This will certainly be troubling news to the buyers of yesterday's spin-out stock flotation of Mobileye.
From TechCrunch:
A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale. So in terms of the daily lived experience of most people reading this, truly autonomous vehicles just aren’t going to happen. The evidence pointing to this has been mounting for years now, if not decades, but it’s now tipped the balance to where it’s hard to ignore for a reasoned observer – even one like myself who has previously been very optimistic about self-driving prospects.
My decision to make this call is mostly predicated on one big event from Wednesday: Scooped by our very own Kirsten Korosec, Ford announced that it would be winding down Argo AI, the company backed by itself and fellow automaker Volkswagen focused on developing full level 4 autonomous driving technologies. Ford explained their justification in doing so when they released their Q3 earnings a few hours later, noting that not only were they shutting down Argo, but they were also essentially deprioritizing L4 technologies altogether, to instead focus on advanced driver assistance (ADAS) systems with internal resources.
Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves” on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening. The sentiments echoed those of a much younger and more tech-forward automaker CEO from just last week at our Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
While Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe did say the company was eventually aiming to introduce Level 4 autonomy, he also said that the plan is to focus first on L2 and L3 ADAS, with its existing shipping vehicles capped at L3 given their current hardware limitations. He did say that he believes L4 is actually currently possible for companies with the proper advanced hardware kit on cars – with the caveat that those be geofenced to a specific location.
That brings us to the companies who are currently operating driverless vehicles on actual public roads, Waymo and GM’s Cruise. Surely, if two (ostensibly) for-profit companies are already out there doing it, then it’s going to happen, right?....
....MUCH MORE
To date our favorite self-driving/training the AI story, last seen in March 2022's "Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall":
"When Google was training its self-driving car on the streets of Mountain View, California, the car rounded a corner and encountered a woman in a wheelchair, waving a broom, chasing a duck. The car hadn’t encountered this before so it stopped and waited."
