Yesterday, while driving to work, I listened to a recent Autonocast episode, “EV Rental Blues.” Basically, they talk about Hertz selling off most of its big recent investment in EV rental cars.

The Autonocast panelists, who are all EV enthusiasts, mostly speculate about the difficulties ordinary, non-EV rental customers encounter when renting their first EV. I suspect the panelists are correct. I helped out my parents once after they unwittingly rented and I half-suspect that my parents – who are not dummies – would’ve just run out of charge and had the tow the car had they not had assistance from me.

But I think it’s also worth pointing out that I also have come to view renting an EV as a bad proposition – and I am not an EV neophyte. I own and drive an EV daily!

The problem with renting an EV is pretty similar to the problem with owning an EV if you don’t have at least moderate speed charging at home or at work. If you can’t charge the EV while you’re hanging out somewhere, doing something else that you would be doing anyway, then you have to take 30-60 minutes out of your life every few days specifically to charge the vehicle.

EVs are terrific when paired with home or office charging, because you don’t have to allocate any extra time to fueling up, not even pulling into a gas station.

But without home or office charging, which is almost always the case for car rental customers (including me), the charging time (and sometimes the lack of charging infrastructure) becomes a major pain. Better to just rent a gas vehicle.

Udacity announced yesterday that it is selling itself to Accenture.

Although I left Udacity three years ago, it looms large in my career. In 2016, Sebastian Thrun recruited me to join his start-up and build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, which wound up teaching tens of thousands of students to work on autonomous vehicles. I led the Nanodegree, and the team the built it, which was the highlight of my career.

2017, in particular, was Udacity’s biggest year. Several other Nanodegrees followed fast on the heels of the self-driving car program, leading the company to rocket ship growth.

The subsequent years had ups and downs, but Udacity always had the best instructional model of any educational enterprise I’ve ever tried.

And that pedagogical success really stemmed from Sebastian. He is the best teacher I’ve ever known – charismatic, but humble enough to realize that students don’t learn from listening to him. Students learn by doing, which was part of Udacity from Day 1. Hands-on quizzes, exercises, and projects, and then feedback on those projects from trained reviewers, are the core of what made Udacity so great at teaching.

I texted Sebastian yesterday to congratulate him on this milestone in Udacity’s journey, and to thank him for recruiting me there, all those years ago.

He texted back and reminded me that my Nanodegree is still out there, along with all the other courses and programs I taught at Udacity, and that people are still learning from me. I hope they keep on learning 🙂

If you follow the CEO’s Twitter account, every once in a while you get an early peek into what the company is about to disclose publicly.

Today Don Burnette posted:

In particular:

2024 is looking to be the biggest year yet for @KodiakRobotics as we gear up for driverless!

I mean, I guess all self-driving companies are always working toward going fully driverless. But I don’t think you have to read too hard between the lines of Don’s tweet to figure out our big focus for 2024 😉

Very cool!

The ankles seem a little stiff, but the demonstration of picking up and egg is very impressive. It’s always hard to know how staged these demo videos are. But I’ve heard previously that the dexterity to grip something fragile without breaking it is pretty hard for robots.

I hope this translates to real breakthroughs for users of prosthetic limbs, among others.

The dance party at the end is a little hokey, but I guess I appreciate the whimsy.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently visited California and got introduced to Kodiak’s defense vehicles. We have been working on both a Class 8 truck and an F-150 for military use, relying most of the same hardware and software that our commercial over-the-highway autonomous trucks use.

“We developed our autonomous driving system in a way that is conducive and broadly applicable to other environments outside of over the road highway,” said Burnette. “We think that’s a strategic advantage. And we want to take advantage of the fact that our system works in these dual use environments.”

Our F-150 is currently my primary project, along with many other colleagues, so this is particularly exciting for me. One of the interesting challenges on which I’m currently focusing is how to make Kodiak’s planning stack correct and robust for multiple types of vehicular platforms – everything from a large tractor-trailer configuration to a pick-up truck.

XPeng’s head of automotive, Wu Xinzhou, just jumped to NVIDIA, and apparently everyone is quite happy about it.

Wu’s job hopping has had the blessing of his former boss. In a Weibo post announcing Wu’s departure, Xpeng’s founder and CEO He Xiaopeng expressed pride in his former employee for attaining a “top-level management role” at a “globally renowned company,” which turned out to be Nvidia.

On social media, He and Wu have each hinted at a tie-up between Xpeng and Nvidia in the area of semiconductors. In a photo posted by Wu the day before he started at Nvidia, he was flanked by Huang and He, suggesting a close partnership between the two companies.

“Tomorrow is my first day at Nvidia, and I appreciate Xiaopeng for personally escorting me here. According to Old Huang [Jensen Huang], I will still be working for Xiaopeng in the future, just without him having to pay my salary,” Wu wrote in the post.

Chinese companies like Baidu, XPeng, and Pony have operated AV engineering units in Silicon Valley for years. Mostly those offices employee Chinese-speaking, often China-born, engineers who live in the US.

Relatively few US companies have opened China offices, particularly in the AV space. In fact, concerns about IP protection have often led US AV firms in the opposite direction.

Opening a China-focused AV division could indicate a combination of bright signals for NVIDIA:

• They anticipate doing even more business in China, despite the deteriorating geopolitical relationships between the US and China.
• They think China is home to world-class talent that is easier to source than in the US.
• They think the cross-cultural and data protection issues that have bedeviled other US-China teams.

Hopefully bright days ahead!

“How (Not) to Get Hit by a Self-Driving Car” is an awesome-looking interactive experience at Playable City, a collection of interactive experiences in cities around the world.

The goal of this particular experience is to traverse a 30 meter long stretch of pavement, littered with cones and other road debris, and touch the goal at the end. The big catch is that if the camera system trained on the space detects you as a human, you lose.

This is a kind of adversarial data collection, where the human participants are trying to beat the system by faking it out and slipping through without detection. The idea is to help people recognize the powers and limitations of the types of cameras that are on self-driving cars. Presumably the data would be useful to perception researchers, as well.

The video shows people turning cartwheels and draping themselves in blankets, trying to fool the camera system.

Of course, an actual self-driving car would have multiple sensors and sensor modalities (radar and lidar, typically). But this is a neat experience, just with a camera!

With founder & CEO & CTO Kyle Vogt’s resignation, Cruise’s EVP of engineering, Mohamed Elshenaway is now President, and seemingly running the company.

I never met Mo personally during my time at Cruise, but he was well-regarded and universally known by his nickname.

According to various news outlets, Mo sent a company-wide email on Thanksgiving Wednesday, outlining the next steps for Cruise. These include a continued focus on the Chevy Bolt (the tradeoff being delays in the future Origin platform), a renewal of driverless service in a single city, and a limited number of layoffs.

The speculation is that Cruise will begin driverless testing in a more friendly regulatory environment than San Francisco, probably Texas or Arizona. That makes sense politically, but culturally Cruise is highly tied to San Francisco. The logic was always to focus on the city that is both one of America’s toughest and home to the company’s headquarters and most of its employees. Once Cruise cracked San Francisco, everything else would be easier.

A few things have changed in the last few years that might call that logic into question:

• Cruise employees are much more geographically distributed. The pandemic normalized remote work, and the tech boom made Cruise more flexible in hiring employees (especially engineers) beyond the Bay Area.
• Waymo’s alternative approach of starting in a much easier environment – Phoenix – and then expanding to San Francisco seems to be successful.
• Cruise’s non-fatal but repeated mishaps strained its relationship with California regulators and San Francisco city officials.

Another notable element of the reported email is that, while layoffs are coming, layoffs in engineering roles are previewed as minimal. One possible outcome could be that low performers might be culled, but otherwise the engineering organization would remain intact.

Perhaps the most important signal, at least to shareholders like myself, is that the plan seems to be for Cruise to continue as a robotaxi-focused mobility company distinct from General Motors.

In the aftermath of Kyle Vogt’s resignation, some people speculated that Mo’s elevation to president might foreshadow efforts to deprioritize operations and perhaps even bring the engineering team into General Motors. So far, that looks to be maybe not the case.