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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

#401

Post by tziki »

krackers wrote: post #338
loeg wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existing regulations here might be insufficient. There is definitely risk if the devices are not carefully designed to be safe.

To date I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use. Most consumer facing lasers are either class 1 but hidden (CD-ROM), or class 2 but basically not shined into your eye (barcode reader). There was another discussion a week back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126780 The lack of accessible certification/testing docs for the lidars is also worrying. Where is the proo…

>I can't think of any existing lasers which you are intended to look at during daily use

Iphone face unlock users lidar to scan your face when you look at it.

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

#402

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

Agreed, autonomy is a service and not a feature of the car. It has to be. There is inherent cost as you use it and associated liabilities, legal requirements for auditing, technical need for maintenance and dealing with updates in a timely fashion.

You could make the point that owning the car is a lot less important if you don't drive it yourself. If Uber didn't have to pay drivers, they could expand their area of operation to basically everywhere. Drivers need to be paid so having them drive long distance is relatively expensive. That constrains the area of operation. But otherwise, cost per mile is very low. So, orchestrating pickups in the country side becomes possible.

It's going to enable night time travel as well. Nap/sleep while traveling. Wake up at your destination. That's going to revolutionize commutes as well and enable people to live much further away from work. A four hour commute is much less of a problem if you can spend the time working or napping.

That in turn is going to do wonders for real estate prices. Because there are a lot of nice places to live that are currently far away from cities and therefore still relatively affordable. We got a preview of that during the lock downs when people figured out that remote working is a thing.

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

#403

Post by m463 »

stavros wrote: post #78
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…

Why would I own a car when I can Waymo one?

If you want to leave the waymo boundaries?

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

#404

Post by robocat »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #205
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 would be an absolute energy and efficiency nightmare. I hope to god this never ever happens. > No sharing space with people on public transit. If people really want their own private suites they should be paying thru the nose and ears for it. Cars are a worse version of this and the car-centric lifestyle is heavily subsidized by everything from taxes to people's lives (air pollution from ICEs yes, but tire pollu…

> If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.

In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.

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

#405

Post by m463 »

vasco wrote: post #362
mlsu wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of an easy way to have the controls accessible no matter what's going on on the touchscreen, but then again that's probably what disqualifies me from being the CEO of a big car company.

Take that idea of buttons and knobs and just replace it with another ipad. Make it revolutionary, put the ipad in the middle of the steering wheel, boom.

make the steering wheel an ipad and swipe to turn!

You could really future-proof the car if you replace the windshield with an ipad. then you can overlay ads on reality just like they do in soccer games.

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

#406

Post by m463 »

billti wrote: post #374
diddid wrote: post #354

Interesting contrast to all this tech is that my wife liked the Rivian, but when I told her they won’t do car play that interest went to 0. Can CarPlay not play nice with these things or do they want to keep all the tech dollars to themselves?

I was hesitant buying my Tesla this year (first one) as I really liked having CarPlay in my prior car (Jeep). But after having it a while, it's really a non-issue. The Tesla Apple Music app is pretty good. Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD). And I can easily just use the bluetooth connection for a couple other minor things I occasionally use.

> Their maps and navigation is pretty good (and integrated with FSD)

I got a loaner with fsd and tried it out.

There was this one trip I took to a store and for some reason, the nav route detoured off the road to the next street over, then joined back with the route.

I think this is a thing nav systems do and people just ignore it and go the right way.

except the tesla tried to drive the dumb route.

lol

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

#407

Post by simondotau »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #322
Rover222 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo operates on guardrails, with a lot more human-in-the-loop (remotely) help than most people seem aware of. Tesla's already have similar capabilities, in a much wider range of roads, in vehicles that cost 80% less to manufacture. They're both achieving impressive results. But if you read beyond headlines, Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years.

> Tesla is setup for such more more success than Waymo in the next 1-2 years Iff cameras only works. With threshold for "works" beig set by Waymo, since a Robotaxi that's would have been acceptable per se may not be if it's statistically less safe compared to an existing solution. Waymo also sets the timeline. If cameras only would work, but Waymo scales before it does, Tesla may be forced by regulators to integrate…

In the increasingly rare instances where Tesla's solution is making mistakes, it's pretty much never to do with a failure of spatial awareness (sensing) but rather a failure of path planning (decision-making).

The only thing LIDAR can do sense depth, and if it turns out sensing depth using cameras is a solved problem, adding LIDAR doesn't help. It can't read road signs. It can't read road lines. It can't tell if a traffic light is red or green. And it certainly doesn't improve predictions of human drivers.

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

#408

Post by m463 »

igor47 wrote: post #22
darth_avocado wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rivian has a huge interest in being the outsourcer for legacy automakers. They’re not able to sell $100k cars enough and even with the promised R2, they probably will only be a small-ish player in the EV market. Their CEO recognizes how crazy good Chinese EVs are and currently they’re not even a competitor for Tesla. But, VW is willing to pay $5B for their software platform. I think they want to extend that to being…

Which honestly is crazy to me. I have a Rivian, and to say the software is disappointing would be an understatement. There are heisenbugs galore; some examples: * Doors refuse to open * Lose the ability to control media playback using any controls * Any button in the UI just opens and closes the windows Granted, I'm a server side/backend engineer mostly, and I don't know much about writing software/firmware for a ver…

stuff like that happens with tesla.

one funny one is that periodically you can trigger the "more cowbell" rainbow road easter egg. You can cancel the road animation, but you can't cancel the easter egg music or control the volume.

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

#409

Post by mft_ »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #377
staticshock wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct quote from RJ Scaringe, founder/CEO of Rivian: > This is a decision. It's generated, I said there's many millions of decisions, many of them will never get noticed and they're just under the surface. One of those decisions that's been noticed quite a bit is the fact that we've intentionally not included CarPlay in the vehicle. And that's not to say we don't think a close partnership with Apple is important. So…

Bullshit response. It would cost Rivian nothing to allow Apple (and Android) devices to use the monitor in the car as a second screen to be able to play music and whatnot, they just don’t want to to increase vendor lock in. They could easily make their screen compatible with Carplay/Android Auto and provide whatever experience Rivian wants to at the same time, and they could let the drivers choose which to use. And I…

It’s not a bullshit response. It’s hidden in swathes of typical CEO bullshit corp-speak, but underneath that he’s clear that they’ve made the deliberate decision to be responsible for the full infotainment UX/UI, despite the trade-offs this brings.

We may both disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean the explanation is bullshit.

And to be fair, as you point out, if they do a really good job with the UI/UX (as Tesla have mostly done) then you’ll probably not miss CarPlay most of the time.

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

#410

Post by m463 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #252
m463 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it helps you drive. It takes away the tedium of driving and reduces your workload. Big wins are: 1) stop-and-go traffic 2) long boring highway trips infrequent but just as important - emergency braking That said I absolutely hate that this seems to give tesla the "courage" to remove physical driver controls (like turn signal stalks, drive select stalks, full controls for wipers, lights and defrost)

As an aside, IIRC they put the turn signal stalk back in a recent update. It saves them a few bucks per car to use buttons instead, but there are people who will not buy a Tesla without a turn-signal stalk -- and the loss on that is probably 500x what is saved by not putting in a stalk.

do they do this for all cars? S/X, truck, 3/Y?

EDIT: looks like model 3 only and they didn't remove it from the y?

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