Tesla Motors hiring talent for developing self-driving cars

http://www.efinancehub.com/tesla-motors-inc-nasdaqtsla-seeking-to-hire-an-adas-controls-engineer-to-develop-autonomous-driving-technologies/122963.html

by bhauer • 13 years ago

102 83 13 years ago

efinancehub.com

Zikes• 13 years ago

I really hope they partner with Google on this, at least I can't think of any reason not to.

MartinCron2• 13 years ago

I was thinking the opposite. Competition is good and there isn't any obvious competition to Google in the self-driving car space.

Permit• 13 years ago

There is actually a reasonable amount of competition within the autonomous car space. A lot of people online only ever hear about Google's initiatives, but Audi, BMW et al. are building driving systems, some of which approach 100+ km/h.[1]

I definitely agree that more competition in the area is good. Hopefully as more players build these systems, they'll continue to improve and be commercialized quicker.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#2010s

aylons• 13 years ago

Actually, several manufacturers have self-driving car projects[1]. some of them are even field-testing them in real-life situations, such as a driven leader truck being followed by other trucks[2].

So, I don't think it lacks competition for Google, who doesn't even build their cars - most probably they'll license the technology for other companies, and Tesla may well be one of them.

[1] Links from 8 to 14 in this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#cite_note-idsia-...

[2] http://phys.org/news/2013-03-japan-group-fuel-saving-driverl...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Not to mention, what is the point where Google just has their fingers in too many places?

loceng• 13 years ago

Google will put a markup on licensing. If Tesla owns technology and produces it, they can a) have it free for their own cars, b) license it out and compete with Google's pricing. Tesla's model is so successful because they keep everything in-house, therefore there aren't tons of profit layers added onto production and distribution.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

I can't wait for the autonomous car manufacturers to start suing the crap out of each other for patent infringement. And by "can't wait for" I mean "dread".

w_t_payne8• 13 years ago

Or they can simply buy the technology from Continental. (Disclaimer: I work on ADAS systems for Conti).

dm23• 13 years ago

Google probably has close to a million miles of self-driving car experience by now, Tesla is several years behind Google in this field.

I'd be willing to bet that they were planning some sort of partnership. This isn't a technology that you want to get wrong, and once other vehicle manufacturers start offering a comparable electric car (soon) then Tesla will need to have something to differentiate themselves.

_mulder_2• 13 years ago

The incumbent car manufacturers are struggling to keep up with Tesla's first offerings, they're going be beside themselves if Tesla can pull this off.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

The incumbent car manufactures, by which I assume you mean GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and the like, are operating a far different market segment. They face a much more difficult market, where profit margins are tighter, because they by default aim to the mass market.

Tesla is operating in the upper luxury end of the market, where margins are fatter, where vehicles sold can be lower but the margins maintained. They are making very large cars, even their follow up model to the S is the same wheel base. Why is that? Most likely because Musk knows they cannot deliver the range needed at cost and more importantly, a size, that a smaller car will be.

There are many self driving efforts going on in the market, both Mercedes and Infiniti have vehicles on the market that offer some limited form of self driving. Mostly lane departure and the like but they are pushing distances.

Tesla should be the one who worries most, because they have a unique product only for a short time and they won't get into the smaller sized car market because the technology path they have followed is not progressing fast enough.

If they made a car the size of standard midsized car, lets pick Fusion or Accord, the wheelbase shrinks by ten inches on average, width comes down too. All that shrinkage will take away from battery capacity, hence range. That is one reason many of the offerings by the incumbents have less range. Many use a battery solution not all that different, just restrained by size and technology.

There was a reason Musk went for the price point he did, it allowed larger vehicles which current technology requires. Never bet on the incumbents sitting still, Musk certainly is not. It just comes down to, can Tesla execute well in the mid size market, should they ever get there. Who knows, he made cede that space by licensing tech to let other people work the small margin sales

nextstep• 13 years ago

Do you have sources for any of that?

_mulder_2• 13 years ago

It depends what market segment you're looking at. If it's the 'Electric Car' market, Telsa are pretty much the leaders in this segment apart from a handful of super-micro city cars. If you mean the 'Performance Car' market, apart from one or two niche offerings and prototypes, the usual manufacturers should be spooked by Tesla's potential to realise and implement new technology.

Musk makes no secret of his positioning in the market and going for the price point that they have. But there are hundreds of different cars at the same price point of the Model S, none of which are even in the same ball park.

The necessity for the incumbents to appeal to the mass-market is exactly why they should be worried, they're business relies on so many manufacturing synergies to reduce price, adapting all of those chassis and systems to cope with electric drive and self driving is going to be a challenge if they're to sell to their exist mass-market customers, at a price they expect. Tesla doesn't have that problem.

nonchalance2• 13 years ago

Tesla is trying to catch up to other manufacturers here: Mercedes has sold cars with lane assist (preventing drifting out of lane) since 2009 and Ford has a self-parallel-parking system for a while.

w_t_payne8• 13 years ago

A lot of companies with a "hardware" background have trouble writing software - they simply do not grok the management mentality and organizational culture that is required to do it efficiently. More to the point, they have difficulty distinguishing between ill-disciplined cowboy development and the agile, fast-moving (albeit highly disciplined) approach that you really need to have to develop complex systems without exponentially sky-rocketing costs. This culture may be changing (slowly) - but my gut instinct is that Tesla stands a chance to throw them some surprises before they do.

zalew• 13 years ago

no to mention BMW who has been launching self-driving prototypes for years, one was even racing around the TopGear track.

FD3SA• 13 years ago

Tesla should find this team:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

Videos here:

http://rtml.ece.cmu.edu/Shuster/video.html

jareds4• 13 years ago

As a blind person I get excited about this until I think of just how much the first models will cost. I guess I should save what would now be a car payment if I could drive in hopes that it will be enough of a down payment that I can afford one of these when they come out and pass all the regulatory hurdles.

wavefunction3• 13 years ago

I find it far more likely that these cars will mostly operate in fleets, since most people just need auto-travel for short periods each day. So you will probably be able to subscribe to a car service that picks you up when you need it on demand, and moves on to the next subscriber when you're done.

He's also working on automated maintenance facilities that would allow a self-driving car to report for maintenance/cleaning. The car drives up, receives service and drives off afterwards to the next pick-up.

jareds4• 13 years ago

I had this discussion with my friend. Would automated fleets of cars make sense? If traffic is three times as heavy during rush-hour as it normally is then you would either have to have a lot of cars sitting idle the rest of the day or raise costs for rush-hour so high that it wouldn’t make economic sense to use a self-driving car service to get to and from work. I’d be interested if there’s any statistics on traffic volumes for areas including cities and there outlying suburbs in the United States to see what the economics of a service would have to look like taking into account daily variations in traffic patterns.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

It is conceivable (even probable?) that self-driving cars would be subsidized for the visually handicapped.

jareds4• 13 years ago

They may be subsidized but I could see myself making enough money where I wouldn’t qualify for the subsidy if it was income based but not making enough money to be able to easily afford one if they were six figures.

eru2• 13 years ago

Why not just give the blind (or anybody deserving) money, and leave them free to decide how they want to spend it?

saturdayplace• 13 years ago

I guess I should save what would now be a car payment

In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.

revelation• 13 years ago

So you will then have a car of your own, and then what? Lots of young people are opting not to buy a car; they are a huge black hole for money and can be extremely inconvenient to operate in modern cities.

It might turn out that by the point the technology exists for self-driving cars, private car ownership will be extinct and driving a car within city limits a felony.

tootie• 13 years ago

Personal car ownership is a pain in cities, but livery fleets are huge. Hello and welcome to Johnny Cab.

nonchalance2• 13 years ago

This is an attempt to pump the stock price (interesting to note that it was efinancehub.com and not a tech site that reported this).

ADAS isn't just about the self-driving cars that Google is testing. ADAS includes systems like:

- Warnings if you drift out of your lane (Mercedes has been advertising this for four years)

- Warnings and stops if the car predicts an accident may occur soon (Infiniti has been advertising this for years)

- Automatic parking (Ford has been advertising this for years)

- Blind spot detection (many car companies have it)

- Cruise control that maintains minimum distance to the car in front of you (BMW and Audi mid and high-end cars had it since 2010)

It really looks like Tesla is trying to develop those features for the Model S and future cars.

kyrra• 13 years ago

For adaptive cruise control (varies speed based on the car in-front of you), some will only take you so slow. Some auto makers can have the adaptive cruise control bring you to a full stop (for something like stop-and-go traffic).

Then a step up on the "drifting out of your lane" is one that will attempt to keep you in your lane (Acura and Mercedes have this, goes by the name "Lane Keep Assist"). [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0KRWJwA2Q

cma• 13 years ago

Elon said that their path to self-driving cars is incremental and will be by adding such features over time until eventually it just drives itself.

Seems saner than Google's approach, but Google doesn't manufacture cars so the same model would be harder...

notatoad2• 13 years ago

I think both approaches are necessary, and complement each other well. An incremental approach will be the best way to clear out the psychological obstacles to self-driving cars, people need to gradually get used to the idea or else it will just be met with fear. and google's approach is already proving to be an effective tool to clear out regulatory obstacles and get the public excited.

And for a company like Tesla, who will sell their own cars, an incremental approach can be self-funding. Google has a ton of money to dump into research and is unlikely to bring a car to market themselves, so building a finished product will make it easier to find customers to license individual components of their tech to.

samstave• 13 years ago

I was thinking about Tesla Driving Data today:

I was wondering what data they were gathering, and what they would do with it, and how it could be useful to other drivers:

What if you have a Tesla driver profile and you could see your driving habits ranked amongst all other tesla drivers (anonymously) to determine your rank as the most safe, efficient, slow, fast, whatever driver.

To see where you stack among others would have an effect on your driving. To see how your particular car performs against all others - its mileage vs age against others etc...

I think that there is a whole other layer that could be added onto the Tesla experience that other car manufacturers are far too old and less nimble to do appropriately.

apapli• 13 years ago

Your driving habits could also significantly impact your insurance premium too...

aggie• 13 years ago

interesting to note that it was efinancehub.com and not a tech site that reported this

It was also reported by Wired the same day. http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/09/tesla-autonomous/

omribaumer• 13 years ago

Driverless cars are the future. anyone thats missing that will stay behind at some point

drzaiusapelord• 13 years ago

Honest question: is there harm in competing self-driving schemes? I really don't want to shop "safety." By that I mean, paying more for stopping in the rain well or having one competitor hold the patent for driving in the snow properly. I imagine it will be properly regulated, but I'd love it to be an industry-wide initiative where everyone shares and maybe even uses the same codebase.

w_t_payne8• 13 years ago

Alas, that is a bit of a pipe-dream. It would be nice if there were an open-source codebase for this, with a consortium of companies contributing, as it would mean better systems overall and lower cost to the consumer; but the senior management of the companies that are involved get too big an ego boost from owning the IP on all that cleverness. Plus, the tragedy of the commons applies: everybody wants a piece of what is going to be an astronomically huge market. (Not just passenger cars -- a big chunk of the road transportation & logistics business will be up for grabs too).

jlgreco• 13 years ago

What you are looking for is basically what happened with 3-point safety belts:

"The three point belt was developed by Nils Bohlin who had earlier also worked on ejection seats at Saab.[15] Volvo then made the new seat belt design patent open in the interest of safety and made it available to other car manufacturers for free.[16][17]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Three-point

dm23• 13 years ago

These sort of minor patents should either be invalid or only valid for a couple of years at the most.

It's the same as saying one phones corners can't be perfectly round or icons can be on a certain side of the screen.

themodelplumber2• 13 years ago

Will we get to the point where people will be giving the finger to anyone not in a self-driving car, because it messes with e.g. optimum traffic flow?

farnsworth• 13 years ago

Probably. I can understand that some people will want to do their own driving for fun, but driving in traffic isn't very fun. So they'd probably 1. have the car drive itself to the open highways outside of town. 2. switch into manual mode and cruise.

dm23• 13 years ago

No, why would you pay attention to the road?

There might not even be windows in the self-driving car of the future.

themodelplumber2• 13 years ago

Well, opening the door to view the awesome forest fire in the distance is probably inconvenient. Plus you know...the billboard lobby ;-)

msoad• 13 years ago

I live near tesla hq. I saw some Audi cars with radars on top of it around. They are tesla people I guess. Because google cars are Lexus.

cmansley• 13 years ago

Tesla HQ is near Stanford, which has some Audi cars which have sensors on the roof.

mikeyouse• 13 years ago

Stanford has a group called "VAIL" which is an acronym for the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. [1] As you probably know, Audi is a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Auto Group. AFAIK, this group was borne out of the DARPA Autonomous Car challenge, where the Stanford team partnered with VW to win the challenge. [2]

They've produced several different VAG-based models including several Audis that mainly focus on self-driving and similar AI. One of their more high profile recent examples was an Audi TT that climbed Pikes Peak without any human input. [3]

Some pretty cool stuff, and likely the cars you saw.

[1] http://www.stanford.edu/group/vail/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Y88...

danielharan• 13 years ago

They may be looking to buy Google's technology, and this is just a negotiation tactic: a threat to do it themselves to keep prices down.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

The article reads like it was translated into English. So many bizarre word choices. Anybody else notice? Self-ruled cars. Features owned by other cars. Sovereign driving. Systems (that) have congregate functional safety. I stopped reading after enough little phrase bombs like those.

prawn4• 13 years ago

Talking about self-driving cars, a friend said:

"They will have to be proven as perfectly safe. One accident and people will go crazy."

And though that's true, it of course made me think about the countless accidents involving human-driven cars through distraction, drink/drugs, weather, medical issues, confusion and whatever else.

We haven't proven our driving abilities as perfectly safe, not by a long shot!

xal• 13 years ago

I highly doubt that. What's way more likely is that even if they are just slightly more safe, you will be able to get cheaper insurance for them. Eventually, over time, this will push all self directed cars off the road.

There is even a disruption potential: Put together a new insurance company that only insures self driving cars and make it meaningfully cheaper. The ones that still insure self directed cars and self driving cars both will have a tough time to compete because their blended economics don't allow for the super cheap rates.

prawn4• 13 years ago

I don't think many people will necessarily own their own self-driven cars. Why have something there idle when it could be doing other work? More likely it will operate more like a taxi or by subscription. Or even own your own, but have it used in a pool to recoup costs, a bit like swap-n-go gas bottle refills.

dkokelley• 13 years ago

It won't be about an abstracted concept of "safer". It will be about whether the car is perceived to be a better driver than "me". Most people estimate their own abilities as above-average.

Lost_BiomedE• 13 years ago

Maybe it is just my circle of friends, but people seem to be gaining some immunity from media attempts to create a craze.

I would bet the headlines and maybe a politician or two would yell it, but I would also guess that the overall reaction would be much more reasonable.

prawn4• 13 years ago

Yes, it's just your circle of friends and mine too. Majority out there are easily swept up in a panic, sadly.

driax• 13 years ago

A self-driving car would be able to provide a lot more information about how the accident happened. This would probably except a lot of accident since they could prove that what they did was (mostly) correct, and it was either the other drivers' fault or something outside of their control. Any accident this wouldn't cover, would undergo a lot of scrutiny, more like how airplane crashes are, than car crashes are today. And they would be able to fix it. Which would be a pretty good argument for self-driving cars.

prawn4• 13 years ago

The public aren't really aware of how much of a flight's control is handled by a computer and how much by the pilots themselves. Behind closed doors, literally.

I'm keen to see self-driving cars, but there will be a lot of opposition. Lobbying from trucker unions and the like will push negative stories and pressure decision makers, for example.

sidcool• 13 years ago

Why don't they tie up with Google?

Tesla Motors hiring talent for developing self-driving cars

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