvo, under which Volvo supplies the base vehicle along with redundant power supply and other features which is then plugged into Uber’s autonomous driving “brain”. It looks like the Daimler/Mercedes relationship will be similar. Both Alphabet’s Waymo and Uber have now made clear statements to the effect that they don’t see value in trying to build cars, a topic on which Apple still seems to be somewhat uncertain. What’s less clear is whether Uber, like Waymo, sees a role for itself in designing the hardware to go into cars, such as LIDAR. These tie-ups between carmakers and ride sharing services make plenty of sense: if autonomous driving is going to have a role in the near term, it will likely be as part of ride sharing or ride hailing services, which have narrowly defined geographic areas in which they operate – that’s the same reason Ford’s aggressive 2021 goal is designed for a fleet scenario rather than retail sales. It’s also interesting to see a premium brand like Mercedes associated with Uber here – though limos were an important part of the early value proposition for Uber, the focus has since shifted well down market towards UberX and Uber Pool.
via Bloomberg