What company springs to mind when you think cutting-edge auto tech? Same here. Tesla. At the recent FT Future of the Car Summit, Elon Musk reminisced about the first Roadster.
“There were no start-ups doing electric cars, and the big car companies had really no electric car programmes,” he said. “Unless we tried, they were not going to be created. It wasn’t from a standpoint of thinking, hey, here’s a super lucrative idea.”
EV all the way: Tesla car line-up
20 years later, Tesla is the world’s most valuable car brand, and it’s not even close. In June 2022, Statista valued it at US$75.9 billion, up from a mere 40-odd billion in 2020, and substantially more than second-placed Toyota and third-placed Mercedes-Benz put together.
From drivetrains to marketing, it has shredded the vehicle manufacturing rulebook, and continues to do so. Consider just some of the key developments over the last six months.
Tesla to Twitter
In March, Musk entered into a Twitter spat with US president Joe Biden, after the latter praised Ford for investing $11billion to build EVs, creating 11,000 jobs, and GM for investing $7billion, creating 4,000 jobs. He retorted: “Tesla has created over 50,000 US jobs building electric vehicles and is investing more than double GM and Ford combined.”
Research by StockApps confirmed that Tesla spends miles more on R&D than rival carmakers, around $3,000 per vehicle produced. While Electrek highlighted that Tesla spends nothing on advertising, relying “almost entirely on word-of-mouth”.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. A court in Germany ordered Tesla to buy back a Model 3 from a customer who likened the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package to “a drunk first-time driver”. With EV no longer a USP, ADAS is the new battleground.
In May, a judge in California ruled that the driver of a Tesla operating in Autopilot must stand trial for a crash that killed two people. A Model S reportedly ran a red light and hit a Honda Civic at 74 mph. It could mark the first felony prosecution against a driver using a partially automated driving system.
More negative press followed when it emerged that hundreds of Tesla owners had complained about “phantom braking”, with cars stopping suddenly for no apparent reason.
Cue the headlines, “Tesla Autopilot and Other Driver-Assist Systems Linked to Hundreds of Crashes” in The New York Times, and “Teslas running Autopilot involved in 273 crashes reported since last year” in The Washington Post.
Importantly, the US Public Interest Research Group clarified that: “Teslas are connected to the internet and automatically report if the car was in Autopilot. Honda asks its drivers if they were using ADAS, so it relies on hard-to-verify personal accounts. Everyone else leaves it up to the police report.”
Tesla went on the offensive, quoting some eye-catching statistics: “In 2021, we recorded 0.22 crashes for every million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology. For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology, we recorded 0.77 crashes for every million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there are 1.81 automobile crashes for every million miles driven.”
Its Impact Report also noted that, “In 2021, the global fleet of Tesla vehicles, energy storage and solar panels enabled its customers to avoid emitting 8.4 million metric tons of CO2e”, compared to an ICE vehicle with a real-world fuel economy of 24mpg. A timely reminder of the extent of its achievement.
That’s a whirlwind six months, and we haven’t even mentioned the Gigafactory in Texas, the Cybertruck SUV, the plans to launch a steering wheel free robotaxi by 2024, June’s new car price hikes, or the off-the-chart used values.
The fact is Tesla has revolutionised the global motor industry at lightning speed, and shows no signs of slowing.
Please note: a version of this article was first published by the Institute of the Motor Industry’s MotorPro magazine.
Video of Cruise self-driving taxi disrupting traffic in SF
What’s more, there’s an unfortunate ratio at play: the more disruptive the self-driving, the greater the media appeal.
Self-driving local news
In late September, SFGATE reported that: “At least three driverless Cruise cars were responsible for holding up traffic and reportedly blocking a bus lane in San Francisco last week”.
One such incident was captured by news anchor Dan Thorn, who posted the following video to Twitter:
A San Francisco Story: while driving a colleague home from work we stumbled upon a @Cruise self-driving car no longer self-driving. It was blocking Sacramento at Mason. “Jasper” the car was playing tunes but no one was inside. @SFMTA_Muni bus had to reroute. pic.twitter.com/NYYdeRmNPD
All part of the learning process, but too many incidents like this will dent public acceptance.
A spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) warned: “If an autonomous vehicle company violates their permit conditions, the CPUC has the authority to suspend or revoke their operating authority.”
Long-read interview with self-driving expert Ben Upcroft, VP of Technology at Oxbotica.
Over the last few years, Cars of the Future has reported extensively on the growth of Oxbotica – from Founder and CTO Professor Paul Newman’s ambition to target “anything that moves people or goods”, to exciting partnerships with big hitters including BP, Navtech, NEVS, Ocado, Wenco and ZF, to its headline-grabbing achievement of running a zero-occupancy self-driving electric vehicle on UK public roads.
Self-driving expert: Ben Upcroft of Oxbotica
In this exclusive long-read interview, Oxbotica’s VP of Technology, Ben Upcroft, discusses the company’s vision for universal autonomy and its role in sustainable mobility.
NK: Thanks for your time, Ben. For starters, tell us about your work at Queensland University of Technology and how you ended up in the UK at Oxbotica?
BU: “I’ve been involved in robotics and autonomous platforms for over two decades, initially on draglines, shovels, and haul trucks for mining. We were looking to take autonomy out into the field, to understand how we could use it in industry. Since then, I’ve been involved in underwater robotic platforms, aerial vehicles, and robotic manipulation.
“Vehicles present such rich problems. Solutions will continuously evolve, just like computers – we’ve gone from mainframes taking up whole rooms to being in everyone’s pocket. Today, we have autonomous vehicles out there operating in all sorts of different domains – on-road, off-road and everything in between – and they’ll continue to improve.
“It has been a real privilege to be part of this product development, from the very early days to a place where we will see autonomy in everyone’s hands, where every person and every organisation will be able to leverage autonomy. That’s what attracted me to Oxbotica.
“We’re creating a Universal Autonomy software platform to enable any vehicle in any place to operate autonomously and gain all the benefits that autonomy brings – efficiency gains, productivity gains and safety gains.
“We’re working in different industries, with lots of different organisations, and have already deployed it into many different domains. To do that, we have made a software platform without baking in assumptions on the hardware, the domain, or the environmental conditions.
“Assumptions are dangerous. For example, to presume that you’ll always be able to see lane markings (not true for off-road domains) and making that a fundamental part of your technology limits your capability for off-highway and off-road domains. Conversely, thinking about things in terms of Universal Autonomy – with a capability to deploy around the globe in various domains – has many advantages.
“Oxbotica is one of very few companies, if any, operating in mining environments, airports, ports, quarries, urban environments for grocery deliveries and passenger transport. It’s such an exciting place to be, to see how we can enable all these industries to take advantage of autonomy.”
Self-driving: Oxbotica Applied EV in Oxford, May 2022
BU: “Yes, we’re really proud of that particular vehicle – demonstrating how, with our software, any type of vehicle can be autonomous. On one hand you had the technical challenge, but perhaps the greater challenge was understanding how to work with the government, proving bodies, regulatory bodies, policymakers and certification authorities to create the ecosystem.
“It was great to have all those appropriate authorities watching and being involved in the program – understanding how autonomy can go from an add-on to a vehicle driven by a human, to one with no human, no steering wheel or pedals. That unleashes a whole expanse of capabilities for industry to amplify, from deliveries to public transport.
“Zero occupancy enables all kinds of changes. For example, space savings because you don’t need to build a vehicle around the person anymore. Since the invention of the motor car, design has always had to be about the driver, until now. Then there’s power requirements, comfort levels, all those things.
“If it’s a zero-occupancy vehicle for grocery deliveries, the milk doesn’t care if the acceleration is different to what you’d expect from a normal car. If it has to stop and wait for a little while, maybe that’s not such a big issue, because you’re not optimising for the human in the loop anymore. I’m really excited to see how these factors change how industry operates.
“We call this an economy software platform, building on top of what autonomy brings. Much like Android on a Google phone – they don’t build all the apps, they build the capability for others to add apps.
“Microsoft never set out to build a booking system for a dentist business, but they enabled people to come up with the ideas and build on the platform to enable those capabilities. That’s what I really want to see – our platform enabling countless further innovations, progress that no one expected or foresaw.
“The zero-occupancy side of things is very exciting and Oxbotica is one of the first companies in the world, certainly in Europe, to achieve it on public roads.”
Self-driving: Oxbotica Applied EV
NK: It seems that every company developing self-driving tech pays close attention when someone else makes a breakthrough…
BU: “We all rely so much on vehicles to get our goods and move ourselves around, and autonomy brings such a new paradigm to transport, that I can absolutely understand why everyone’s watching everyone else – maybe Oxbotica more than most, because of the partnerships we’re building.
“Our Universal Autonomy capability makes us a horizontal across multiple industries. We build the software into all these different domains, all these different vehicles, and any industry can give us a call if they can see benefits in working with us.
“We’re not trying to be a taxi company or a mining company, and we don’t want to be. Just like we won’t tie people into using a certain type of sensor or fleet management system. We build software that enables companies to innovate, to amplify what they’re doing.
“We work with partners that are experts in their domains, and this gains us experience in terms of the benefits that autonomy can bring in different sectors. For example, Ocado has such an amazing automation system for grocery packing in their warehouses. What we do is connect a warehouse to the kerbside using autonomy, so they’re extending automation all the way to their customers.
“BP is another amazing partner to work with, because it has such a diverse set of domains. Solar farms, wind farms and refineries all require different types of vehicles, and they have locations all around the world which, again, means different requirements. We’re agnostic to the type of vehicle and the type of domain.
“ZF is an automotive tier one supplier developing passenger transport shuttles and we’re its autonomy software platform provider. That’s a super exciting partnership for us because we’ll enable these shuttles to operate autonomously in urban environments all around the world.
“Another one is NEVS, an OEM car manufacturer building small electric passenger vehicles.
Working on autonomy for these vehicles has really changed the way we think about how passengers and people can move around, reducing the need for individual car ownership and reducing congestion.”
Self-driving: Oxbotica Applied EV, 2022
NK: That brings us nicely to the relationship with the traditional motor industry. How do you see that evolving over the next 10 years?
BU: “It’s going to be mixed. You’re going to start seeing autonomy in some places, in some industries. As that proves out, it will expand, both geographically for that particular industry, and into other markets, as we as a community gain confidence and better understand the technology and the regulatory frameworks.
“There’s not a huge pull for consumers to have an autonomous car at their doorstep that they can use whenever they want. Don’t get me wrong, that’s potentially a very large market for the future. But there are other markets that have a need for autonomy right now – mining, airports, logistics – they’re looking for safety, productivity and efficiency gains, and the ability to operate 24/7.
“It’s likely that industries struggling to recruit enough drivers will increasingly turn to autonomy to deliver the kind of productivity levels they’re aiming for. And, as we service these markets, that will bring confidence.
“The ability to drive anywhere, anytime, anyplace is a vision that we are working towards, starting in domains that can significantly benefit from autonomy now. So you’ll start seeing autonomous public transport, shuttle buses, soon, within two to three years, maybe earlier.
“Those types of platforms will pop up in different cities, different urban environments. We’ll see other types of autonomous vehicles too, for goods delivery, for example, in an even shorter timeframe. And that’s just going to continue and expand. Autonomy brings so many advantages that industries will soon need to leverage it to be competitive.
“For us to deploy into all these different domains, we need to demonstrate that our technology is safe, both to get insurance and to assure the communities that we’re working with. But traditional verification and validation involves years of continuous testing, driving millions of miles. That doesn’t seem like the smartest way of going about it.
“We think there’s a way to verify and validate in a more accelerated way: to give the system the ability to test itself in simulation and find the edge cases much more rapidly. We’ve developed a product that enables rapid validation and verification called MetaDriver. It’s exciting. It will enable us to deploy new products more quickly, so everyone can gain the advantage of whatever new feature is available in autonomy. That will be key.”
CNBC in America has reported on a key exchange traded fund (ETF) for electric vehicle (EV) and self-driving stocks suffering “an ugly month” in September.
On Friday 30 September, the Global X Autonomous and Electric Vehicles ETF closed 37% off the group’s 52-week high.
CNBC said: “It was the second worst-performing month for the group on a percentage basis on record, behind only March 2020 when the overall stock market saw dramatic declines.”
Self-driving stock
CNBC re EV and self-driving stocks Sep 2022
Global X says the DRIV fund offers high growth potential, noting that: “While global EV registrations increased by more than 40% in 2020, EVs were still less than 5% of new cars sold, highlighting substantial room for further adoption.”
The top 10 holdings (as of 10/04/22) were:
Tesla
Apple
Microsoft
Alphabet
Qualcomm
Toyota
Nvidia
Intel
Pilbara Minerals
Honeywell
At Cars of the Future, we suspect the falls have more to do with the EV side and assisted driving than true self-driving… but rumours of a global recession don’t help!
Zenzic CAM – connected and self-driving – Scale-Up winners all get UK government funding
On 6 October, the UK self-driving organisation, Zenzic, announced the seven winners of its 2022 CAM Scale-Up Programme: Axitech; Calyo; Dromos; Eloy; Gaist; Oxford RF; and PolyChord.
The future of self-driving: Zenzic CAM Scale-Up Winners 2022
The selected start-ups and SMEs each win a share of UK government funding through the Centre of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), access to the world class testing facilities of CAM Testbed UK, and investment support from delivery partner Plug and Play.
They follow in the footsteps of six 2021 winners: Albora; Exeros; Grayscale AI; R4DAR; Xtract 360; and Route Konnect (celebrated at the brilliant CAM Innovators event in March this year). And five 2020 winners: Angoka; Beam Connectivity; Eatron Technologies; Helix Technologies; and RoboK. Will there be eight winners next year?!
Connected / self-driving
Here’s a bit about this year’s cohort:
Leeds-based Axitech for its Connected Collision Management Platform “empowering automotive organisations to deliver transformational customer and claims experiences”.
Bristol-based Calyo for its next-generation AI-enabled perception system, offering “an unprecedented combination of high performance, flexibility and low cost for smart mobile robots and autonomous vehicles”.
German company Dromos – partnered in the UK with designer PriestmanGoode and engineering firms Buro Happold and RLB – for its “high-density urban passenger & freight transport” offering the “highest passenger convenience” at “half the cost/space/time”.
Hertfordshire-based Eloy – a connected and autonomous vehicle software business “focused on multi-vehicle coordination”.
Skipton-based Gaist, “Leading the way in road scape and highways information”.
Oxfordshire-based Oxford RF Solutions, offering “breakthrough radar vision for autonomy”.
And, finally, Cambridge University spinout PolyChord for its “uniquely powerful data science technology”.
Throw in an intro by the CCAV’s Michael Talbot, a fireside chat with Kirsty Lloyd-Dukes of Waymo and Ben Peters of FiveAI, and a closing keynote by UK Automotive Council CAM Working Group chair David Skipp, it really was an action-packed couple of hours.
As programme director at Zenzic, Mark Cracknell, said: “These companies are the future that’s happening now.”
More questions than answers as self-driving delivery robot enters Los Angeles crime scene.
The incident itself – a suspected shooting – thankfully turned out to be a false alarm.
Was it self-driving?
However, the appropriation of blame is complicated by human intervention – a bystander lifting up the police tape to enable the robot to proceed, and the later claim that a human operator was responsible.
On 17 September, Serve Robotics, took to Twitter to clarify that: “This week a Serve robot failed to reroute around a police barrier because of human error. While robots are capable of operating autonomously in most circumstances, they’re assigned to human supervisors to ensure their safe operation, for instance when navigating a blockage. We respect the important work of law enforcement and are taking steps to ensure our operating procedures are followed in the future.”
This week a Serve robot failed to reroute around a police barrier because of human error. While robots are capable of operating autonomously in most circumstances, they're assigned to human supervisors to ensure their safe operation, for instance when navigating a blockage (1/2)
As with the Cruise robotaxi drive-off back in April – “Ain’t nobody in it!” the officer says – in America, autonomous vehicles are having real-world run-ins with the law.
It’s only a matter of time before similar incidents happen here in the UK.
Aurrigo’s self-driving vehicles arrive in Taunton, Somerset, as part of CCAV trial.
The good people of Taunton, Somerset, were treated to rides in Aurrigo’s self-driving Auto-Pod and Auto-Shuttle as The Great Self-Driving Exploration continued this week.
Run by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), and research specialist BritainThinks, a similar trial took place at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland in June.
Self-driving feedback
Lucy Bush, Research Director at BritainThinks, explained: “It offers an opportunity to understand what people think of self-driving vehicles as they are now, and also their expectations for the future.
“This will provide crucial insight to government and industry to support the development of self-driving technology that benefits everyone across the UK.”
For this event, it supplied three different vehicles:
Aurrigo self-driving vehicles at Alnwick Castle, June 2022
On the left, the ten-seater Auto-Shuttle is the first road legal vehicle to be manufactured by the Group. It can operate fully autonomously or be driven manually.
In the middle is the Auto-Deliver, a one-off prototype designed for home deliveries.
On the right is the four-seater Auto-Pod, designed for non-road passenger transportation, such as airports, university campuses and care communities.
At Taunton, the Auto-Pod operated at the picturesque Vivary Park, close to the town centre, while the Auto-Shuttle ran at Somerset County Cricket Club, where the Auto-Deliver was also on display.
Aurrigo self-driving Auto-Delivery vehicle at Somerset County Cricket Club, September 2022
At Alnwick, the Auto-Shuttle took passengers from the bus station up to the castle – a 1.2km route shared with cars, bikes and pedestrians – while the Auto-Pod carried passengers on a shared 500m path between the castle and Alnwick Gardens.
Aurrigo self-driving Auto-Pod at Alnwick Castle, June 2022
Ricky Raines, Operations Manager at Aurrigo, said: “We believe these types of first and last miles transport will be key to supporting people with mobility issues.
“These events are extremely useful in helping understand how individuals in rural locations feel about self-driving technology.”
Further afield, also in September, Aurrigo had a Pod at the joint Department for Transport (DfT) and Innovate UK stand at the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) World Congress 2022 in Los Angeles.
Aurrigo self-driving Pod at ITS World Congress 2022
On Tuesday 20 September, Nvidia unveiled a new computing platform, DRIVE Thor, designed to centralise self-driving and assisted driving, along with other digital functions such as in-car entertainment.
Succeeding the successful DRIVE Orin, Nvidia founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, describes Thor as “a superchip of epic proportions… an incredible leap in deep neural network accuracy”.
The system-on-a-chip (SoC) is built on the latest central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) advances, delivering 2,000 teraflops of performance.
Self-driving superchip
“DRIVE Thor unifies traditionally distributed functions in vehicles — including digital cluster, infotainment, parking and assisted driving — for greater efficiency in development and faster software iteration,” said Huang.
“Manufacturers can configure the DRIVE Thor superchip in multiple ways. They can dedicate all of the platform’s 2,000 teraflops to the autonomous driving pipeline, or use a portion for in-cabin AI and infotainment.”
Nvidia DRIVE Thor: distributed v centralised computer
Nvidia says the SoC is capable of multi-domain computing, enabling a car to run Linux, QNX and Android simultaneously on one computer. Realistically, it could be fitted into carmakers’ 2025 models.
Danny Shapiro, head of Nvidia’s automotive business, told Reuters: “You can imagine a tremendous savings in terms of cost, in terms of reduced cabling, in terms of reduced weight, in terms of reduced energy consumption overall.”
As we noted in our “Connected car data surge” feature last year, there are pressing questions around data privacy, but there’s no doubt this technology is phenomenal.
Computational horsepower
Check out the “computational horsepower” of DRIVE Thor compared to Orin, which was itself highly rated:
New research by a team at The University of Tokyo indicates that fitting robotic eyes to self-driving vehicles could improve pedestrian safety.
The images below show first-person views of an experiment conducted using virtual reality (VR), with participants deciding whether or not the cart had noticed them. The researchers called it the ‘gazing car’.
Toyko uni scenarios on giving eyes to self-driving cars
The team set up four scenarios – two where the cart had eyes and two without. Was the eyeless cart intending to stop? How did results change when the cart had eyes, either looking towards the pedestrian or looking away?
University of Tokyo gazing car video
The study was small: only 18 participants – nine women and nine men, all aged 18-49, all Japanese – but there did seem to be differences in reaction according to gender.
Self-driving gender differences
More male participants reported “feeling that the situation was more dangerous” when the eyes were looking away. While more female participants said they “felt safer” when the eyes were looking at them.
Project Lecturer Chia-Ming Chang, a member of the research team, commented: “The results suggested a clear difference between genders, which was very surprising and unexpected.
“While other factors like age and background might have also influenced the participants’ reactions, we believe this is an important point. It shows that different road users may have different behaviours and needs that require different communication.”
Self-driving communication
Professor Takeo Igarashi, from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, added: “There is not enough investigation into the interaction between self-driving cars and the people around them.
“Moving from manual driving to auto driving is a huge change. If eyes can actually contribute to safety and reduce traffic accidents, we should seriously consider adding them.
“I hope this research encourages other groups to try similar ideas. Anything that facilitates better interaction between self-driving cars and pedestrians, which ultimately saves people’s lives.”
Here at Cars of the Future we have, of course, explored similar concepts before. Notably, in our interview with Yosuke Ushigome, Director at design innovation studio Takram.
For further info on The University of Tokyo study, see the team’s project page.
UK self-driving organisation Zenzic issues statement on the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The longstanding connection between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the automotive industry is well documented. She famously drove an army ambulance in World War II and trained as a mechanic.
Representing the UK self-driving sector, Zenzic said: “We are saddened to hear of the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and send our deepest sympathies to the Royal Family at this time.”
