Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I wish they had invested 500 million into buying a self-driving startup or something instead. Or just opening up a new AI branch for Toyota / Lexus. It's not like people en masse are driving around in self driving cars while asleep at the wheel yet so the race for self-driving is still a turtle race. They have the resources imho to do great things, maybe they're afraid after the software issues where cars would keep accelerating, but that shouldn't stop them from getting in on the game.

Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.

View on HN

The evidence that there actually were any software issues related to unintended acceleration is pretty tenuous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle...

"Driver error or pedal misapplication was found responsible for most of the incidents.[28] The report ended stating, "Our conclusion is Toyota's problems were mechanical, not electrical." This included sticking accelerator pedals, and pedals caught under floor mats."

And Malcolm Gladwell's podcast about the subject, http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

That doesn't make me trust them or their software / electrical team.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-toyota-prius-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Barr_(software_enginee...

T-SB-0172-09

I love the concept of electrical cars but that has to come with a leap forward in software quality and electrical engineering quality, which I am not really seeing happen.

The idea of Quality is still, basically, alien in the software field. Some of that can be blamed on 'the marketplace' but then again, I believe that if people are going to call themselves "Engineers" they should take up that old mantle of the public responsibility inherent in that title, as it was developed after much blood and horror was spilled over the failed bridges and railroads of the 19th century.

Um ... I don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCTf7wT5WR0

Yeah I remember reading about the bug here on HN sometime back. Maybe it was a mix of both mechanical issues and software issues to some extent? Not totally impossible. Heck wouldn't surprise me if one end said "don't worry about that, the software will handle it" and the other end said "don't worry about that, the hardware will handle that" kinda thing. But that's just me speculating, which does nobody any good.

This video is an excellent analysis. I love the detail these investigators went into to uncover the software development practices during the early 2000's at Toyota. I really hope the automobile industry has taken this to heart and is creating more process around the software that our lives depend on.

I'm disappointed in Malcom Gladwell's analysis of this situation. His advice is dangerous and should be corrected. Here is a response to his piece that is well laid out. http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/tipping-point

They already have Toyota Research Institute, which they've invested 1 billion and got the Gill Pratt to head so I not sure why they want to team up with Uber now.

Hedging is very smart when there’s a huge future market at stake and you (Toyota) makes hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue per year.

Unfortunately, it's not unusual for large corporations to invest millions or even billions into new R&D projects that yield no results.

This is especially true for high technology projects, and only becoming more of a risk as technology becomes more complex.

Can totally see it happening with something like self-driving cars, which is currently still a black art (remember how even Uber apparently needed to filch some IP from Waymo to even get its own project going?)

> remember how even Uber apparently needed to filch some IP from Waymo to even get its own project going?

Any proof? I see a settlement but not an admission or proof of guilt by Uber (not saying the former Google employee wasn't dirty). https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/9/16995254/waymo-uber-lawsui...

To digress a bit, if development and research is becoming more and more expensive, that would seem to imply increasing concentration of wealth is necessary to keep tech progress chugging along. To build pyramids, you have to have pharaohs...

Spreading their bets? Buying into something else with Uber with the "self driving" being a front?

This. Toyota knows our cars may go the way of our CD collections

The skills necessary to "win" driverless cars (i.e. first/second place) are scarce as is, and ridiculously competitive. There will not be a long tail of driverless car companies, so it makes more sense to invest in an existing one that already has momentum, than to take up the challenge from scratch yourself.

You do know that there were no software issues that would keep cars accelerating, it was purely user error that got blown out of proportion?

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

A rather stark rebuttal to Gladwell's analysis was posted elsewhere in this discussion:

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/tipping-point

Edit: I see this is addressed in updates to the Revisionist History posting, in PDF form.

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, but I doubt they are letting the sticking accelerator software bug affect their positions on mobility in the future.

It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections.

Does anyone have a name for this type of advantage, or know of examples in other areas?

> It appears that autonomous vehicle progress has an interesting moat where being good at it (the ability to drive a lot of miles) allows you to get better faster (drive more miles, more quickly). It is similar to a network effect, but with competency rather than number of connections.

This doesn't seem to be the case. Look at the California disengagement statistics over cumulative miles - it looks like it's logarithmic or something, certainly not accelerating. Or look at Waymo in Arizona: they are driving, what, 70,000 miles per month and have racked up cumulative millions there already; if there really were some sort of compound interest or exponential improvement, then after they solved it well enough to go live and started racking up all those miles, self-driving cars should be on the verge of being solved & going global unless you postulate an enormous distance in between 'good enough to drive customers around Arizona' and 'good enough to drive customers around everywhere'.

Compound interest, Pareto principle, Matthew Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com