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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Wow. FYI - This is how you mess up content marketing. If the author genuinely wanted me to read the article and get to know the brand, he shouldn't have used such a scummy title. Yes, the article is /technically/ true. But they are only talking about the hardware, and acknowledge in the second paragraph that they don't have the software. So while the title implies self-driving cars are a solved problem, they are really only making claims about hardware. Cool I guess? But tesla probably already beat you to it?

Titles like these are what happen when marketers optimize everything towards clicks, and don't care about actual impact on the brand itself.

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Ok, we changed the title above to one of the subtitles (a photo heading) that appears in the article, which hopefully is less contentious.

That doesn't address the question of exactly what 'self-driving' means in this context, but many articles on the topic suffer from this problem.

Regardless of whether it's true or not, the title is a great example of the "no true Scotsman". [0]

A: We built the first real self-driving car.

B: What about the Waymo car?

A: That's not a _real_ self-driving car.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Saying that self driving car hardware problem is solved and all we need is software is like saying that one solved the problem of building interstellar space ship. All they need now is the warp drive. Otherwise it is all solved...

x is already solved, we just need to solve the parts we haven't solved.

I didn't get that impression. Paragraph two says they have "the most advanced self-driving software ever demonstrated," which has been in use driving cars around in real city traffic on their prototypes or whatever (according to their youtube videos), but the article seems to be saying that they now have designed and built mass-producible cars that can run the software. (If I'm wrong, then yeah, not only the title but the whole article is misleading.)

I guess the hedge-word there is "demonstrated". I'm not sure if Waymo et al have ever demonstrated their most advanced software to the public.

Paragraph 2: "today, we’re unveiling the world’s first mass-producible car designed to operate without a driver"

Implies L5

Paragraph 3: "The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car"

ie L3, you need a driver paying attention like in a Tesla(?)

No, paragraph 3 means it's the third iteration of their hardware. That's unrelated to the self-driving "levels".

>But tesla probably already beat you to it?

Tesla hasn't beat anybody to anything. AP2 is still behind Ap1, which uses a single camera and mobileye's comparitavely tiny Eyeq3 chip.

Waymo and Uber are more likely to have beat them to it (lidar) than Tesla, but point very much taken.

Neither of those companies make cars.. The article is about actually putting a "self-driving" (however they define it) car through a proper manufacturing engineering environment to develop something that can scale to hundreds of thousands of cars per year.

Redesigning the software of a production car and actually integrating the tech at the factory-level gets you much closer to a mass-volume car than making some fancy software with a sensor package that you bolt to the top of a minivan.

Kinda seems like putting the cart before the horse though.

Despite what the mountain of "Autonomous vehicles are around the corner" PR articles say there's still a lot of problems to be worked out before we see any fully autonomous vehicles for sale.

And you need to work out your prototypes issues before you start mass producing something so that you mass produce something that you can actually sell.

>>>Titles like these are what happen when marketers optimize everything towards clicks, and don't care about actual impact on the brand itself.

Uh, you say this as if you truly think that this is NOT the actual premise of marketing.

https://youtu.be/DFCMhSzeGuA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4

Eh. I work at a digital marketing agency and plenty of brands are spending lots of money just so you hear the name and think that brand is good. Some never mention a product or a service, just pure branding.

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