
Ford tops the list of automated driving leaders in new study - Fricken
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/ford-tops-the-list-of-automated-driving-leaders-in-new-study/
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dsfyu404ed
Like I said before, you can't turn an aircraft carrier on a dime but when it
finally comes around you've got a f __king aircraft carrier.

The established players in the auto industry noticed Tesla a few years back,
began writing checks and now the ship has come around and they're closing the
gap.

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Spare_account
I don't have any sources to back this up but I don't think that worries Musk.
I don't think he's actually overly concerned about _Tesla_ succeeding at self
driving cars, or electric cars.

Musk wants the self driving car _industry_ to be better. He needs those
technologies to be significantly better for his interplanetary ambitions to be
realised.

The solar roof, the power bank, all of the other endeavours he is engaged in
are all intended to catalyse the industries that he's rattling the cage of.
He'll need them on Mars and they're not good enough at the moment.

Ford winning at self driving cars is a good result for Musk.

~~~
jstandard
I think GP was talking about winning autonomous cars. While it might be the
case Musk isn't concerned, that's a bad result for 30,000 other employees who
are more invested than Musk in the success of their company.

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michaelbuckbee
This was a couple years ago (and I apologize for not being able to find a
source), but I heard an interview with a Ford exec about the limits of
adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance and he basically said: "Our
drivers don't want that. They want the control of their own vehicle."

And not that it's set in stone, and not that organizations can't change, but
in general it sure seems like Ford and the other big automakers don't want
self driving cars.

Partially, it's a concern that they'll see their existing model torn to shreds
if self driving cars become the basis for much more efficient on demand or
fractional ownership car usage.

And I think partially it's that the designers, engineers, exec's at Ford are
"car people". They love driving cars, they see a romance to them ("the open
road"), they have "daily drivers" and "my pride and joy" type of relationships
with their cars.

If nothing else, it's abundantly clear that Tesla is coming at this from a
whole different direction.

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cujo
Are you sure? From where I sit, it looks like Tesla is just offering a
traditional car with a different set of organs. They don't seem to show any
signs of doing anything different than ford on the sales/direction angle.

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michaelbuckbee
Here's the things that seem different to me:

\- No dealerships

\- Supercharger network (It started as free, but now it's moving to pay/minute
usage). I expect that in the years to come it will become a profit center.

\- Powerwall battery + solar roof integration

\- Tesla seems to have more cars on the road doing some level of autonomous
driving now than anyone else. I think that real world experience and data
counts for something.

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briandear
No dealerships isn't an innovation.

I do find it ironic that those that complain about Uber "violating the law"
when it comes to taxi services seem to have no problem not complaining when
Tesla attempts to subvert many state laws against direct-sales. For the
record, I think Uber should challenge ridiculous anti-competitive regulations
just as Tesla should challenge ridiculous anti-competitive regulations.

But you can't cheer Tesla fighting the law while condemning Uber for doing the
same and stay intellectually consistent.

Dealership laws were passed ostensibly to 'protect the consumer' just as taxi
regulations were passed for the same reason. In reality, both types of laws
don't protect anyone -- except industry incumbents.

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entee
It does appear that Tesla is a little more deliberate than Uber in that
regard. They do comply with court orders, they have been trying to fight the
laws in court and the legislature as a first option instead of as a, "we got
caught, sorry" option. It's also unclear that Tesla is particularly opposed to
regulation in general, whereas Uber has essentially resisted any regulations
(say, fingerprinting or deeper background checks or employee/contractor
designations) at every turn. Uber (until recently) wouldn't even pay a nominal
fee to test autonomous vehicles!

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apsec112
Reports like this are meaningless, because they make up arbitrary categories,
and then assign them arbitrary weights. This one is especially bad because it
has categories that are almost impossible to judge objectively, like
"Strategy".

Reminds me of San Francisco's report on the Central Subway. They created eight
categories, equally weighted, of which one was "cost". Of course, everything
in construction trades off against cost. So the most expensive option always
came out ahead, because it "gained" in seven categories but "lost" in one.

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EStudley
"The annual survey looked at 18 different companies, smeared across 10
different criteria, ranging from strategy, to core tech development, to
manufacturing capability and staying power, and a company that’s over 100
years old ended up leading the list."

Why does 'manufacturing capability and staying power' correlate to 'potential
in the world of autonomous driving'? It doesn't matter if you can pump out a
thousand cars an hour if they crash a mile down the road. This should be based
on core tech development only..

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whalesalad
The inverse is also important. If you "invent" the best tech possible but have
no way to get it onto the road -- is it the best?

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EStudley
I get that. It just seems like that specific metric could have been over-
weighted seeing as how Ford and GM were at the top of the list..

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Fricken
I think GM deserves to be at the top of the list. Cruise is very quickly
closing the gap between themselves and Waymo, and they have a comitted car
company to back them up. The jury is still out as to whether Ford can make
good headway on their 'secret sauce', which is now in the hands of Argo.ai.

~~~
Judgmentality
Yeah, Cruise seems to be doing a great job. Argo has a great founding team,
but there are still a lot of things that can go wrong. While I'd give Argo the
edge in technical competence (I realize that's not a very meaningful statement
considering the age of the company), what really matters is building the right
product at the right time. You can have a ton of great engineers and still not
accomplish much in the market - just look at Waymo and Uber.

The way I see it, at least in the US, it's really GM vs Ford (which is Cruise
vs Argo). Waymo has a management crisis and lost most of their top talent, and
Uber is hemorrhaging talent (and money). Apart from that there are various
startups but I don't believe they'll ever get the money necessary to compete
with the big players - even Google gave up on that front.

Outside the US I'm excited to see what happens with Volvo, which says they'll
have 100 stage 4 vehicles delivered to customers by the end of the year.

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Isamu
> During the past year, Ford has invested in Civil Maps, Velodyne, and
> autonomous AI startup Argo – plus it acquired Chariot, and algorithmic
> platform startup SAIPS.

Plus they actually make cars, that's apparently why they are highly ranked.
But their investments have yet to bear fruit, we will have to wait and see.

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revelation
The only relevant data you could possibly look at is the disengagement reports
they are legally required to provide. And looking at those, it's Google... and
then nobody else for a long, long, long time.

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x_foo_x
Then I guess Telsa marketing dept > Ford marketing dept.

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onmobiletemp
I dont have deep knowledge of this but wow, what a laugh this is. Tesla has a
huge fleet of vehicles that its training with. Ford bought some lidar stuff.
Yeah, once you have an aircraft carrier on your tail its big trouble but ford
has directed their aircraft carrier in the completely wrong direction. An
aircraft carrier is useless without a captain.

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twobuy
I know this isn't normally the forum for these sort of comments, but is anyone
else put-off by how this story occurred the same day as the 'Tesla overtakes
Ford' story?

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skdotdan
Time to long Ford.

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dayaz36
I'm hoping people here are smart enough not to actually believe this nonsense.
Tesla is BY FAR the leader in autonomous driving

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revelation
This is the leaders performance on actual production hardware outside of fancy
(postprocessed) videos with their "cameras only" approach:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg)

At this point I don't even care if they theorethically are the best, if they
are willing to release this dangerous crap they are sooner going to go up in a
big publicity fire than get actual autonomy to customers.

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dmode
This is an old outdated and out of context video. I just drove 150 miles this
weekend using AP2. It works pretty well.

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revelation
It's February, hardly outdated. Did you drive on residential streets, as in
the video, or highway?

See, highway "autopilot" debuted in upper class Mercedes Benz some 10 years
ago..

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dayaz36
Feb was before 8.1 software update which has significant AP updates. So it is
outdated.

