Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that American automakers are ahead of the Japanese automakers in the areas of self-driving and electric cars. Not really what I would have expected if you had asked me 10 years ago.

View on HN

10 years ago, or "that time I pretend was just 10 years ago"? I confuse those two all the time.

Actual ten years ago, in 2008, Japan had long lost the halo of being the dominant economic force of the future it had through most of the 1980ies and 1990ies. In 2008, Tesla was already selling the Roadster, the iPhone wasn't new anymore, the The Matrix sequels were already older than the original movie had been at the time of their release. Another twenty years earlier, we all watched Bruce Willis chase German terrorists through Nakatomi Plaza, that's when Japan was "The Future".

In 2008 the iPhone was only a year old, Japan was still the world's number two economy, and two of the big 3 American car companies was bankrupt by the end of 2009 and got bailed out by the government.

So you were referring more to a particularly weak moment of American car makers than to the strength of their Japanese counterparts at the time, makes sense that way.

Eh, seems plausible to me. The Roadster was just a cool toy. Toyota's Prius had become a symbol of the future of cars (not necessarily hybrid, but low consumption) while GM was preparing to file for Chapter 11 and Ford had reported the largest annual loss in company history just a couple of years before.

Well, to me this is not really surprising since America is leading the way technologically speaking. Computers, the internet, the smartphone, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

What is a self-driving car, really? Software on wheel. Who's leading the pack in software development? America.

For every one of those companies you mention there are Chinese ones that are arguably bigger and more successful.

And I don’t think you can chalk smartphones down to an American invention really.

Can you provide their names? I’m curious if I’ve heard of them.

People are browsing in browsers created by american companies, compiled with compilers created by american companies, running on Operating Systems by american companies. The easy surface problems (making websites and apps) has indeed started to be tackled by the rest of the world, but the US is clearly the birthplace of all the computing stack. It's not surprising they are the first to tackle self driving cars.

What, like Huawei? I don't think you can call the companies (I'm making assumptions about which ones you're alluding to) more successful when their success is predicated upon corporate espionage and IP theft from the aforementioned American companies.

And these companies are?

These companies are successful inside China but if actual free market competition was allowed in the communist country, they would have hard time competing with US counterparts imho.

Was it not the DARPA challenge in the USA that honed the skills of urmson, CMU, Stanford, and other engineers? What role did Japan have to play in FSD vehicles?

Why? We lead the world in software by a long margin. It's one of the reasons english is the lingua franca of software development. As for electric cars, it's only the US and the chinese who are heavily invested in it. The japanese have a presence in EVs but they are more heavily invested in hydrogen cars.

European manufacturers are heavily investing in electric cars. You're perhaps blinded by local news -- then again I'm surely too, as I don't know of US companies other than Tesla that are doing something with electric.

GM has been shipping the Chevy Bolt for a while though sales are down. Of course there are lots of hybrids.

GM has the Bolt and Volt, and a Cadillac hybrid. Ford has the C-Max plug-in and a few other hybrids, and is going to build a hybrid F-150 and Mustang in the next few years. And for some reason Chrysler managed to beat Toyota and Honda to market with the first hybrid minivan.

Given that the F-150 is the bestselling vehicle in the United States, Ford might become one of the world's top sellers of hybrid cars when they release it. And the hybrid Mustang is supposed to be one of the fastest Mustang models.

I'm skeptical that a hybrid F150 would be much of a success, outside of people that probably don't need to have a full-size truck anyway.

It might be mildly interesting if any batteries were stashed in the rear - in the winter I have to put about 1000 pounds of sandbags to make it safe to drive on snow and ice.

The hybrid F150 will sell well based on one feature alone: using the vehicle’s engine and electric motors to function as a powerful worksite generator. Of course most people won’t use it for that but it gives them the excuse to buy it.

That and fleet sales are huge for f150 iirc. A more efficient, even if more boring to drive option exists, they will procure it en masse.

>for some reason Chrysler managed to beat Toyota and Honda to market with the first hybrid minivan

Chrysler pretty much invented the minivan and is actually very competitive in the minivan market. Here's[0] a review of Chrysler vs Honda & Toyota.

[0]https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2017-chrysler-pacifica-...

In what way other than wages does the US lead the world at all, never mind "by a large margin"?

off the top of my head, the three most valuable tech companies in the world are based in the US.

who do you think is the world leader in tech?

The Nissan Leaf seems more than "a presence".

Toyota production system heavily favors autonomation vs automation. That combined with incremental process improvements and heavy bureaucracy has been a huge impediment

Theee is a reason why TPS is the current gold standard in production, regardlesz of industry. Automation is fine in theory, but no silber bullet solution. Large hardware manufacturing is something different than small electronics.

If it weren't for the threat of Google and Uber American car makers would still probably be uh... asleep at the wheel :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com