The Coming Dawn of Self-Driven Cars with Oliver Cameron

While there are debates about whether the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles will happen in one or several years, everyone agrees that the coming moment is very close. In this episode, we chat with Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Voyage, a self-driving car company focused on bringing their technology to market as soon as possible, serving those who need it the most.

At this point, Voyage is on the very cusp of providing fully autonomously driven cars. Oliver gives us an idea of their go-to-market strategy that involves catering to senior citizens in retirement communities before talking about the role that testing in these environments has played in the progression of their technology as well as the roll-out of their products. He also lets us know what a market-ready car needs to be able to do, and the significance of the difference between one car that works all the time and another that doesn’t. We get into the tech stack that is being employed in Voyage cars next, talking about computing power and sensors, why the team chose Chrysler’s Pacifica as their model of choice, and what their cars are currently capable of doing.

Oliver sketches out the computational procedure a self-driving car performs while on the road and gives some idea of how few milliseconds the process should take. This window of time a car has to make decisions in is small, offering little leg room where costly tradeoffs are being made making driving at high speeds or in busy environments the horizon for new breakthroughs. Oliver also shares his thoughts about the industry during COVID-19, what widely publicized crashes mean for regulations, and what startups should expect to raise to pay for the costly tech these cars use!

Key Points From This Episode:
- Oliver’s background in Udacity’s founding team, designing courses about self-driving cars.
- The origins of Voyage, who they serve, and the level of their autonomous driving tech.
- Testing the tech for Voyage in small towns and senior communities, their target markets.
- Challenges Voyage encountered in its mission to cater to senior communities.
- Voyage’s place in arguments about when fully autonomous driving will arrive.
- Taking driverless cars from an experiment that mostly works to a safe marketable product.
- How becoming market-ready means enabling the car to know when it needs help.
- Voyage’s go-to-market strategy; gaining momentum after dominating the retirement community niche.
- Businesses that gain and those that suffer due to COVID-19, and how Voyage is faring.
- The car model Voyage uses, its limitations and capabilities, and the self-driving tech it uses.
- Different aims and computational tech changes in the Voyage products per generation.
- Voyage’s use of LiDAR in its sensor suite; thoughts on sensor bias and camera sensors.
- Regulations and thoughts on Uber’s widely publicized crash.
- Plans for tackling the final puzzle pieces; hardware and software solutions to car confusion.
- Better sensors, better data, or better algorithms? Oliver’s take on the final steps.
- The technical procedure behind a car driving itself, and the minimum milliseconds needed.
- Performance vs latency tradeoffs: does good AI even matter if it’s slow?
- Thoughts on Waymo’s quietness; are they in trouble or just being cautious?
- Companies Oliver respects and why he has doubts about autonomous trucking.
- The amount of capital needed to fund essential labeling and data pipelines.

Tweetables:

“What really separates Voyage from the rest is that we are focused on bringing the technology to market as soon as possible, serving those who need it the most.” — @olivercameron [0:02:24]

“One of the things that doesn’t really get talked that much about is this transition from an RND project or science project to commercial-grade technology.” — @olivercameron [0:06:12]

“The type of sensor is not important, it’s just having the stability of all you can in the environment around you with the reliability that you expect. I don’t care that it’s a LiDAR, a radar, a camera – just tell me that an object is there.” — @olivercameron [0:24:48]

“Every time you optimize for the latency, you make a tradeoff in the performance of it.” — @olivercameron [0:40:49]

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Видео The Coming Dawn of Self-Driven Cars with Oliver Cameron канала ARK Invest