“We’re Looking for Innovators”

Dice.com has a couple of articles up about the huge demand for self-driving car engineers. And my cricket buddy from Ford, Jinesh Jain, is featured!

So I thought I’d share some of Jinesh’s quotes.

“It’s helpful to know C++ or to have experience with human-machine interaction. But being adaptable and a quick learner is more important since companies that design and build robotic cars may be using a different mix of technologies or applying them in different ways.”

And I like to think that this quote is specifically directed at me 😛

“Successful candidates bring a fresh set of eyes and new ideas. The auto industry is on the cusp of a great transition so, we’re looking for people who can drive innovation.”

Jinesh is great. You should work on self-driving cars so you can meet him!

Tesla and Mobileye Break Up

On an earnings call today, Mobileye announced that it will not be providing any more computer vision or sensing products to Tesla. This ends what had been perhaps the most prominent manufacturer-supplier relationship in the autonomous vehicle world.

Mobileye announced that it will move from focusing on driver assistance components to a focus on fully autonomous vehicle components. However, Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua declined to state who broke up with who.

This is a huge surprise to me, although in hindsight there were some signs.

Immediately after the announcement of the first Tesla Autopilot fatality, Mobileye and Tesla issued conflicting statements about whether Tesla could have used Mobileye’s technology to prevent the crash. Mobileye said its products were not yet designed to handle that type of situation, whereas Tesla indicated the sensor data could be used to avoid future such accidents.

That was a surprising amount of daylight between two normally tight partners.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also tweeted some positive statements about progress being made with Bosch, which is Tesla’s radar vendor. The absence of any such statements with Mobileye was conspicuous.

Finally, there have been on-again-off-again rumors about whether Tesla was looking for a different computer vision vendor for years.

Writing all that down, I’m thinking maybe this wasn’t such a shock after all.

Self-Driving Car Panel

A small team of us from the Udacity self-driving car team will be at the Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence panel tonight, which focuses on Self-Driving Cars.

Please come out to meet us!

Sorry, I should have posted this information much earlier. The event opens in five minutes and the panel starts in an hour, so unless you happen to live right next to the NVIDIA campus (the host site), it might be impractical to attend.

But if you are here, please say hi!

Perfect Is Not the Enemy of Good

NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind recently announced that automakers “can’t wait for perfect” in the release of self-driving technology, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Rosekind declined to address the May fatality involving Autopilot because NHTSA is investigating the incident. The agency’s main objective, he said, is to reduce traffic fatalities, which rose to 35,000 in 2015, an increase of 8% compared with 2014.

“We should be desperate for anything we can find to save people’s lives,” Mr. Rosekind said.

That strikes me as just right.

Unrelated Fun Fact

The building in the cover photo here is my old office when I worked for Ford, and the driver in the photo is my old boss Tory Smith.

Test Tracks

Today The New York Times banged on one of my favorite drums — the need for test tracks for autonomous vehicles testing.

Some Michigan lawmakers are pushing for a centralized national test track for autonomous vehicles.

“We know we need a national testing and validation site,” Senator [Gary] Peters said at an automotive digital security conference here. “We need one in place where all the auto companies can come together.”

Despite my love for test tracks, I am not crazy about a centralized test track run or funded by the US government. But maybe we take what we can get.

The Times lists several of the leading contenders:

GoMentum Station near Silicon Valley, in California
MCity in Ann Arbor
A site near Blacksburg, Virginia, run by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute
Willow Run, the new General Motors test site in Michigan

There is also Castle Rock (Google) and Pittsburgh (Uber), although those don’t merit a mention in the article.

Self-Driving Car Employers

On Wednesday, Udacity announced the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree, about which I’m super-excited.

One of the first questions we got was, “Are there enough jobs to make this worthwhile? It’s just Google and Tesla, right?”

There are so many jobs!

Transportation-as-a-Service

Uber is building out their own autonomous vehicle division in Pittsburgh.

GM just announced that Lyft will be running GM’s first production run of self-driving cars.

Tech Companies

Google is the most famous tech company working on self-driving cars, but Baidu is working on this as well. Lots of rumors indicate Apple might be working on this.

OEMs

Every OEM has a team, or multiple teams, dedicated to self-driving cars. Tesla, Ford, GM, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, Kia, Volvo, and the list goes on.

Startups

Startups like Otto, Comma.ai, and Zoox are hiring as fast as they can.

Tier 1 Suppliers

Companies like Delphi, Bosch, and Continental are known as Tier 1 suppliers. They sell automotive-grade hardware in bulk to OEMs, and they badly want to win these contracts.

Tier 2 Suppliers

Tier 2 suppliers span a range of specialties, and typically sell their components to Tier 1 suppliers, who in turn package it up for OEMs.

This is a huge category!

In computer vision there is Mobileye, in mapping there is HERE, in processors there is NVIDIA and Intel, in lidar there is Velodyne. So many suppliers!

This is just a sample list of who is hiring. There are a lot more companies, and right now demand for talent is far outstripping supply. It is a great time to go to work on self-driving cars!

Musk’s Second Master Plan

Elon Musk dropped a pretty big blog post on the world yesterday.

I don’t think I could do any better than pull out two quotes, and encourage you to read the whole thing.

The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final stages of completion. It wasn’t all that complicated and basically consisted of:

Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive

Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price

Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car

And…

Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.

And:

So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it

Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Nanodegree

We are building a Self-Driving Car Nanodegree at Udacity!

Please sign up here if you are interested in learning more. Limited enrollment will begin later this summer.

The Self-Driving Car Nanodegree involves courses and projects that will give you hands-on experience with deep learning, robotics, computer vision, sensors, and hardware. It will be a blast.

One of the best parts is that Sebastian Thrun will be leading the nanodegree with me!

Sebastian is the co-founder of Udacity, and also a rockstar in the world of autonomous vehicles. Before Udacity, Sebastian launched Google’s Self-Driving Car program. And even before that, he won the DARPA Grand Challenge self-driving car race as a Stanford professor.

I have had so much fun learning about self-driving cars with Sebastian, and I’m confident you will, too.

My own career in self-driving cars started with Udacity’s Artificial Intelligence for Robotics course, and I followed that with an arduous combination of online courses and projects and networking.

Our goal with the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree is to create a program that is fun and comprehensive and not at all arduous.

Most of all, we want to help you learn the skills and techniques from the most advanced autonomous vehicle companies in the world!

So, please, sign up here to learn more, and join us as part of the first class of self-driving car engineers at Udacity!

GM to Launch Self-Driving Cars with Lyft

Big news. GM is going to launch its self-driving cars “much faster than people anticipate”, and their going to be on the Lyft network. And by all appearances, the platform will be the Chevy Bolt EV.

GM’s Chief Engineer Pam Fletcher told Tech Insider:

We are working on an on-demand ride-sharing network with Lyft, it’s not something we are thinking about, it’s something we are very much readying for consumer use.

That’s about the extent of the news, though. Open questions include what cities this will operate in, what the launch schedule is, how much the cars will cost, what kind of sensors they use, if they will even have a steering wheel, and when they will be available for purchase outside the Lyft network.

I guess that’s a heads-up to Uber, though.

Black Boxes

Germany is considering requiring automotive manufacturers to include the equivalent of airplane black boxes in new automobiles.

Manufacturers will also be required to install a black box that records when the autopilot system was active, when the driver drove and when the system requested that the driver take over, according to the proposals.

This seems like it could help a lot, and increase accountability and trust in automotive manufacturers. There are privacy considerations, and hopefully this can be done in a way to mitigate those issues.

I’d love to see the industry voluntarily adopt a standard and opt-in, but if it has to be done by law, this seems like one of the higher-value regulations I’ve seen.