Tesla is worth more, but Toyota gets carmaking, Akio Toyoda says
Nov 07. 2020Elon Musk and Akio Toyoda in 2010. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Kiyoshi Ota.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · River Davis · BUSINESS, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS Toyota might be losing to Tesla in terms of market value, but don’t underestimate the fact that the Japanese manufacturer has built more than 100 million cars, President Akio Toyoda said in unusually direct comments at a competitor.
“Tesla says that their recipe will be the standard in the future, but what Toyota has is a real kitchen and a real chef,” Toyoda, 64, said during an online briefing on Friday after more than doubling the company’s operating profit forecast for the current fiscal year.
Tesla overtook Toyota as the world’s most valuable automaker in July, thanks to investor enthusiasm for next-generation electric vehicles. Indeed, Tesla is now worth more than Toyota and Japan’s six other major car manufacturers combined, Toyoda pointed out. That’s despite the fact that Tesla sold about 367,500 vehicles, or 3.4% of Toyota’s output of 10.74 million units, last year.
“We are losing when it comes to the share price,” the grandson of Toyota’s founder said. “But when it comes to products, we have a full menu that will be chosen by customers.”
Toyota, the world’s second-largest automaker by sales volume, has built its brand over decades by offering affordable and reliable vehicles backed by large-scale manufacturing. Toyoda said he sees Toyota’s “picky customers” sticking with the manufacturer’s cars.
At the same time, Toyoda said that his company has many areas where it can learn from its rival, such as Tesla’s ability to generate profits from battery-based electric vehicles, software updates and renewable energy products.
Toyota has lagged behind the rest of the auto industry when it comes to selling all-electric vehicles, and stuck to its strategy of building out older and more affordable hybrid technology until battery costs come down.
Toyota is setting its sights on ramping up battery-based EV volume; Nikkei Asia reported in January that Toyota is aiming to sell 500,000 electric vehicles annually in 2025, citing unidentified sources. Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, has predicted that his company should be selling “a few million cars a year” globally around the same time. Volkswagen AG aims to produce 1 million electric cars by the end of 2023.
“They aren’t really making something that’s real, people are just buying the recipe,” Toyoda said of Tesla, expanding on the cooking analogy. “We have the kitchen and chef, and we make real food.”
Volvo opens warehouse in Samut Prakarn to serve as one-stop Asean hub
Nov 06. 2020
By The Nation
Volvo Cars Thailand has officially launched an innovative new dedicated Volvo warehouse for the first time in Thailand.
The “Volvo Car Thailand Central Distribution & Training Centre” (VCT CDTC) on Bangna-Trad Road Km23, in Samut Prakan province, spread over an area of 23,331 square metres, is set to become Volvo’s one-stop hub in Asean and is the result of an investment of over Bt1 billion.
The warehouse can store up to 550 Volvo cars with efficient spare parts management. There is also a comprehensive vehicle condition inspection department with world-class technology ensuring that every Volvo delivered to dealers across the region, and for direct delivery to customers, is in perfect condition, the automaker said.
In addition, there is an international training centre and a dedicated performance-testing centre for the press.
Chris Wailes, managing director, Volvo Car (Thailand) Limited, said, “Our new Volvo Car Thailand Central Distribution & Training Centre warehouse is specially designed for Volvo Cars Thailand, in collaboration with our partners, the WHA Group,”
Chris Wailes, managing director, Volvo Car (Thailand)The centre is equipped with cutting-edge technology to manage warehouse and spare parts stock and has been designed to support its long-term strategic plans for Thailand, he added.
“We have also planned ahead and installed a new battery charger for recharging the electric cars we will be launching next year. We are confident that this new warehouse will play a major role in moving Volvo’s business forward in the future.”
Uber says it wants to bring laws like California’s Prop 22 to other states
Nov 06. 2020
By The Washington Post · Faiz Siddiqui · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, POLITICS, TRANSPORTATION SAN FRANCISCO – Uber helped wage a $200 million war in California to keep drivers as contractors. Now that the ballot measure passed, the company says its work isn’t done.
The ride-hailing giant’s CEO said Thursday that Uber is looking to expand the model to other states, joining an executive from rival Lyft who said something similar earlier this week. Proposition 22 established workers as independent contractors, superseding a California law that aimed to make gig workers, including ride-hailing and food delivery drivers, employees with full benefits.
“Going forward, you’ll see us more loudly advocating for . . .. laws like Prop 22,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, adding later: “We were the first to come forward with this [independent contractor]-plus model, the idea that drivers deserve flexibility plus benefits. We want to have a dialogue with governments [in] other states.”
Prop 22, which was approved by 58% of voters, makes drivers independent contractors with promises of 120% of the minimum wage and a health care contribution, equivalent to either half or 100 percent of the employer-provided average under the Affordable Care Act. Unlike full employment, however, benefits are calculated based on a driver’s active time, negating the potential multiple hours per week they spend waiting for a fare while logged onto the apps.
Labor advocates fiercely opposed Prop 22, arguing it was a transparent attempt to snatch newly enshrined employment rights from workers.
Companies such as Uber, DoorDash and Instacart, which contributed to the $200 million campaign war chest in support of it, said they needed to maintain their contract models to keep the flexibility that allow short wait times and low fares within their apps.
But steep costs also come with employment. Uber and Lyft’s stocks have rallied this week, logging percentage gains in the double digits as investors reacted to the news that they would not have to make drivers employees.
Still, the more limited benefits instated by Prop 22 will cost Uber.
“It will result in probably a 5 percent increase to cover the incremental [costs],” including benefits, said Uber Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai. “We do believe that it’ll be manageable.”
Uber reported a $1.1 billion quarterly loss in the period that ended in September, six percent less than the figure reported in the same quarter a year ago. The company has not been profitable since debuting on the stock market in May 2019.
Anthony Foxx, Lyft’s chief policy officer and the former secretary of transportation under President Barack Obama, said in an interview Wednesday that the company would also look to expand the Prop 22 model across the country.
“I think Prop 22 has now created a structure for us to discuss with leaders in other states and Washington, potentially,” he said. “We think that Prop 22 has now created a model that can be replicated and can be scaled.”
Waymo seeks to calm doubts about driverless cars with data trove
Nov 01. 2020
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Ira Boudway, Gabrielle Coppola · BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, TRANSPORTATION Autonomous vehicle developers have so far operated without shared industry standards for safety and with minimal oversight from state and federal governments.
Waymo, saying that it is seeking to revive a conversation around these issues, on Friday released a trove of safety data for its fleet of robo-taxis in Arizona. The voluntary disclosure comes less than a month after Waymo announced that it would begin offering fully driverless service to customers in Arizona and days before an election that could usher in a much tougher regulatory regime.
“It’s really just going to be a question for us of how strong some of the opposition will be to this technology, versus how enabling the legislative or regulatory approaches might be,” said George Ivanov, Waymo’s head of international policy and government affairs, during a conference call with reporters.
The safety report covers 6.1 million miles of automated driving in 2019 and 2020, including 65,000 miles without a safety driver at the wheel. The total mileage, Waymo said, represents more than 500 years behind the wheel for the average U.S. driver. It’s the first time that Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car unit has made such information public. Waymo also released a 30-page document describing its methodology for assessing the safety of its vehicles.
When Waymo announced its fully driverless service in Arizona earlier this month, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk paid the rival a back-handed compliment on Twitter, calling Waymo a “highly specialized solution.” Tesla, which some consider Waymo’s primary rival in automated driving technology, was developing a “general solution” that was “capable of zero intervention drives,” he wrote. Waymo, in an uncharacteristic move, replied to Musk’s tweet with a photo of the steering wheels in its robo-taxis, which are labeled with the warning: “Please keep your hands off the wheel. The Waymo Driver is in control at all times.”
“We’re two entirely different businesses, building two entirely different technologies,” Nick Webb, Waymo’s director of systems engineering, said of Tesla on the conference call. While Tesla, he noted, needs drivers at the wheel paying attention, Waymo is building vehicles that allow passengers to ride in the back seat while the front is empty.
Waymo reported 18 “contact events” involving its fleet over the span of the safety report, only one of which involved a fully driverless vehicle. In an additional 29 instances, Waymo concluded that there would have been a collision had a safety driver not intervened-using simulators to play out these “what if” scenarios. All 47 incidents involved errors or rule violations by other road users, according to Matthew Schwall, Waymo’s head of field safety. None was severe enough to be likely to cause critical injuries, the company said, though airbags were deployed in either the Waymo minivan or another vehicle on three occasions.
Although the 29 simulated incidents all involved aberrant behavior from other road users-including missed stop signs and failures to yield the right of way-Waymo’s safety drivers performed better in those moments than its robots at anticipating danger and preventing collisions. Waymo, said Schwall, looks carefully at such events and uses them to refine its driving software. The company cautioned against comparing its record with accident rates in the general population, both because its report includes minor accidents of the kind that rarely get reported in everyday life and because all of its 6.1 million miles were logged on a select set of suburban Phoenix roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour or less.
In a poll taken earlier this year and commissioned by the advocacy group Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, nearly half of respondents said they would never get into a self-driving taxi. In March 2018, a vehicle in Uber’s self-driving car unit struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, leading the state to shut down the company’s testing program there. The incident created an implicit standard of zero fatalities for AV developers in the state and raised thorny legal and ethical questions about liability when humans and robots share driving responsibilities. Earlier this year, the Uber car’s safety driver was charged with negligent homicide.
Federal regulators have so far taken a hands-off approach to automated vehicle development. While California requires that autonomous vehicle developers report the total miles and the number of interventions by safety drivers for test cars in the state, there is no federal mandate for safety reporting. In its latest guidance, released in September 2017, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, under Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, put forward a “non-regulatory approach” that left the automotive industry to design its own best practices for testing and deployment.
In the absence of strong regulation, Waymo has taken a relatively cautious approach, limiting its ride-hailing vehicles to 100 square miles in suburban Phoenix and pulling safety drivers only after tens of millions of miles of testing. Tesla has been more aggressive, releasing increasingly ambitious versions of its advanced driver-assistance systems to the general public. Earlier this month, it began rolling out a beta version of what it calls “Full Self-Driving” to select customers. Videos of rattled Tesla drivers finding flaws in the system soon proliferated on social media. The software’s terms of service requires drivers to remain prepared to take control of their cars, and leaves them liable for collisions.
MMC: Electrified vehicles to account for 50% of passenger car sales by FY30
Nov 01. 2020Mitsubishi Mortor’s Mi-Tech hybrid concept sport utility vehicle is displayed during the Tokyo Motor Show in Tokyo in October 2019. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo)
By The Japan News
Mitsubishi Motors Corp. has announced that it aims to increase its passenger car sales for electrified vehicles, which include electric and hybrid cars, to 50% worldwide by fiscal 2030.
Mitsubishi Motors made the decision in response to changing environmental regulations in Europe, the United States and other countries.
The company plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per vehicle by 40% in fiscal 2030 in comparison to fiscal 2010.
The carmaker previously planned to increase the sales of electrified vehicles to 20% by fiscal 2020 by boosting the production and sales of such vehicles in Southeast Asia and other regions.
Other carmakers have also set sales targets for electrified vehicles. Toyota Motor Corp. plans to sell more than 5.5 million electric vehicles in 2030, of which more than 1 million cars are expected to be EVs and fuel cell vehicles.
Honda Motor Co. is also aiming for two-thirds of its global sales to be electrified vehicles by 2030
Toyota, Honda, Subaru see record global output in September
Oct 30. 2020Toyota Motor Kyushu Inc.’s Miyata Plant is seen in Miyawaka, Fukuoka Prefecture, on April 3. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo)
By Syndication Washington Post, The Japan News-Yomiuri · No Author · WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC
Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Subaru Corp. all announced on Thursday that their world production in September hit a record high for the month.
Suzuki Motor Corp. and Mazda Motor Corp. also saw global production increases from the previous year, reflecting the situation that production has started to recover after a sharp decline resulting from the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Toyota’s September output rose 12% from a year earlier to about 840,000 units, marking the first increase since December 2019. Sales of Lexus luxury cars and RAV4 sport-utility vehicles were strong, mainly in China and North America. Global sales rose 2% to about 840,000 units, hitting a record high for September.
Honda’s global production rose 10% to about 470,000 units, the first year-on-year increase since July 2019. Suzuki and Subaru saw growth for the second and third consecutive months, respectively.
Conversely, Nissan Motor Co., Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Daihatsu Motor Co. all saw their global production decline in September from the previous year, although the rates of decline were smaller than in August.
The combined global production of the eight major automakers fell 62% in May. Since this summer, when the spread of infections began to decline in China and Japan, the number of vehicles produced has started to rise as sales have recovered.
Auto parts makers are also seeing improved results as production recovers among the automakers. While both Denso Corp. and Aisin Seiki Co., which are affiliated with Toyota, said Thursday that consolidated earnings for the first half of the business year ending September 2020 were in the red, they are forecasting a profit for the business year ending March 2021.
King of Auto Products expects brisk business at its Fast Auto Show Thailand 2020, which has taken over halls 105 and 106 at the Bangkok International Trade & Exhibition Centre (BITEC) until Sunday.
The exhibition features new models from an array of different manufacturers, as well as modified cars.
King of Auto Products chairman Pattanadesh Asasappakij expects around 250,000 visitors to book more than 3,000 cars.
Renault’s made-in-China electric SUV stirs labor unrest at home
Oct 23. 2020Renault will make the Spring electric automobile in Shiyan, China. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Benjamin Girette Photo by: Benjamin Girette — Bloomberg
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Tara Patel · BUSINESS, WORLD, ASIA-PACIFIC, EUROPE
Renault unions are raising hackles about the French carmaker producing a new electric mini-SUV in China and selling it in Europe, a clash that could become more common given how many companies have similar plans.
A Renault Megane eVision electric automobile, manufactured by Renault, is displayed during the automaker’s E-Ways event in Paris, France, on Friday, Oct. 16, 2020. Renault’s promotional blitz for its growing electric lineup may be too late for the maker of Europe’s best-selling EV to stay atop the region’s expanding market for battery-powered cars. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Benjamin Girette
Labor groups are assailing Renault for exporting the Dacia Spring — a small crossover the automaker bills as Europe’s cheapest electric vehicle — to Europe from a plant in central China’s Hubei province. Workers have been on edge about a jobs-cutting plan the company announced just before it secured a state-backed loan in June.
“We are fundamentally opposed to making the Spring in China,” said Frank Daoust, a spokesman for the CFDT union. “This isn’t in keeping with government support for the car industry and jobs in France.”
The complaints may become more common. Automakers are planning a wave of similar exports, many of them EVs. The models include BMW’s iX3, which recently started production in Shenyang and Tesla’s Model 3 built near Shanghai. Several brands plan to base the manufacturing of their entire lineups in China, including Daimler’s Smart and Volvo Car Group’s Polestar and Lynk & Co., all three of which are jointly owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
Renault’s plan is particularly tricky for political reasons. The company has drawn a small portion from the 5 billion-euro ($5.9 billion) loan that France backed earlier this year, and President Emmanuel Macron only made government funds available after the carmaker agreed to consult with unions on plans for two underutilized factories at home.
The FO labor union, which also represents Renault workers, called for the carmaker to stick to its goal to make France a global center of excellence for electric cars. The union said the Spring’s carbon footprint will be “disastrous” because of the emissions involved transporting the model to Europe from China.
“It’s inconceivable and irresponsible to make them anywhere but France,” the labor group said in a statement.
Renault will make the Spring at the plant it runs jointly with Dongfeng Motor Group and alliance partner Nissan Motor in the city of Shiyan, where the electric Renault City K-ZE is produced. Chief Executive Officer Luca de Meo unveiled the Dacia model last week along with the more upscale Megane eVision planned for 2022. Renault will build that EV at its Douai plant in northern France.
Before Renault closed the books on a record first-half loss, Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard warned French lawmakers of the threat China’s exports of electric cars posed. “We are going to face ferocious competition from within and outside Europe,” Senard said in June. “We have to turn around quickly to be able to counter these new entrants.”
Tesla is putting ‘self-driving’ in the hands of drivers amid criticism the tech is not ready
Oct 22. 2020Inside the Tesla Model 3, the dashboard is mostly contained in a touchscreen in the center of the front console. There’s no information directly behind of the steering wheel. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jhaan Elker.
By The Washington Post · Faiz Siddiqui · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, TRANSPORTATION, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS
SAN FRANCISCO – In a year when Tesla might have been forgiven for extending its timeline on a key initiative, Elon Musk is forging ahead with a vision for what he calls “Full Self-Driving.”
This week, a group of drivers was selected to receive a software update that downloaded automatically into their cars, enabling the vehicles to better steer and accelerate without human hands and feet. According to Tesla, hundreds of thousands of its cars will be able to drive themselves as soon as this year, probably making them the first large fleet of vehicles billed as autonomous owned by ordinary consumers.
Tesla is forging ahead despite skepticism among some safety advocates about whether Tesla’s technology is ready – and whether the rest of the world is ready for cars that drive themselves. An industry coalition consisting of General Motors’ Cruise, Ford, Uber and Waymo, among others, this week criticized the move by Tesla, saying its vehicles are not truly autonomous because they still require an active driver.
Self-driving is lightly regulated in the United States, and Tesla does not need permission to launch the new feature.
A point of contention among Tesla’s critics is that the company is moving ahead without a key piece of hardware. Nearly all self-driving carmakers have embraced lidar sensors, which are placed on the outside of vehicles and can detect the precise size, shape and depth of objects in real time, even in bad weather.
Instead, Tesla is trying to achieve full self-driving with a suite of cameras and a type of radar that are constantly connected to an advanced neural network. Tesla’s technology can detect vehicles and pedestrians in the road and some objects such as trees, but it cannot always see the true shape or depth of the obstacles it encounters, according to some safety experts. That might not allow the car to distinguish between a box truck and a semi as it approached the rig from behind, for example.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has decried lidar as “expensive,” redundant and “a fool’s errand,” calling anyone who relied on it “doomed.”
In response to an analyst question during the company’s analyst call on Wednesday, Musk said he would not equip the company’s vehicles with lidar even if it were “totally free.”
In addition, unlike autonomous vehicle companies such as Waymo and Cruise, which have been testing their self-driving cars in controlled pilot programs, Tesla has decided to put its self-driving technology into the hands of consumers. That means the risks of a malfunction will be absorbed by ordinary drivers.
Tesla did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said it will not activate full self-driving until it receives regulatory approval, though it remains unknown exactly what certification would be needed. Musk said on Twitter the self-driving beta rollout would be “extremely slow & cautious, as it should.”
The company reported its quarterly earnings Wednesday afternoon, posting a $331 million profit. Tesla sold $397 million worth of regulatory credits to other automakers in the quarter, similar to the pattern that has generated its past few quarters’ gains. It also touted its full self-driving rollout to the select group of users this week, which it said “will allow the remaining driving features” of its system “to be released.”
Tesla added that “as we continue to collect data over time, the system will become more robust.”
“We’re starting very slow, and very cautiously, because the world is a complex and messy place,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes and probably release it to more people this weekend or early next week and then just gradually step it up until we have hopefully a wide release by the end of this year.”
The company’s stock rose nearly 3% in after hours trading to $435.50. Tesla built a network of connected cars. What happens when it goes down? Demonstrating the challenges of putting the features into users’ hands, in one such recent update, some Tesla cars could detect red lights and stop signs but would not proceed through the intersection until the driver confirmed via the accelerator or steering wheel stalk that the traffic light was green, according to Tesla.
“The fundamental challenge of neural nets is achieving sufficient reliability to use in a safety-critical system,” said Edward Niedermeyer, communications director for the Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) campaign, a coalition of nonprofits seeking to help the public better understand driverless technology.
“I’m puzzled as to where the confidence came from almost four years ago that they’d be able to do this,” said Niedermeyer, who wrote the 2019 book “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.” “The reason you do these things is because it’s an extremely hard problem, and it’s not realistic to solve this problem with some cameras.”
Silicon Valley regards autonomous vehicles as the holy grail of transportation’s future, enabling customers to deploy their cars as driverless robotaxis, making the owners money even when they would be typically parked in the garage, in Tesla’s case. It could also shrink the cost of an Uber or Lyft trip to just cents on the mile by eliminating the need to pay a driver.
Several companies are making slow but steady progress on that goal, too. Waymo announced this month it would be launching driverless vehicles in the Phoenix metro area, becoming the first entity to bring the vision of fully autonomous cars to consumers as part of a dedicated ride-hailing service. Last week, Cruise said it would launch driverless cars in San Francisco, becoming the first company to debut unmanned vehicles in such a complex city environment and the country’s second-densest metropolis.
And on Wednesday, Cruise announced it was seeking the federal government’s permission to put its dedicated driverless vehicle, called the Origin, into use – ushering in the era of self-driving vehicles without steering wheels or pedals.Tesla floats fully self-driving cars as soon as this year. Many are worried about what that will unleash.
Tesla’s public timeline has been rapid. Musk promised in 2019 Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020, a reference to the company’s full self-driving ambitions.
Musk said on the call with analysts that Tesla aims to make the feature widely available to owners by the end of the year.
The company’s self-driving technology will make use of the eight surrounding-view cameras attached to its cars. Those cameras collect critical data on how to navigate chaotic freeways, labyrinthine city streets and dense traffic.
Musk has said the new software being delivered this week will better capture the view outside the cars, more seamlessly integrate the footage Tesla collects, creating a kind of stitched-together, multidimensional view. It will collect data that the company’s engineers can label and help the computers better interpret. The cameras would replicate a core function of lidar, seeing what is happening around the cars.
In essence, Tesla is aiming to compensate for its hardware limitations by supercharging its software, almost to create a virtual lidar using Tesla’s existing suite of cameras, said Eshak Mir, a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who reviewed and worked with data aimed at training Tesla’s neural network.
“They’re trying to combine all the feeds from the cameras into one full video and label it in real time,” Mir said. “With that, you’ll be able to pick up a full sense of depth.”
There is no true industry hardware standard for a self-driving car. But before Tesla came along, there was little question that a sophisticated sensor in the vein of lidar was necessary for the redundancy and complex image processing required of self-driving vehicles. Some experts continue to hold that view.
Overcast skies, rain, snowstorms and especially bright sunlight can challenge mere cameras’ perception. “In normal daylight conditions, the cameras work perfectly fine,” Mir said.
“Just from my experience, cameras are very dependable, but at the same time there can be a challenge when there’s harsh conditions,” added Mir, who supports Tesla’s current approach.
But safety advocates objected to Tesla’s rollout of features that are still in testing, saying it is dangerous to blur the line between driver assistance and autonomy.
“Public road testing is a serious responsibility and using untrained consumers to validate beta-level software on public roads is dangerous and inconsistent with existing guidance and industry norms,” the PAVE campaign said in a statement issued through Niedermeyer. “Moreover, it is extremely important to clarify the line between driver assistance and autonomy. Systems requiring human driver oversight are not self-driving and should not be called self-driving.”
For the broader, lidar-equipped fleets, safety setbacks – including a fatal crash when a pedestrian was struck by a self-driving Uber in 2018 – have led to delays and slower timelines for autonomous vehicles as a whole. And some are questioning whether truly driverless vehicles are possible.
“They say that it’s just around the corner, but you don’t realize that the effort to get just around the corner gets more and more and more [complicated] as you get closer to the corner,” said Ted Pavlic, an Arizona State University assistant professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, who works in robotics and autonomous systems.
Companies developing dedicated robocars for ride-hailing purposes, such as Waymo, Amazon-acquired Zoox, Uber and Cruise, all use lidar in their vehicles. They consider lidar a critical element of redundancy capable of making rapid-fire observations in all manner of conditions, filling in gaps where the cameras fall short.
On a recent autonomous vehicle trip in downtown San Francisco, for example, the lidar sensor spotted vehicle traffic over a steep hill before the camera suite or view out the windshield showed it, and the car began making adjustments earlier than a human driver might have. Most testing of autonomous vehicles has been with lidar.
Waymo conducted 1.45 million miles’ worth of autonomous vehicle testing in California last year, the company reported to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Tesla vehicles drove a total of 12.2 autonomous miles, to record what it called a “demo run” around its Palo Alto headquarters. Tesla has argued that it “has a fleet of hundreds of thousands of customer-owned vehicles that test autonomous technology in ‘shadow-mode’ during their normal operation,” constantly improving through billions of miles of real-world driving. Shadow Mode allows it to test some of those automated features without actually activating them in the real world.
Still, Tesla has been dogged by safety concerns, including regulatory investigations and multiple crashes involving Autopilot that have resulted in fatalities and injuries. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has said it is looking into more than a dozen incidents involving the Autopilot software. Tesla has also faced lawsuits from the families of victims in Autopilot-related crashes.
Tesla has repeatedly defended the Autopilot system, saying it is merely there to assist the driver, who is ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the car.
Autopilot, Tesla’s driver-assistance system that operates like an advanced cruise control function, has been criticized for giving users an exaggerated view of its cars’ capabilities. At this stage, the cars are capable of highway driving from on-ramp to off-ramp, self-parking and summoning – where they can navigate to the driver in a crowded parking lot, for example. In cities, Tesla’s vehicles can detect traffic lights and stop signs. It is not autonomous, however, and Tesla has faced criticism for giving users the impression the system is capable of driving the car itself – without supervision.
“Autopilot is not an autonomous system and does not make our vehicles autonomous,” the company noted in a disclosure to the state DMV. California’s vehicle codes, for example, state that autonomous test vehicles must be capable of “performing the dynamic driving task on a sustained basis without the constant control or active monitoring of a natural person.”
Pavlic, who works with autonomous systems, recently purchased a Tesla Model 3 but didn’t opt for the $8,000 “Full Self-Driving” package.
He said Tesla risks giving users an exaggerated impression of the cars’ capabilities with the over-the-air updates, various iterations of Autopilot and “Full Self-Driving” marketing.
“It requires you to be very educated to be able to parse these things,” he said. “I would say I can definitely see how someone might think that Autopilot did more than it did . . . as they’re rolling out these new features.”
Tesla owners are no stranger to the challenges, observing how new and previous unpredicted sights can leave their cars confused.
Zlatko Unger, a 36-year-old Model 3 owner who lives in Redwood City, Calif., recalled taking his car to a horse park he frequents on a weekend in late July, when his car detected a hazard it displayed on its info screen.
“I noticed it picked up the piles of poop as [traffic] cones, and I was like, ‘Hey, this is not right,’ ” he said.
Car sales in China shine as rest of world reels from virus
Oct 13. 2020A customer speaks with a sales agent at a Ford dealership in Shanghai on July 19, 2018. The automobile market in Asia’s biggest economy is a lone bright spot as the pandemic dampens sales in Europe and the U.S. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Qilai Shen
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · No Author · BUSINESS Demand for cars in China is going from strength to strength, making the automobile market in Asia’s biggest economy a lone bright spot as the coronavirus pandemic puts a damper on sales in Europe and the U.S.
Sales of sedans, SUVs, minivans and multipurpose vehicles jumped 7.4% in September from a year earlier to 1.94 million units, the China Passenger Car Association said Tuesday. That’s the third straight monthly increase, and it was driven primarily by demand for SUVs.
Passenger vehicle deliveries to dealers rose 8% to 2.1 million units, while total vehicle sales, including trucks and buses, expanded 13% to 2.57 million, data released later by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed.
With auto sales in the U.S. and Europe still affected by covid-19, reviving demand in China is a boon to international and domestic manufacturers. It is set to be the first country globally to bounce back to 2019 volume levels, albeit only by 2022, according to researchers including S&P Global Ratings.
Automakers worldwide have invested billions of dollars in China, the world’s top car market since 2009, where the middle class is expanding but penetration is still relatively low. Brands from countries such as Germany and Japan have weathered the pandemic better than their local rivals — the combined market share of Chinese brands fell to 36.2% in the first eight months from a peak of 43.9% in 2017.
Auto stocks extended their recent gains Tuesday, with Great Wall Motor Co. and Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. both advancing by the 10% daily limit, making them the best two performers on the CSI 300 Index of large caps.
Even as the Chinese auto market recovers, it may still record its third straight annual drop in sales, Xin Guobin, a vice minister at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said last month. That’s because of the heavy declines suffered at the start of the year, during the height of the outbreak.
Regardless, China’s importance is boosted by its focus on nurturing the electric-car ecosystem, a technology shift in which automakers have invested a great deal of time and money. Beijing wants new-energy vehicles to account for 15% or more of the market in 2025, and at least half of all sales a decade later.
Wholesales of NEVs, consisting of pure electric cars, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell autos, surged 68% to 138,000 units, a record for the month of September, according to CAAM.
Tesla Inc., which started deliveries from its Shanghai gigafactory at the start of the year, sold 11,329 vehicles, down from 11,800 in August, PCA said. The American carmaker ranked third in NEV wholesales last month, behind SAIC-GM Wuling Automobile Co. and BYD Co., PCA added.
PCA said it expects NEVs to help drive overall auto sales growth in the fourth quarter with the introduction of new, competitive models, while strength in the yuan will help lower costs locally.
Overall vehicle sales for the full year should be better than a previous forecast for a 10% contraction thanks to the recovery in demand, said Xu Haidong, deputy chief engineer at CAAM, without elaborating.
Elon Musk and Akio Toyoda in 2010. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Kiyoshi Ota. 
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Mitsubishi Mortor’s Mi-Tech hybrid concept sport utility vehicle is displayed during the Tokyo Motor Show in Tokyo in October 2019. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo) 
Toyota Motor Kyushu Inc.’s Miyata Plant is seen in Miyawaka, Fukuoka Prefecture, on April 3. (Yomiuri Shimbun file photo) 
Photos by Supakit Khumkun 
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Renault will make the Spring electric automobile in Shiyan, China. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Benjamin Girette Photo by: Benjamin Girette — Bloomberg 
Inside the Tesla Model 3, the dashboard is mostly contained in a touchscreen in the center of the front console. There’s no information directly behind of the steering wheel. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jhaan Elker. 
A customer speaks with a sales agent at a Ford dealership in Shanghai on July 19, 2018. The automobile market in Asia’s biggest economy is a lone bright spot as the pandemic dampens sales in Europe and the U.S. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Qilai Shen 
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