Cruise has kept at least a portion of its self-driving fleet operating in San Francisco during the COVID pandemic. Those vehicles are focused on delivering meals to vulnerable populations in the city, according to Mashable.
This is a great move by Cruise, both because it keeps the vehicles up and running, and because it contributes to a societal need.
Without a larger mission, Cruise might find it hard to justify violating shelter-in-place restrictions by driving on city streets with two vehicle operators inside a prototype autonomous vehicle. But Cruiseâs mission transforms the testing operation into an âessentialâ service, and justifiably so.
The goal of self-driving cars is to serve our communities in dangerous times and situations, like the pandemic in which we now find ourselves. The autonomous technology may not have fully arrived yet, but Cruise shows how we can achieve some of those goals in the here and now.
Teslaâs Q1 2020 earnings call was Wednesday. By all accounts, the company crushed it. They turned a $16 million profit, which Car and Driver marks as the first time the company has ever turned a profit in Q1.
The Tesla roller coaster ride has been and up and down for years. The nadir was perhaps when short-sellers baited Elon Musk into tweeting that he would take the company private. That tweet violated all sorts of SEC guidelines and was a bit of a PR disaster. Around the same time, the company periodically came within months or even weeks of bankruptcy.
Flash forward a few years and today Tesla is back on top as the Americaâs most valuable (and most profitable) care company.
Keep in mind, of course, that by just about any other metricââârevenue, units, employeesâââGM and Ford are an orders of magnitude bigger than Tesla.
But Wall Street seems to think Teslaâs small profit in the present is a prelude to much bigger profits in the future.
I have a three year-old boy who, like most three year-old boys everywhere, is in love with construction equipment. Heâll watch construction sites for hours. He canât even put on his own socks, but he can distinguish between a dozer, a digger, a front-loader, a crane, and a backhoe.
I stumbled across this writeup of Built Robotics, a San Francisco-based construction equipment maker. Their homepage features a rotating model (I think itâs a model?) of an autonomous dozer. I have to get one of those for my kid.
Itâs interesting that their autonomous dozers feature cabs, although the video on their website shows an operator on foot controlling driver-less equipment via iPad.
Back when I worked at Ford, one of the points that my manager liked to emphasize was that Ford makes cars for the masses.
Although he never made a specific comparison to Tesla, it wasnât too hard to imagine the connection. Ford, the company of the Model T and the $5 Day, isnât on earth to make high-end cars for Silicon Valley millionaires. Fordâs purpose in this world is to make terrific, affordable cars for everyone.
It makes perfect sense that the companyâs recent announcement of the Mustang Mach-Eâââan electric SUVâââis priced at less than half of Teslaâs Model X. Ford makes cars for the masses.
And frankly, it looks like a pretty awesome car for the masses.
Recently, Waymo rolled out fully driverless vehicles to pre-approved riders living in suburban Arizona. Ed Niedermeyer has a great article (and video) in TechCrunch.
My former boss, and Voyage CEO, Oliver Cameron is a bit astounded that this event has passed with barely a ripple in the news cycle, as am I.
The lack of attention is, in some ways, a good thing.
Suburban Arizona residents havenât gotten upset, thereâs been relatively little news to make of the whole event, and so far none of the riders (who are under NDA) have found a reason to make a big deal over this.
One of questions Niedermeyer ponders is what threshold Waymo crossed that finally allowed for driverless vehicles, albeit in a tightly geofenced area.
âWaymoâs decision to put me in a fully driverless car on public roads anywhere speaks to the confidence it puts in its âdriver,â but the company wasnât able to point to one specific source of that confidenceâŚ.
âAutonomous driving is complex enough not to rely on a singular metric,â Panigrahi said.
Itâs a sensible, albeit frustrating, argument, given that the most significant open question hanging over the autonomous drive space is âhow safe is safe enough?ââ
Iâm not so sure I agree with Niedermeyer that the argument is âsensibleâ. Waymoâs response to the key question of what makes its vehicles safe enough to be driverless is, essentially, âtrust usâ.
And so far that works, at least for Waymo, which has done virtually everything right and caused no significant injuries, much less fatalities, in its ten years of existence.
Were Waymo to continue that trend indefinitely into the future, âtrust usâ, would continue to suffice.
Presumably, though, as Waymo ramps up miles and riders, collisions and injuries will happen. At that point, âtrust usâ probably wonât seem so sensible.
But all of that is in a hypothetical future. For now, I think itâs okay to celebrate and revel in what humanity is accomplishing.
We hear from a lot of Udacity students about their experiences in our programsâââthe good and the bad. Both positive and negative feedback are valuable, and itâs always nice to hear when weâve done a good job.
I will present Teaching Autonomous Driving at Massive Scale at 9am on Sunday, October 27. WEinADT (as it is called) is part of the larger IEEE Intelligent Systems Transportation Conference.
Professor Alexander Carballo has done terrific work organizing the workshop and I am lucky to be a part of the agenda!
This will be my first time visiting New Zealand, and I am super-excited to participate in WEinADT and ITSC. If youâre going to be at ITSC, please swing by my presentation at 9am on Sunday to say hello!
If you happen to be in New Zealand, even if you wonât be attending ITSC, send me (david.silver@udacity.com) an email! Iâd be delighted to meet some friendly faces in Auckland.
Reilly Brennan, a venture capitalist at Trucks.VC and one of the movers and shakers in the world of autonomous vehicles (seriously, look at that investment portfolio!), has a short post critiquing the naming regulations for advanced driver assistance systems.
âWeâre probably using [driver assistance systems] the wrong way and I believe a significant contributor to that problem is the branding and marketing of these systems.â
In particular, Reilly points out that USDA food labeling standards are much more stringent than labeling standards for driver assistance systems, which donât even really exist.
âBut if you want to brand your carâs systems as Auto-magic-pilot-drive-yourself, there is little today that the US Department of Transportation or Federal Trade Commission will do to prevent you.â
He doesnât quite prescribe a solution, but calls for âequal attentionâ between food labeling and vehicle systems, particularly because vehicle systems can kill other people on the road besides just the customer of the system.
Iâm genuinely uncertain how to handle this myself, and the post is worth a read and a ponder.
On a recent episode of MergeNow, Ed Niedermeyer interviewed Jon Mullen of RightHook, an autonomous vehicle simulation startup. I worked with Jon at Ford, so I was particularly interested.
Jon was on the show describing ScenarioScript, âan open format scenario-describing language.â Think of ScenarioScript as a format for describing traffic scenarios for autonomous vehicles, including variables like weather, road dimensions, and other relevant parameters.
Early in the show, Ed asked Jon if the release of ScenarioScript is an attempt to move everyone onto RightHookâs ecosystem. Jon said that was not the case, and itâs worth listening yourself to hear why and decide whether you believe that.
What struck me, though, was the question of whether and why it ever would be remunerative for a company to move the world onto its chosen open-source ecosystem.
The best example I can think of this is Bell Labs, where Unix, C, and C++ were invented, along with lots of other things. Bell Labs seems to me to be understudiedâââthe Wikipedia section on Nobel Prizes and Turing Awards is tremendous and must outstrip any other non-university in the world, certainly any for-profit entity.
But itâs less clear how much Bell (later AT&T, and now Nokia) benefited from these inventions. At the very least, the through-line from open-source creation to corporate profit requires some thinking.
Another, smaller, example is Willow Garage, the technology incubator that at one time maintained ROS, OpenCV, and PCL. All of those projects have been critical for self-driving car development, and robotics more generally. But Willow Garage dissolved as an entity in 2014.
The list could keep going. The success of Java was, at least, insufficient to prop up SUN. JavaScript didnât save Netscape, or its eventual acquirer, AOL.
Perhaps the most prominent counterexample is Android, which has made Google lots of money (I think) via Google Play commissions on apps.
Other companies are centered around developing hosting and services for a particular open-source project. MongoDB Inc. does this for MongoDB, Elastic does this for Elasticsearch, and Databricks does this for Apache Spark. All of these companies have been quite successful, but in the long run, Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers look like real threats.
Looking over this list, I actually think the invention of JavaScript at Netscape is the most instructive. JavaScript was transformational for the browser industry, and the Internet generally. But the open-source nature of the tool may have limited the value that Netscape specifically was able to capture.
A similar case might pertain to Unix, C, and C++ at Bell Labs.
These tools were a tremendous benefit to the entire industry, and perhaps helped Netscape and Bell at the expense of alternative (TV and postal mail, respectively?). However, the benefit accrued to the entire industry, not only to the company that invented to the technology.
To bring this full circle, if you go back and listen to Jon Mullenâs rationale for open-sourcing ScenarioScript, thatâs what he says đ
Dan Primack has been writing about the stumbles of VC-backed companies that have grown tremendously but struggle with unit economics. WeWork is the poster child of the moment, but per Primack:
âThere are dozens, if not hundreds, of other mature startups caught with their income statements down.â
While heâs not quite willing to come out and make a bold prediction, he hints that maybe, possibly, things might be tough for certain types of startups:
âFor companies with reasonable controls and paths to profitability, all systems remain goâŚ.But for unicorns that never looked beyond the trough, it could be slaughter season.â
Where I think this intersects with autonomous vehicles is that so many AV startups have raised huge amounts of money without a clear path to revenue, much less profitability.
This aligns with another trend, which is the increasingly common belief that the deployment of driverless (i.e. no safety operator) Level 4 vehicles is going to take a while.
âWe expect to see small-scale deployments of self-driving vehicles in the next five years, and then see the technology phase in over the next 30 to 50 years.â
Autonomous vehicles have tremendous capital requirements, which have thus far been financed either by automotive companies or VC firms. This has, in some cases, been spectacularly successful for early investors.
But if the funding well dries up, and weâre looking at 30 to 50 years until meaningful deployment, thereâs going to be a push for revenue in the near term.
Iâm interested to watch those revenue sources emerge.
David Silver 