Video on 17 self-driving stories in early 2022

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Here's a new video where I go over 17 different recent stories in self-driving for early 2022. The video is divided up with Youtube "Chapters" so you can easily seek to the stories of interest to you.

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 0:31 Cruise Accident
  • 1:48 Tesla no radar in S or X
  • 2:30 Tesla phantom breaking
  • 3:15 Tesla speeds up delivery if you buy $12K FSD
  • 6:11 Waymo charging money
  • 10:27 Motional Robotaxi in vegas
  • 11:52 Cruise History
  • 12:35 Origin manufacturing approval
  • 13:15 Kyle CEO of Cruise
  • 15:50 Wayve gets a ton of money & Neural Nets
  • 16:54 Waabi World
  • 18:00 Starship gets $100M
  • 19:43 Yandex shuts down delivery and robotaxi
  • 21:10 Waymo trade secrets
  • 22:40 Baidu and AutoX expand in China
  • 23:30 Tesla FSD Rolling Stops
  • 28:30 Dawn Project & Security Risk on Cars in War
  • 31:40 New FMVSS for robots
  • 33:16 Story of Uber safety driver

Comments

What is Toyota "breakthrough" with cameras for training algos?

Press reporting was misleading. They want to use camera only cars for training data. They still plan for the self-driving cars to use a full sensor suite.

breaking news from Handelsblatt VW to use Qualcomm chips

Contract until 2031, vol 1bn
1st chip delivery 2025
Install Software, developed w Bosch
2nd step L4 software install
SoC ship used by all brands fr 2026

Handelsblatt implies exclusive use of Qualcomm chips by VW for autonomous driving SoC for 5 years.

from 2026 onwards across all brands worldwide. Handelsblatt found out from corporate circles. Volkswagen declined to comment on the information.

The contract value is rumored to be around 1 billion.

If true, a negative for Intel's Mobileye.

Volkswagen is making a long-term commitment to the US chip company Qualcomm in the development of automated driving . The carmaker will use the "System-on-a-Chip" (SoC) specially developed for automated driving from 2026 onwards across all brands worldwide. The Handelsblatt found out from corporate circles. Volkswagen declined to comment on the information.

The contract with Qualcomm will continue until 2031. The first chips will be delivered to VW in 2025. According to locals, the contract amount is equivalent to one billion euros.

VW will install the automatic drive software on the Qualcomm chip, which the car manufacturer is currently developing alongside Bosch. In the second step, the programmed automatic drive software on so-called Level 4 should also run on the chip. At this level, cars can drive independently on the highway at all times.

A key element of the plan is the pressure to discover Volkswagen and the entire automotive industry when it comes to connecting and driving freely. According to corporate circles, Qualcomm is a “speed booster”. Thanks to chips from the American group, the car manufacturer could bring Bosch’s software to market more quickly.

A few days ago, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess traveled to Qualcomm's corporate headquarters in San Diego, USA , to sign the contract . There, Diess, together with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Qualcomm Automotive boss Nakul Duggal, agreed on the terms of future cooperation.

The fact that Diess flies personally to the USA for the negotiations shows the importance of the cooperation for Europe's largest car manufacturer and its CEO. For the 63-year-old, the agreement with Qualcomm is a success with a great signal effect. He can show critics that the future business with automated driving at the VW software unit Cariad is finally making headway.
Criticism of Diess and Cariad had recently increased in the group itself and outside. Since the beginning of the year, Diess has taken over the operational supervision of the software unit as VW boss. Together with Cariad boss Dirk Hilgenberg, he works out the software strategy of the VW group. Now both are under special observation and the corresponding pressure to succeed.

For a long time, Cariad has been accused of not being able to keep to the given schedules. Internally, resistance from individual brands in particular seems to be great. According to insiders, the Stuttgart sports car manufacturer Porsche is not really convinced of the capabilities of the Cariad. Because the software for new models there is not ready in time, their market launches are sometimes postponed. Even suppliers with whom Cariad works on software development are critical of the sluggish progress, as the Handelsblatt recently reported.

In Wolfsburg, delays at Cariad are now openly acknowledged. There have been problems with various software projects over the past year. At that time, Audi CEO Markus Duesmann was still responsible for the new software unit. The company says things are moving faster now.
Increasing competitive pressure
The fact that at least the chip question for automated driving has now been clarified should give new impetus to the further development of the software in the Volkswagen Group. The Wolfsburg manufacturer doesn't have much time left. Because in view of competitors such as Tesla and newcomers from China, such as Xpeng or Nio , who are already entering the European market with ready-to-use software systems, the competitive pressure is enormous.

Volkswagen and the other German manufacturers will have to catch up with the software for automated driving and the car operating systems in the next two to three years in order to remain competitive at all. Volkswagen and Co. can only keep to this time window if they get help from large chip companies with the hardware.
VW is pursuing a particularly ambitious plan. While the southern German competitors are developing the software for automated driving together with the respective chip companies, the Volkswagen subsidiary Cariad relies on Bosch as a software partner. A few months ago, the VW Group and the world's largest automotive supplier concluded a corresponding cooperation agreement.

According to the group, Bosch was therefore involved in the decision to buy chips from Volkswagen at Qualcomm. Because the jointly developed software must be closely coordinated with the hardware, i.e. the chip, so that maximum performance can be obtained from the chip with minimum power consumption. This procedure is familiar from the world of smartphones, where Apple uses its own chips for its iPhones, for example, which are customized for the respective software.

The chips that Volkswagen will purchase from Qualcomm for automated driving in the future were still fully developed by the American IT group. But that should change soon, the VW group wants to develop semiconductors itself in order to be able to use them in its vehicles as required. News can be expected this year, according to company circles over the weekend.

By choosing Bosch as a software partner, VW hopes that it will have more control over development – ​​and higher sales. Critics claim that competitor Mercedes, for example, entered into a "gag contract" when it decided to cooperate with Nvidia in terms of both hardware and software.

From 2024 onwards, when the first jointly developed systems come onto the market at Mercedes, more than 40 percent of the income that Mercedes generates with software packages for automated driving functions will end up at Nvidia.

Volkswagen also chose Qualcomm so as not to become too dependent. "Because unlike other chip manufacturers, Qualcomm was the only company that offered us cooperation on an equal footing," said one person with knowledge of what's happening at VW. Volkswagen's contract with Qualcomm is not based on a "revenue-sharing" model like Mercedes, but rather the Wolfsburg company pays per chip.

With the Qualcomm deal, Volkswagen has only cleared the first of several hurdles. It is still unclear which chip Volkswagen will use in the high-performance computers for the future self-developed car operating system. The car manufacturer is currently negotiating this with all three major suppliers from the USA: Nvidia, Qualcomm and Intel .

With the upcoming car operating system, Volkswagen wants, among other things, to create the conditions for vehicles to be able to communicate via the new 5G mobile communications standard. The planned “VW.os” operating system is also to be used in all vehicles from the Volkswagen Group from 2026 onwards. Cariad is also responsible for the development of this operating system.

Google AI release of research on Waymo related datasets labeled, Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Detection, is hard to take serious in lieu of the new Mobileye release news on production ready True Redundancy. The Google AI research blog paper painting single digit performance gains over public algorithms as state-of-the-art performance as bravado is a stretch, especially given the available resources of Google and Waymo. Mobileye seperating sensor systems as independent functions is an understated achievement few are willing to admit as the most flexible long term path towards affordable HAV scaling. Tick tock.

Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall
What would it take for artificial intelligence to make real progress?

BY GARY MARCUS March 10, 2022

STEGO — which stands for “Self-supervised Transformer with Energy-based Graph Optimization”

unsupervised segmentation

European Union General Safety Regulation (GSR) has mandated that every new passenger vehicle model sold in Europe introduced in 2022 and onwards is equipped with an always-on display of the current speed limit and with a system to warn drivers when they exceed it. Starting in 2024, this regulation will include every new car sold in Europe.

Is Jack Weast still with Intel/Mobileye?

Any discussion of how drive by wire, brake by wire, and throttle by wire technology could impact the AV ecosystem remains sparse.

Will Samsung make cars again?

asianews dot network/will-samsung-make-cars-again/

Samsung drops plan to enter electric vehicle market.

The core reasons behind this decision are that it doesn't believe its entry into the finished EV segment will see sustainable profits, and it holds the intention to continue avoiding any possible conflicts with its top clients, amid the focus on its contract-based semiconductor foundry business, according to them.

m dot koreatimes dot co dot kr/pages/article dot asp?newsIdx=329197

Magna International
Williams Advanced Engineering
Foxconn MIH
Benteler
Zhejiang Geely Holding
Lotus
U Power
REE Automotive
Schaeffler
Karma Automotive
Bollinger
Rivian
Canoo

Benteler and Bosch started collaboration on a rolling chassis platform in 2020 with Bosch focused on mechatronics and Pininfarina developing a concept upper body. Benteler and Mobileye started collaboration on a robo-shuttle in 2022 based on this Benteler-Bosch rolling chassis with Pininfarina again contributing an upper body design. VW and Bosch started collaboration on automated driving software and systems in 2022. VW and Mobileye started a new collaboration on a robotaxi in 2022. Bosch and Mobileye have in the past been highly competitive in assisted and automated driving solutions. Any new collaboration between Bosch and Mobileye, though seemingly unlikely, would be a pronounced shift for the two competitors.

Will Junko Yoshida fall on the sword and apologize and distance herself from Colin Barnden when the time comes? The reputation of the Ojo-Yoshida Report will be more than tarnished. Some simply do not understand table stakes. You read it here first.

a server is going to be a system on a chip. It will all come up off the board and land on a chip ... just takes time ... If all of the innovation in the server is being pulled up on chip, and we don’t build chips, we don’t innovate.
James Hamilton, AWS.

drive-by-wire
steer-by-wire
brake-by-wire
central compute
etc

sensor (edge) AI processing

VW eyes quicker uptake of Qualcomm chips in key platforms

VW may switch to Qualcomm's chips on MEB platform.

Volkswagen Group is investigating using Qualcomm's powerful computer chips in the updated MEB Plus electric platform as well as

Here comes sell off and shorties

Mbly go down much more to 36

mbly down 21 % in 7 day

moral at Mobileye today is probably down given the Autonews Europe report about VW and Qualcomm

January 25, 2023

Ford’s BlueCruise Ousts GM’s Super Cruise as CR’s Top-Rated Active Driving Assistance System.

CR's ratings have always been strange on this. They talk only a little about how good the system is at keeping the car in the right place (Which I would make 95% of the score) and they spend most of their time worrying about how good it is at nagging you if you don't pay attention, whether it stops you from using it on smaller roads, how well it does if you fall unconscious, and how clear the UI is.

I am not saying those things are useless, but they should be a small part of the score.

January 25, 2023

Ford’s BlueCruise Ousts GM’s Super Cruise as CR’s Top-Rated Active Driving Assistance System.

John Murphy with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Amnon, as you're making this progress with SuperVision as far as book business and discussions, are the customers just kind of throwing up their hands and saying, listen, we just can't do this ourselves or these other partners. So we're just kind of handing the keys and becoming exclusive with you or are they sort of parallel processing other systems and what - how is that developing?

Amnon Shashua

I don't think the story is so dramatic as to handling the key, all right? OEMs do what makes the most sense. They want to deliver a product, they want to deliver a competitive product, they need to compete with other OEMs, they need to provide value to the customers and they see what Mobileye is doing. I think the launch of the ZEEKR SuperVision created a kind of a significant moment.

Because it's one thing to show a development system and other thing is to show production system doing something very impressive. So it's not that OEMs decided to throw in the towel, it's simply a natural evolution of a competitive landscape. You need to be able to deliver brands with the best technology and use the suppliers for it. The EyeQ Kit allows the carmaker - I think, the EyeQ Kit was a very important moment here.

It allows the carmakers not to completely tweak our system at the black-box, but to add to it their own software and to create further differentiation, but trying to replicate what Mobileye has been doing, personally I don't think it makes sense, really, because, I know the amount of investments that's being done. And this kind of investments cannot be done just through money. There is a time factor forward - a significant time factor forward. So I think that the ZEEKR launch created kind of a reality check in many of our OEM partners.

November 2019 PDF:
Mobileye Sensing Status and Road Map
Dr. Gaby Hayon, EVP R&D

Technology such as ME 'occupancy networks' well ahead of industry

Over 50% of Mobileye float ownership is with 7 entities.

Norges Bank - 11,611,694 shrs
Baillie Gifford - 6,182,361 shrs
General Atlantic - 4,761,905 shrs
Fidelity Investment - 2,631,819 shrs
Principal Financial - 523,835 shrs
Amnon Shashua - 476,191 shrs
Franklin Resources - 396,565 shrs

shares in float - 51,911,905

CEO holdings does not include any RSU, RSA, or equity grant compensation.

Norges Bank Investment Management Fund is the largest single owner in the world’s stock markets, owning almost 1.5 percent of all shares in the world’s listed companies, totaling about $1.4 trillion dollars.

Norges Bank ownership 22.37 %

Mobileye Short Interest on 1/30/23 was about 6.57 million shares.

Balthasar led automotive sector investments at Norges and now serves as co-CIO Equities. Norges 11.6 million share investment in Mobileye, now worth over $525 million, could indicate that the Ruter-Holo-Mobileye autonomous driving project launching in Groruddalen soon is important to the future transportation transformation in Norway.

amendment to the SC 13G

Norges Bank Investment Management Fund

12,085,900 shares of Mobileye
23.28 %
as of December 31, 2022

Ahead of October's IPO, analysts and investors had the chance to experience assisted and autonomous driving technology at events in Jerusalem and Detroit.

A whistlestop six-day roadshow included 26 one-on-one meetings, eight small group meetings and one large group webinar.

Ford BlueCruise with Mobileye REM technology launches in 2023 in the US per Mobileye Investor Relations at Wolfe conference.

A SuperVision program in the US (and Europe) launches in 2024 per Mobileye CEO from Autonocast podcast.

Innoviz Technologies CEO in Baird's 2023 Vehicle Technology & Mobility Conference

Several new details in talk.

kvgo dot com/baird-2023-vtm-conference/innoviz-technologies-ltd-feb

Sidenote: Semiconductor analysts state the successful acquisition of Tower Semiconductor by Intel is still the most important tool for any accelerated growth ambition by Mobileye in the automotive lidar sector.

Nevertheless, three seperate articles/analysis in Israel press (eg. CTech) in last 5 weeks believe Mobileye needs to expand lidar team to build out development and support infrastructure but have failed to mention the Tower Semi acquisition deliberations with China.

The interview of Mobileye's IR head Dan Galves at this week's February 15 Wolfe Investor Conference mentioned that the Zeekr Chauffeur launch in late 2025 is targeted for 10,000 vehicles in the first year, akin to a "pilot launch" (Webcast replay available on Mobileye's IR portal).

In contrast to this "pilot" Zeekr Chauffeur program, the recently signed premium European OEM Chauffeur program is scheduled for a 2026 launch (through 2030) of $1.5 billion dollars (between 250,000 - 275,000 vehicles over 5 years). It is interesting these two program launches are within a span of about a year.

The premium European program launching an average of about 5x more vehicles with a Chauffeur AV kit is interesting given Mobileye's CEO Prof Shashua comments on the Autonocast Podcast today discussing shadow-mode validation, ADS design modularity, SuperVision/Chauffeur program sequencing, etc. (playback also available).

Mobileye's CEO also commented today that hundreds of vehicles with the Mobileye Drive technology will be launching in the next 10 months.

bmw on 14.02.23 issue company news and no indication of mobileye in new l4 project

BMW and Valeo engage in a strategic cooperation to co-develop next-generation Level 4 automated parking experience.

The software functions are based on the current automated parking software stack first launched with the BMW iX in 2021. In the next generation it will be further extended by a powerful computing platform hosting the jointly developed algorithms.

I think Aptiv and Mobileye make original software so maybe Valeo replace Aptiv as partner.

Mobileye’s EyeQ5M SoC, placed inside Aptiv’s ADCAM Mid ECU for the BMW iX.

mobileye stock price to go down much for next 2 months

maybe Audi not Bmw is mobileye 2026 europe chauffeur oem

Why does Mobileye CEO invest in Geely given the below?

As part of its Smart Geely 2025 strategy, the Chinese automaker focuses on operating systems, self-developed chips, intelligent cloud computing, and satellite networks. According to Geely, the system offers the fastest system startup and response time in its class – it takes just 0.5 seconds to enter a ready operational state.

The company will benefit from its parent company's network of satellites to have access to accurate geo-positioning and high-precision maps, which are used in the intelligent driving functionality. By 2025, Geely Holding Group expects to have a 72-satellite network called Geespace.

AutomotiveIT interview Jan 24 2023

"But we are pleased that we have received an incredible amount of positive feedback from Europe - especially from Germany
- receive. This is how the recently communicated project with Hamburg Hochbahn came about, which includes 1,000 movers. This shows that the demand in Europe is also huge. We have city scenarios that go even further. We are suddenly talking about quantities in the four-digit range, the competitors have not even produced a few hundred vehicles in the past ten years. The market is heading for a kind of tipping point: the demand is already there, only the supply is missing. Now comes an offer - and a solid one at that."

Mobileye over $45 and market cap over $36 billion

news is leaking

Are there already plans to build larger or smaller models?

Kolmeier: Of course, our first Holon Mover won't be the only one. We are aiming for a larger version with a capacity of up to 22 people. A smaller model isn't planned yet, because I think it will be a while before the time for robotic taxis comes.

The Holon Mover I is a Class III M2 bus. The Mover I is intended for up to 15 passengers (ten seated and five standing), and operates at a maximum speed of 37 mph (60 km/h).

Class III : Vehicles constructed exclusively for the carriage of seated passengers.

Category M2 Vehicles used for the carriage of passengers, comprising more than eight seats, and having a maximum mass not exceeding 5 tonnes.

from public meetings this week with

mobileye to charge oem a maximum of $1500 for full Supervision plus about $40 to $50 a year for Rem mapping used in Supervision.

Mobileye targeting a minimum of 2 hours driving before a minimal intervention with Supervision today.

At time of purchase of new car, what will the oem cost of Supervision to auto owner be for eyes-on, hands-off everywhere.

SuperVision averages $1500
The cost can vary from $1000 to $2000

in the last five publically available mobileye presentations over the last 7 weeks the tone on two subjects has changed

.. thoughts on having to fill role as a tier 1 for supervision for first 5 launches and thoughts going forward

.. the status of one of those western oems' supervision programs previously announced

Willer's "MaaS Meeting 2023" discusses new pilot with Mobileye.

WILLER sees autonomous driving as one of the tools for making rural transportation sustainable, and is working with Mobileye to promote its development in Japan.

Moovit founder Nir Erez shares his vision for full mobility as a service at Calcalist’s Innovation Conference Feb 02 2021

“Moovit and Mobileye plan to start operating autonomous vehicles in Israel by the beginning of 2022 — within a year from today. We are already seeing on-demand transportation services and ridesharing services in the country, and even if, to begin with, there will be a human behind the wheel of the autonomous car, it will be in preparation for the eventual arrival of driverless vehicles — vehicles without a steering wheel and pedals, driven solely by a computer,” Moovit Founder and CEO Nir Erez said in an interview with Sophie Shulman during Calcalist’s online Innovation Conference.

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