
Failure of Self-Driving Truck Co Tells You All You Need About Self-Driving Vehs - ourmandave
https://jalopnik.com/the-failure-of-this-self-driving-truck-company-tells-yo-1842417033
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mywittyname
I bet a lot of investors were backing out because they don't see any money to
be made in this space. With the economy turning south, none of the major
automakers are going to be dumping billions in to acquiring self-driving
startups for at least another decade, at best. Worst case, Starsky Robotics
won't able to even keep up with what the major automakers or suppliers are
doing. I used to work for a major supplier in the automotive space and these
companies do have some world-class software engineering talent.

I'm a daily reader of Jalopnik, but we have to be honest: they are the tabloid
news of auto journalism. A lot of their articles are poorly researched and
they pander heavily to their readership (unfortunately, IMHO, the author of
this piece is the site's worst offender in this respect). Most of their good
writers left a long while ago, so the only informative articles I see on there
anymore are about motorsports.

I would recommend skipping right past the sensationalized Jalopnik
regurgitation and reading the actual blog post from Starsky [0].

[0] [https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-
starsky-...](https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-
robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5)

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ramzyo
It seems short-sighted to have focused all efforts on safety engineering,
which is inherently boring to investors regardless of whether it’s the correct
approach (I believe there’s a strong argument that it is).

Unfortunately it seems like they found this out the hard way. Would be
genuinely interested to understand why they didn’t do some split, say 60/40,
safety/flashy new AI features. If the goal was to extend runway, this may have
just done the trick. Or perhaps the headwinds are just too strong and they
would’ve crumbled around 2021/2022 anyway like they predict most others will.

Wish them the best, not easy to go down when you’ve given it your all,
especially in this environment.

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redis_mlc
VCs are fad-driven - they're sheep.

It was amusing to see at least one major VC, Kleiner Perkins, implode funding
clean tech in the last hype cycle, and now we have self-driving vehicles.

[https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/](https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_solyndra/)

What both categories have in common was that investors thought they could make
money from something they couldn't even explain.

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numpad0
What's the investment money has to do with SDC anyways? It pays rents, buys
food, keeps GPU hot but I still can't imagine the capital accelerating time-
to-market all that much.

People talk expensive gears made cheap, as if they make AI smarter or as if
that "enables". The reality is there's no such AI that can steer or clear path
to _develop_ something that could, no?

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heyitsguay
As far as i can tell, investment helps with getting bigger, better research
and engineering teams together.

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neonate
[http://archive.md/pqTsy](http://archive.md/pqTsy)

