Hyundai Motor Group, Aptiv to set up $4B self-driving car venture | Hacker News Reader

Hyundai Motor Group, Aptiv to set up $4B self-driving car venture

reuters.com

50 pointshhs30 comments

“ Instead, the new firm would begin testing fully driverless systems in 2020 and have a production-ready autonomous driving platform available for robotaxi providers, fleet operators and automakers in 2022.”

I’ll eat my hat if this is ready for level 5 in 2022.

Nine financial quarters. Yeah, not happening.

The gulf between "testing fully driverless systems" on desert interstates and "deploying a useful autonomous vehicle" is wiiiide.

My tongue-in-cheek prediction: we'll have commercially viable self-driving cars one year after Amazon warehouses are fully automated.

Is anyone actually testing self driving cars on desert interstates yet? From what I understand, most of the testing happens on residential streets in the Bay Area. Testing on desert interstates would be a huge step up.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/15/20805994/ups-self-driving...

There's a video out there of the UPS truck driving 90 minutes end-to-end without interruption by the driver or engineer who are along for the ride.

Desert interstates are actually easier than residential streets. No pedestrians, no snow, little rain, no intersections.

High speeds, winding roads that go up and down mountains. It actually isn’t that easy out here.

It should be predictable difficulty though, right? What's the actual difficulty for a robot driver? Typically in residential driving it comes down to perception(/prediction) difficulty and planning difficulty.

Interstate highways have minimum curve radii and maximum grades and a whole host of other requirements that make them easy by definition.

It's not hard to do. Google has been able to do it for some years. It's difficult to build a service around cars that are only autonomous on the highway, so the autonomy companies pivoted to in-city driving as a natural next step toward having no safety driver.

[edit: it's hard to do, but has been done a couple times over by a couple of companies]

I've been waiting for someone to try Montana in the winter. I'll believe the self driving thing when that works. Might be able to save some lives and keep the number of roadside crosses down.

Having done SLC I15 to Spokane I90 (the route that takes you into Idaho twice, and crosses the inter continental divide a few hundred times) in the winter before, I’m not even sure human-driving works well across those passes. Was in first gear going down while locals were passing me at 80 MPH.

Canadians[1]! A whole country, full of innovation north of Montana and frighteningly aware of snow and ice :).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zaf4pSe4v4

Yeah, but Montana is, well, Montana. I'm in North Dakota and we have some really scary driving weather including the ice rink known as I-94 near Fargo. But, Montana has such a variety of driving conditions including mountain passes from heck, and a tradition of driving a bit fast to make life difficult for any automated system.

Also rain. LIDARs don't work in the rain, and driving in rain is quite challenging in urban areas.

Hello from Michigan, and ditto. I've been dodging potholes that could eat an entire motorcycle, and I have yet to see a so-called "self-driving" car that even understood the concept of a pothole.

Or random road construction that just closes an entire lane on a 1-lane road, so you have to divert into the turn lane. No arrows, just cones, figure it out. This is obvious and natural for human drivers...

Or flagmen at a construction site, with the "stop/slow" sign....

9 financial quarters plus all the prior years of work.

Aptiv appears to have been working on self-driving for quite some time.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/05/31/self-dri...

https://www.aptiv.com/media/article/aptiv-launches-fleet-of-...

In fact the self-driving part goes back several years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joecornell/2017/12/06/delphi-au...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16533534/delphi-nutonomy...

Yes, Ottomatika (self-driving car CMU spinoff) was purchased in 2015 and NuTonomy (MIT spinoff) in 2017. They have been busy.

I think Hyundai/Kia had self driving systems in development for the past, what, 5 years? Kia debuted its DriveWise in 2016. So they don't start from scratch.

Hyundai is a massive conglomerate, as well as being one of the top automakers in the world. I certainly wouldn't bet against them.

You're seriously underestimating how long it'll take to perfect a self driving car. 2-3 years is very laughable. And even if by some amazing miracle, they achieve it, the legal challenges around making such a system ubiquitous won't be resolved in 3 years.

> the legal challenges around making such a system ubiquitous won't be resolved in 3 years

They don't claim that. They say they'll have something production->>ready<<, as in ready to produce once the legal framework is clear.

Self-driving cars on the open road are likely an AI-complete problem.

That actually gives me all the more reason to bet against them in the SDC space.

That being said, iirc Aptiv has nutonomy which has a good approach and smart people. That could be a wildcard.

Why does it even have to be fully autonomous at this rate?

Highway automation seems like a far easier problem to solve and tons of people and businesses spend countless hours on the highway.

Why not try to reach better-than-humans at highways with large scale deployments as step #1?

Because while 99.9% of highway driving is simple, you don't want to turn something like another car being parked on the highway[1] into a mass-casualty incident because it was too complex for the lead car to handle, and the following 200 vehicles were all filled with equally stupid AIs driving with their owners sleeping or on their phones.

1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-acti...

That’s why I said they should perfect that first and use that as the primary goal...

Tesla’s first version doesn’t fit that description nor should it be any reason for others to stop.

"Production-ready" can mean a lot of things. They do have over 30,000 trips logged in Vegas so far: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianblanco/2019/01/29/apti...

Based on the CES demo videos, the loops they're doing are pretty easy, so having something "production ready" by next year if only for those loops probably isn't out of the question. Definitely nowhere near "True Level 5," but something that can generate (even modest) revenue.

Aptiv is a truly huge conglomerate (140k+ employees), and the self-driving team (e.g. Nutonomy) is just a few dozen and distributed all over the US. It's easy for investors to look at Aptiv and see a disconnected Lord of the Flies. However, this announcement shows Aptiv wants to be seen as more of a unified Aurora-like start-up and thus warrants billions of external investment. Given how much mileage they've accumulated, I'm surprised they didn't raise more money.

Besides the fact that this won't work ("fully driverless" by 2020? Next year!) we must all realise that, in the midst of a climate crisis, making more cars, autonomous or not, is a proposition that is at best disconnected from reality and at worse actively hostile to life on the planet.

We must make fewer cars, not more. We must get rid of a large number of existing cars, and switch to alternatives like public transport and, well, public transport. We can't afford everyone having their private automobile, families having two or three each, any longer.

From what I understand, this plan does not even involve electric cars, which would at least show some willingness to consider the climate.

Edit: added missing rs (r key was stuck).

Autonomous vehicles could easily reduce the number of cars if they turn into a service rather than a product. Think of how much wasted utilization occurs while each car sits idly in a parking lot. There would also be considerable waste elimination through the ability to optimize ride sharing

UBI needs to be implemented before we think about this, because many many industries depends on automotive industry, if we don't sell more car, economy will collapse, and to protect people from it, alternative income solutions must be in place.

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