> The automaker is using the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt as its autonomous mule
Wonderful.
Has anyone tried the Bolt yet? I think Bolt is turning out to be what Tesla Model 3 was intended to be... it's cheap, electric, rides excellently, and looks pretty slick. One of the best things about it is the top-view, which is a god-send when it comes to parallel parking: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5kei2BVFGb8/maxresdefault.jpg
It seems really innovative in lots of clever ways. For example the "one pedal driving" is neat (push the pedal to go.. and when you take your foot off the pedal, the car slows down, the point being that you basically stop using brakes and save energy that way).
While the tech and features are pretty great, I think many disagree with it looking slick. I'm in the market right now, but I could never see myself driving a Bolt. I'm stuck waiting several years for a model 3 to get an EV with actual aesthetics (that isn't 100k+).
I'm stuck waiting several years for a model 3 to get an EV with actual aesthetics (that isn't 100k+).
The aesthetics that say, "I entered 'generic electric vehicle' on iStockPhoto, and this is what I got."? I own lots of TSLA, I'd even consider buying a Tesla when the Leaf dies, but that purchase would be despite the aesthetics of any Tesla, not because of.
But to each their own. As long as what's available today isn't the aesthetic equivalent of the Pontiac Aztek, I wouldn't put off a purchase for several years just for looks. Though I also own a Leaf and an original body style Scion xB, and I'm sad that the Honda Element is no longer made. Do not look to me for fashion advice.
I honestly really like Bolt's look, and not because it "stands out" as being electric. I like crossovers (Prius, Impreza, etc.) and I think this one has great aesthetics. I like model 3 less, but that's just me.
Different strokes for different folks hey.
(but I will concede on one thing if we're talking about pure aesthetics: Tesla's "T" logo is really cool, Chevrolet's "+" is anything but. I honestly think they should change the logo. As established as that brand and logo may be, they should be targeting the newer generation... "Chevrolet" definitely does not scream cool to anyone born in the last 40 years)
Cross-overs are pretty popular. There was an article not too long ago about how they pretty much all blend in together.
The Bolt looks more like European cars than what we imagine 'American' cars looking like (though that has changed over the decades). We'll see many more like it as more people move to cities but still need cars.
Yeah, Chevy doesn't scream cool. I've had an Acura since 2003 and knock on wood will drive it until it's dead. I wouldn't put as much stock in an American-made car to last as long.
As said by someone else, to each his own. But a friend of mine has an i3 and every time I ride in it, I'm underwhelmed.
It's like if IKEA designed a car. If I'm riding in a BMW, I expect a certain amount of luxury, not bamboo and vast open spaces where the dashboard should be.
I agree and disagree. I don't think the Bolt looks much worse than any other contemporary small car. The new Prius is worse IMO. The Leaf and the i3 are likewise ugly.
I agree the Model 3 looks better than any of them.
Edit: I will say I like the look of the Ford Focus EV much better than the Bolt, it's quite a bit cheaper, and I like Ford better as a company, but the Focus EV has only about half the range of the Bolt.
No need to spend $55k. I bought a 2015 Leaf with 19k miles for $8.5k. Of course it dos not look good like a Tesla, but if you want to get your feet wet with EV driving, it's a steal.
I travel frequently across the US, and require the Supercharger network (which is why I went with a Model S over a Leaf), but as you mentioned, you can get a Leaf at golf cart prices. You can also get a top notch used Model S for a bit more than you'd spend for a long range Model 3 (which includes free supercharger access) if you don't want to wait 2 years for it.
While I see what you mean, this comparison isn't all that dissimilar to saying "No need to buy a 5 series BMW, you can get a Nissan Micra for less!"
I wouldn't imagine that a person looking to buy a large, fast sedan that can get from 0-100kph in under a handful of seconds is going to consider a small runabout in the same decision making process...
I assume you're only talking about exterior aesthetics.
Because the interiors of Tesla cars are extremely poor compared to even the lowest end cars. Poor quality, cheap looking plastics and leathers. And the large screen looks tacky and easy to date.
Honestly I had a change to sit in one recently and found the interior materials, seats, etc. to be pretty bad for the price.
The big digital displays were nice, but the rest of the interior seemed about on par for a Honda Fit or Chevy Sonic type vehicle, and significantly worse than something like a 2017 CRV (my daily driver).
It felt like a sub $20k car with electric guts and some (admittedly nice) tech gadgets added on. It's also weird that there is no adaptive cruise control available, a feature that's present now on some cars that are $10k cheaper.
To be fair haven't seen what the interior of a $35k Model 3 looks like either, all of the photos and units that have shipped have had the more expensive 'Premium' interior option.
From my limited experience, the Model S has about the same interior quality as a $40k car (entry-level luxury or well-optioned standard). There's definitely a large price premium for choosing electric.
Who is turning out long-range electric semis? Certainly not GM, Ford, and Toyota. They're still laughing.
Anyway, Tesla isn't about dominating the /entire/ electric car market. They're a premium brand like Apple. They're not trying to make econobox cars. The Model 3 is probably close to the cheapest car they'll make.
And yeah, you can make really, really cheap electric cars. Just as cheap as conventional cars (and as we make advances in battery economics, nearly the same range... though the longer range ones will always have a slight mark-up).
But GM is not selling many Bolts and not planning to. It works as a halo car for them, and by only producing a few tens of thousands of EVs per year, GM can stretch out their EV credits for many years longer than Tesla. (The Bolt MSRPs for greater than the Model 3.)
The Bolt is also more vulnerable to a cut in the EV tax credit. (Tesla knew the credit would go away for them soon anyway.)
The Bolt also doesn't have access to the speedy and extensive Tesla supercharger network. This, besides the brand value, is one of Tesla's premier advantages over everyone else.
But I don't think it's necessary for everyone else to fail at electric cars in order for Tesla to succeed.
I had a lyft ride in one last weekend and chatted with the driver about it. I agree it looks nice. The interior was great and the ride was comfy. The driver was very enthusiastic about how much he loved the car. Plug it in over night, drive to SF and do lyft all day, then drive home. He didn't share my concerns over the range at all.
I imagine city driving in start/stop traffic to be a perfect use case for EVs. Regenerative braking will recoup lots of battery through out the day, and you don't lose much to drag at highway speeds.
The EPA range probably uses a profile more like a commute from one point into the city versus another. It may not be an adequate representation of what a Lyft driver actually does during their work hours.
Anecdotal, last year as a personal curiosity, I drove for Lyft over 6 weeks, but only 16 hours/wk (2 days x 8 hrs), I was hitting 65-70 miles per 8 hours. In a metro of 2 million people and change.
This was in a 2012 Accord, not an EV. But yeah it seems do-able in a modern EV. Most urban dwellers daily driving is never more than like 20 miles all-day.
The Bolt is a wonderful car for the price, except for the looks. But the distinctive/garish appearance is deliberate--the Bolt is designed for people who want to be seen driving an electric car but can't afford a Tesla.
Luckily, it's only a matter of time before the electric motors start showing up in non-Bolt lines.
I think this is one of the things that Toyota has done really right. Their hybrid drivetrain has made its way into a few models now (Corolla, Camry, Prius) and it's never a big thing, just a feature of the vehicle. I'm a longtime proponent of EVs and I've always hated the way that car companies feel compelled to turn any electric offering into a science project freak show.
To my mind this is the number 1 thing that Tesla has done right with their vehicles. They don't sell "Electric Vehicles", they sell vehicles. Which kick ass. And happen to be electric.
Toyota basically started this trend by making the Prius ugly and distinctive. Which is why Prius's sell very well but other hybrid drive trains in normal looking cars don't. You don't get cool points for driving a Camry Hybrid.
I dunno, the Insight looked pretty weird, with it's Citroen-esque covered rear wheels and its super-sleek exterior. But otherwise... I see where you're going with the "make hybrids/electrics look different so they'll gain cred" but it seems to be belied by most manufacturers' "here's a weird-ass dork car, you won't buy it right?" thing. Even the Bolt (which I'd argue is one of the better-looking non-Tesla EVs) is kind of klunky-looking.
I think they've even done one better. They've managed to associate, in the public's mind, the idea of "electric drivetrain" with "conventional but stunning good looks" with "amazing performance."
>designed for people who want to be seen driving an electric car
it may have been the case 15 years ago. Not today. EV/plugins/hybrid appeal to very specific perceived sense of practicality, to which hatchback (single volume) design appeals too (speaking from my mind as i have Pruis Plugin, and in the past among others i did own a high end BMW, and our tastes/preferences do change with time). Notice that all popular and/or good sellers EV/plugins/hybrids are hatchbacks, be it Model S or Bolt or Prius. And in my opinion GM did very good job with Bolt styling. It fits exactly the target segment, where is Model 3 looks like cheapened Model S, not a good start. I mean it is a high skill to sell cheaper, yet not cheapened, models by a high end manufacturer, and for example Mercedes(especially) and BMW do it masterfully. GM, not being high-end one, with Bolt needed to do something what is really far from "bad" GM, yet still GM. For me it seems like they hit the target.
Referencing the '"bad" GM': I'm really surprised they didn't start a new brand. Anecdotally traditional, American car companies have such a bad reputation that I'm surprised they didn't use EVs for a brand reset.
All Teslas use one pedal driving. I'm under the impression that all EVs operate that way.
Edit: Yes of course, one pedal driving only applies to regenerative braking, normal brake pads are still engaged with a separate pedal. The Bolt works the same way. Imagine if simply releasing the accelerator slammed the brakes as hard as possible. That's a bad idea.
I have a 2015 leaf. Put in ECO mode, then switch to B (braking) instead of D (drive). Plenty of regen for 1 pedal driving. Also, tapping the brake turns on the regen in normal D mode, without moving the brake calipers.
Supposedly, there is a recall mandated by NTSB that will mess up this 1 pedal driving. The NTSB does not like it because the brake lights do not turn on. I'm not having that done.
What I don't like is the "creep" that they put in to emulate an automatic (torque converter).
> The NTSB does not like it because the brake lights do not turn on. I'm not having that done.
The NTSB must be ignoring the millions of manual-transmission vehicles which can be slowed down through engine braking without their brake lights turning on.
> tapping the brake turns on the regen in normal D mode, without moving the brake calipers.
Surely I'm not the only one terrified by this? Is there seriously a computer sitting between the pedal and the pads, and the pads don't move unless the computer says so?
not the new one. the new Leaf (never used/tried old one) has one pedal features with a .2g decel
the GM cars can work both ways, the L on the automatic puts in one pedal or as close to it as GM will allow. Using D is like any gas car and much simpler to stretch mileage for many in
This is incorrect. Teslas have both a brake and an accelerator. Releasing the accelerator causes regenerative braking to kick in, but they still have a brake.
I don't have the Bolt, but I do have a vehicle with top down view, which was not something I was interested in much when looking for cars, but it came with the package.
i agree, it's a god send, and has prevented my car from getting dinged or scratched in more than one occassion.
The Leaf has that with B-mode although I think this area is ripe for improvement.
In B-mode or one pedal driving, when you take the foot off the pedal, rather than slowing down with aerodynamic drag, regen is engaged and those electrons are pumped back into the battery. On the Leaf and just about any EV or hybrid, when you brake, regenerative braking is used down to about 5 mph. Brakes last forever.
One pedal driving takes a little getting used to. Not a lot, but a little.
Can you explain this to me? Do you ever hit the brake pedal outside emergency situations? What is the rate of braking when you take take your foot off the pedal? Does it take into account the car in front of you?
Presumably if I want to brake more slowly I need to keep my foot slightly on the gas.
Naively, the system seems wasteful. Regenerative breaking tops out at 80% efficiency I think, so I'd guess that you waste a lot if you remove the natural coasting null point of a two-pedal system and induce drivers to alternate between acceleration and deceleration. Maybe the idea is that if you encourage the driver to brake quickly using the regenerative system you recover more energy than if you coast slowly and bleed it into air resistance.
> Do you ever hit the brake pedal outside emergency situations?
Yes. BTW, you mostly use B-mode on the highway. You don't get any advantage in stop and go traffic.
> What is the rate of braking when you take take your foot off the pedal?
It is greater than aerodynamic friction. What I like is that in emergency situations where you do brake, it brakes faster since in the interval between your foot on the accelerator and your foot hitting the brake, it's already braking.
> Does it take into account the car in front of you?
There may be cars that do this (Tesla?) but not the Leaf and probably not the Bolt.
I get a lot of advantage out of one-pedal driving in a Model S in stop and go, both urban and highway.
One thing that makes me sad about Tesla's adaptive cruise control is that it's not as good as I am at never touching the real brakes -- it doesn't anticipate very well, and waits until it gets within 2-3 car-lengths (settable) before it even thinks about braking.
Yeah, I was on 880 and I saw a Tesla doing that. I knew it wasn't a human decision. It was too precise and at the same time unnecessarily disconcerting. A human would have been less precise but would have dipped in speed well before 2-3 car lengths and probably would have taken the opportunity to zip around the car in front.
Self-reply: It is adjustable in most electric cars at, variously, up to 0.2g or 24 kW of regenerative braking power. This is actually significantly higher than typical engine braking in a gas powered manual transmission vehicle. Engine braking can keep up with low-power, light braking to adjust following distance on highways, and can limit acceleration on a downhill if you downshift to force the motor to run at 3/4k RPMs on a steep hill, and can eventually bring a vehicle to a stop. Regenerative braking can be equivalent to typical braking forces for day-to-day driving, depending on battery capacity and charge level allowing the required power dissipation to be in the range of safe charging rates.
(Note: By "Engine braking" I'm referring to throttle retardation in a typical non-diesel engine, not jake brakes on big diesels. I have no idea how powerful those are.)
I would use the hell out of this for situations where I normally engine brake in a gasoline-powered vehicle. You can basically harvest energy from the change in gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy as you're falling downhill.
One of the things that sucks about my new truck is that 3rd gear is so efficient that I can no longer engine brake on many of the grades where I was able to do so in the past. It's a much less comfortable driving situation to have to brake periodically on the downhill.
You can coast, to do that you just keep your foot down enough to keep the regeneration from kicking in.
There's no free lunch. You don't recover meaningful energy by regenerating vs. coasting over the same distance. What you do recover is energy that would otherwise go into the air as heat in braking situations.
> You don't recover meaningful energy by regenerating vs. coasting over the same distance.
In fact, you lose net energy if you regeneratively break and then accelerate (vs just coasting) because it's only 80% efficient. So if the "default" position of the pedal is to be braking, rather than coasting, I naively expect it to induce more braking followed by more acceleration, wasting net energy.
Your expectation isn't true for the way I drive, at least. With one pedal driving, you don't really know if you're accelerating or braking, unless you're braking enough that your foot lifts from the pedal... or you look at the dashboard. I find that when traffic is heavy, I spend a lot of time slightly accelerating and slightly braking, while keeping the distance between my car and the one in front of me.
If someone rear ends you because you have B-mode or one pedal enabled then they're following way too close to begin with. Way too close and/or not paying attention at all. B-mode doesn't slam on the brakes. It engages regen to decelerate at perhaps a greater rate than rolling resistance.
I strongly agree that the brake lights should come on in B-mode. That doesn't happen on the Leaf or on the Volt. That is however a different matter and it should be the law. But B-mode with brake lights is a fine idea.
I've driven both the Bolt and the Volt on electric power. The Volt is far more pleasant to drive, the Bolt's turning and acceleration feel weird. I also think the volt looks better (though not good). Other than that, Bolt seems great.
Have you actually used the top-down to parallel park?
I don't own a car with one of those rear-view cameras but am always fascinated to watch it. I worry I would trust it too much instead of what I'm used to.
And it's not available outside of US, which seems to be a huge mistake. At the moment in UK if you want an electric car with decent range the only option is a Nissan Leaf.
no adaptive cruise control makes it totally useless. PS: Leaf 2018 will have most Tesla 3 like auto-pilot features. Tesla has self driving vaporware they'll gladly sell you today.
Only on the outside. On the inside, excluding the touchscreen the interior of the Tesla 3 (and really, all Teslas excluding the original Roadsters) has more in common with a Yaris or 90s era Kia then a Model 3 or entry-level Lexus.
For people with multiple cars, it's not much of an issue for things to be just a little off (the plastic, the handles, the seat fabrics, steering wheel alignment, shavings on the dash board, etc.)--the Tesla is a show car and treated as such. For people who would use the Model 3 as their primary vehicle, the experience is subpar for its current price point compared to all other vehicles in its class (entry level luxury vehicles) or engine type (other EVs) and this is one of the difficulties Tesla will run into once it actually starts public shipments of the car. There's enough competition out there now that being an electric isn't enough to justify a premium price; the car has to have premium interiors as well.
Source: my boss has all of them. I ride shotgun quite frequently.
I hear this argument against Tesla all the time (disclaimer: I own a Model S). I used to own a BMW 3 series and an X5. Tesla, IMHO, is a far superior car. Interior materials is just one aspect of the car. But a car is a complete package. And Tesla overall gives you much more - an infotainment system that is 100x better than an awful BMW iDrive (or my Hyundais system), monthly software updates, no dealership model, constantly improving autopilot systems, an amazing supercharger network, minimal options package (BMW will charge you for LED lights on 7series), free LTE, free Supercharging (atleast for me), a minimalist interior, huge cabin space etc. etc. I would take a Tesla Model S any day over a 7 series or S class. And a Model 3 any day over a BMW 3 series. A 328i is a 4 cylinder underpowered vehicle that comes with a manual parking brake, a tiny screen, and hundreds of useless controls. Then you have to buy a million option to make the car half decent. And my 335i would break down every other month.
Yes, this is exactly right. I was astonished the first couple times I rode in a Tesla at how downmarket the interiors feel compared to your middle of the road German luxury cars like a BMW 3-series or equivalent.
I think you're wildly overestimating the sophistication of car buyers.
Luxury car buyers, fundamentally, are buying the logo, and the handful of obviously markers inside the car that tell people it's a Lexus or whatever. They aren't buying fit and finish, even if they think they are. Tesla buyers are no different: they want a Tesla, not a Lexus or a Mercedes.
I'm sure to the trained eye a Lexus has a different build than a Tesla, just as cheeses and wines are different. That's not what drives sales.
I don't think you're taking into consideration what people want out of a commuter car. The Model 3 isn't targeting luxury buyers anymore--it's targeting upper middle class drivers looking for a commuter car that will function as their primary day-to-day vehicle.
They want comfort, first and foremost. A Tesla nameplate means nothing on your daily commuter car if it's not pleasant to drive. A Lexus or a Mercedes, even at the entry level, provides a comfortable ride. The interiors feel luxurious. A Tesla does not. And that's the problem--it charges an entry-level luxury price but doesn't provide an entry-level luxury ride. Subjectively, I find that the Tesla's interiors aren't even as comfortable as the Bolt, and I'm not even including the many QC issues they have in that assessment.
The Tesla name might bring potential buyers to the dealership, but when you're targeting a road warrior, the interior is what sells the car.
I dunno. I mean, I want a Tesla (a little) and I don't want a Lexus or Mercedes in particular. I think you're overgeneralizing. Markets are big, the "people" in your first sentence aren't the same population for Tesla buyers and Lexus buyers.
We looked at a Bolt. We mostly liked it, except the seats are incredibly uncomfortable. I'm not even close to obese, and the seat bottoms were just too narrow to be comfortable. It is odd, as there is plenty of space to either side of the seat with the doors closed .. they could have made them wider, but chose not to.
All of those characteristics are worse than Model 3, so I'm not sure what you mean by "what the Model 3 was supposed to be".
1) Bolt is $2500 more than Model 3 pre-credit.
2) How well it rides is debatable, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same performance as Model 3. For instance, it has a motor power of 150 kW vs 300 kW for Model 3, and its acceleration is significantly worse, too.
3) It looks like a typical boxy hatchback.
Finally, we already know GM loses $9,000 per Bolt and it seems to have been losing 10,000 euro for the Bolt-based Ampera-E in Europe. What this tells us is that it's more of a compliance car/EV mascot for GM than a model they actually intend to have everywhere.
GM has sold 3,000 Bolt units so far in 2017. Tesla will sell hundreds of thousands of Model 3s in 2018. I don't think GM will be in a hurry to catch up to them going by those losses.
Tesla will sell hundreds of thousands of Model 3s in 2018.
Well, if we're just going to pull stuff out of our arses, why not millions? Millions! of Model 3s sold in 2018!
For our readers at home, if you ever wondered what a real-life example of "FUD" looks like, this is as close as you'll come without a time machine to the 80s to witness IBM's marketing in person. Instead of making a valid comparison based on the reality of today, let's talk about what might happen tomorrow. And since tomorrow isn't here yet, we can make up whatever shit we want. Whether it's the capabilities of the new mainframe IBM's releasing next year, or how many cars Tesla is going to sell next year. Because comparing current products to what your company might produce next year is super easy when I can't buy a Model 3 today.
But more to the point, as a TSLA shareholder I find the idea of bringing up GM's losses laughable. Do you really want to go there, talking about who's making money manufacturing cars and who isn't? 'cuz I got some balance sheets you might want to take a look at.
Yes, parent poster was laughable. Though I will give him only this one thing. Tesla is positioned better than anybody else on battery supply. GM can produce as many EVs as they want when they decide to do it, as they have a lot of factories and sales channels, and as seen with the Bolt they have just-in-time production and mass manufacturing mostly figured out ... unlike Tesla. But GM is dependent on LG Chem to actually make the batteries, and from what i've ready LG Chem has already announced their plans and it's not enough to make hundreds of thousands of vehicles for next year (though maybe the year after...)
But I also do not think Tesla can pull off a significant ramp up on the Model 3. I think numbers for next year will be below 100,000.
But GM is dependent on LG Chem to actually make the batteries, and from what i've ready LG Chem has already announced their plans and it's not enough to make hundreds of thousands of vehicles for next year (though maybe the year after...)
That's a damned fine point, as it's the one part of the supply chain GM doesn't control and can't take in-house over the short term. So we end up with a company that can build the hell out of some cars, but is constrained on batteries. Another has lots of batteries, but is still wet behind the ears when it comes to making cars. Hey, I have an idea...
I know eh? But at Tesla's ridiculous market cap, it's more likely Tesla would buy them (crazy!) than the other way around. And I can't see that happening, or working well at all. Whatever departments put together the Volt and the Bolt seem like some kickass engineering teams. But not so much the rest of GM, which looks like a pretty typical internally dysfunctional mediocre large corp from a distance.
Then again, Tesla is showing all the signs of a company that has grown too fast and with too much hubris.
This was false. The plant was shut down for an extra two weeks to control Sonic supply. There's been more demand than inventory almost everywhere except California. They've basically sold everything they've made. LG Chem was contracted for 30k batteries and that's about what they will have sold by Jan or Feb or so at the current rate.
Yes, at a loss. Do you actually think GM who are "so good at manufacturing" will sell more EVs than Tesla will sell Model 3's by the end of next year? I won't even include Model S and X, to make it more fair.
Tesla also currently sells Model 3s at a loss using the same GAAP[1] accounting metrics GM uses. (Their latest quarterly report states that they're not even break even on a non-GAAP method of accounting.[2])
The difference is that GM can afford to absorb the loss while it ramps up production. Tesla needs the Model 3 to be profitable, or the company dies.
[1]GAAP = generally accepted accounting principles. In other words, standardized methods of accounting for profit and loss. Tesla uses non-standard (i.e., non-GAAP) accounting in its financial reports to paint a rosier picture of its financial state than GAAP reporting would provide. Some people say that non-GAAP reporting paints a more accurate picture of a company than GAAP. This might be true for new industries that don't have sufficient history to establish industry-specific GAAP. However, the auto industry has been around for more than 100+ years, so the use of non-GAAP accounting by Tesla and Faraday is generally indicative of unstable financial health.
Do you actually think GM who are "so good at manufacturing" will sell more EVs than Tesla will sell Model 3's by the end of next year?
GM could should they choose to do so. They can certainly manufacture them, whereas Tesla's ability is questionable. But one has to sell them once their made. Oh, sure, you might buy a Tesla. Hell, I bought a Leaf, I might buy a Tesla. But you know who won't buy a Tesla? Everyone after the early adopters. GM's been making cars for over 100 years. Odds are really good that a potential customer has owned a GM. Odds are near zero that a potential Tesla customer has owned a Tesla before. For good or for bad, GM is a known quantity. Personally, I go back and forth before laying out money for a $700 phone that is a switch from my current phone. Now scale that up to a $35K car. Maybe you'll just take that out of petty cash from your last liquidity event. The rest of us will scrape together a down payment and hope we can make that monthly nut. And if you're doing that, you're going with the safe bet. The safe bet has a nation-wide network of dealers to work on it, has sold cars for 100 years, and isn't going out of business any time soon. The less-safe bet can't even tell you when you're getting your car +/- six months. In short, when we bought our Leaf, I knew it could easily turn into a $35K mistake, but we have the means and the risk tolerance. I would not make the mistake of projecting that to Mr. and Mrs. Middle America.
You're already being downvoted, so not sure it's worth an extensive rebuttal, but since you're spreading misinformation.
As of the beginning of November, GM has sold ~20,000 units in the US, with an additional 2000 or so in Canada 2017, not "3,000." As of the end of the year it'll probably be about 30,000 units sold if you include those from last year: http://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chevrolet/chevrolet-bolt-ev/c...
Same people who tore down the Bolt and estimated these costs said it would cost far less in 2018, and also pointed out that Tesla's Model 3 costs are almost the same.
And indeed GM has already pre-announced a bunch of new models and says 20 electrified vehicles by the early 2020s, including two new ones late 2018, 2019.
LG Chem wouldn't be opening a brand new battery facility in Detroit if GM wasn't committing to production vehicles.
"Compliance" vehicles are vehicles like the Fiat 500e, or Rav 4 EV or Honda Clarity that sell only in states that mandate them. GM is selling the Bolt in all states and provinces, though has of course allocated more inventory to regions that have subsidies or incentives.
Demand has outstripped supply for the Bolt everywhere except California, where there is subsidized competition from above named compliance vehicles.
Unlike Tesla GM has to make a profit and doesn't have a seemingly infinite investor line of credit.
First thing, cheap? The Bolt starts at $37,495. Straight from GM's website. That is pretty much the same as the Model 3.
Electric, check. But with the Bolt, you are maxed out at 238 miles EPA range. With the model 3, your base is higher and if needed you can get over 300+, I believe the EPA just rated it out somewhere in the 320's for the Long range version. Perfect.
I think you are one of the few who would call the Bolt "slick", especially in relation to Tesla, but to each their own.
Rides excellent.. yeah, the Model 3 does that well, see MotorTrend's review even.. [1]
Parallel parking manually... that's cute. Model 3 does it autonomously.
I'm pretty lost on where you think the Model 3 fell short of expectations and isn't what it was intended to be?
To top it off, I just checked 5 Chevy dealers around me locally (I'm in the third largest metro in the U.S.) and not one had a Bolt in inventory. I have actually never seen one on the roads either. So the "you can get it today" argument is very limited to only a few markets... and that is a maybe.
Don't forget that the Chevy Bolt is also a compliance car. I'm sure the quality and engineering time put into it was top-notch.
Cruise Automation's software is a sloppy collection of special cases, coded by hand. We write ad-hoc rules to handle each situation we observe.
We don't really develop any neural networks ourselves. We use what we can get off GitHub: freely available research and school projects that we paste together, often without understanding them.
We use ROS (http://www.ros.org). ROS is not reliable for a timing-critical automotive system. That's why our cars drive so slowly/cautiously and stop so abruptly/frequently. It's because we're always on the verge of reacting late and hitting something.
Our technology is not "real" in the way that Waymo's technology is real. We build demos and promote them in the media. That's the truth.
Am I proud of this? No. But GM is paying for my house in San Francisco, so...
You claim "I know a little about Waymo. They seem ok."
Then go on to explain:
"Waymo: Code written by professionals. A system using models trained on vast amounts of data. Written slowly, meticulously, exhaustively, heavily reviewed, and intended to be reliable."
What sort of structure would make more sense than the ad-hoc rules?
Do you have comprehensive profiling for the latency or logging so you can detect when there is a lag and then patch ROS or the TCP stack or whatever is causing it?
I can see how reliability is critical, but whether it is so important to be actually real-time is less obvious. If you can get latency variability down to within about 1 ms, is that not adequate to greatly exceed human capability?
I guess when it comes down to it there needs to be some certainty that there cant be a big hiccup that creates a big latency spike. So whatever underlying Linux or whatever needs to be real-time in that sense. And there needs to be a real-time backup system that cuts in if the other system takes too long to react (hits a hiccup which it is not supposed to be able to).
I mean, if your idea is to throw everything out and start over with a real-time OS and some bespoke NNs, is it quite certain that any team would actually be able to replicate the task integration and actual functionality of the system you have with that approach?
Assuming this isn't a shitpost, do you have any insight on the realness of other companies technologies? eg uber, drive.ai, tesla, etc or do you feel like your company is fairly uniquely shitty?
When GM bought us we were given three Milestones to reach. The first Milestone was supposed to be delivered this time last year. We failed to deliver. We didn't have the basis for a real self-driving car. Just a demo (enough to make GM buy us).
So the Milestones were divided up. A year after we should have delivered that first Milestone we have hand-coded enough special cases that GM believes we're about half way through that first Milestone. We're not.
I take GM's money but I know we're lying to them. As an engineer I'm embarrassed by the system we've built.
This is pretty fascinating. I've been mulling a change in careers bc I believe over the next 20 years this will become a massive industry. Do you see GM Cruise hitting their 2019 goals? How close are they to producing ~1k - 10k cars with this tech in multiple cities? I find the 2019 targets incredibly aggressive. 5-10 year timelines seem more practical. Also whats the alternative to ROS, why isn't it good for time critical operations?
See the ROS2 real-time proposal link above for a discussion of ROS's shortcomings. ROS is ok for school projects and loose systems but you can't use it to pilot a passenger aircraft or car.
I'll admit I was pretty surprised at the speed that Cruise seemed to come out of nowhere and start doing pretty impressive demos. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that corners were cut somewhere.
Can you give an example of the sort of special cases you're talking about so we can get a sense for what it's like?
Imagine predicting pedestrian behavior with if/else and numeric thresholds (distance to curb less than 1.25 meters?) instead of a principled model trained on data.
Waymo uses sophisticated predictive models trained on vast amounts of data. Cruise slaps together piles of guesses and (frankly) bullshit.
There is always an expert safety driver ready to take over.
You can operate an unreliable system (randomly reacting late 0.1% of the time because of a hiccup in C++'s standard library memory allocator, say, or encountering an unhandled scenario 0.1% of the time) as long as there's a guy to take over immediately.
Waymo: Code written by professionals. A system using models trained on vast amounts of data. Written slowly, meticulously, exhaustively, heavily reviewed, and intended to be reliable.
Cruise: Amateur hour, written FAST. Better yet, let's just use this code we found on the net! Can we make it look like it works most of the time?
I see, I don’t see anything wrong with using code from the internet but maybe it’s a situation where the waymo ppl have had a longer time and more resources to get it right. They are hiring many more people at cruise so hopefully it gets better over time.
The one thing that does bother me is waymos use of captchas by users to annotate data. That’s concerning bc waymo has a data set no one else does and makes it difficult for others to compete from the get-go. Not good for consumer choice or competition. Fuck google I hope you guys do well.
Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, in his part of the talk repeatedly emphasized the efficiency of their validation process that contributes to their high rate of improvement. Every outside indicator suggests Cruise really is moving faster toward their goal than anyone else.
Vogt also repeatedly emphasized that they have a mountain of engineering challenges still ahead of them before they're ready for an initial commercial deployment. They're rapidly scaling up testing, and hope to drive 1 million miles/month by the end of 2018. For Comparison, Waymo just announced they've done 4 million miles testing on public roads total, since 2009.
From Waymo's 4 million mile announcement[0], they did their most recent million miles in 6 months (May 2017 to Nov 2017). The announcement also has the timeline of when they hit each million mile mark.
Also, I'm not sure this stat says anything besides how many cars they have on the road. Disengagement rates are probably still the most useful to gauge how good any company is doing.
Disengagement rates out of context don't indicate much. Going 10,000 miles up and down a lonely stretch of highway without an unplanned disengagement makes for a pretty number, but is worth less than going a mile in dense urban traffic with cyclists, pedestrians, left turns through busy uncontrolled intersections, double parked vehicles etc.
That's a misquote. Lidar is down to $10k from $90k. With the acquisition of Solid state lidar startup Strobe, they hope to get the costs down to ~$300. It's not clear if that's a per-unit cost, or a per-vehicle cost.
For sensors Cruise's Bolts currently use 14 cameras, 3 articulating radars, 8 regular radars, 5 Velodyne32 ultrapuck Lidar units, and 10 ultrasonic proximity sensors.
That's what Waymo's little bug-like car had. One in front, one in back, one on top, and one below each side-view mirror. Full coverage.
LIDARs are getting cheaper. Continental, the big auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts and is preparing to bang out low-cost LIDAR units in quantity.
Color TV cameras were once insanely expensive. This is the RCA TK-41, the first good color TV camera.[1] Each image orthicon alone (it used three) was about $10,000 in the 1950s. The camera in your phone costs about $10 and far outperforms a TK-41.
They require extremely high power outputs since the beam spreads out. This limits the range significantly but also makes it so that you need very powerful lasers, and the only way to make that eye safe is to use 1550nm light, which requires InGaAs photodetectors, which are much more expensive. In addition, you usually need SPADs which have very high noise levels. You can reduce this noise somewhat by cooling them, but that's very expensive and infeasible for automotive applications m
That's what I thought when I visited Advanced Scientific Concepts in 2003 and saw the prototype optics working on an optical bench. They pointed the thing out an overhead door and imaged the parking lot. It worked. But it was too big and too expensive for the 2004-2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Over time, ASC units got smaller, range and resolution improved, but pricing remained around $100K. Then Continental, the European auto parts company, bought ASC. Continental's units are smaller, cheaper and more rugged.[1] They haven't announced a price point yet, but being a major automotive parts manufacturer, they know how to get the price down on something when they make it in volume.
Continental is quietly coming out with all the parts for self-driving cars. They make the sensors, actuators, and high-reliability computers. They work on the little stuff, too, such as systems for cleaning the sensors while in use. All the things you need to do it, instead of just prototype it.
I fear that we are moving towards a future that is shaped by monopolies (or the "digitalisation" supports monoposlistic strategies). If you read the slides, you notice that GM understands that by controlling everything (manufacturing the car, supply chain, the app) it makes more profits. I think that there is a trend in many industries towards monopolies, if you for example look at amazon or google. I don't think it's healthy and I am convinced that there is not enough awareness to tame these giants.
Vertical integration shouldn't be an outright concern. Even if GM can integrate its entire supply chain, if they're still competing with other companies the consumer should come out alright in the end.
If monopolies start to hurt consumers then we can hope that the anti-trust regulators will step in, and hopefully in the case of a car manufacturer the anti-trust violations would be well defined enough for regulators to actually act.
Vertical integration can have some benefit for consumers by optimizing the pipeline and cutting down costs.
In digital companies such as Google, it enables creation of integrated experiences. For example: having their own web browser enables Google to utilize better compression algorithms and minimize bandwidth.
But horizontal monopolies (such as ISPs) have no benefit to society and only stale innovation.
To be fair, though: this is literally the definition of hype and BS. GM is just saying what they're going to do. I mean, yeah, if it works then Tesla and Waymo are probably toast. But if Tesla and Waymo haven't made it work yet, what are the serious odds you're putting on General Motors catching up and passing them within two years?
GM is already ahead of Tesla in vehicle autonomy. It's even debatable as to whether GM is ahead of Waymo. Waymo is poised to deploy first in Phoenix, but they haven't even begun serious testing in dense urban areas, which are far more challenging and where Cruise is focused and making headway. GM may or may not achieve it's targets on time, but without question they are putting their money where there mouth is.
GM is the most vertically integrated and they're showing very good progress relative to the competition, they're in the best position to deploy at scale. Their acquisition of Cruise was money well spent. GM has a legit opportunity to achieve dominance.
And really, if anybody is spreading hype and BS about autonomous vehicles it's Tesla. Developing an autonomous OS to minimum viable product is a ~5 year job, depending on how well or poorly things go.
Musk was tweeting in the spring that they'd be able to demonstrate L5 capabilities on underpowered hardware by the end of this year. Which is total bullshit. Many car companies are making nebulous claims about when they expect to achieve autonomous capabilities, but Tesla lied outright to get people to reserve their Model 3 orders.
> Waymo is poised to deploy first in Phoenix, but they haven't even begun serious testing in dense urban areas
I've seen Waymo cars in SF around Market st, near Dolores Park and near Noe Valley. I assume that they're also testing heavily in their main cities, so (anecdotally) I don't think this is accurate.
We'll find out in a few months when the 2017 California disengagement reports come out. In 2016, Waymo had ~630,000 autonomous miles and GM Cruise had a few thousand, so there isn't a comparison to be made on that data.
Waymo has been in and out of San Francisco since the beginning, but as far as I know it's not full-scale testing in preparation for a deployment. Waymo either is, or has been in 14 different cities, but their primary focus is in Phoenix.
For the level 4 driverless tests, yes. GM isn't even close to L4 driverless testing yet.
Also, Waymo has gathered enough road data that they're doing accelerated testing in simulation now. I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the self driving car tech when doing your comparison.
The subject here isn't GM's in-house autonomous development program (Supercruise), it's their subsidiary Cruise Automation, who has been doing L4 testing for at least 18 months now. Cruise Automation began in 2013 as a silicon valley robotics start-up, and was acquired by GM in early 2016.
Cruise is also using simulation. They mentioned in their presentation yesterday that they have 3 simulation engines, and together they do 150 simulations/minute. I'm not sure exactly what that means but simulation is an integral part of their validation process just like with Waymo.
My point is that your comparing progress by measuring the number of cities they're in is senseless, because at a certain point road data stops and simulations take over.
Also, GM nor Cruise have launched driverless L4 testing yet, which Waymo was the first company (ever) to do last month:
My understanding is that "driverless testing" here means either (1) moving the safety driver to the back seat or (2) following the vehicle with a second vehicle with a remote kill switch.
Thanks for posting that link though, I've been curious to read more about this.
"""At first, most of Waymo's driverless cars will have an employee in the back observing the vehicle's behavior. If something goes really wrong, they'll be able to push the "pull over" button to stop the car."""
Yes, driverless testing involves having a passenger function that where the passenger can request that the car pull over at the next available spot.
I'm not sure why you're splitting hairs on that though, when there's a definitive difference between having testing with someone in the driver's seat and not having someone in the driver's seat.
When Waymo went live without a driver in Phoenix, it wasn't a test, it was the real deal.
When they run simulations, often they're running simulations of specific intersections or stretches of road. Using simulation dramatically condenses development timelines, but simulation is still anchored to physical testing on real roads.
Testing in multiple cities is necessary to avoid overfitting for a specific region.
When I compare Waymo and Cruise, I use every publicly available piece of data I can get my hands on. There actually wasn't much to know about Cruise's progress before the end of 2016, when the disengagement reports came out.
Waymo reported 5000 miles between unplanned disengagements on average. Cruise reported 180 miles of testing per disengagement out of much less overall miles. None of the other 2 dozen or so companies registered to test with the California DMV even mattered. Going 180 miles on busy downtown streets between disengagements was hard to believe coming from a non-entity like Cruise, but in spring of this year Cruise released a string of videos demoing their driving in SF, and sure enough, they were doing it. At that point it was time to regard Cruise as a contender. Mentioning them as a contender on forums like this one were generally met with derision.
On the 28th of this month Cruise did it's first driving demos for the press, and so we finally had people to independently verify the vehicle's performance. Out of a dozen articles written by various journalists, one reported an unplanned disengagement when one of Cruise's Bolt's was confused by a cherry picker. Most journalists commented that the ride was 'herky-jerky', and that Cruise's vehicles would often stop, sometimes suddenly and think for a long time before making a decision. One thing is clear, Waymo has put more effort into polish and ride feel. Cruise contends that ride feel is not a priority for them at the moment.
Cruise makes a big deal about focusing their testing efforts in downtown SF, and notes they encounter 40x the number of interesting situations per mile as in the more suburban Phoenix. They intend to launch in NYC next year, and to roll out 1000s of Bolts, with the aim of scaling up their testing to 1 million miles/month in prep for an initial commercial deployment sometime in 2019.
Waymo supposedly intends to begin their initial pilot commercial deployment early next year. Very exciting stuff, it will mark a major milestone, they'll be the first company to go from zero to one with fully autonomous vehicles.
Waymo doesn't have a vehicle manufacturing partnership, and until this is addressed it's a constraint on their ability to scale their deployment. Their current strategy of retrofitting Pacificas is not an efficient or long term solution.
One of the first things Krafcik did in his freshly minted role as Waymo CEO was blow off a promising manufacturing partnership with Ford. This left Ford in the lurch, and ultimately led to the replacement of Mark Fields with Jim Hackett. Then the Waymo team was given a series of massive bonuses that were promised them in exchange for meeting certain benchmarks. Then most of Waymo's key people left. Levandowski went to Uber. He was sharply criticized by Chris Urmson, who himself left to start Aurora.ai with Sterling Anderson (their website went live today). Brian Salesky, also a Google vet, left to start Argo.ai with Peter Rander (they had their first delivery of testing vehicles today). The only main guy left at Waymo is Dmitri Dolgov. Waymo's engineers are more loyal to Dolgov than Krafcik. There are reports of leadership conflicts between Krafcik and Dolgov.
Kyle Vogt and Justin Kahn, before founding Cruise started and scaled Justin.tv, which rapidly scaled and became Twitch. They sold it to Amazon and used their wealth to self-fund Cruise. Their initial plan was to develop a retrofit kit for the Audi A8, and they spent a few years working on that, growing their team to 90 people before being acquired by GM and showing an impressive ability to solve hard problems that many other established and well-capitalized development programs are struggling with. Vogt is legendary for locking himself in a room with a problem and not coming out until he has a solution, sometimes for days. For what it's worth, he's also an asshole with a giant ego, and still very young. He participated in the DARPA Grand challenge in 2004 as a 19 year old MIT junior, he's been into robotics since he was a kid.
I'm seriously concerned about this. "Self-driving" is not a library that you get from Github and just dump it into your car. Waymo has been doing this for a decade. Do GM's claims mean that Waymo's experience doesn't matter much or is GM actually going to cause real world accidents by moving too fast?
they have the money to hire the ai researchers & executives, and the industrial know how & infrastructure to actually follow through.
Google and Tesla probably have easier access to top top talent because of the more attractive research & dev culture & hype/branding, but GM can probably just pay more and still get high grade talent, because they know it's worth it in the long term & they have capital.
.. some researchers must have been the target of pretty intense bidding wars. Like Karpathy at Tesla... I'd be really curious to know if his salary reached low 8 digits. Mid to high 7 for sure, right.
> they have the money to hire the ai researchers & executives, and the industrial know how & infrastructure to actually follow through.
If they're able to isolate these researchers and executives from the cruft and bureaucracy that has built up in their ICE-based manufacturing, sure.
I've made a number of deliveries to their Warren, MI tech center. While I'm generally supportive of unionization efforts in most industries, the unions at GM cause a lot of work to take place at a tenth the pace and urgency of other companies.
I'd expect that if they hire a top-talent AI researcher, they'd then ask them to spend the first 3 weeks of their employment waiting around for IT to finally procure a laptop for them. And you'd better hope that it comes with a full battery charge, because plugging the charger for said laptop into the wall requires summoning the maintenance electrician. It's unfathomable the way weeks of delay can be added to tasks that would take an hour at most in a startup.
I see this said frequently about self driving cars and I'm just baffled by the cynicism. Who cares if self driving cars can't drive in all conditions yet? A shit ton of people live in parts of America that are hardly ever subjected to poor weather/snow, perfect places for self driving cars to start in. And in these early stages, if I tried to get my car to self drive in terrible rain/wind/snow and it just said "can't do that sorry" I'd be fine with that.
Your attitude is like looking at the wright brother's plane and being upset it can't make a transatlantic flight yet.
I'd buy a self driving car that just doesn't work in bad conditions.
The bigger question is "has the self driving issue been solved in clear conditions." Is there any real evidence someone has a self driving car that is better than human drivers?
Oh, no. GM doesn't expect you'll be able to buy your own for 10-15 years. They're focused on robotaxis.
Robotaxis are geo-fenced. They're worth ~$200K apiece (that's a very loose figure). Autonomous vehicles will require a fair bit of maintenance and oversight before they're idiot proof enough put in the hands of private owners. Initial commercial deployments will certainly be in fair weather cities.
If GM can make more money operating a robotaxi fleet, why would they ever even offer them for sale?
There are a lot of medium sized cities in the US with crappy public transportation systems. Maybe these cities could subsidize on-demand rides in robotaxi fleets operated by GM and Uber and other companies rather than owning and operating a fleet of buses running on a limited schedule.
> If GM can make more money operating a robotaxi fleet, why would they ever even offer them for sale?
Because they can make even more money doing both. I don't think the independent must-own types will magically change their ways, and taxis don't solve many people's needs. Why not sell em too? It's like asking if they make more money leasing why do they sell also.
It's a good question. GM is projecting they'll be able to get rideshare costs down below $1 per mile around 2025. They believe that when they can do that they'll be able to collect 20-30% margins through a scaled robotaxi service. It would be a waste to sell a vehicle at a 5% margin when it's worth so much more as an autonomous fleet vehicle.
How do you get to 20-30% margins off of $1/mi costs? Uber and Lyft are already <$1/mi for pooled services and around $1-1.50/mi for non-pooled services in low cost markets. Price competition should make anything beyond classic transportation margins of (negative) - ~5% standard for any self-driving taxi service. 20-30% gross margins might be standard but operating margins at that level seem like a pipe dream.
They also mentioned data monetization as an unspecified portion of those 20-30% margins. Robotaxis will gather a lot of data, around 4 terabytes a day. Enough to hypothetically run a real time virtual simulation of a city, if 1000s of sensor riddled robots are all prowling the streets, seeing, recognizing and classifying everything. I can think of all kinds of ways to monetize data like that, both good and terrible.
Because selling has better cash-flow properties than renting, and by selling GM can push some financing requirements into smaller and more dispersed entities.
Besides, a bigger market does not mean it's more lucrative. Competition on ride-sharing will probably be much more intense than on car manufacturing, and GM may be completely unable to succeed on that new market.
The bigger question is "has the self driving issue been solved in clear conditions."
It's hilarious how far ahead of ourselves we've gotten on this topic. "Can it drive in the snow yet?" Umm, how about we get them to drive from Redmond->Seattle in clear conditions and minimal traffic before we start talking about whether it'll get me to the ski resort.
> I'd buy a self driving car that just doesn't work in bad conditions.
Same here. I live in the midwest and our two-car family always owns at least one 4x4/AWD vehicle for the winter. The other is usually optimized for MPG/reliability (things that go down when you start adding heavy parts - like the kind needed for AWD).
A lot of it is software. The hardware is mostly solved except for cost and there's no reason to think it won't go through the same cost reduction curves that are common throughout the industry. So, IF you can get to viable technology for specific use cases, there's not much reason to think you can't get to workable economics.
> So, IF you can get to viable technology for specific use cases, there's not much reason to think you can't get to workable economics.
This seems like a good analysis, but are there particularly good reasons to believe we will be able to produce a car that drives through an urban environment, at any cost?
Some day. At this point, IMO it would be foolish to say never or not for a century. We could find ourselves in a place where the current path that's mostly deep learning gets close but not close enough. But we seem to be moving forward pretty well even if the last 5 to 10% takes a couple decades longer than many people think.
But I'm still inclined to think that generalized door-to-door autonomy without a competent human present is still a long way out.
There is a wide range of ability when it comes to driving cars, these don't have to be better than everyone to be useful, just better than the worst drivers, which I think it's clear they already are.
Plus they learn as a fleet. So when they start out as barely better than the worst legal drivers and start improving then a large set of vehicles will improve every time they roll out improvements to handle some edge cases.
If all the car reviewers get their hands on it and say it's like a timid person lost in downtown Baltimore driving a uhaul truck it's gonna crash and burn
You have to do something well to redeem that or sales will be a flop. It doesn't look like self driving cars will be much cheaper, better handling, cheaper to own or more luxurious than normal car so the only thing left is for them to drive as better than most people.
The kind of review you want is "this thing costs $10k more than a Prius but being able to sleep off a hangover on your way to work is worth every bit of that $10k"
Self-driving cars will first be deployed in fleets that you can request, where the cost of the cars will be amortized over the many people who get to make use of them, making them far cheaper than owning, operating and parking the car. Much of this margin will probably be captured by the self-driving car companies for the near future, but in the long term with a competitive market they should be far cheaper than current cars for the vast majority of users.
Waymo was reporting 0.2 disengagements per 1000 miles last year, but people like to nit pick those because they're not all downtown miles.
For context humans have 0.006 accidents per 1000 miles driven, and that's counting all the simple miles we drive on highways. So last year Waymo was within a factor of 30 of average human performance, assuming each disengagement was an accident.
If you allow for the fact that with so few disengagements, some of this is noise, and that most of these disengagements would probably not result in accidents, but are rather drivers being cautious and the cars are probably better a year later, I'd say they're probably knocking on the door of human safety at least.
Obviously hard to really say without more data, but the data makes me bullish rather than bearish.
A recent study by University of British Columbia researchers found that rain and darkness like one would experience during Vancouver and Seattle winters would also be challenging for self driving cars.
Another chapter in the super interesting story of the GM vs Tesla battle. Part of me wants to compare Tesla to strategies of companies who needed more established companies to compete with to generate higher demand, yet still had the best product and came out ahead.
But wonder if GM could pull ahead since it has more of a history of mass producing things, and all the infrastructure around that all built. Time will tell.
This is somewhat of a nightmare scenario for city governments due to the properties of induced demand.
A rolling fleet of self driving cars eliminates many of the deterrents to driving. No parking, storage, and insurance costs and one doesn't even need a license. Elimination of all these costs could significantly incentivize people to choose driving as their primary form of transportation, which would significantly increase vehicle traffic and all the associated costs and problems that come along with that.
The one thing that keeps me from believing this will happen is GMs history of shooting itself in the foot. They have amazing engineering and design capabilities but deliver low quality cars. Their lineup has had (and has) some exceptions, but generally I avoid them.
It's why I hope GM does not delivers on this statement. Their quality track record[1] doesnt inspire me confidence.
We see a lot of back-of-the-envelope math about total costs. Eg FastCompany has a post [1] that suggests total costs today [with more-or-less publicly available equipment] would be about $300k.
I think if it remained north of $200k, it would be viable for kind of specific applications [eg truck driving] where you're replacing modestly compensated workers over many years. [truck drivers have a median compensation of $40k by a quick search, and hopefully the equipment would have an average expected lifespan of >5 years with nominal maintenance]
However, multiple companies at this point are claiming very inexpensive LiDAR units [2] [3].
If you assume costs drop to $100k [including maintenance] for a self-driving car, now three years of driving a truck would pay for itself [and taxis wouldn't be far behind].
In [1], analysts estimate costs will be down to $10k total by 2025. At that point, car ownership will be dramatically different. Analysts discuss the confluence of electrification, servicification [of rides], and self-driving cars to be kind of unpredictable. Each of these would be a massive shakeup for the industry, and the combination will be pretty interesting to watch.
I'm happy that progress is being made. I'm not excited as a person who likes driving to be sharing the road with a bunch of computers. I'm not worried that they'll crash into me. I'm more concerned that they will be in my way.
Wonderful.
Has anyone tried the Bolt yet? I think Bolt is turning out to be what Tesla Model 3 was intended to be... it's cheap, electric, rides excellently, and looks pretty slick. One of the best things about it is the top-view, which is a god-send when it comes to parallel parking: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5kei2BVFGb8/maxresdefault.jpg
It seems really innovative in lots of clever ways. For example the "one pedal driving" is neat (push the pedal to go.. and when you take your foot off the pedal, the car slows down, the point being that you basically stop using brakes and save energy that way).