Hyundai is spending $1B to keep self-driving startup Motional alive | Hacker News Reader

Hyundai is spending $1B to keep self-driving startup Motional alive

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50 pointsharambae49 comments

As part of the deal, Hyundai is also getting control of Aptiv, with 85% of the shares. It will be interesting to see what Hyundai will do with it.

I don't think so. This is just for Aptiv's investment. Looks like Aptiv (APTV) will remain separate.

Aptiv is a ~$21B market cap company and Hyundai didn't buy any portion of Aptiv (as far as I know).

Hyundai and Aptiv were joint venture owners of Motional (50/50). Motional is privately held and worth around $4B or $5B. Hyundai bought out some of Aptiv's stake and also invested some more in Motional. Hyundai spent ~$1B.

I cannot edit this anymore. Yes, meant that the control Aptiv had over Motional will now be with Hyundai, practically.

The point I was trying to make was that this was titled in Aptiv's Q1 presentation [1] as "APTIV EQUITY INTEREST TO BE REDUCED FROM 50% TO 15%". That is, they will offload most of the control to Hyundai. Immediately, Aptiv shares rose. So for some reason, this is seen as a good thing by Aptiv shareholders.

My point was and is: Considering the above aspect, it will be interesting to see how Hyundai will make use of it.

[1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/336558720/files/doc_presentations/2024...

Is it really worth it to invest that much money into self driving. Like the sheer numbers is out of this world. Surely there's better investments.

If you figure it out the reward is easily 100x that.

Not clear. Waymo has made it work, but cost per car and per ride is still very high. That should come down over time. It's not clear that this is a hugely profitable business. It's basically auto rental and taxi service, after all.

because waymo relies on a continuous mapping of the cities you can take it. that's why it is available in few US cities, but this does not scale at all. The point of those startups (and tesla's) is to produce something that can drive everywhere whitout prior information (fantasy world right now)

As far as the scaling, I think some would have said the same about Google Street View, but now the majority of streets in the country are mapped out. Google already has the infrastructure to be able to do the necessary mapping. And as Waymo cars become more common, I suspect they'll be able to fill in a lot of the gaps.

street view has images from years ago depending on where the google cars are mapping in that moment, waymo needs constant mapping of the cities it has cars in, therefore needing more man-hours. furthermore the driving laws differs from country to country, and in most of the world the road paint/signs are borderline indescifrable for a human, let alone a machine. i'm not saying that it can't be done, but it is already expensive in big US cities, it just do not scale well.

It's not at all clear why that wouldn't scale, could you elaborate? Legitimately not being snarky. The existence of Google Street View seems to be a fairly strong counterpoint.

> The point of those startups (and tesla's) is to produce something that can drive everywhere whitout prior information

Nope. The point is to make asstons of money. One does not need to achieve this silly ideal in order to do so.

This argument keeps coming up, mostly from Tesla fans. Google does collect a lot of data, but it uses it mostly for two things: 1) location with loss of or errors in GPS info, and 2) street maps of where to go. The driving environment is too dynamic for static info to be useful for more than that.

Driving in static environments with GPS, maps and LIDAR worked two decades ago, after all. The hard problems involve the other players.

Yes, Musk is saying that Tesla will have robot taxis by August 2024.[1] He said that back in 2021, too.[2] And in 2016.[3]

Tesla vs bollard: [4] Tesla still has only a not-very-good level 2 system.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-robo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vZ8eWBiWFE

[3] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4682448-tesla-sudden-third-...

[4] https://twitter.com/WorldBollard/status/1585626430154502145

The way I see it is what Waymo + others (and even Tesla until last year pre v12) was the same as someone doing ChatGPT but not with generative transformers but with if statements. If user asks what is that, say this, etc.

And now Tesla changed the game completely and moved to a 100% NN based system which indeed requires huge amounts of data which they're the only who actually have. All the other companies have no chance of getting that unless they fit their cars with thousands of dollars of gear for free (because I think no one would pay extra to get it and they really need it in ALL cars).

So it's probably not a good idea in terms of monopoly, but I think it will be Tesla FSD that gets integrated in all the other brands.

Because I would want to put a NN as unreliable as GPT4 in control of my car ... They are struggling to put in guardrails and make it politically correct with text.

I guess AI truly is the new crypto because I'm seeing all the same hype patterns. And Tesla is always riding the wave.

I've heard from several folks working on self driving outside of Tesla that they're very concerned about how cavalier Tesla is being about safety. I recall hearing one story about an engineer who outright refused to ride in a Tesla with FSD enabled. All anecdotal, sure, but I've become very skeptical of Tesla's approach.

> They are struggling to put in guardrails and make it politically correct with text.

Are they? It’s quite hard to get politically incorrect outputs from ChatGPT nowadays.

How many things does it not talk about? One of the challenges of self-driving is that it has to fail safely so they have to handle all of these uncommon situations a chatbot can just give up on.

There are two drivers here:

1) Non linear payoff if it does work. A billion seems like a lot of money but at the volume of cars that Hyundai produces (millions), it's not a lot per vehicle and as a percentage of their revenue it's also pretty modest (about 1%). This stuff could add a lot of value to their cars.

2) Fear of missing out if somebody else manages. The nightmare scenario for Hyundai would be Tesla or some other competitor managing to launch something that actually works and then having to license their solution just to keep up; probably at great cost.

There are a lot of nay-sayers out there proclaiming at length how all this is a mission impossible. But the reason these investments are happening is that there are by now quite a wide range of autonomous taxis driving in a growing number of cities in the world. And they mostly seem to get their passengers from A to B without a driver. So, it's clearly not that impossible for this to work. Going from hundreds of bespoke cars operating for the likes of Waymo to millions of autonomously driving cars is the game here. Somebody is going to get there eventually. But not without a lot of investments.

Hyundai is opting to hedge their bets here. They are investing a lot more conservatively than e.g. Tesla. But they are not completely ignoring it either.

> Somebody is going to get there eventually. But not without a lot of investments.

There's still a bunch of major technological problems to be solved.

Taking Waymo as the best right now: 1. Their solution requires detailed mapping for all areas before it works 2. It doesn't appear to work with rain 3. Or snow

Like, none of these challenges are insurmountable, but as they say the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the next 90% of the time.

And more generally, even if the technological problems were solved, there's the regulatory concerns, in that who takes liability when (not if) there are accidents.

Given all that, I wouldn't expect to see full autonomy for about 10-15 years.

I think 10-15 years is extremely pessimistic given we have cars on the road now delivering passengers. Scaling that is the game.

I’d say 10-15 years is an optimistic outlook for ”full autonomy”. Maybe in some regions of the world in certain weather conditions. Full autonomy in northern snowy countries isn’t going to happen in 10-15 years, imo.

I think 10-15 years is a good guess because the issue is about regulation and infra and these move much slower.

> given we have cars on the road now delivering passengers

No we don't, only local roads, not fare-paying passengers on freeways, not in NorCal. In Phoenix AZ they are still testing self-driving on the freeway on employees, not fare-paying passengers on freeway.

Wait until you see self-driving taxis on freeway and to/from airports, with fee-paying passengers, in traffic, in bad weather, at night. See how many accidents there are per million miles. Then the discussion moves to "How many accidents/fatalities are acceptable per million passenger-miles?"

> See how many accidents there are per million miles.

It's hard to do worse than human drivers on that front. Especially under the circumstances you mention.

Don’t we need data before we can say that? Human drivers are pretty bad but self-driving software is hard to compare appropriately since you can’t just use national averages which include conditions the self-driving systems don’t support.

> 2. It doesn't appear to work with rain

Waymos do drive in the rain. See [1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/126kznl/wa...

Mapping isn’t a major issue because there’s surprisingly few roads across a country. The interstate highway system is 47,432 miles in the US, you could send a car down every lane every day without major issue.

The US has 4.09 million miles of road for 333 million people. If you assume it costs 10$ / mile / year which seems excessive that’s still a trivial expense.

Why did Waymo survive and Cruise fail then?

From the outside, with no insider information, my impression is waymo was under a lot LESS pressure compared to others to exaggerate their successes. This is just my impression but to me it feels like waymo was able to do a lot better self-policing or was much better at marketing to appear keeping safety at a top priority. For example, I remember reading articles that said the equipment on early prototypes were multiple times the cost of the Toyota Prius cars they were mounted on. Things like this make me feel safer with a waymo.

The real answer though is money. Since none of these investments are close to breaking even, the only obvious answer as to why one succeeds vs fails is the continued additional investment of money.

Execution, having a good idea and lots of money doesn’t guarantee success.

Waymo is 4 years older than Cruise

Cruise severely botched an accident investigation which they might have been cleared of if they didn't try to hide evidence from CA regulators [0].

Follow the laws and it's fairly easy to operate.

I was a happy customer of Cruise's btw and they largely solved the self driving taxi problem at the city level at least, but Waymo does have access to better mapping because of Google.

[0] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-05/gms-cruise...

Theres a world outside US

The important bit is the ratio of customers to miles of road. The US has 80+ people per mile of road, that radio may be slightly higher or lower in each country but it’s never going to be prohibitive.

This is the Hyundai Motor Group that is making investments. They are the parent organisation of Hyundai, Kia and Genesis. They also make Commercial vehicles. FSD, at this point have a lot if challenges, technology and regulation wise. But it is clear that these companies see value in their offerings being able to be driven without full attention from drivers. For that, I think this is not that bad of an investment.

A billion is really just a drop in the bucket.

> Hyundai will spend another $448 million to buy 11% of Aptiv’s common equity interest in Motional

It seems the company has retained its $4b valuation from 2019.

Self-driving tech is really a bet auto manufacturers are making for the US market. Most of the developed world will move away from individual vehicles for anything besides the last mile in the next decades. Modern countries will have extensive train networks (already somewhat self-driving), but the US' faux-democracy does not allow for incumbent technologies like the automobile to be supplanted.

This is such a pipe dream, your pipe must be heavily clogged at this point.

I live in Switzerland, it doesn't get more developed re infrastructure on country level than this really. Car ownership ain't going away, train network is fine but a) ridiculously expensive and prices are raising each year; b) certainly not good enough for many many tasks, unless you like spending 2h in trains/buses instead of 30 mins in the car, sometimes there is just nothing.

Yes you can arrange your life and simply experience less, but why the heck would anybody do that? Private car ownership is at all time high and not slowing down, there are visibly more and more cars on the roads every year.

Self-driving may change that, once it comes. I estimate 2040 earliest en masse, musk poisoned that pond pretty badly with his lies and unfulfilled promises. It just became a no-topic for next decade and some.

> Most of the developed world will move away from individual vehicles for anything besides the last mile in the next decades.

I live in Seoul where despite its jokingly small size, people have car(s). We already have highspeed rails and everything. Cars are definitely not going anywhere unless specifically went against it by governemntal policies.

Well thank God for that because I would rather not risk getting assaulted on the train, or ride with people shooting up and vaping, or experience it catching fire underground and breathing in enough smoke from an electrical fire to guarantee cancer, all of which happen regularly around here. Give me those robo taxis, baby.

So you can get carjacked instead? I’d have thought watching so much local TV news would have informed you that leaving the house is unacceptably risky.

I don’t watch local news but I did take the metro to work for many years.

Me too, but never that risky. The worst it got was a drunk college girl throwing up on the way back from the bar.

Move to a first world country

Glib and ironic since first world countries are the ones where these types of problems exist the most.

The joke is your think your country is good, but it turns out it's terrible if those things are "happening regularly"

I would not trade my standard of living for better public transit.

I live next to a train station in Scotland. To travel to a big city near me 32 miles away and back would cost me £11.30

This would cost £1.92 in my EV (or £7.68 in my old diesel).

It would also cost me £1.92 for my whole family in the same car, whereas the train fair would multiply.

There’s a lot more to it than that of course but public transport is expensive.

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