
VW, BMW and Daimler hold talks on cooperation in self-driving cars - lawrenceyan
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/autonomous-plans-vw-bmw-and-daimler-hold-talks-on-cooperation-in-self-driving-cars/23909322.html
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ivankolev
Standardizing on sensors and communication protocols can only be a good thing,
and the talks about making an "open" self-driving platform are enouraging.
Time will tell if it's going to pan out and whether the need for quotes around
open.

~~~
beerlord
We are also going to need standardisation on reporting of car use to
Governments. If we are no longer going to fund roads through fuel taxes, we
need some other mechanism to do it. Proper charging of road use would unlock
efficiencies for the road network overall.

~~~
repsilat
Dunno about other places, but in New Zealand commercial trucks mostly have
voluntary GPS tracking/logging to estimate their road mileage for road levies.
(IIRC because they can subtract mileage travelled on private roads, but the
per-km rate might be lower too.)

For most purposes though, a few linked to odometer reading, measured at
mandatory "car health check-up" time and maybe amortised over the intervening
period would be just fine, and require no new tech or tracking. Maybe tie it
to insurance somehow?

------
ineedasername
Self-driving kind of seems like the type of thing that would benefit from a
single standard protocol. It seems almost reckless to have a dozen or more
organizations trying to invent it on their own, each discovering or missing
pitfalls that can cost lives. The problem is that the asymetry of balkanized
development leads to lucrative competetive advantages, at least in the short
term as the first to "get it right" can reap a windfall. And I suppose they'd
deserve it for the risk of the investment they spent.

Is there an alternative they could compete on instead of the core tech? Maybe
their coverage of localizations to different sets of traffic laws? Even with a
dozen parallel developers, eventually the tech will become commoditized. When
that happens to a technology, often the competition surrounding it focuses on
services instead. What would those services be with self driving tech?

~~~
tim333
Trouble is no one has really cracked self driving yet so it's probably
premature to focus on one flawed system. Even Waymo it seems can't merge with
heavy traffic
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011890).
We may need better AI beyond current machine learning algorithms.

~~~
partingshots
No real breakthrough is needed. At this point, the current machine learning
architectures and models we have are enough. The pains of R&D have been dealt
with, and now it’s all about implementation and scaling, at least for the
companies that have reached this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if these
German car makers are still heavily behind the state of the art.

~~~
Doubleslash
I don't think this is the case - both the breakthrough and your statement
about where the car manufacturers are. First, current machine learning is
flawed. I provides reasonably accurate predictions for simple to medium
complex problems with manageable amount of input variables, but requires a lot
of data already at the high end of that. For high confidence and high
dimensionality it's already uneconomical to even get the data in amount and
quality needed. These models fail ultimately with complex scenarios like day
to day driving.

As you can see with Waymo and Uber even the simple grid like traffic systems
in the US with wide lanes and lots of space to cross are already a problem.
Here we haven't even looked at organically grown traffic systems like in
Europe or the sheer craziness they call traffic in countries like India.
Effectively none of these are self-driving cars as they all come with a driver
who regularly has to intervene as the cars prefer to drive around the block
rather than doing a left-turn. These are problems they will not be able to
solve even with 100x the mileage and cars they have today - scalability is not
the problem here. Or rather it's uneconomical to solve it like that - by the
time you gathered the necessary amount of training data the traffic systems
will likely have changed significantly.

The underlying problem is that machine learning is impossible to debug and
deep learning is based on the understanding of the human brain from the early
60s. These fields has advanced significantly since then and we will need both,
new algorithms and new hardware, of what will eventually become sophisticated
neuromorphic networks that truly mimic the human brain capacity. As it stands
today, a human needs only a couple of examples to train, a machine needs
millions. This is not only a compute problem but also a sensor problem.
Today's sensor don't deliver the data at the necessary fidelity fast enough.
We need algorithms that can learn more effectively, not harder.

I wouldn't be surprised if the German car makers are basically where everybody
else is, but just waiting until the systems gets to a level where it's
economical, truly safe and well accepted to get into mass production. Until
then, they are probably fine with customers of Uber / Waymo play guinea pig.

~~~
partingshots
There is a huge level of information assymetry that currently exists in the
self driving industry. It is very much not an equal playing field. You have to
understand that certain companies are so far ahead of other ones that they are
pretty much competing in distinctly different leagues at this point.

You’re perspective on what the cutting edge of machine learning is shows your
understanding of the current technological landscape is lacking. It’s
understandable as the developments are happening incredibly quickly and the
majority of the research is done privately, and unless you follow the release
of academic papers very closely, it can be very easy to fall behind.
Nevertheless it’s all happening regardless of whether you’re aware of it or
not.

------
samstave
Imagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech for
brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works.

Or Boeing and Airbus competing on fundamental safety aspects of flight.

Self driving should be a singular science with canonical baseline requirements
and standards to how it should function and interact/react to the human
environment.

So - this shouldn't be "news" \- it should be the requirement to even play in
the space.

~~~
fvdessen
> Imagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech
> for brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works.

Except for the seatbelt, That’s how it went. Especially with Airbus and Boeing
who have chosen completely different approaches to flight safety system.

~~~
blastofrocks
different approaches ?

~~~
fvdessen
IIRC, in Airbus planes the pilot has no direct control. He gives inputs which
are then accepted or rejected depending on what the computer thinks is safe;
at take off you can pull the stick as much as you want, the computer will not
let the tail hit the ground. In Boeing you have direct control but with better
feedback on what’s going to happen.

~~~
tomatotomato37
What's interesting is that modern crash-rate statistics for the two companies
are essentially the same, meaning there doesn't seem to be a superior choice
of the two approaches

~~~
sokoloff
Or meaning that the machine-sourced crash rate is low enough that it's
dominated by flight crew and weather factors.

------
ascar
A big reason for this is probably to ease the way to government regulations.
Germany is very strict on these regulations and compared to, e.g. Arizona,
reluctant to give experimental technology a pass for the street. If they pull
on the same string, they have a much better chance to lobby for the required
legislation to actually test and finally sell their self-driving technology in
the important domestic market.

~~~
Reason077
Historically the German auto industry has held a lot of influence over
politicians. They've successfully lobbied against things like a national speed
limit and for weakened emissions rules in the past.

More recently, they have blocked and delayed the EU's proposed emissions
targets for 2025 and 2030 which would have required 40% fleet-wide CO2
reductions by 2030 and set minimum targets for zero emission vehicles.

(It should be noted Sweden, France, and Spain - who also have significant auto
industries - are in favour of the new rules).

~~~
ileri62
Not to mention that germany did absolutely fucking nothing against VW when
dieselgate happened. Still waiting to see Winterkorn & friends under the
guillotine for scamming the entire world.

What happened instead? Normal engineers got blamed instead of executives.
Fucking capitalism and fucking CDU, SPD and FDP. The sole reason for their
existence is to sack money from lobbyists.

When you have people like Schäuble, a piece of shit that was convicted for
corruption in 1999, who was the minister of finance for the past couple of
years in germany, it makes sense that germany does nothing against big
corporate.

~~~
ahartmetz
While it is true that Germany has legalized and not so legalized corruption in
politics, it makes no sense to single out VW. All large companies have
"government affairs" departments which sadly provide great return on
investment. If only the people had a government affairs department...

~~~
ileri62
>it makes no sense to single out VW.

merely giving an example that fits this thread (automotive).

------
TaylorAlexander
I think this is great news. I think it’s a valid point that it’s hard to
compete with Waymo (and probably Cruise from GM). I’d also worry what would
happen if Silicon Valley cornered the market.

~~~
Sendotsh
> if Silicon Valley cornered the market.

Your SelfDryv subscription has expired. Please renew via the SelfDryv app
(available on iOS only) to continue using your car. Subscribe today for only
$99/year (for our 5k Mile Package) + $20/year per each passenger.

Notice: After an incredible 12 months, SelfDryv will be ceasing operations in
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Credits you have within those 30 days, before your SelfDryv vehicle stops
functioning. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, but we are currently
unable to offer refunds or credits for your vehicle. Please see the attached
document for alternative vehicles you can purchase going forward.

~~~
B-Con
We apologize for the SelfDryv experience disruption experienced by some[0]
customers earlier this week[1]. We experienced technical difficulties during a
server migration that may[2] have degraded customer experience. The server
migration exposed an incorrect dependency between the SelfDryv consumer
hardware the the SelfDryv cloud services[3]. We have issued a fix[4] and offer
5 miles credits to any customer who was effected.

[0] About 100%

[1] 54 hours spanning Monday through Wednesday.

[2] ^H absolutely most certainly did

[3] Turns out part of the car's A/C UI dynamically fetches JavaScript on
startup and our outage stopped serving JS, so A/C module failed to load. The
worker thread that spawns the rest of the car's functionality freezes if the
A/C module fails to respond. I guess we never tested that, I mean our internal
network is pretty reliable, you know?

[4] We moved the JavaScript to a CDN so that means 100% availability.
Presumably eventually we'll rewrite the entire client stack anyway thus
implicitly killing this horrible dependency.

~~~
CPLX
Also due to the fact that you forgot your password once and your last name
sounds vaguely Ukrainian our AI has determined that your account should be
shadowbanned, which means the app will appear to function as normal but the
car will only drive in small circles around your home.

When you contact customer support our reps will explain that it must be
something in their system but they can’t see your account and will transfer
you to a manager at which point the call will disconnect.

------
nabla9
Level 3 autonomy works much better and level 4 becomes possible and scales
faster earlier, if all carmakers cooperate and lobby for the same geofencing
infrastructure and protocols in those roads where it's possible.

Level 5 is far away pipedream and research project that would boost global
productivity and car sales for everyone. Cooperating in basic research is
good.

~~~
mtgx
Level 3 shouldn't exist. Multiple self-driving car makers have studied the
issue and have concluded that Level 3 is too dangerous for humans, because
human reaction is too slow to deal with the imperfections of a Level 3 system,
all the while "expecting it to work flawlessly 90% of the time."

You can't just tell humans, "Hey, this works 90% of the time - it's up to you
to decide when to take over that 10% of the time. Oh, and we've legally
covered in the ToS footnote, just in case you think about suing us later! Best
of luck, though! Thoughts and prayers for you and your family."

------
NoblePublius
Three competitors conspire to not compete. Hmmmm. I’m glad thr EU anti-trust
authorities are focused on Google!

------
krona
Given that these companies have given up on competing with one another many
years ago and have almost identical supply chains, wasn't this inevitable?

------
SlowRobotAhead
I work in automotive.

These are the last three companies in the world you want defining industry
standards / practices for anything.

------
srkmno
This can't be accurately called "collusion" since it's not a secret, it's
still a cartel thought but lucky for them EU regulators have eyes only for US
companies.

~~~
hocuspocus
There's been increasing consolidation in the automotive industry, nothing new
here.

Big challenges need big investments and it makes sense to work on open
standards. Car makers don't want to become the next smartphone industry, with
a race to the bottom among OEMs and Google reaping all the profits.

German groups know very well that creating distrust in the industry is not a
winning strategy when everyone works with the same suppliers.

Disclosure: former HERE employee, executives always insisted on the fact
staying neutral was key to long-term success and that we should welcome
investments from other OEMs.

I admit that European countries have conflicting interests in the matter,
however I'd rather have them look at more pressing issue first, like measuring
and enforcing emission standards. "Unfair" competition against Google and
Uber... I can live with that.

~~~
srkmno
You're suggesting that the law shouldn't apply to the competitors of US
companies because you worked for one of them and feel sympathetic?! That says
a lot about the community makeup and voting pattern on HN.

~~~
hocuspocus
I'm not suggesting anything, and I don't feel sympathetic towards my current
or previous employers, this would be quite silly.

I'm sure German car makers take part in cartel-like behavior, like all big
companies. However I don't see how building an open platform and working
together on setting open standards could be seen as one of them. By the very
definition of open standards, competitors can adopt them.

------
abhinai
These are seriously big and well funded companies. Why do they need to share
development? If Cruise can build a working prototype as a startup so can BMW.
What is going on?

Part of me wonders if self driving tech ended up being harder than expected.
These companies can't get it to work but also don't want to be left behind.
Collaboration makes perfect sense.

Pure speculation.

~~~
DeonPenny
They aren't tech companies. It's like asking why satellite makers don't build
their own rocket. The algorithms used in most cars whether it's deep RL or
something even more specific isn't easily understood and worst yet scalable by
many people. Say nothing for the custom hardware google uses in the form of
TPUs.

~~~
ascar
That's a very narrow definition of tech companies. I wouldn't be surprised if
VW, BMW and Daimler together employ more software engineers than Google or
Apple. Don't forget that modern cars use over a hundred micro-controllers.

~~~
zmb_
That's true, but only indirectly. Since these companies mainly assemble cars
from components designed and built by suppliers, the software engineers are
working for suppliers like Bosch. If you talk to the tech people from, e.g.,
BMW, their roles are managing budgets and projects implemented by external
partners.

This is also why they want self driving to be just another standard function
that they can buy from a supplier, while letting the suppliers compete away
their margins.

------
kome
...they are already working together on so many things, like lobbying and
screwing the environment with their diesels.

German automakers formed a secret cartel in the ‘90s to collude on diesel
emissions: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/16021292/german-car-
compa...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/24/16021292/german-car-companies-
cartel-diesel-emissions-90s)

