Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

The claim that outfitting an existing car is the wrong way to approach the remaining problems doesn't seem like a reasonable case to me, at least given my understanding of what those problems are. Is the state of the technology not currently limited by the type and quality of sensor data when it comes to unfamiliar/unsatisfactory road conditions, as well as the shortcomings of neural nets/alternative existing algorithms?

View on HN

Exactly. But hey cool concept cars make for pretty pitchdecks. Technology will solve itself if you just throw money at it, right? Next up, we'll have startups whose main differentiation is designing the interiors of time machines.

This resonates with me. The kind of company that makes a good human-driven car is so far away from the kind of company that can develop a level 5 autonomous system that to try to start up both at the same time would be simply multiplying an already low chance of success by another low chance of success.

How about developing the world's leading level 5 system and then licensing it to the all auto companies?

L5 is science fiction, nobody has even an hypothesis about how to do that. Zoox and the other major players are developing L4.

There is another interesting, but still young company called Aurora innovation that has a very good team together that plans to develop and licence L4 to 3rd parties. Aurora has partnerships with 2 of the top 3 biggest car manufacturers in the world, VW and Hyundai, as well as with Byton, a Chinese EV startup backed by big Asian capital. Zoox has a different plan.

For those curious what 0-5 is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Definitions

(edit: changed link to point to wikipedia instead of random site)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com