The annual Consumer Electronic Show, once home to the gadget world, is being increasingly taken over by car companies. From Ford to Toyota, to Future Faraday—the secretive car company once rumored to be a front for Apple’s automotive aspirations, but now outed as a project funded by a Chinese billionaire.
The future of cars is taking shape far from the conservative car culture of Detroit where even simple things like higher CAFE standards were anathema. Instead, that future is being defined in California, home of the highest fuel efficiency standards in the country. Ironic, in fact.
But California is the world HQ for technology, and cars are increasingly little more than computers and a big-ass battery pack on wheels, driven by (relatively) simple electric-driven drivetrains.
Tesla has driven much of the industry’s refocus on electric, one now being aggressively pursued by traditional German and American automakers. (The Japanese are bizarrely clinging to fuel-cell technology, but they’ll eventually come along too. The Koreans are nowhere to be found.)
But Tesla’s emergence has proven that market space exists for automotive startups, and into that breech we now have Faraday Future.
FF’s single-seat 1,000-horsepower batmobile-looking concept car was actually quite underwhelming. The future of an all-electric and autonomous automotive future won’t be built on ridiculous cars like that one. But FF wasn’t trying to sell batmobiles, it was trying to prove that electric-drivetrains could out-muscle muscle cars. Of course, Tesla already proved that, so it was a pointless exercise. (Or maybe it was trying to prove that it had the chops to actually build something that wasn’t vapor, but if so, mission not accomplished.)
Electric cars will be faster, more reliable, cleaner and simpler than legacy gas-powered engines. Few people doubt that anymore. The challenge now is to bring such vehicles to the masses, particularly with range that exceeds 200 miles (besting current EVs like the Nissan Lead and Chevy Spark). Tesla will be formally announcing its mass-market Model 3 in a few months (target price: $35,000 for base model, before incentives), supposedly for production in 2018, and the Chevy Bolt is on its way (target price: $30,000). Apple is cooking something up in its secretive labs.
Faraday Future plans to play in that market segment, another entrant in an increasingly crowded field. In addition to having hundreds of employees, it is about to start construction on a $1 billion plant in Nevada to produce the vehicles. The company wants to quickly move from stealth mode, to vapor mode, to a real thing that produces real things.
And it’s not just cars we’re talking about.
[Faraday Future] promises a subscription model, which, paired with the car’s ability to drive itself, will let you order the car up to your door whenever you want it.
Tesla already has a rudimentary auto-pilot on the road. Google is building its own self-driving technology, though it claims it’ll license it to other manufacturers rather than build its own cars. Apple is building its own self-driving cars. Uber certainly wants to ditch its human drivers for self-driving vehicles. Lyft just announced a partnership with GM to develop self-driving cars as well.
GM will invest a whopping $500 million in Lyft, get a seat on the company's board, and together the two will help usher in our self-driving, on-demand utopian future.
I’m a gadget freak and I love tech. So the idea of whipping out my phone and having an autonomous car show up to take my almost-teen son to soccer practice makes my head swim. There are other benefits: self-driving cars can be safer than humans, particularly if they can communicate with each other. Having 360 radar, cameras, and other sensors beats our two eyes and ears, and they won’t be impaired by drugs, alcohol, mental state, how much sleep someone got that night, or distracting text message. There will be no road rage, no undeveloped frontal lobes, no distracted glances at pretty girls or changing the radio station or arguing with the kids in the back seat or gawking at accidents, or the myriad other ways we humans can be distracted while behind the wheel.
Indeed, every day, almost 3,300 people die in car crashes around the globe, or 1.3 million. In the United States, the annual death tally is 37,000, 1,600 of them children, with another 2.35 million injured or disabled.
Since 2009, Google self-driving cars haven’t caused a single accident, and neither have Tesla’s cars on auto-pilot. And a network of cars, all talking to one another, would presumably lead to smoother flowing traffic.
Self-driving safety records won’t be perfect, computers glitch and there will be genuine concerns about hackers causing mayhem, but these systems are being built with redundant fail-safe systems and with a genuine understanding of the challenges they face (one of the benefits of trial lawyers—these automakers don’t want a compromised product dragging them into court). So even more so than going electric, automakers are piling on this bandwagon, like safe-car king Volvo, Audi, BMW, and Ford.
Volvo will purchase several hundred Nvidia Drive PX 2 car supercomputers as part of an effort to develop self-driving cars [...]
The new PX 2 is the computational equivalent of 150 Macbook Pros and is about the size of a lunch box. It can process 2,800 images per second...
That’s some serious computing power, and technology only improves with time. We still have years ahead in development and testing, and regulators will need to be appeased. But the future features cleaner cars driving largely by supercomputers, and it’s coming a lot sooner than anyone expects.