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Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

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Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#341

Post by rahulstein »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #18

Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway). Of course, people won't like this…

Apple products are good counter examples to your point. The cost of the basic software and OS w/ updates is included in the hardware

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#342

Post by plun9 »

dymk wrote: post #284
iambateman wrote: post #278

it seems like car-makers themselves feel burdened to make their own self-driving tech, as opposed to outsourcing the software to a third party. Dell and HP don’t make operating systems…it seems like having a handful of companies focused on getting the self-driving part right without the need to also specialize in manufacturing would be beneficial. My first inclination was to be bullish on Rivian, and there’s no quest…

They could have a better driving assistance package than 99% of other cars on the road for 1/10 the price by using OpenPilot as the LKAS, or installing a Comma in the car. Real shame nobody has taken that approach, not even a fork

Aptera has: https://aptera.us/openpilot-release

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#343

Post by Neywiny »

tennysont wrote: post #45
filoleg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically). Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated. However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against…

Why wouldn’t your eye lens focus LIDAR photons from the same source onto a small region of your retina in the same way that a phone camera lens focuses same-origin photos to a few pixels? Sorry if this is a silly question, I honestly don’t have the greatest understanding of EM.

It's incredibly important to understand that eyes and glass have different optical properties at these wavelengths. It's hard to conceptualize because to us clear is clear, but that's only at visible light. The same way that x-rays and infrared and other spectra can show things human eyes can't see, or can't see things visible light can see, it's a 2 dimensional problem. The medium and the wavelength are both at play. So, when you have the eye which is known to absorb such light, and artificial optics which are known to pass it without much obstruction, they're going to behave like opposites. Imagine if the glass/plastic they used in the car blocked the light. Wouldn't really work.

There is a flip side to this though. Quick searches show that the safety of being absorbed and then dissipated by the water in the eye also makes that wavelength perform worse in rain and fog. I think a scarier concept is a laser that can penetrate through water (remember humans are mostly bags of salt water) which could, maybe, potentially, cause bad effects.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#344

Post by citizenpaul »

rahulstein wrote: post #341
TulliusCicero wrote: post #18

Autonomy subscriptions are how things are going to go, I called this a long time ago. It makes too much sense in terms of continuous development and operations/support to not have a subscription -- and subscriptions will likely double as insurance at some point in the future (once the car is driving itself 100% of the time, and liability is always with the self driving stack anyway). Of course, people won't like this…

Apple products are good counter examples to your point. The cost of the basic software and OS w/ updates is included in the hardware

Counter counter point. Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500 and they basically rely on people upgrading every year or two. Almost like a ........subscription.

Rather than a car which a person may keep for 20 years at a one time huge purchase. Its not really reasonable to expect a company to support something longer than even lifer employees will be there to work on it.

I do really really hate the idea of automotive subscription services though.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#345

Post by nomel »

citizenpaul wrote: post #344
rahulstein wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple products are good counter examples to your point. The cost of the basic software and OS w/ updates is included in the hardware

Counter counter point. Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500 and they basically rely on people upgrading every year or two. Almost like a ........subscription. Rather than a car which a person may keep for 20 years at a one time huge purchase. Its not really reasonable to expect a company to support something longer than even lifer employees will be there to work on it. I do really really hate…

> Apple's most expensive offering is something like $1000-$1500

Same with Samsung, S25 Ultra ($1100 to $1460) [1], with the fold starting at $2k [2].

[1] S25 Ultra https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s25-ultra/buy/...

[2] Z fold, $2000 to $2500 https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-fold7/buy/ga...

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#346

Post by hateselfdriving »

mbg721 wrote: post #333
hateselfdriving wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The…

I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.

I am also very suspect of the origins of some of these regulations as well. Modern airbags are wonderful, don't get me wrong, but it's not unreasonable to question, in the US at least, whether auto manufacturers and their lobbyists have been causing new rules to be invented that coincidentally both require fancy, expensive technology AND increase the difficulty/ cost of meeting the standards as a mean to prevent new competitors from starting up in auto manufacturing. Rear-view cameras, eye tracking, and drunk-driving detection all come to mind.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#347

Post by wmf »

thomasjb wrote: post #85
bjord wrote: post #2

is everyone designing their own silicon getting so much additional them-specific utility out of it that it's actually worth it?

Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in r…

Nope, it's replacing Orin.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#348

Post by colordrops »

ok_dad wrote: post #305
colordrops wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fine for all use cases. There are many people who are holding out because it's either not fine for their main use case, or even just a use case that occurs infrequently, but still important to them.

I'd like to see data on the distances people drive on a regular basis. For America where I am from, I think that a vast majority of people could use EVs today with the ranges they have today. I didn't see any EVs with ranges below 200+ miles and most had 260+. If you have to go further than that on a regular basis, I think that most cars won't work for your specific needs, let alone EVs. The whole range argument seem…

I'm speaking out of personal experience as an EV owner in Los Angeles that takes occasional road trips. It's those occasional road trips that are preventing me from going full EV. And I'm like 99% certain I'm not a tiny minority.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#349

Post by neutronicus »

pastel8739 wrote: post #168
echelon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo. Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so. The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip. If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and sk…

> This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper This will certainly not happen. The reason these places are culture and food deserts is precisely because people drive everywhere and the driving infrastructure requires so much space that it is impossible to have density at the levels needed to support culture.

It already has!

Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.

Re: Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

#350

Post by echelon »

deaux wrote: post #324
hcurtiss wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.

> I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution. Will you enthusiastically support the taxes on you needed to entirely offset this negative externality?

Rubber ppm over some threshold safety level is a negative externality worth maybe a few billion in remediation, healthcare costs, etc. (As a society, we're still not convinced pulmonary health as impacted by particulate inhalation is important - which is a mistake. It absolutely is a big deal and negative externality driving a whole host of bad health outcomes.)

Malinvestment into public transit in a way that serves only a limited few of the population and that costs 10x the already high initial estimates is a negative drain on the balance sheet worth 500 billion or more. And this infra is woefully inflexible and static.

California HSR alone is already suboptimal vs. flights, and once we have long distance autonomous self-driving, that'll meet the same demand with 1/100,0000,000th the cost (if you average out the costs and benefits of self driving over all other routes).

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