What happens if self-driving cars don't arrive this decade?

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As a companion to yesterday's article about why the death of self-driving has been exaggerated here is an article asking what happens if the doomsayers are right, if people can't pull off a usable robcar and robotaxi for a decade more more.

There are lots of easier, more tractable opportunities out there, and I list a number of them.

Read What happens if self-driving cars don't arrive this decade?

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Geely Holding's premium electric vehicle (EV) brand, ZEEKR, announced via its WeChat the self-driving all-electric vehicle model it co-developed with Waymo made its official debut on Nov. 17 in Los Angeles, the U.S.

The cooperative model is built on the basis of the ZEEKR M-Vision, which will be prepared for volume production in 2024, the EV maker said.

The latest model premiere marks a significant advancement for the cooperation ZEEKR and Waymo formed in December 2021. Per the agreement, both parties would collaborate on the development of a new battery-electric vehicle (BEV) for deployment in the Waymo One autonomous ride-hailing fleet in the U.S. The model rides on ZEEKR's SEA-M architecture.

ZEEKR claimed the SEA-M as the world's first BEV architecture specifically designed for self-driving mobility service, boasting an exceptional expansibility available for a wide wheelbase range of 2,700mm to 3,300mm and diverse seating arrangements. The architecture has access to Level 4 and higher levels of autonomous driving systems, and is compatible with various autonomous driving technology solutions.

The ZEEKR M-Vision is jointly designed by ZEEKR's R&D facility, namely CEVT (China Europe Vehicle Technology Centre) in Gothenburg, Sweden, and an R&D team from China. It will have two driving solutions, under which a steering wheel and the steering-wheel-free design will be offered, respectively.

The ZEEKR M-Vision features an advent-garde capsule-style front design and power sliding doors that make passengers easily get into and out of the vehicle.

ZEEKR said the ZEEKR M-Vision features a super-long designed service life of 5 years/500,000 kilometers, which indicates 16 hours of non-stop driving per day.

17 miles per of operation per hour for 16 hours a day is 3 fares per hour per in-service vehicle.

Stellantis Accelerates Autonomous Driving Journey with Acquisition of aiMotive

www investors com/research/the-new-america/mobileye-stock-will-its-auto-software-dominance-extend-to-driverless-cars/

from 2.2 bil to 4.4 bil in 2 years ?

oops 2.2 billion to 4.4 billion in 3 years

GS 2026 sector estimates included in numbers help

Volkswagen Delays Key Trinity Project which may delay Level 4 consumer AV.

Volkswagen Group new CEO Oliver Blume plans to push back the automaker's key Trinity flagship EV project from 2026 toward the end of the decade because new software for the project won’t be ready in time. ....

... VW software unit Cariad “will gain some time” to work on a new cross-brand platform and architecture, dubbed SSP, Cariad’s Chief Executive Dirk Hilgenberg Hilgenberg said in an internal letter to employees seen by Bloomberg.

The comments suggest Volkswagen is taking a cautionary path in developing the SSP architecture, which is also supposed to enable Level 4 autonomous driving.

www dot teslarati dot com/vw-autonomous-cars-mainstream-2030/

"Waymo's lost ~$11 bil cumulatively and Cruise ~$7 bil
....
Uber operates at ~~100,000 times the commercial trip scale of Waymo & Cruise."

Continental will offer ADAS solutions based on the CV3 SoC from Ambarella.

Continental’s ADAS systems Ambarella SoC will be showcased for the first time at CES 2023 in Las Vegas in January 2023.

Bosch has announced that it will add the Ambarella CV3 artificial intelligence domain controller System on a Chip (SoC) range to its portfolio of highly efficient SoCs to enable next-generation ADAS functions.

CV3 has been in the hands of potential customers for evaluation for only 4-5 months and is the first announced design win for Ambarella's SoC, unveiled back in January of 2022 at CES.

Competitive SoCs from Qualcomm and Mobileye also debuted at CES 2022.

not exactly timid writing

www dot haaretz dot com/haaretz-labels/cutting-edge/2022-04-27/ty-article-labels/trailblazing-self-driving-into-the-tangible-present/00000180-85e5-d95b-ada5-8fff32490000

Israel based Autobrains, Ambarella, and Continental have all been exploring technologies with each other for the last 12-24 months.

Continental, Toyota, BMW iVentures, as well as Knorr-Bremse AG have an investment in Autobrains.

Autobrains has developed 3 commercial perception software stacks.

Autobrains is said to have between 120 and 150 employees.

article labeled as promoted content is at least honest.

"However, it’s been reported that Mobileye and others have several shortcomings – most notably problems with biases and errors which lead to an inability to cope well with edge cases, as well as high power and computing requirements, and a problematic gap between perception to decision.

All the while, Autobrains has been quietly developing an ADAS system at accelerated pace that is not only significantly safer than competing solutions but is also dramatically less expensive.

After being tested on millions of miles by top automakers, Autobrains has proven itself to be safer than the competition. In particular, it demonstrated superior performance in edge cases, including bad weather conditions and incidents where pedestrians are hard to discern, to name a few.

Along with improved safety, Autobrains’ additional advantage is the significantly lower costs that it offers its customers. By reducing reliance on labeled data, Autobrains’ technology requires far less computing power and can be produced at a fraction of the cost of current deep learning systems on the market (up to 40% lower).
...
Autobrains’ self-learning AI operates in a fundamentally different way from traditional deep learning systems. Autobrains’ signature-based approach simulates how the human brain functions, shifting from labels to generic representations. The sensory information is indexed by compressed, generic neural responses and later used for various semantic tasks. This lean approach is highly efficient, and more robust in edge cases than traditional approaches. With self-learning replacing supervised learning, neural networks are not reliant on extensive manually labeled data and it does not require the massive brute force typical of supervised learning AI – so the learning process is much quicker and immune against human error.

...Unlike supervised artificial intelligence, Autobrains’ system learns from the surrounding environment in real-time and updates its databases accordingly.
...
As a result of the technology’s successful testing and the global interest that it is attracting, Autobrains partnered with the most innovative companies in the automotive industry. To this end, Autobrains has already signed several important collaboration agreements with leading Tier-1s, automakers and Silicon players to work together to make autonomous driving safe and affordable for all."

12 firms initiated coverage

Citigroup Initiates Coverage On Mobileye Global with Buy Rating, Announces Price Target of 77

Evercore ISI Starts Mobileye at Outperform

Mizuho Securities Starts Mobileye at Buy

BofA Starts Mobileye at Neutral

Cowen Starts Mobileye at Outperform

RBC Capital Starts Mobileye at Outperform

Goldman Sachs Starts Mobileye at Equalweight

Morgan Stanley Starts Mobileye at Equalweight

Raymond James Starts Mobileye at strong buy

Needham Starts Mobileye at Buy

Mobileye initiated with an Overweight at JPMorgan

JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee initiated coverage of Mobileye with an Overweight rating and $50 price target. The company is well positioned to deliver a "secure revenue and earnings ramp" on account of a ramp in advanced driver-assistance system revenue, Chatterjee tells investors in a research note. The analyst forecasts 38% annual revenue growth and a similar earnings trajectory as Mobileye "increasingly moves from being a camera-based ADAS supplier to a supplier of platforms for Enhanced ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles."

market cap increase from 16 billion to 28 billion

is the mobileye web site incorrect?

the mobileye ceo said 4 months ago -
"The next OTA will be with the full-HD maps powered by REM (Mobileye’s crowd-sourced HD-map building technology) offering point-to-point navigation"

the new mobileye website for supervision states -
"Mobileye SuperVision includes driver-assist features such as -
Point-to-point automated navigation
and adaptive cruise control"
"Over 60,000 consumer vehicles with Mobileye SuperVision are already on the road"

do these 60,000 Zeekr 001's on the road have the future update the ceo referred to?

cannot find an announcement of this OTA update enabling full hd maps offering point-to-point availability.

new Zeekr OS 4.0 release has no new mobileye update to use hd map

mobileye down 12 pc from wed top

FLoC 2022 on you tube

[Logic Lounge] Shai Shalev-Shwartz - Future of Autonomous Driving

WTH
Zeekr OS 3.0 in July
Zeekr OS 4.0 in Dec

But the Mobileye update for using HD Maps for point-to-point hands-off navigation is still not available despite all the discussion of SuperVision by Mobileye. And the new SuperVision web page just appearing in the last week is more vaporware hype.

5. 2 million shares today - biggest day since IPO

WTH
Zeekr OS 3.0 in July
Zeekr OS 4.0 in Dec

But the Mobileye update for using HD Maps for point-to-point hands-off navigation is still not available despite all the discussion of SuperVision by Mobileye. And the new SuperVision web page just appearing in the last week is more vaporware hype.

30 billion market cap

without significant news, 30 billion market cap is the upper limit for a good period

Autobrains IP (unsupervised learning in perception algorithms) must work if Continental and Ambarella have incorporated the technology.

"The budding relationship soured as Ford and VW grew wary that Amazon would divert Argo’s talent and attention, said the people, who asked not to be identified revealing internal deliberations. The companies also struggled to come up with a governance structure for how they would share control of Argo. Additionally, the retail giant was turned off by the high cost of Argo’s technology, one of the people said."

"Argo and Amazon first began working together with a pilot project in Miami in 2019. A test fleet of Ford Fusion hybrids outfitted with Argo’s self-driving system ran predetermined routes from an Amazon warehouse to final destinations — dry runs of so-called last-mile delivery. No packages were actually delivered, but Amazon liked what it saw, said the people familiar with Amazon’s involvement.

By early this year, there was so much optimism that Amazon would do a deal with Argo that the self-driving firm staffed up to work on outfitting the Rivian vans with autonomous technology, the people said. Argo hired about 150 people to work on the Amazon business, bringing its global workforce to more than 2,000.

The plan called for Amazon to steadily increase its investment in Argo as the partnership achieved major milestones, the people said."
But by spring, Ford and VW still hadn’t agreed to terms on sharing Argo with Amazon. Ford would eventually acquiesce. VW remained wary that Amazon — with a reputation for dominating partnerships — would draw talent and resources away from the German automaker’s ambitious self-driving strategy, according to the people. "

"There was one glimmer of hope. VW considered an 11th-hour bailout of Argo this fall when Ford determined it would no longer fund the self-driving firm, the people said. VW looked at covering Ford’s investment in Argo and taking it over completely. Instead, VW invested $2.3 billion to set up an autonomous driving joint venture with China’s Horizon Robotics."

Nvidia 2023 CES autonomous presentation Jan 3

Cognata and Foretellix announced new collaboration and both are Nvidia partners, coincidental?

Waymo, Cruise, Nvidia show sophisticated computer based simulation techology in public yet Mobileye does not but the company is proud of the use of 2600 annotators

"Tesla is scaling the number of FSD simulations per week exponentially. From ~250k simulation per week in 2020 to 2 million simulations per week today (across 5 datacenters)."

Gill Pratt, chief scientist, Toyota Motor Corp. and CEO, Toyota Research Institute, noted, “No one really knows” when fully automated vehicles will reach production.

"Apple is now planning a less-ambitious design that will include a steering wheel and pedals for driving around town, while fully autonomous driving will be done only on the highway, according to the anonymous sources."

"In a significant shift for the project, the company is now planning a less-ambitious design that will include a steering wheel and pedals and only support full autonomous capabilities on highways, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private."

"The heart of Apple’s technology is a powerful onboard computer system — codenamed Denali after the tallest mountain peak in North America — and a custom array of sensors. The processor’s performance is equal to about four of Apple’s highest-end Mac chips combined and is being developed by the company’s silicon engineering group. The chip has reached an advanced state and is considered nearly production-ready, though Apple may scale it down before the car’s launch to lower costs.

In addition to the onboard hardware, the system has a cloud-based component for some artificial-intelligence processing. Apple is relying on Amazon Web Services for hosting, costing the iPhone maker about $125 million per year. But that’s just a sliver of the roughly $1 billion the company is spending on the car project annually.

Apple hasn’t yet settled on a design for its car and the vehicle is considered to be in the “pre-prototype” stage. The company is aiming to ready the design by next year and have the features set by the end of 2024. It then plans to put the car through extensive testing in 2025."

www bnnbloomberg ca

isn’t feasible with current technology

WTH does that mean?

"technology must advance further so people can spend more time watching movies and playing games"

if Apple spends about $125 million per year on Amazon Web Services for the Apple Titan car project with 1000 employees according to BBN, imagine what Mobileye's use of Amazon cloud services for 3100 employees, REM and Moovit costs the company.

from 10Q
Additionally, we intend to explore a collaboration with Intel on a technology platform to integrate our EyeQ SoC with Intel’s market leading central compute capability, with plans to utilize Intel Foundry Services’ advanced packaging capabilities. This potential platform is intended to enable functions essential to safety, entertainment, and cloud connectivity.

Japan approves use of highly autonomous 'level-4' self-driving vehicles from April 2023.

Japan decided Tuesday to allow highly autonomous “level-4” self-driving vehicles to be used for transit and delivery services from April 2023.

Private cars will not be subject to the changes next year, with limited adoption of the automated vehicles intended to lead to the technology’s use in unmanned bus services in regions with falling populations and in self-driving delivery robots.

Self-driving automation is classified into five levels starting at level-1, which allows either steering, brake or acceleration support.

At level-4, set to be permitted from April 1, a vehicle is considered able to conduct driving tasks without human intervention within a limited area, while a level-5 vehicle can drive itself anywhere under all conditions.

Private vehicles classified as level-3 are already available, with Honda Motor’s revamped Legend sedan becoming the world’s first to reach the market in March 2021. Under certain conditions, including in congested traffic and on expressways, the car can operate itself while the driver engages in other activities.

Companies running transit services with level-4 automation will need permission from prefectural public safety commissions.

They will also be required to install long-distance surveillance systems for regular vehicle checks, and cybersecurity measures to ensure an unauthorized third party cannot take control of them.

In a push for greater use of automated vehicles, the Japanese government has set a target for more than 40 areas nationwide to use level-4 automated transit systems by fiscal 2025.

"Akio Toyoda, leader of the world’s largest and highest valued legacy auto company, Toyota (covered by Shinji Kakiuchi), refers to the ‘silent majority’ of auto executives who question over-committing to EV strategies at the sacrifice of other decarbonizing technologies. The vocal majority of auto industry followers (this author included) had criticized Toyota’s resistance to keep up with EV launches from competitors. While Toyota will eventually achieve scale in EVs, the later/follower approach may prove optimal over time."

Alliance for Automotive Innovation today released Ready to Launch: Autonomous Vehicles in the U.S., a new report surveying autonomous vehicle (AV) activity in the U.S. during the first half of 2022.

Among the findings

84 AV companies in 120 cities across 30 states today – includes 69 distinct companies with physical facilities and U.S. employees.

40 AV companies testing or transporting passengers or freight.

Nearly 170 on-road autonomous technology programs (testing and commercially operational).

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