Narrative: Tech Disrupts Transportation
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Uber Hires Veteran NASA Engineer to Develop Flying Cars – Bloomberg (Feb 6, 2017)
Amazon is fond of making announcements around cool but generally far-off concepts around the end-of-year holidays as a way of giving its brand a boost just when people are thinking about buying lots of stuff online. The timing here may be a coincidence, but it certainly won’t hurt Uber to have some flying car stories out there at a time when its brand has taken something of a knock in the US from the immigration brouhaha. Flying cars are probably the only thing Uber is working on that’s even further out than its autonomous cars in terms of timelines – hiring a NASA engineer to head the project is a great PR move, but there’s no chance we’re seeing anything like this in any American cities anytime soon. Take all the regulatory hurdles associated with autonomous cars and then put them in the sky and you have some idea of what these VTOL (vertical take off and landing) vehicles would have to overcome to go into production, even with human drivers/pilots. And as with autonomous driving, Uber’s cavalier attitude towards regulation doesn’t give me lots of confidence that they’re the ones I want pioneering this technology.
via Bloomberg
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
The Google Car was supposed to disrupt the car industry. Now Waymo is taking on suppliers – Recode (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a subtle shift, but an important one – one that began to become apparent a few weeks back. Alphabet is fundamentally a software, rather than hardware, company (Google’s recent push into first party hardware notwithstanding) – that’s where its skills have always lain, and where it has been able to add the most value both in its own products and in partnering with others. However, in the car space, it’s increasingly clear that Waymo will pair those software skills with developing hardware skills around things like LIDAR, and potentially attempt to sell packages of hardware and software or even complete systems, rather than just providing the software brains that will leverage hardware from other suppliers in cars. There are pros and cons here – on the one hand, Waymo doesn’t yet have great credibility in hardware in cars, and so trying to bundle the two together may threaten its ability to sell its software. On the other hand, it didn’t have much credibility in self-driving software either a few years back, but has earned it over time and now has partnerships with FCA, among others, so perhaps it can win trust in the same way with hardware as it makes progress here.
via Recode
Tesla sues ex-Autopilot director for taking proprietary info, poaching employees – TechCrunch (Jan 26, 2017)
Things are getting nasty between Tesla and one of its prominent former employees, Sterling Anderson, who used to run its Autopilot program. The lawsuit alleges that Anderson both took proprietary data from Tesla when he left and that he tried to poach additional Tesla employees to work on his new venture with Chris Urmson, formerly of Google’s autonomous driving unit. This lawsuit just highlights how competitive the space has become, and how eagerly many different companies including established carmakers, smaller carmakers like Tesla, big tech companies like Apple and Google (and Uber), and startups like Anderson and Urmson’s new venture Aurora are pursuing it. We’re going to see a lot of ugliness, and certainly plenty more hiring and poaching between these various companies, over the coming years.
via TechCrunch
Lyft to launch in 100 new US cities, including 40 on Thursday – Business Insider (Jan 25, 2017)
Lyft is perennially in second place in the US ride sharing market, in terms of cities served, rides taken, and any other metric you might care to check. But it’s also been losing far less money at its smaller scale, and has looked like hitting profitability rather sooner than Uber. However, a massive expansion like this is likely to set that effort back somewhat, given that the main reason for the losses is customer acquisition costs, which are always highest in a brand new market. I’ve yet so see any commentary on that point from any of the coverage on this news today, but it should be a major focus here for anyone watching the company.
via Business Insider
Key Google executive heads to Uber – CNBC (Jan 20, 2017)
We’re not seeing anywhere near the same hysteria over this move from Google to Uber as we saw around Chris Lattner’s recent move from Apple to Tesla. In fairness, Singhal left Google a while back rather than making a direct switch, but the move is in some ways very similar – a senior engineer working on key products at a pure tech company is moving to a car-centric tech company. No-one seems to think Amit Singhal leaving Google is a sign that things are going wrong there, in contrast to the reaction to Lattner’s departure, which just highlights the power of narratives – Lattner’s departure from Apple taps into a powerful present narrative, while Singhal’s doesn’t. A few years back, when there was a cluster of departures from Google in quick succession, this was a story, but not today – that reflects both overall perceptions of these companies, but also the fact that people often do leave in clusters, often for similar reasons, but not always because they’re unhappy. Often, it’s just that they’ve been there for a long time and want a change of scenery or a new challenge. It’s nice to see this hire being seen in a more rational light. Update: as Recode points out, there are actually two hires here from Google, not just one, which just reinforces the point about narratives above.
via Key Google executive heads to Uber – CNBC
Proposed state law would require emissions-free autonomous vehicles, and tax them by the mile – The Boston Globe (Jan 20, 2017)
As regulators and governments seek to provide a legal framework for autonomous driving, we’ll see something of a dichotomy between those who try to be as welcoming as possible to experiments and development of the technology, and those who see this as yet another opportunity to drive tax revenue or other separate goals. These lawmakers in Massachusetts seem to be taking the second approach, proposing that autonomous cars pay a per-mile road tax and produce zero emissions. Contrast this with Arizona’s governor, who has been very open to testing of autonomous vehicles and famously invited Uber’s self-driving cars to his state when they were banned from San Francisco. San Francisco, of course, is somewhere in the middle, largely open to testing of the technology, but with reasonable limits. Just as there will be fierce competition between tech companies around autonomous driving, there will be competition between states and cities around the technology too. Policies such as those being advocated in Massachusetts are likely to do little to endear the state to would-be autonomous driving companies.
NHTSA Finds No Fault in Tesla Autopilot With Regard to May 2016 Fatal Crash – NHTSA (Jan 19, 2017)
This is NHTSA’s report on the Tesla Autopilot crash in May 2016, which was investigating whether the Autopilot system was at fault. The headline from Tesla’s perspective is that the Autopilot system wasn’t at fault, because it (a) operated as expected, and (b) wasn’t intended to be able to avoid such cross-traffic collisions. That’s good for Tesla, because it exonerates its system, and also because NHTSA determined that its Autosteer system increases safety by 40%. Incidentally, the report also classifies Autopilot as a Level 2 system, whereas I’ve seen some people incorrectly refer to its as Level 3. The key here is that Level 3 systems allow the driver to stop paying attention, whereas Level 2 systems require full driver attention at all times. The problem in this crash was that the driver treated the system as a Level 3 system (which the term Autopilot somewhat implies), and paid insufficient attention to notice the truck crossing the car’s path. Tesla’s system may not have been at fault, but there’s a reasonable argument to be made that it’s not doing enough to train drivers not to treat its Level 2 system as something more – though NHTSA didn’t address that point in its report.
via NHTSA Finds No Fault in Tesla Autopilot With Regard to May 2016 Fatal Crash – NHTSA (PDF) – see also news coverage of the report on Techmeme