Tesla won the self-driving car war, they just aren’t telling us

There was a time when I could figure something out, just plain figure it out of raw data, then blurt my conclusions out to the world through this rag just to see what would happen. And what would inevitably happen was a thousand experts would pipe up just to tell me to pipe down, saying that I was too frigging stupid to read, much less write. Except occasionally I got it right (pure luck) so, damn it, they had to keep reading my work. Well I’m back to try again and here it comes: When the history of autonomous cars is written, the winner will be Tesla. Heck, I think they’ve already won.

Autonomous […]

By |September 17th, 2020|2020, Artificial Intelligence, Companies, mobile technology, self-driving cars, transportation|175 Comments
Read More

Prediction #4 — Self-driving cars won’t happen this year no matter what Elon says

We all know people who seem to not like anything. There are very successful people who sometimes seem to have reached that success entirely through saying “no.” I’m not that kind of person. I’m an optimist. I’m even a bit of a risk-taker. But I can’t say that we’re going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019. So my Prediction #4 is that self-driving cars won’t hit the retail market in any fashion this year. We simply aren’t ready and probably won’t be for years to come.

The problem with self-driving cars isn’t the technology. Heck, we’ve had the technology pretty much whipped for the past decade. […]

By |March 19th, 2019|2019, Predictions|134 Comments
Read More

The real problem with self-driving cars

Whatever happened to baby steps?

Last week a 49 year-old Arizona woman was hit and killed by an Uber self-driving car as she tried to walk her bicycle across a road. This first-ever fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle has caused both rethinking and finger-pointing in the emerging industry, with Uber temporarily halting tests while they figure out what went wrong and Google’s Waymo division claiming that its self-driving technology would have handled the same incident without injury. Maybe, but I think the more important question is whether these companies are even striving for the correct goal with their cars? I fear that they are over-reaching […]

By |March 26th, 2018|2018, Government, Intellectual Property, mobile technology|77 Comments
Read More

An impending black swan for electric cars

Model-SA black swan is what we call an unexpected technical innovation that disrupts existing markets. Intrinsic to the whole black swan concept is that you can’t predict them: they come when they come. Only today I think I’ll predict a black swan, thank you, and explain exactly how the automobile business is about to be disrupted. I think we’re about two years away from a total disruption of the automobile business by electric cars.

One of the readers of this column is Robert Cumberford, design editor at Automobile Magazine. Nobody knows more about cars than Bob Cumberford, who has written about them for more than half a century. Here’s what he told me not long ago […]

By |March 19th, 2014|2014, mobile technology, Technology|212 Comments
Read More