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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

>"If you assume the cost of these autonomous vehicles, the very early ones, will be six figures, there aren’t very many retail customers that are willing to go out and spend that kind of money," Ableson said.

"Tesla Narrowly Misses 80,000-Vehicle Sales Goal in 2016"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-misses-its-2016-sales-goa...

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Yeah I think they missed the "..on a GM" portion of that sentiment. There are plenty of people going and buying six figure cars, clearly. However, spending six figures on the Chevy brand would feel weird.

A bit pedantic, but the Corvette z06 gets pretty close to six figures.

True, although it's arguable that that car is more a "Corvette" than a Chevy, from a branding POV.

Well for GM, 80k cars doesn't move the needle.

GM sold 320k cars in December 2016 alone.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/auto-industry-poised-to-set-ann...

None of those 320k cars GM sold have autopilot hardware sending data back to the manufacturer for self-driving algorithm refinement. All of those Tesla vehicles do (Autopilot 2 hardware). New Teslas are delivered every day that accelerate the rate at which Tesla collects autopilot data.

Hence the comparison.

EDIT: https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles...

"Tesla has now 1.3 billion miles of Autopilot data going into its new self-driving program"

There's a reason Tesla picks up the tab for your vehicle's machine to machine cellular connection. And why it connects to wifi when you're at home.

I think you're missing the point that a car manufacturer does not care about autopilot for autopilot's sake. They care about the feature in so far as it can drive sales and revenue.

Think about it this way: Companies like Google or Amazon don't launch products just because the tech is cool or innovative. They only launch products that can become $1B+ drivers of revenue for them.

(fwiw I am not the one downvoting you)

Having a better autopilot than your competitors can strongly drive sales and revenue if that's what the market wants.

>Google or Amazon don't launch products just because the tech is cool or innovative. //

That is a thing though, have cool stuff that serves as advertising to showoff your company as being cool & cutting-edge.

Amazon gets a lot of mindshare out of echo beyond the raw value accrued through sales IMO.

The only thing Tesla vehicles have the bandwidth and storage to send back is "oops i'm crashed".

It's possibly a way to test your implementation by comparing it to what the human does, but that doesn't apply for a million basic things like sign recognition and you can't teach machine learning with that.

Tesla fans seem to believe this very very strongly. Do you get a massive mobile bill from your car? Does your car have a huge storage device in the trunk? Does it upload 50GB of data over your wifi every time you park it in your garage? If not, the amount of data that Tesla collects for this purpose has probably been dramatically overstated.

They're not necessarily uploading continuous video of the entire time you're driving to the mothership - that would indeed be wasteful. More likely, they're monitoring diagnostic values from their autopilot algorithm (like "error in predicted steering angle") and using that to trigger recording of video and sensor values for a short period, which could then be used as "test cases" for future algorithm updates.

When is the autopilot data "good enough" with any further improvements being marginal, i.e. how much of the data being sent back to Tesla is repetitive?

This problem lends itself to horizontal scaling very well, I'd say.

GM sold a lot more cars, but in my line of work 2% definitely counts as "moving the needle."

That figure was comparing Tesla worldwide sales to GM's US sales. GM sold over 10 million cars worldwide in 2016, it's more like 0.75%.

And that's only in the US -- GM sells something like 10 million cars per year.

[Edit: Over 10 million cars last year: http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/07/news/companies/gm-record-sal... ]

Cost of these autonomous vehicles, the very early ones, will be six figures

GM paid a billion dollars for those Cruise clowns. If they build 10,000 self-driving cars, that alone is $100K per car.

Meanwhile, Volvo is quietly putting 100 customers in self-driving cars.[1] They're still way ahead on marketing, too.[2]

Volvo and Google/Waymo are the only self-driving car makers I'd trust right now. They're the only ones who take the safety issues seriously. All the other ones testing in California have crappy disconnect statistics. (Uber refuses to test in California because they'd have to report their numbers, but reports of their bad driving indicate their system isn't very good.)

[1] http://blog.caranddriver.com/meet-the-first-real-family-slat... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA

Until companies actually launch their products, I think nothing is a foregone conclusion. We don't know that Volvo's technology is just going to work flawlessly. People assumed that about Tesla and at least 1 person died (there are reports of accidents in China as well that tend to miss the US media).

I am strongly against the PR blitz that self-driving cars have been getting for years, but to judge a company's product before they have a product is a little presumptuous.

Each company has its pros and cons. Waymo certainly seems to have the current lead, but they bled so much talent it's strongly indicative of a serious internal cultural problem. Delphi has been steadily improving their technology over the years, but as more automakers build their own tech it will be hard for them to find a buyer. Argo is the new up and comer, but they haven't really announced anything other than a large amount of funding and some great leadership. Volvo seems to be doing a great job and I hope they deliver on their promises, but they haven't launched yet so who knows what will happen. Uber pursued the technology aggressively and that has led to something of a shitshow, and they've already lost a lot of talent. Tesla had the PR machine that is Elon Musk behind it and their customers love them (and many of their customers believe they have level 4 autonomy) but their track record for self-driving technology is questionable. Cruise has a great business model by working with Lyft and GM and have clearly developed quickly, but they haven't released nearly as much data as Waymo. Then there are the others that haven't really had any PR announcements and the companies that are completely in stealth mode.

I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen.

One of the few sources of objective data is the CA DMV's disconnect and crash reports.[1] There, Google/Waymo has two orders of magnitude fewer disconnects per mile than anybody else testing in California.

A certain level of paranoia in the design is required. The kind of paranoia that aviation engineers have. Volvo gets this - they have dual everything, lots of sensors, and their CEO says that if there's an accident in autonomous mode, it's Volvo's fault. Google got it while Chris Urmson was in charge. The others, not so much. Tesla ... many of their customers believe they have level 4 autonomy. Yes. At least one death is clearly attributable to customer overconfidence in the system.

One thing has become quite clear - expecting the driver to back up the self-driving system on a second by second basis does not work. If the driver can tune out, they will tune out. It's now clear, even to Tesla, that if you don't have level 4 automation, you must keep the driver's hands on the wheel.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/

> We don't know that Volvo's technology is just going to work flawlessly. People assumed that about Tesla and at least 1 person died //

There are two problems for autonomous vehicles that this part of your comment highlights - one is how good a driver is good enough, is it good enough if they have less accidents than a taxi-driver?

The other is managing the negative perception when the press report deaths, even if the vehicles are safer and produce less deaths than human drivers, the press will ensure the perception is negative despite what the statistics may show.

And the Teslas are nicer cars to boot.

But it probably isn't a great comparison, at least not until we see what the GM cars can do and then the Teslas prove out equivalent capabilities (without the benefit of $50,000 of sensor hardware).

I also think they missed the mark on "six figures". If that car costs six figures they are DOA. The most expensive part of self-driving cars (as I understand it) is the LIDAR, and I think those have come down to sub $10,000, and Tesla has more-or-less figured out how to do self-driving without it.

I would expect that the engineering costs to bring the vehicle to market would, even when divided among many sales, far exceed the cost of a single LIDAR unit.

They're not DOA if they allow fleet operators to not hire drivers.

>"Tesla Narrowly Misses 80,000-Vehicle Sales Goal in 2016"

So 1/10 of 1% market share a whole lot of red ink (meaning cars may be under-priced, increasing quantity demanded), and no competition constitutes "many customers"? I guess it's all relative, but I disagree.

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