Ford and VW pulling the plug on self-driving vehicles | Hacker News Reader

Ford and VW pulling the plug on self-driving vehicles

cnn.com

16 pointsfloathub8 comments

> “… profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology ourselves,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said

This is a great way to think about it honestly. Why pour millions or billions into something when some company is sure to pop up thats doing it better than you and would do anything to land your company as a licensor?

With respect to the old saw that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", this suggests that the market can remain irrational for about twelve years.

Waymo and Cruise are still operating.

The market can remain irrational as long as its backers remain solvent.

Getting Alphabet to admit that Waymo was a ridiculously expensive failure will take a lot.

Just a matter of time before the auto industry heads the way of the smartphone. Foxcon is already pitching to be a OEM manufacturer for automotive brands. EVs are taking over china, with many of them being from local brands, giving them the required scale.

Tech first companies like Tesla, Rivian, Xpeng and Nio will lead the way.

Huh? It’s possible that pretty soon Ford will be the 2nd largest EV company if they get their act together. How is that related to this news ?

There will always be domestic automobile manufacturers, it's a national security issue to preserve large-scale vehicle production lines within your borders.

Last time I checked, people want to get from point A to point B with their cars, which are as cheap as possible.

Staggering amount of regular citizens all over the world does not even know that their car can already park itself using USS or have a cruise control, let alone how to trigger that function.

Tech is irrelevant to most of users, because main goal is to get to destination. Everything else are decorations on a Christmas tree. However from some reason tech bros likes to overplay importance of tech.

If that's the case, then plastic cars made of minimum cost products from Foxconn would be well-positioned to upset the market and eventually take over from the older business model.

If the value add is "no value," Chinese manufacturing has already demonstrated its capacity to dominate that game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com