Lame! Vaporware!
"Audi releases a press-release, no video, no demonstration, no real-world evidence"
European manufacturers sure are capable and know what they're doing! What a refreshing change!
I just don't see it as plausible that a company with little to no roots in software managed to bring on a large enough team from scratch, that understands software engineering well enough to build something like this to a high level of reliability.
Does anyone here really think that the same or similar teams responsible for the god-awful, un-updateable, UI disaster that is the center console nav in any car ever have somehow elegantly conquered autonomous driving?
Demonstrating a “god-awful” UI as evidence that they can't do autonomous driving is silly imo. We talk about people who design cars that can safely travel at 150+ kph. The tiniest bug or design failure can kill their clients in a spectacular way. We trust these guys with our lives.
Autonomous driving isn't about the UI, it is about math, systems, modeling, safety valves, rigorous testing. This is engineering and isn't taught in CS but in ECE classes. It is easier for an engineer to learn git than for a developer to learn differential equations. Airplanes, cars etc are controlled by microprocessors for the couple last decades. Sure, writing a polished website in angular is cool but engineers write the software that runs pacemakers. How can they not understand reliability?
Your talk about their hardware engineering chops completely ignores the very real evidence we have that their software engineering efforts are utterly horrifying. Have you seen the reports about Toyota's software development practices?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551
By all accounts, while Toyota is a particularly bad offender, these kinds of problems are not unique to them. Software engineering is not something that historically-hardware manufacturing companies tend to have the culture to perform well.
This is basically a similar feet in autonomous robotics, whose transport constraints happen to be a person carrying car.
Its only if you formulate it as such, the gap becomes more obvious.