One year old Pony.ai raises $112M Series A to build autonomous car future

Shouldn't that also imply that people wouldn't care which brand of car gets them to their destination now? That is definitely not the case, for many people.

Bob Lutz, former GM CEO and something of a sage in the automotive world takes a sardonic glee in describing a transportation future he probably won't live to see, in which boxy 'modules' ferry us from place to place.

German Car designers, in trying to come up with ways to differentiate themselves in a world where torque and handling no longer matter have placed a focus on the user experience, and have delivered concepts where the interior is reimagined as a living room, with sprawling sofas and wide screen televisions.

These guys are really hurting for ideas. They think of autonomous vehicles as cars that have had the souls sucked out of them. What's there to love? What's there to stir our primitive urges?

But really, it's quite the opposite. They won't be cars anymore. They'll be robots. They'll be animated. They'll be creatures. Alive, and with personalities.

Ford and Dominoes partnered on an autonomous pizza delivery service and were surprised that people often thanked the vehicle for delivering the pizza.

There's a video that has been removed, I wish I could show it to you. Starship technologies is working on sidewalk delivery robots and the prototype looks like a beer cooler on wheels. In the video the bot is trying to cross the road at a crosswalk, and a slowly a car comes around the corner, the driver can't see the bot, it's below his eyeline. The bot, recognizing it's peril, stops and tries to back up, in a last ditch effort for self preservation, but it isn't quick enough, and in slow motion the car runs into it and knocks it over. The bot had a human minder and he quickly righted it and pulled it to the curb. In the comments thread there's all these comments along the lines of 'OMG, that poor little robot, he almost got dided!'. People were anthropomorphizing and empathizing with a fricken beer cooler.

Nobody empathizes with a car when it gets rear ended. We don't project a personality onto it. We're concerned for the passengers, maybe, or the material costs of the damage, but the car has no feelings.

So at the moment we're focused on just getting autonomous to work, it's a technical problem. Autonomous vehicle developers need to demonstrate a minimum viable product that is safe,reliable, and able to generate revenue before they can do much else.

But there is so much else. Once we're ready to start having fun with it, I would trust an artist at Disney to come up with a lucid and original concept for an autonomous vehicle before I would anyone from the tech or automotive industry.

In fact, this is almost the case. Timothy Kentley Klay, the founder of Zoox, worked in digital animation in Australia. Without any automotive or tech industry experience whatsoever he showed up in Silicon Valley with nothing more than a rendering of a bi-directional robotic car he imagined in which the seats face inwards and all four wheels have their own independent steering and motor, and he started knocking on doors and chatting people up in hotel bars at conferences. That was in 2013. Zoox is a unicorn now, miraculously they have $300 million in funding and their test vehicles are out and about in SF and working pretty good.

There's a whole world of possibilities out there that most people, especially car people, aren't thinking of. They're robots of the kind that live and work amongst us, with their own power of agency.

Henry Ford is attributed with saying "If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would've answered 'a faster horse'"

I think it's about time to give the people what they want. Ride 'em, Pony.