I think it’s a branding issue. It was supposed to be a SV darling to do it first, not some legacy German carmaker.
You can see significantly more negativity for non-SV tech, especially when they do something outside of the narrative. If it’s an electric car, should be batteries and not fuel cells for example.
This is also one of the reasons why if a company wants to go big needs to move to SV. It looks much better when things happen the correct way, you don’t have to do all that convincing.
> It was supposed to be a SV darling to do it first, not some legacy German carmaker.
I feel quite vindicated by this, because I've always been (perhaps irrationally) rather suspicious of Tesla. Software company suddenly decides to make 'luxury cars'? Cool story bro.
My opinion is that the German triad (BMW, VW (and subsidiaries, including Porsche), Merc-Benz) may have lost some ground to Tesla when it comes to EVs and self-driving cars, but they have an immense mind- and market-share and will quickly recover lost ground. They have a pretty good engineering-first mentality, too.
Plus, they have always built generally good cars (late 1990s-early 2000s unreliability notwithstanding).
In fact, this is not surprising at all. Audi claimed in 2017 that its A8 was capable of Level 3 self-driving[1], but the system was subsequently downgraded. In the intervening years, the Germans' research into self-driving cars has drastically expanded.
> My opinion is that the German triad (BMW, VW (and subsidiaries, including Porsche), Merc-Benz) may have lost some ground to Tesla when it comes to EVs and self-driving cars, but they have an immense mind- and market-share and will quickly recover lost ground. They have a pretty good engineering-first mentality, too.
Americans, SV and HN especially, are also oblivious to this.
The current VW CEO was just sent packing.
Why?
Software quality.
They know it's do or die and the level of investment into it is huge, they've been hiring software devs like crazy, in Germany.
Exactly. More like they are selling vaporware. I paid $7500 for the self driving mode _a full year ago_ and it I definitely don't expect it to ever work now. They clearly sold customers something they didn't have.
If you are a Tesla AP owner, I have a question for you that has been bothering me for a while. Would you demand a complete refund if Tesla announced a Level-3-ish model with LiDAR? Because for a while I have been wondering if that's why they are so keen on camera-only self driving.
When Tesla's sky-high P/E was predicated on software supremacy. I was informed self-driving robotaxis would be a multi-billion dollar industry that Tesla and Uber would dominate, destroying legacy automakers in the process. This was back when Uber had a self-driving program, it's been downhill since. TO answer your question more concretely: I'd say since 8-10 years ago.
But, like, that's after they were making EVs. The roadster was announced in 2006, and started production in 2008 - 15 years ago.
They went from making EVs, which are cars with some software inherently in them, to making different cars with even more software in them. They're a car company first, who have been increasing the amount of software they've written to put in their cars.
The comment I was replying to was suggesting they were a software company first, which then pivoted to making cars. Which is... just... what?!?
Yes, you technically answered my question, so thanks for taking the time and making the effort and whatever, but just not in a way that is actually helpful in the context that I asked it.
I suspect there's a semantic collision on the meaning of first: it can refer to temporal ordering (occured before other events), first can also also refer to primacy/importance (which was my reading. i.e. to be read as "Tesla is fundamentally a software company which happens to sell cars." A take I never agreed with, but was the basis of the overvaluation.)
In my mind it makes sense for Mercedes-Benz to be the first one to do this. There's probably a laundry list of automotive firsts that are associated with just the Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
Sure, they even did some cool self driving experiments back in the 80s-90s but the tech wasn't ready. There must be a video of a mercedes loaded with PCs driving slowly but autonomously.
Anyway, the way I see it is, to get positive reaction you need to drive and follow the narrative. That is, for example, providing arguments about how it should be done as if it is a public debate and then reveal your tech. Then you will have fanboys and and hateboys and people will feel involved and if you do it in SV your ability to do what you say you do would not be questioned as much because magic happens in SV.
You say that your car is basically a computer o wheels and the story gets traction, when a car company makes a self driving car it doesn't fit and will need to do much more convincing because the techies will be digging in to find faults. The computer on wheels might cause crashes but the techies will be much more forgiving and look for excuses.
And Mercedes has been pumping huge amounts of money into it for at least a decade. They're just much more conservative than typical SV companies so they only publicly announce products when they're ready.
I don't think the Benz Patent-Motorwagen is considered an S-Class. Technically you could say that the S-Class is derived from the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, but you could also say that about any other car.
For some reason, a large part of HN users seem to hate every fundamentally new technology. It seems the majority here thinks the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, with only minor, gradial improvements. And every idea of a bigger shift is a scam.
I have yet to see a good explanation of this.
Maybe this is the case on every forum, simply because that is the prevailing attitude among people in general? During the evolution of mankind, fundamental shifts have probably not happened during a lifetime. So maybe our brains are wired to fight the idea of fundamental change as nonsense or betrayal?
Reflecting on the infamous dropbox comment, I think it has to do with being jealous of the attention someone else's idea and/or implementation is getting. After all, I could build Twitter in a weekend - but I didn't - but the fact that you're getting all this attention. Grr. I want to be the star of the show!
I try to push back against this attitude by leaving positive comments to the effect of "Hey, this is cool!" for cool things, but it's an eyedropper against the ocean sort of situation.
It seems to me that a large part of HN users are over forty. I'm over forty. When I was twenty, every new technology that promised the world was to be believed. Now that I'm over forty, the bar for believing in a new hype is very very high.
This may be more a result of news outlets exaggerating claims, than of actual creative entities themselves overpromising.
The thing is, most Mercedes employees are over forty. So while news outlets might exaggerate, Mercedes doesn't really. They tend to only publish products when they're ready.
But the twenties of today are also wary of many thing that we, the fourtier tech (bearded white males? true in my case) cared about.
"We" built a free, open, internet. Which brought the twentiers mostly surveillance capitalism by a few monopolists. "We" built a system in which companies that seed division can generate trillions of revenue from that. Twentiers (tweens?) rightfully are sceptical about the things I am sceptical about today, but which I rooted for (and spent my energy on) in my twenties.
Because a lot of people here are very pessimistic ("this won't work/it's not viable/it's fake/etc"), and whenever there's actual progress that contradicts their previous predictions, they try to save face, move goal posts, etc because obviously they couldn't have misjudged the technology.
To be fair I don't think this particular "L3" is groundbreaking but what I said still applies.
You have to be, working in self-driving I know for a fact a lot of "shortcuts" were used in a lot of places. For example, using LiDAR data, map data, overfitting on a short section of road to make it seem the solution is universal when it's just "hardwired".
I wouldn't necessarily call it fake, but it was unsustainable and sometimes oversold.
Good luck communicating this to everyone that takes every opportunity to shit on Tesla and tries to claim that Tesla is falling behind in self driving.
> Mercedes’ Level 3 conditionally automated driving assistant can, on suitable highway sections and where traffic density is high, offer to take over the driving, leaving the driver free to do something else, like watch a movie or participate in a meeting.
Objectively speaking, the article IS complete horseshit, if it resorts to suggesting "watching a movie" or "participating in a meeting".
Which has got nothing to do with the technology itself, though.
Maybe I'm picking wrong examples, but lately almost every "distruptor" company or tech either turned to be an outright scam or a net negative social outcome.
Uber never got big in places with decent worker protection laws, which makes me believe that their entire business model depends on exploiting their totally-not-employees. So, I disagree. It might have made the world better for their customers, but that doesn't tip the scale for me.
Much like airbnb, if it was true to its original mission, it would work well, aka people looking to earn some side cash. But if you are working a low-paid driver "0-hour" contract job without health insurance and a self-funded minimum cover insurance and no PTO, sick days or benefits, that kind of sucks.
I’ve read convincing arguments that while drivers may believe they are better off, the cost/income numbers are such that drivers essentially break even. If true, Uber is merely taking advantage of their drivers lack of sophistication re: vehicle wear/depreciation, and the drivers are not actually better off financially. Even if we find no ethical complaint, a shift in the cost/income value perception by drivers seems like a notable risk.
> It seems the majority here thinks the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, with only minor, gradial improvements. And every idea of a bigger shift is a scam.
More like the last 200 years will be like the last 200 years. When has there been some truly "giant shift" that swept the world in less than a decade?
The automobile we know today was an outgrowth of the decades of developments of steam engines to farm tractors to passenger vehicles and was only fully enabled once we built the interstate system and has required decades of further development particularly of safety systems to bring us to the comfortable place we are now.
I imagine this technology will eventually be useful, but so many more developments and earned experience needs to be gained before we can build out the rest of the infrastructure that will truly allow this technology to become a ubiquitous improvement over our current state.
It's maybe not that we're negative on the new technology, it's just that we'd like to acknowledge this gap and concentrate on the issues that it creates rather than getting lost in the perennial shine of the new.
These aren't exactly giant shifts though, just incremental progress. Maybe with the exception of cars vs horses, but this shift took at least half a century and two disruptive world wars happened in that time. For the other things, the enabling technologies were microchips and the internet, and those also took their time to grow.
If the web was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is. If mobile was not a giant shift, then I don't know what is.
The web created a searchable, worldwide instant knowledge base in which mankind shares what it knows.
Mobile makes everyone connected to everybody else, where ever they are.
For all of these examples, the time going from "most people are aware of it" to "most people use it" was less than 20 years.
Example: Most people in developed countries started to become aware of email in the 90s. In the 2010s most people had an email. Probably even in the 2000s already.
These were mostly 'predictable' consequences of miniaturization in electronics and connecting computers into networks which had been happening since the late 1940s and the 1960s. And those idea didn't come out of nowhere either, science fiction invented most of those concepts long before they could be technically realised (see Star Trek's communicators).
This is not a new technology. L3/L4 autonomous vehicles have existed for 50+ years.
Even in cars, it's not a new technology. But it's very easy to claim something without backing it up. Which is exactly what tesla has been doing with this "new technology" for the last 10 years. People are cautious about hearing news about self-driving, because in the past there have been some pretty major caveats.
Because I've been in the driver's seat of a tesla vehicle when it attempted to turn into oncoming traffic, color me skeptical. No reason for it to turn left, but started to crank the wheel left into oncoming traffic. It's dangerous to call that autonomous, precisely because of how good it "looks" from the outside. The closer people are to this, the more they'll trust it.
That is a hand-selected collection of seconds long snippets. By the manufacturer. That does not give me any sense of how well this car can drive itself.
I mean, there are a bunch of long form videos on Youtube from people who rode Waymo's service in Phoenix in particular. How long do you want to watch a car drive around ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPZH2PlmzFs is at least in San Francisco which is maybe more interesting than a Phoenix suburb
Oh, I see, sorry. I think the "as well as they do now" is a constraint which means the answer will be null because of continuous improvement.
But I believe the video with the blind guy does have a long form version somewhere, so if you consider that (different vehicle, much older technology) to be "as well as they do now" in the sense you meant then that's still roughly in the six year mark.
xracy talked about autonomous vehicles which will include at least trains. London's Victoria Line underground service build in the 1960s was always ATO, which is closer to L4 in this scheme than L3, under normal operation the original Victoria Line trains basically require the driver to push a button, closing the doors and then once the train concludes all of its doors are safely closed it will leave, drive to the next station, stop and open the doors, then we just rinse and repeat.
Now, trains don't actually use the car terminology, in trains we'd call this GoA2, Grade of Automation 2, with the next steps being GoA3 in which there's a human who knows how to operate the train manually in principle, and they are on the train, but they aren't up front "driving it" unless something went wrong; and then GoA4 in which the train doesn't have anything resembling a human driver it just has passengers, in an emergency some central authority will set out to rescue the passengers from their disabled train. There are a handful of GoA4 train systems, but they're probably only 5-10 years old.
There are largely two common takes on self-driving cars here:
- "Self-driving cars are a suspect and dangerous technology which is unlikely to perform as well as the companies promoting it claim, and may not become broadly useful for decades, if ever" (I broadly fall into this camp) - These people don't like it because it's a 'self-driving' car, FSVO self-driving.
- "Self-driving cars are coming any day now, and will be a transition straight to robo-taxis lead by visionary super-genius Elon Musk" (This has probably become less common as the promises from that camp haven't materialised over the last decade) - These people don't like it because it is insufficiently robo-taxi-y or musky.
There's possibly an argument that the first camp has become too cynical in response to the second, but as it stands there just isn't that much mindshare for this sort of cautious progress.
