OEM Update: Honda, GM, Tesla

Honda Acura RLX: According to The Motley Fool, Honda is testing an autonomous Acura with Lidar and other sensors near San Francisco.

It sounds like early days, but I was interested to read about “GoMentum Station, a special testing facility near San Francisco.”

A challenge with developing self-driving cars in the Bay Area is the cost of land, and thus the scarcity of test facilities. Google tests their cars at decommissioned Castle Air Force base in the Central Valley, hours from their Mountain View headquarters.

It’s also interesting to read about Honda’s foray into self-driving cars, as they have been one of the less visible autonomous vehicle OEMs, thus far.

Finally, the news-breaking ability of The Motley Fool is surprising to me. I think of them as a financial publication, not a tech or automotive shop. But they have been all over self-driving car news.

Chevy Bolt: GM is testing the Bolt in San Francisco. This is not surprising, given their acquisition of Cruise Automation. But it’s an indicator that the Cruise team is continuing to function post-acquisition, which is a good sign.

Tesla and Mando: Tesla has inked a deal with Mando, Korea’s largest Tier 1 automotive parts supplier.

Mando doesn’t have the name recognition in the US that Delphi, or Continental, or Bosch have, but they’re a major supplier, particularly to Korean car manufacturers.

It’s hard to tell how important this deal is — most OEMs have some sort of relationship with almost every supplier.

The theory floated by The Country Caller is that Mando is less expensive than other Tier 1 suppliers and this is a way for Tesla to cut costs as it moves down market to the $35,000 Model 3.

Open Relationship

Google and FCA might be making minivans together, but they’re still seeing other people.

“This is just FCA and Google building 100 cars together,” Google self-driving car chief executive John Krafcik said in an interview on the sidelines of an energy conference in Washington.

“We’re still talking to a lot of different automakers,” he added. “We’ve been very open about what the technology is and the problem we want to solve together. Solving this problem is going to require a lot of partnership.”

That’s either a pretty good headfake or a remarkably unenthusiastic partnership endorsement.

Recall my earlier post that this partnership seems like a minor win for Google and even less promising for FCA.

Uber’s Self-Driving Car

Uber won the Internet today with news that it is testing its self-driving car in Pittsburgh, the hometown of its Advanced Technology Center.

Kudos to Uber!

Testing a self-driving car is a big step, especially in real-world scenarios.

Photos of the car show an impressive array of sensors, which must make the car insanely expensive. In fairness, Uber ATC head John Bares is completely open that this is “nascent technology”.

It’s pretty exciting for me that they picked a Ford Fusion as the base for the car!

The Queen’s Speech

Queen Elizabeth II of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland recently gave her annual address to Parliament, and allegedly it contained a plug for self-driving cars.

I write “allegedly” because I read several headlines about the speech, but none of the articles I read actually quoted the Queen. Maybe there is a prohibition against quoting British royalty?

Here’s an account from Fleet News:

A Modern Transport Bill, which encourages investment in driverless cars and aims to ensure insurance is available to their users, has been announced by the Queen at the state opening of Parliament.

The Government says the Bill will help cut red tape and put the right framework in place to allow innovation, which it claims will put the UK at the forefront of autonomous and driverless vehicle ownership and use.

Good for the UK!

Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo are all testing autonomous vehicles in the UK already, so hopefully this clears a path for them to accelerate.

Weekend Roundup

Apple and Didi Chuxing: Apple just invested $1 billion in the Chinese ride-sharing company. It’s not clear to me to what extent this is a bet on ride-sharing, China, or self-driving cars.

“The ride-sharing investment barely dents Apple’s war chest, which stood at $232.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of its most recent earnings.”

BMW Self-Driving Car: They plan to launch in 2021. It looks like the Batmobile. “Our goal is already clearly-defined — to be number one in autonomous driving”, said BMW CEO Harald Krueger.

Mobileye Locks In Customers: But they won’t say who they are.

Audi Self-Driving Car Has Manners: Their concept car acts like a human driver — including giving extra space to trucks, and telegraphing (visually) it’s lane changes.

GM Acknowledges Google, Tesla: “GM executive Richard Holman said he and his colleagues once thought self driving cars would become available in 2035 or so. But thanks to the two Silicon Valley companies ‘pushing the envelope,’ he now seems that happening 15 years earlier.”

Automotive Grade Linux

PCWorld has a quick writeup of a project called Automotive Grade Linux, run by the Linux Foundation.

The goal is straightforward enough — to create a Linux flavor that meets the needs of the automotive industry.

They’re starting with a focus on infotainment consoles, which are the big screens in the center of many modern cars that offer navigation, music, Bluetooth integration, and more.

But the eventual goal is to be the operating system for the entire car.

This is an interesting idea, and analogous to the hardware world. Automotive grade hardware is often a modified version of off-the-shelf hardware, with housing designed for the rough conditions and longer lifetimes required by a car.

One concern I have is whether there will be enough of an ecosystem around AGL. Ubuntu isn’t a perfect solution for cars, but one nice thing about it is that so many people use Ubuntu that the bugs are driven out quickly.

Autonomy and the Law

Crain’s Detroit Business published a story about all of the Michican law firms that are forming autonomous vehicle legal teams to handle this new category of business.

And I can imagine there is lots of new business to get. In particular, the attorney’s quoted in the story talk a lot about connectivity issues. Whereas I might have guessed that the legal issues surrounding autonomy are primarily safety-related, these legal teams think there is a lot of legal work related to transmitting data from the car to the cloud or to other cars.

The geographic angle is also interesting. One of the lawyers mentions that her autonomous vehicle group was formed in response to requests for legal help from startups.

Many of those startups are probably California-based, although the article doesn’t specify.

I’ve written before about the Michigan-California competition for OEMs, but it makes sense that this competition travels all the way up the supply chain.

Land Grab

A major property manager just let slip that both Apple and Google are looking for large spaces, specifically for their autonomous vehicle efforts.

The comments come from Victor Coleman, the CEO of Hudson Pacific Properties, which is apparently a major Bay Area landlord.

The news is a little bit more revelatory for Apple, whose autonomous vehicle efforts have been mysterious to the point that many people (or least I) wonder whether Apple is making any headway.

“We’re seeing the Toyotas of the world, the Teslas of the world, BMWs, Mercedes. Ford now is out in the marketplace looking for space,” he said on the landlord’s quarterly investor call. “I haven’t even mentioned the 400,000 square feet that Google’s looking to take down and the 800,000 square feet that Apple’s looking to take down for their autonomous cars as well.”

That Google is looking for major space isn’t so surprising, given how public they have been about moving their AV team out from under the X umbrella.

GTA V: Google Car

At first I thought this third-party mash-up of the Google Car and Grand Theft Auto would be funny. And I guess it is, sort of.

But it also involves mowing down a lot of virtual pedestrians, which doesn’t seem quite so amusing, although I realize that’s part of the attraction of the GTA franchise.

Maybe I need a better sense of humor?

In any case, it’s worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrPeC1ez-M4

GM and Lyft

GM and Lyft announced that they plan to test self-driving cars on real customers within the next year. That’s a pretty aggressive timeline and a pretty amazing goal.

The reports have been pretty light on details, so there’s not much comment on.

One thought is that this would be awesome.

Another is that I’d love to see some firmer details around this prediction. For example, how many cars will there be and how tightly geo-fenced will the routes be?

I was trying to think of how likely I believe this prediction is to come to pass, but it’s impossible to put a finger on that without firmer details.

A third thought is that this would show a remarkably successful and fast integration of the Cruise acquisition into GM.

My last thought is that asking people take a ride in an autonomous vehicle is probably a smaller lift than asking them to purchase one outright. So this seems like a smart way for Lyft to introduce their AVs.