Till a few weeks back, Cruise was considered one of the big three of autonomous general driving. It was licensed to run a robotaxi service in San Francisco, and my LinkedIn feed was full of folks gushing over the magical experience of being driven around in a car without a driver. Then the proverbial shit hit the fan. One of Cruise’s robotaxis got caught in a classic edge case, with a road user who was hit by another vehicle, falling in its path. So far so bad, but then things got worse. In...

Since the beginning of time, cities have been incredibly important to civilization. Today, the World Bank estimates that cities contribute 80% of global GDP. Cities are central to our growth and prosperity, but every single major city in the world is facing challenges ranging from poor air quality to creaking infrastructure.  So how do cities evolve to prepare for the future? And what role does AI play in this evolution? On this unique episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I invited the...

Vehicle quality issues that lead to recalls and lawsuits cost automotive OEMs tens of billions of dollars in cost and lost revenue each year. Given the explosion of connected vehicle data, one might expect that this data could be leveraged to reduce this cost. Things are rarely that straightforward. Why is that? I invited David Hallac, CEO of Viaduct to the AI in Automotive Podcast to find out more. David’s 5-year old startup finds patterns and relationships amongst billions of connected...

Autonomous Driving is a big enough paradigm shift. But after years of research and billions of dollars spent trying to get cars to drive themselves, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift within a paradigm shift. What might this look like? Daniel Langkilde, CEO of Kognic joins me on the AI in Automotive Podcast to discuss exactly this. Daniel and I talk about the current approach to autonomy, which involves breaking down a very complex problem into its components - perception, prediction and...

Radars have been evolving at a really rapid clip, helped in no small part by innovative companies like Arbe Robotics. On today’s episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I am talking to Ben Rathaus, VP of AI and Perception at Arbe. Ben talks us through the history of radars, and how and why they found their way onto cars. We discuss how Arbe’s silicon and software is creating an order of magnitude improvement in the resolution and performance of automotive grade radars. We talk about the...

Connected cars have been around for a while, but in-car services have strangely not really taken off. I learnt in my chat with Todd Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer at AiDEN Auto that there’s a good reason. Or four. Todd spoke to me about the evolution of the modern car to become a more mature connected device from its current state, and in the process we unearthed some real gems of insight.  After today’s chat with Todd, I have a much better understanding of what connected vehicles 2.0 might...

Designing a car is hard. 🚙 🏎️ 🏁 It involves solving a series of multi-dimensional problems under a variety of constraints. I am oversimplifying here, but a problem with 8 dimensions and 5 values for each dimension will have 390,625 combinations to be experimented with. Real-world problems are usually way more complex, and testing every unique combination of inputs in an experiment is often not viable. So what is the solution, and what role does AI play? Gary Brotman, CEO of Secondmind,...

Have you ever thought about how autonomy came to be? What were the origins of the idea of autonomous vehicles? Have you ever wondered what is next for autonomy, and how will this space evolve in the future? Well, wonder no more. On this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I am delighted to host an OG member of the autonomy gang, whose connection with autonomous driving goes way back to the heady days of the DARPA Grand challenge almost two decades ago. Bibhrajit Halder, Founder &...

In the world of autonomous driving, high-compute GPUs are all the rage. So I was incredibly delighted to learn of a company that is taking a very counter-intuitive approach to the perception stack. These guys have identified a number of use cases that do not require the 100% accuracy that autonomous driving demands, and are focused on making their vision perception stack work on smartphones you can buy for a hundred dollars. In this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I am pleased to...

LiDARs are an important piece of the autonomous driving and ADAS puzzle. While they boast impressive resolution and frame rates, they have also built a reputation for being big, bulky and expensive. Can there be another way? Paul Drysch, CEO of PreAct Technologies certainly thinks so. PreAct has been working behind the scenes for a number of years to develop their short-range LiDAR which aims to deliver all the functionality of a LiDAR at short distances while addressing the biggest drawback...

If you, like me, grew up using Windows 3.1, then you are familiar with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. One of the reasons for that blue screen - in simple terms - was that the computer had run out of resources to run all the tasks that were being demanded of it.  I have news for you - that reality may be coming to your car sooner than you think. We are putting increasing amounts of computational demands on the modern vehicle. The increasing number of sensors, the increasing resolution of...

There has been a lot of talk recently about vision versus LiDARs and RADARs. I hosted Leaf Jiang, CEO of a company called NODAR to learn more about the advantages and limitations of each technology, and how NODAR's own technology overcomes them. Their name is a nice play on the fact that their product is not RADAR or LiDAR, but in fact, uses vision to achieve resolution and depth perception better than either of them. Instead of relying on machine learning models to interpret the feed from...

Fancy waking up one fine day to find that your car, much like your smartphone, now has a better interface on the infotainment touchscreen, or that annoying niggle that was draining your battery has magically been resolved? The essence of software-defined vehicles is their ability to keep getting better over time. A lot needs to happen behind the scenes, for this to work. How is data from a fleet of vehicles moved into the cloud? How do engineers use this data to identify patterns and...

Buttons and physical interfaces disappearing from your car is now an inevitability. That said, we certainly can’t be fumbling with a touchscreen to change the fan speed or switch the radio station. There has to be a better way. That’s what makes me very bullish about voice as the primary human-machine interface in the modern car. We have all gotten used to speaking to our smartphones and smart speakers, and getting a lot done - typing out an email, playing your favourite 60s rock album and...

Electric Vehicles might look and drive like normal cars, but scratch beneath the surface and you will realise that they are fundamentally different at an architectural level.  With the modern car being so much more than merely its mechanicals, I learnt that digital architecture in cars is a thing. The hardware - system on chip, or SoCs, processors and screens, combined with the software - the operating system, middleware and applications bring to life so many elements of the modern car that...

Connected vehicles to me, for the longest time meant a car that has a SIM card and is connected to the Internet as an IoT device. But connected vehicles are, and should be, so much more than that. In a world where vehicles are able to communicate with each other, with other participants on the road and with infrastructure, the possibilities that can unlock are endless.  So what is coming in the way of that happening? Technology? Policy? Universal standards? What role can startups, private...

What would you define as automotive? Sure there are the cars, motorbikes, vans, trucks and so on. But what about lawn mowers? We are stretching the definition of automotive in this edition of the AI in Automotive Podcast. And you will see why. Today we are speaking to Andres Milioto, a Senior Vision Engineer at Scythe Robotics. This company has developed an all-electric, fully-autonomous commercial mower, which, needless to say, uses machine learning extensively, primarily for perception. The...

Over ten years ago, an idea that captured our imagination was that software is eating the world. Well, software may not have eaten the automobile, but it is certainly transforming it in very profound ways.  The modern car is incredibly complex - not just from a hardware perspective, but also from a software point of view. Today’s software-defined vehicle is made up of numerous subsystems, each run by its own code; hundreds of sensors generating tonnes of data every second; and a number of...

It has been just over three years since I started the AI in Automotive Podcast. With all of the interesting ways in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are shaping the future of the automotive and mobility industries, I am happy to have hosted quality conversations exploring this theme further.  My intention with the AI in Automotive Podcast was - and continues to be - to invite interesting people doing interesting things with AI in the automotive industry, and engage them in...

A number of companies are trying to crack the autonomous driving puzzle, and a variety of approaches have evolved. Some companies are taking a software-first approach, building an AD software stack that can work on any hardware environment. Others are taking a hardware-first approach, creating a sensor and hardware environment that can adopt any software stack. Others still are creating a ‘walled-garden’ with software and hardware designed in close conjunction, allowing each to work only with...

The digital screens in the car are the latest battleground in the battle for the driver’s attention. The main competitor? The mobile phone.  Each time you choose to connect your smartphone to your car’s infotainment system using CarPlay or Android Auto, the mobile phone wins. The car’s digital surfaces are reduced to dumb screens that mirror the phone’s apps and use the phone’s processing power. Your usage data and analytics are no longer accessible to the car maker, putting them at a...

90% of all the data in the world was generated in the last 2 years. I have read this statistic in a news report from 2012, and a news report from 2019 and a news report from 2021. If this statement is true every year, you can begin to imagine the rate at which data generation and use is expanding. Actually that number is so big, you probably can’t imagine it.  As someone famous once remarked: with great data comes great responsibility. Infinite amounts of data raise questions about the...

Automotive product development is not just incredibly expensive, but also an extraordinarily complex process. Everything you see on a production vehicle is, at the end of the day, the result of hundreds of tug-of-war contests. Design and cost, manufacturability and serviceability, power and weight. The list goes on. Dozens of teams with hundreds of engineers pursuing conflicting design objectives, but eventually finding an optimum through a series of very difficult trade-offs. Any benefit an...

In this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, we are following the incredible journey of Ocado from a retailer to a global technology business that offers a cutting-edge technology platform to other retailers. We talk to David Sharp, Head of Head of Autonomous Mobility at Ocado Technology, and he talks to us about their journey - bold and audacious in more ways than one. Three things really stood out for me from this very enlightening conversation with David. One, the way Ocado experiments...