Automakers Are Beating Silicon Valley At Its Own Game

While Silicon Valley is talking the talk, it looks like automakers are walking the walk. To be fair though, had it not been for the tech industry getting the ball rolling, car manufacturers would still be stuck in a rut.

While Apple reportedly scales back its EV/autonomous car project, called Titan, and Google continues to send out monthly updates about how many times other drivers run into their vehicles, companies like Ford, GM, Audi, Mercedes, Honda, BMW and Tesla (the closest thing to a tech company that makes cars) have already introduced vehicles with semi-autonomous features. Research is great, but shipping a product is the end goal. Automakers are shipping.

Is it really "Silicon Valley's game"? It's foreign turf for both automakers and the tech industry. If anything that turf "belongs" to the Defense industry, since they were kinda there first.

It's the current mentality of the Silicon Valley management. They play around with stuff, mostly as experiments without useful applications, and then find applications for them and tout it as the next big thing. When it comes to solving real problems, the fall short constantly, and many times the "improvement" falls short of the current methods. (Software defined networking, software defined storage, X as a service, "cloud", etc) Then their faithful followers push these ideas as the "end-all, be-all" and most others are forced to go along or become unemployed. This is a direct result of the ways public education and our collegiate system are teaching these kids: "everything new is good, old is bad, and results mean nothing." I can't hardly wait to see a fortune 500 company fall to pieces due to adopting "infrastructure as a service" and then come grinding to a halt because of a single backhoe incident. Sure, some of these things have a purpose and a place, but as main infrastructure is not it. We've already seen the "results mean nothing" part cause major fallout twice, and it seems nobody was listening.

So by 'Silicon Valley' they mean Google? Also how is Tesla not a Silicon Valley company? This article is stupid as shit.

So next they should start making flying cars.

So car makers may wind up being better at making cars then computer companies? For all of the favorite child publicity Tesla usually gets, they are still a niche bit player in the car market and will likely remain so for many years. Securing the supply chain, factories and workers to build a million cars a year is not a trivial matter. Much easier to add auto control modules to cars made at existing factories. I hope that somewhere along the journey to self driving cars, someone thinks to hire some good cyber security folks.

But I thought they were using nVidia tech to do the self-driving, not their own house-grown tech. Except for Apple, I think all the tech companies were planning to sell the self-driving tech to traditional car makers, not to start selling their own brand of cars. Even Google has been using 3rd party cars for their self-driving tech.

I would think automakers have a substantial advantage in that they already know how to make cars and deal with regulators. Given that, I'm not feeling very surprised.

Making real things out of metal, plastic, and rubber do things other than survive a 4 foot fall involves more technology than Silicon Valley is use to.

Who said auto makers' brain trust isn't in Silicon Valley?

lironmiron said:

But I thought they were using nVidia tech to do the self-driving, not their own house-grown tech. Except for Apple, I think all the tech companies were planning to sell the self-driving tech to traditional car makers, not to start selling their own brand of cars. Even Google has been using 3rd party cars for their self-driving tech.

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It's more of a mixed bag than that. The auto industry might use Nvidia processing units, but those units don't have software to go with it. They have to built their own, otherwise it'd just be a car with a bunch of sensors, cameras, and processing unit that do nothing.

I think your tech companies were looking at the Auto industry making cars, sticking in Nvidia tech, sensors/cameras from whoever, then running it all with their software package. Which so far, doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Maybe Apple realizes that a true self-driving car is decades away and the automobile companies are advancing a more incremental "semi-autonomous" (i.e. advanced cruise control) car?