Ford tops the list of automated driving leaders in new study | Hacker News Reader

Ford tops the list of automated driving leaders in new study

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58 pointsFricken49 comments

Like I said before, you can't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime but when it finally comes around you've got a fking aircraft carrier.

The established players in the auto industry noticed Tesla a few years back, began writing checks and now the ship has come around and they're closing the gap.

I don't have any sources to back this up but I don't think that worries Musk. I don't think he's actually overly concerned about Tesla succeeding at self driving cars, or electric cars.

Musk wants the self driving car industry to be better. He needs those technologies to be significantly better for his interplanetary ambitions to be realised.

The solar roof, the power bank, all of the other endeavours he is engaged in are all intended to catalyse the industries that he's rattling the cage of. He'll need them on Mars and they're not good enough at the moment.

Ford winning at self driving cars is a good result for Musk.

I think GP was talking about winning autonomous cars. While it might be the case Musk isn't concerned, that's a bad result for 30,000 other employees who are more invested than Musk in the success of their company.

This was a couple years ago (and I apologize for not being able to find a source), but I heard an interview with a Ford exec about the limits of adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance and he basically said: "Our drivers don't want that. They want the control of their own vehicle."

And not that it's set in stone, and not that organizations can't change, but in general it sure seems like Ford and the other big automakers don't want self driving cars.

Partially, it's a concern that they'll see their existing model torn to shreds if self driving cars become the basis for much more efficient on demand or fractional ownership car usage.

And I think partially it's that the designers, engineers, exec's at Ford are "car people". They love driving cars, they see a romance to them ("the open road"), they have "daily drivers" and "my pride and joy" type of relationships with their cars.

If nothing else, it's abundantly clear that Tesla is coming at this from a whole different direction.

Here's the CEO of Ford a few weeks ago talking about launching a car with Level 4 autonomy, with a goal of doing it by 2021:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-driverless-car-fear-...

So not really resisting the whole thing, just no belief that hand offs can work safely.

The auto industry has done an about face over the past couple years, switching from a belief in an incremental approach to going straight for level 4 robotaxis, as Waymo has been doing from the start. Tesla is the notable exception.

Ford has that whole "roll over problem" back in the day. I'm sure they are not dying to rush to AI driving and be in the press again...

Are you sure? From where I sit, it looks like Tesla is just offering a traditional car with a different set of organs. They don't seem to show any signs of doing anything different than ford on the sales/direction angle.

Here's the things that seem different to me:

- No dealerships

- Supercharger network (It started as free, but now it's moving to pay/minute usage). I expect that in the years to come it will become a profit center.

- Powerwall battery + solar roof integration

- Tesla seems to have more cars on the road doing some level of autonomous driving now than anyone else. I think that real world experience and data counts for something.

1. No dealerships isn't innovative. It's common in many parts of the world.

2. Is anyone interested in adopting Tesla's power connector ? If not then it is a massive sunk cost. Not a smart move for a small company.

3. Not aware of any unique integation between Tesla car and the Powerwall battery. I can imagine the car being used as an extended battery but that's hardly a game changer.

4. The big difference for me having driven a Tesla is how god awful the interiors are. Arguably one of the worst on the road today. That's definitely unique.

No dealerships isn't an innovation.

I do find it ironic that those that complain about Uber "violating the law" when it comes to taxi services seem to have no problem not complaining when Tesla attempts to subvert many state laws against direct-sales. For the record, I think Uber should challenge ridiculous anti-competitive regulations just as Tesla should challenge ridiculous anti-competitive regulations.

But you can't cheer Tesla fighting the law while condemning Uber for doing the same and stay intellectually consistent.

Dealership laws were passed ostensibly to 'protect the consumer' just as taxi regulations were passed for the same reason. In reality, both types of laws don't protect anyone -- except industry incumbents.

It does appear that Tesla is a little more deliberate than Uber in that regard. They do comply with court orders, they have been trying to fight the laws in court and the legislature as a first option instead of as a, "we got caught, sorry" option. It's also unclear that Tesla is particularly opposed to regulation in general, whereas Uber has essentially resisted any regulations (say, fingerprinting or deeper background checks or employee/contractor designations) at every turn. Uber (until recently) wouldn't even pay a nominal fee to test autonomous vehicles!

Other than no franchise stores and big budget advertising.

The conversation is about self driving features, not about sales.

And yet, you also see Ford addressing themselves as a "mobility company." I think your confirmation bias is showing here. These companies (and Ford especially, it seems) see where the market is heading and are trying to get ahead of the puck. I can almost guarantee Ford has a thinktank working hard right now to put together a autonomous vehicle service.

If that's the case, why was Tesla's first car a super-fast sports car rather than a practical minivan/people mover or a low cost car for the masses?

Reports like this are meaningless, because they make up arbitrary categories, and then assign them arbitrary weights. This one is especially bad because it has categories that are almost impossible to judge objectively, like "Strategy".

Reminds me of San Francisco's report on the Central Subway. They created eight categories, equally weighted, of which one was "cost". Of course, everything in construction trades off against cost. So the most expensive option always came out ahead, because it "gained" in seven categories but "lost" in one.

"The annual survey looked at 18 different companies, smeared across 10 different criteria, ranging from strategy, to core tech development, to manufacturing capability and staying power, and a company that’s over 100 years old ended up leading the list."

Why does 'manufacturing capability and staying power' correlate to 'potential in the world of autonomous driving'? It doesn't matter if you can pump out a thousand cars an hour if they crash a mile down the road. This should be based on core tech development only..

That's silly - what's the point in excellent core technology if you are unable to manufacture enough vehicles or bring them to market?

> This should be based on core tech development only..

What good is the tech if you can't put it into production? There are real design and manufacturing issues to deal with, and a company that doesn't take that into consideration and give it the attention it deserves likely won't do well in the long run.

The inverse is also important. If you "invent" the best tech possible but have no way to get it onto the road -- is it the best?

I get that. It just seems like that specific metric could have been over-weighted seeing as how Ford and GM were at the top of the list..

I think GM deserves to be at the top of the list. Cruise is very quickly closing the gap between themselves and Waymo, and they have a comitted car company to back them up. The jury is still out as to whether Ford can make good headway on their 'secret sauce', which is now in the hands of Argo.ai.

Yeah, Cruise seems to be doing a great job. Argo has a great founding team, but there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. While I'd give Argo the edge in technical competence (I realize that's not a very meaningful statement considering the age of the company), what really matters is building the right product at the right time. You can have a ton of great engineers and still not accomplish much in the market - just look at Waymo and Uber.

The way I see it, at least in the US, it's really GM vs Ford (which is Cruise vs Argo). Waymo has a management crisis and lost most of their top talent, and Uber is hemorrhaging talent (and money). Apart from that there are various startups but I don't believe they'll ever get the money necessary to compete with the big players - even Google gave up on that front.

Outside the US I'm excited to see what happens with Volvo, which says they'll have 100 stage 4 vehicles delivered to customers by the end of the year.

Everyone reading this should watch the film Tucker: A Man and his Dream. Sort of a 1950s Elon Musk.

> During the past year, Ford has invested in Civil Maps, Velodyne, and autonomous AI startup Argo – plus it acquired Chariot, and algorithmic platform startup SAIPS.

Plus they actually make cars, that's apparently why they are highly ranked. But their investments have yet to bear fruit, we will have to wait and see.

The only relevant data you could possibly look at is the disengagement reports they are legally required to provide. And looking at those, it's Google... and then nobody else for a long, long, long time.

Then I guess Telsa marketing dept > Ford marketing dept.

I dont have deep knowledge of this but wow, what a laugh this is. Tesla has a huge fleet of vehicles that its training with. Ford bought some lidar stuff. Yeah, once you have an aircraft carrier on your tail its big trouble but ford has directed their aircraft carrier in the completely wrong direction. An aircraft carrier is useless without a captain.

I know this isn't normally the forum for these sort of comments, but is anyone else put-off by how this story occurred the same day as the 'Tesla overtakes Ford' story?

Time to long Ford.

I'm hoping people here are smart enough not to actually believe this nonsense. Tesla is BY FAR the leader in autonomous driving

This is the leaders performance on actual production hardware outside of fancy (postprocessed) videos with their "cameras only" approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg

At this point I don't even care if they theorethically are the best, if they are willing to release this dangerous crap they are sooner going to go up in a big publicity fire than get actual autonomy to customers.

This is an old outdated and out of context video. I just drove 150 miles this weekend using AP2. It works pretty well.

It's February, hardly outdated. Did you drive on residential streets, as in the video, or highway?

See, highway "autopilot" debuted in upper class Mercedes Benz some 10 years ago..

Feb was before 8.1 software update which has significant AP updates. So it is outdated.

Industrial cities like Detroit and my beloved hometown of Pittsburgh have been beating Silicon Valley here pretty readily in the self-driving car space (one reason among many is that California's immaculate weather gives engineers a false sense of confidence when testing their vehicles on its perfectly-marked freeways, causing them to completely gloss over the majority of less-stellar American roads and weather-induced driving situations; indeed, the fatal Tesla autopilot crash took place on a Pennsylvania "turnpike" highway, and not a California freeway).

This happens the same day as Tesla's market cap surpasses Ford. Tesla's stock has been a real rollercoaster lately, and somehow, I just don't think the hype is justified. Remember, Tesla for a while used MobilEye (see anything geohot says about them!).

> indeed, the fatal Tesla autopilot crash took place on a Pennsylvania "turnpike" highway, and not a California freeway

The fatal autopilot crash occurred in Florida, not Pennsylvania. There was also another in China.

I see, so there are others that also support my argument (having been in Shanghai, I can definitely tell you that China's roads are sometimes questionable, the very erratic driver behavior that is the norm even more so). The Pennsylvania crash I was referring to in particular was this one:

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2016/07/07/police-investigati...

Thankfully, it does look like the PA one wasn't fatal after all though. For what it's worth, Tesla also directly and very publicly disputes the driver's own personal account by claiming that autopilot wasn't enabled during the crash.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you go to CMU? Just curious as I've seen your name pop up a few times with regards to self-driving cars.

No I didn't, but I did summer research internships there while I was in college. I was waitlisted from CMU SCS, so I "settled" for Cornell instead. ;-)

The self-driving car space is just something that I like to follow very closely, given that I've had picked up a bit of domain knowledge over time.

In rolled out they are, but what will next year bring. Ford, GM and the like are used to a competitive world - for years they have worked behind the scene to perfect something interesting before rolling it out. Ford has lost big in several lawsuits because their cars were not safe enough - as such I would expect them to be a little risk adverse. It would not surprise me if they had the same technology as Tesla but refused to release it because they were afraid of getting sued in one of the crash scenarios they know it is vulnerable to.

Tesla tech is level 3 - the driver has to be ready to take over. Can that eventually be turned into level 4? I don't know.

I am a pilot, and we've had autonomous airplanes for decades. Even entry level Cessnas have auto-pilots. The auto-pilot is a great tool for reducing pilot workload and increasing safety, especially en route, but you are still expected to be the pilot in command, especially during a tricky maneuver like landing in a crosswind with not so good weather.

I think Ford, GM, etc are right in the long run. There are so many edge cases in driving a car (blown tire, hydroplaning, uncertain intention of an oncoming driver), I would not trust a fully driverless car. That said, there is a lot of room for innovation with automatic braking and collision avoidance that will reduce accident rates and severity, maybe dramatically.

Once most cars are networked and semi-autonomous, lots of things become possible. Example, cars that automatically observe speed limits (which can be dialed down during bad weather). No single measure like this will eliminate all accidents, but each will add to safety.

The problem with too much automation is people become dependent on it and lose skills. This was a critical factor in the Air France flight that stalled and crashed off the coast of Brazil. I'd rather see them focus on helping people be better drivers than taking humans completely out of the loop except on protected roadways.

I'm not saying you're wrong but do you have anything other than anecdotal data?

Data is king when it comes to autonomous driving tech. Last time I checked Tesla had over a billion miles driven (may have passed 2 billion by now) in real world environment. Google has the second most data collected with 2-3 million miles driven which is orders of magnitude lower than Tesla. Not even gonna mention Ford.

Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go

Tesla doesn't have billions of miles of data. You have been lied to and you bought it Hook line and sinker. The data Tesla collect are high precision map based on Gps logging and radar blacklist for false positives.

All that data is useless for anything other than level 2.

You're a portrait of the Tesla hype. But I don't blame you

And you're an astroturfing dummy account. This account was created just to make this comment?

> Also Tesla is the only company that has the hardware setup for full autonomy to achieve level 5 on a production car. They are just working on software. Any other company couldn't even theoretically have level 5 autonomy even if they had the software ready to go

And yet, aren't they -removing- hardware? And as a result, a whole new slew of their autopilot getting _worse_ is hitting the Internet. And some of those are really embarrassing - sunny day but not blinding brightness, clear line markings and the car will just veer into the oncoming lane, or entirely off road with little to no warning.

[citation needed]

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