Of de technologische ontwikkelingen langzamer is geweest is wel waar als je over volledig autonoom rijden spreekt, maar juist niet waar als je over ADAS spreekt. Zie onderstreept.
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Driverless groups such as Waymo, Microsoft-backed Cruise, Amazon-owned Zoox and Aurora are betting on a “moonshot” solution with no plan B. They plan to offer full autonomy — albeit ringfenced to certain locations — or nothing at all. In regulatory jargon, this is called Level 4, in which a robot driver requires no input from passengers. Level 5, the highest step, would allow the vehicle to go anywhere.
This “go big or go home” approach stands in direct opposition to the step-by-step path of the ADAS players led by suppliers Mobileye, Aptiv, Magna and Bosch, which work with all the major carmakers. Their advances mean most new vehicles already have partial automation — Levels 1 and 2, including cruise control and automated braking. Tesla’s AutoPilot System is the best-known Level 2 system.
The notion that this low-cost, evolutionary track could experience a butterfly-like transformation to offer a fully driverless experience has long been dismissed by the Level 4 groups. Chris Urmson, Aurora chief executive, put it eloquently in 2015 when he was Google’s leading driverless engineer: “Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take these driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and?.?.?.?over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars,” he said. “Well, that’s like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”
Big Tech’s failed takeover
Urmson’s logic felt sound at the time: ADAS was rudimentary, whereas robotaxis seemed just a couple of years away from mass deployment. Waymo prepared to order 82,000 such vehicles in 2018, Uber projected it would have 100,000 on the road by 2020 and Lyft divined that a “majority” of its rides would be autonomous by 2021. But none of that happened. Instead, the closer they got to a consumer-facing product, the more complex the problem was understood to be. At the same time, the traditional automotive industry has been galvanised by these efforts and has evolved ADAS into a multi-faceted feature set capable of hands-free highway driving, automated lane changes and robotic valet parking.
Iagnemma says the dramatic improvements in ADAS were unforeseen, and he now sees the two technology curves converging. In 2015 I would have agreed with Chris [Urmson],” Iagnemma says. “Every intelligent observer in the industry believed that was the right path forward. But what that failed to anticipate was the increase in performance, in part enabled by deep learning and other advances, that would allow us to do things with radars and cameras that I would not have thought possible in 2015.” Nevertheless, the Level 4 groups continue to dismiss ADAS as a threat. Shortly before stepping down as Waymo chief executive earlier this year, John Krafcik said: “There is really no path from L2 to L4 — there’s a huge chasm. It’s a completely different development mindset.”
So if the evolutionary approach to building driverless technology proves successful, the upshot would be startling: the world’s biggest, most sophisticated companies — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — would have all backed the wrong horse for a future technology widely expected to earn revenues in the trillions of dollars. This would entirely flip the script from half a decade ago, when carmakers felt under siege from tech companies that were going to displace them at the top of the value-chain.
“There was this general fear that the entire auto industry was going to get taken over by tech — and that totally didn’t happen,” says Austin Russell, chief executive of Luminar, which began as a supplier of visual sensors but now offers a highway autonomy solution for partners such as Volvo. “That whole ‘shoot for the moon’ approach really didn’t play out. That’s why they are in the testing stage and we’re in series production,” he adds. “The traditional automakers still absolutely control all the volume, all the production, everything that goes out there. They are the only ones that can provide a real business case for any of this stuff.”
Today’s driverless car groups are burning through untold amounts of cash. Cruise alone has raised $10bn and just opened a $5bn credit line to build more vehicles. Waymo was funded by Alphabet for a decade before raising $3.2bn in 2020, but it still needed to raise another $2.5bn last month. Zoox was so close to running out of money that it sold itself to Amazon early in the pandemic, while Apple has been working on autonomy since 2014 without so much as a prototype to show for its efforts. Several big companies have already thrown in the towel: Uber in effect paid rival Aurora to absorb its 1,200-person team last year, while Lyft sold its ambitiously-named Level 5 unit to a division of Toyota in April.
Meanwhile, the global ADAS market has become a gold mine. Revenues last year were $25bn, according to BlueWeave Consulting, and are expected to nearly triple by 2027. Roland Berger, a consultancy, expects advanced automation features to be common for “nearly every new vehicle sold in the developed world” within four years. Aside from Elon Musk, who in 2019 promised Tesla would have “operating robotaxis next year” no one is really suggesting the ADAS players are about to “unlock” fully driverless capabilities in the next few years. Nor does their current focus on highway driving necessarily translate well into urban autonomy. But they are under little pressure to make that leap anytime soon.
The business model of selling highway-only autonomy is solid, growing rapidly, and drivers have demonstrated they are willing to pay. Super Cruise, GM’s semi-autonomous feature set, must be purchased in a bundle costing $6,150, and when GM surveyed Cadillac owners last year it found that 85 per cent want it in their next vehicle. Tesla sells its “full self-driving” package, which requires no additional hardware, for $10,000 — an incredibly lucrative sum for the auto business where the average vehicle profit is less than $2,000. So if ADAS players get stuck at highway-only autonomy, they are not in crisis. But if Waymo, Cruise, Zoox and Aurora delay their rollout, they don’t have a product.
Yet the likelihood that driver-assistance systems do keep moving forward, tortoise-like, is high, because as more cars are equipped with the tech, the faster the systems learn. Navigation specialist TomTom has equipped more than 3m vehicles with high-definition maps accurate to a few centimetres that get near real-time updates from crowdsourcing. “It’s a continuous stream of data that’s coming in, and that data is exploding — it’s exponential growth,” says Willem Strijbosch, TomTom’s head of autonomous driving.
The robotaxi groups’ counterargument that their data is superior is undoubtedly true. Waymo’s fifth-generation sensor suite, for instance, comprises 29 cameras and a suite of radar and lidar. But as costs fall dramatically, carmakers will be able to add new layers of sensors to help cross the chasm into a Level 4 feature set. TomTom’s Strijbosch argues that the Level 4 cars are “overfitted” with technology because they let costs run amok and need to make up for their small sample sizes. But even if ADAS data is less robust, it can be multiplied by a far greater number of real-world hours and eventually close the gap with Level 4 tech. “By the time we’ve driven so many billions of kilometres, in millions of vehicles that have this whole sensor set-up, all corner cases will have been captured,” he says.