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Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.

Toyota presumably treats reliability differently.

When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean fully autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same, the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and that level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...

They might do better with hardware than software ...

Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an explanation for the unintended acceleration.

I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments, and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti code?

To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that does not mean it's true of all of them.

Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999% of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.

If drivers pedal errors lead to unintended acceleration in one car, but somehow don't cause unintended accelerations in all the other cars, then maybe there is something wring with how pedal reacts.

> Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is indeed number one by many measures.

Sounds a lot like what people were saying about Nokia in 2007. It had near monopoly and was really good at executing pre-iphone smartphones, however they were never as invested in software as Apple or Google were and we all know how this ended.

Hell you can do an apples to apples comparison. Honda said the same thing about both autonomous driving and EV. They are waaaaaaay behind the curve and are hoping that FUD can keep people from buying their competitor's offerings.

Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes. But autonomous driving is at its core a challenging software problem. No major car manufacturer outside of perhaps Tesla has a track record of shipping software at scale. They're hardware companies.

Your sentiment here is like saying Samsung is great at making phones so they must be great at Mobile OS's. They're fundamentally separate things, and we frequently see that proficiency in one area doesn't necessarily translate to proficiency in another.

Toyota and other car companies are fantastic at building cars, yes.

No Toyota is fantastic at designing, building, marketing, managing logistics, integrating credit systems etc...for cars.

Selling a Level 5 automated car is as much marketing as it is software. It could work perfectly but if nobody trusts it enough to buy, at a low enough price point, then it won't matter.

It's hard to sell something you don't have, and Toyota doesn't have competitive self driving tech or electric car tech.

Arguing that they will be a leader in self driving cars because they are leader is selling legacy cars very much smacks of the "PC guys aren't going to just walk in" comment regarding smartphones.

There's an old saying that goes something like:

X + computer = computer

So

Teletype + computer = computer

VDU + computer = computer

Phone + computer = computer

Computers and IT driven companies are eating whole industries.

Unless they have a huge cultural shift in engineering toward safety and best practices I certainly wouldn't trust them with my life. read through the Barr report on the acceleration incidents and you will see all the untrustworthy engineering going on there.

Change "Toyota" for "1982 IBM" and you'll see the mistake of thinking this is a hardware problem.

And yet the clear winner in the PC market is Apple, an incumbent that always did both hardware and software.

Is that clear?

For desktops, Apple's sales barely register.

Servers? Nope.

Laptops? Sure. But Chromebooks have outsold them.

The only realm that Apple dominates is smartphones. They're great. I enjoy my iPhone. It also happens that iPhone sales are enough to be the biggest publicly-traded company in the world.

In my mind, “PC market” means personal computing devices of all form factors. Any other definition is splitting hairs to serve your desired outcome.

Anyway, when is the last time software alone got someone from point A to point B? It’s a hell of a lot easier to license software from a provider than it is to outsource the building and shipping of reliable vehicles.

I just don't understand Toyota's product strategy here. They are like Apple in car manufacturing (not comparing in design but in reliability and sheer quantity of products). So I'd assume they'd understood the demand for the electric cars for some time now and would have come up with electric cars which have great reliability and are cheap. But all they have done is introduced Mirai which only sells 100 a month and are costly. Very un-Toyota like! It seems that the management is not at all interested in anything except the Hybrid and gasoline powered models.

I think an even bigger conundrum is Nissan ...

They produced and delivered a popular, well received electric car and have been selling them since 2010.

I assumed we would, after a few years, see electric Jukes and 350z and an Infiniti model. Maybe a electric GT-R as a "halo" model. Something ? Anything ?

Instead, seven years went by and they have managed to (almost) release a second-generation Leaf.

Indeed, very disappointing. Even bigger threat for these Japanese automakers is becoming irrelevant once the car companies which don't have ride-sharing platform of their own start becoming just a commodity and wafer-thin-margin businesses. They need to pivot hard in future or else the Teslas and Waymos will overthrow them in a decade or so.

They also have the "e-power" platform, of which the Note version is supposed to be selling well, and a Juke version has been shown in concept form.

This is, basically, the Leaf setup but with a much smaller battery and a range extending generator. Currently you can't even plug it in, but it does give higher mpg and better driving experience around urban areas compared with an ICE car.

They're in an innovator's dilemma because they (all the established players) have a huge advantage in drivetrain/engine technology (which is very difficult to replicate) vs any newcomer that they would be giving up if/when the market moves to full electric and motors.

> They don't make battery electric cars.

They've been selling partial-electric cars since at least 2014. The Prius Prime allows for electric-only driving up to about 30 miles per charge. That's enough for my commute. I got 3500 miles on my first tank of gas.

Really since 1997 at low speeds.

Toyota has put a small battery and electric motor in their cars for 20 years now capable of propelling the vehicle at low speeds.

But if you're trying to build an actual electric vehicle, you don't want a small battery as that puts you on the worst part of the discharge rate and battery life curve. A larger battery in the same vehicle reduces the "C" rate and is much kinder on the battery plus gives you much more power to work with and ability to handle a much higher charge rate.

Big battery wins, long-term. Small battery is a false economy except on hybrids.

I think the lack of appreciation of this (and lack of availability of inexpensive batteries) has hampered a lot of carmakers. Address that (super cheap batteries so you can put a 500 mile battery in if you want), and virtually every "problem" with electric cars goes away or is dramatically reduced.

> Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT. Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics, but Pratt didn't do much there.

They've hired other folks, too, who have real-world autonomous vehicle experience.

Google/Waymo are definitely leading the pack, but I don't think we'll see Level 5 in a production vehicle for at least five years, probably closer to 10.

I read the recent article about their test facility (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...), but 1. It's still California weather and 2. I've routinely seen worse intersections. What do you do in a rotary where you have to cut across multiple lanes of traffic to exit? If the autonomous vehicle waits for another car to give way, it will be there forever.

> What do you do in a rotary where you have to cut across multiple lanes of traffic to exit? If the autonomous vehicle waits for another car to give way, it will be there forever.

What do you do in a multi-lane rotary roundabout with trams going through it, and construction happening? (an actual use case from Bremen, Germany).

There’s so many situations they’re not even considering.

Google/Waymo is building a Schönwetterauto, in the metaphorical and literal meaning.

They're also heavily invested in PFN which makes Chainer (and is apparently helping them on the self-driving effort in Tokyo ).

Where did you get the information that the current Volvo experiment is at level 3? I tried looking at the project home page, but couldn't find any info about it. For their commercial offering they are apparently going straight to level 4, skipping level 3, so running level 3 tests seems odd: http://auto2xtech.com/volvo-to-skip-level-3-autonomous-mode/

who cares if toyota doesn't make battery electric cars in mass yet? what works best in america today is hybrids, and they were ahead of the game there. probably the best decision they made was to go all in on hybrid before battery-only. they know range is super important and the mirai can go farther than almost any electric car.

i really dont see autonomous driving as much of a race when the "race" is going to take 20-30 years to complete. cycles that long give everyone a chance to catch up and leapfrog each other

I, for one, think the hydrogen instead of EV gamble will pay off big time. Especially in Japan where they just can't produce enough electricity to go full EV, what with shutting down most of their nuclear plants. H2 is a much more realistic zero emission energy carrier for them.

Also, as electricity demand and price goes up, and gas demand and price goes down, oil companies will quickly pivot to producing H2 by steam methane reforming with carbon capture and storage, to continue the returns on their billions of dollars of investments.

Agreed fuel cells remain very exciting and maybe patience will be rewarded

> Toyota has been making some bad business decisions lately. They don't make battery electric cars. (They're fixing that, but won't be shipping until 2022.[1]) Instead, they've been pushing cars that run on hydrogen. Toyota sells the Mirai in California, and has a few hydrogen stations so it can be refueled. They sell about a hundred cars a month.

I can't speak to their autonomous technology, but Toyota has always been a leader in electric vehicles, from the early hybrids, to partnering with Tesla, to impressive long term improvements in fuel cells even after the U.S. Gov. Moved on to batteries. Arguably Toyota has more electric vehicle prowess than any other company. It is relatively small potatoes to change the source from open system cells to closed cells, especially when many of battery manufactures are also Japanese.

> [Toyota] don't make battery electric cars. (They're fixing that, but won't be shipping until 2022.)

2022 is a good year if they come up with good tech. At the moment the market for EV's is small, tech is new and only Tesla really shows of something (they have to, because EV's are their only business). All big car makers are researching, from new diesels (double injector SCR's) to EV's & autonomus driving. And if they don't (or go too slow for some), then 1st tier suppliers like Bosch & Continental are doing it.

I can't speak to their autonomous technology, but Toyota has always been a leader in electric vehicles, from the early hybrids, to partnering with Tesla, to impressive long term improvements in fuel cells even after the U.S. Gov. Moved on to batteries. Arguably Toyota has more electric vehicle prowess than any other company. It is relatively small potatoes to change the source to batteries manufactured by Japanese companies.

What do you think of Austin Russell's Luminar?

https://www.luminartech.com/

Their web site has no useful information. It's hard to say much about that.

There's this FastCo piece [0] that talks about their tech and has some videos.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/40406052/this-sensor-technology-...

From the scanning pattern shown, it's a two-axis mechanically scanned system. Resonant vibrating mirror? Mirror galvos? (I've played around with those.) Those work fine but have frame rate limitations. The article talks about "switching the system into high gear". You can trade off resolution for frame rate and may also be able to change the field of view. That complicates the imaging system; now you need gaze management. Not a bad idea, but I think the no-moving-parts solutions will win in the end.