Transportation

Sila’s Gene Berdichevsky on the ‘5-year roller coaster’ facing battery companies • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Batteries, Climate, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, EC Founder Interview, gene berdichevsky, Sila, TransportationNo Comments

As hundreds of thousands of EVs come to market over the next few years, demand for critical battery materials like lithium, graphite, nickel, and cobalt has never been higher. Automakers are scrambling to ensure their own supply of key raw materials and, in the process, reduce their reliance on China, the dominant force in the industry. The result? The price of raw materials has skyrocketed, and it might not come back down to earth for some time. Battery chemistry company Sila says it has a solution to relieve at least one of the current bottlenecks — replacing the graphite in a battery cell’s anode with silicon, which can be made anywhere. The startup finds itself in a perfect storm of product-market fit and is steadily advancing on its path to produce battery cells for automakers on U.S. soil. “I didn’t think the U.S. was gonna pass legislation that is an order of magnitude bigger than anything Europe’s ever done for climate. But it’s very American to wait for a while and then come in big.” Sila CEO Gene Berdichevsky In the year since we last interviewed Sila’s co-founder and CEO, Gene Berdichevsky, Sila announced that its silicon anode material will appear in the Mercedes electric G-Class in 2025. In addition, Sila purchased a facility in Washington that will produce automotive-scale quantities of Sila’s battery technology starting in 2024. In that time, the Inflation Reduction Act became the law of the land. The IRA will provide tax incentives for EVs that are manufactured in the U.S. and that are built with critical materials manufactured in the U.S., which has become a massive tailwind for battery startups like Sila. We sat down again with Berdichevsky to talk about how the IRA will affect the battery industry, when material supply constraints will ease, and why battery recycling will become the next big industry. The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity. ZebethMedia: Your new factory will produce 10 gigawatt hours of capacity annually. When you announced the buy, you told me that scaling from 10 GWh to 150 GWh would require another $2 billion. Are you currently doing another round? Gene Berdichevsky: That’s still true. We haven’t announced a fundraise for that yet, but when we’re ready we’ll need a combination of equity and debt. There’s no reason to raise $2 billion of equity once you have a proven factory and customers and all the rest. Part of that could be leveraging the Department of Energy loan guarantee, as well, which is the same program that funded Tesla, Ford, GM and others to build EVs over the last decade.

Want to tip for your Amazon delivery? Drivr is a new app for that • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Amazon, Commerce, delivery, drivr, Startups, Tipping, tips, TransportationNo Comments

Tipping in the U.S. is a critical part of how the wheels turn in the service economy. One service area that’s been very overlooked, however, is the world of last-mile delivery — a service job that falls between the cracks when it comes to tipping because those who deliver products typically don’t work for the company that is selling you the product, leaving the responsibility and incentive for tipping up in the air. Now a new startup called Drivr is launching to try to close that gap. Drivr is a crowdsourced tipping platform that uses data science to map drivers to neighborhoods, and then creates tipping pools to collect monthly contributions from residents in those neighborhoods, with the sum then divided up among drivers serving those areas proportionately based on how many deliveries they’ve made there. Drivr has built apps for the two sides of its marketplace: residents to tip money, and drives to sign up and collect those tips, and it’s launching first in the city of Santa Cruz, CA, before looking to expand elsewhere in the U.S. Drivr’s arrival (ho ho) comes as several other startups are also thinking about tipping and how to build a business out of it. They include Tiphaus from Seattle; Tipjar in the UK (which has raised around $4 million from angels and crowdfunding); 7shifts (which covers a wider range of services and has raised more than $130 million); EasyTip; and TipPot. Patreon, now valued at over $4 billion, is also honing in on the idea of customers voluntarily paying producers as part of the remuneration equation. Patreon’s focus is on creatives, but coincidentally also has a membership concept to it similar to Drivrs with its monthly contribution element. Building a platform for collecting and distributing tips to last-mile delivery drivers is a long time coming, given how tipping has already become so commonplace in other service areas, including in the tech economy. In the world of on-demand mobility services dominated by the likes of Uber and Lyft, tipping has already come and gone as a thorny issue. Initially the leading company in the space, Uber, was reluctant to create a space for tipping, arguing that the price they were charging, and the payouts to drivers, already took tipping into account (it also conveniently helped reduce friction for paying for a service that was already potentially dancing on the edges of reasonable-meets-affordable for the majority of consumers). Drivers and customers took issue with that, since the lack of transparency felt a little exploitative rather than fair. Eventually in 2017 Uber caved in and created an option for tips. But that was not without problems: user behavior initially seemed inclined to leave tips out. The challenges are even bigger for last-mile delivery drivers, who have a lot of pressure to deliver, so to speak. A daily route often will include between 250 and 300 packages with a pay range of between $16 and $22 per hour of work. The number of packages per day — but not the pay rate — hikes up to 400 during holiday sales and made up sales holidays like Prime Day. Apart from the complexities of Amazon managing tipping for drivers it doesn’t employ, there is another disincentive: membership services like Prime have intentionally lowered the barrier to buying by including shipping charges — meaning somehow building in a tipping option would defeat the point of that as far as Amazon is concerned. Drivr the concept is still in its early stages, and so is the startup, which to begin with is being primarily self-funded by $1 million from the co-founders Sol Lipman and Jacob Knobel themselves. The pair have worked together for years, building a number of startups together, some of which got acquired by Aol and Yahoo — which are now the same company, Yahoo Inc., which also owns ZebethMedia. (To be clear, that is not how I came into contact with the startup). Most recently, the pair worked together at Amazon on Ring, among other things, after Amazon acquired a startup called Owlcam where both had senior roles. It was at Amazon, Lipman told me, that he started to thinking about the role that last-mile delivery drivers play in the e-commerce ecosystem. In short, drivers have it bad. On one hand, they are central both to the customer experience and more practically the completion of each transaction by way of delivering the product into the buyer’s hands. But on the other, drivers also work at arm’s length from the businesses themselves, since both Amazon and major delivery partners like FedEx do not on the whole directly employ all their last-mile carriers. (Flex and Wholefoods are examples of exceptions where Amazon does, and notably you can tip drivers for these services.) One of the consequences is that drivers typically do not have a facility to take tips. This is where Drivr comes in. Lipman’s theory is that because tipping has become a central part of how people in delivery roles are remunerated, when it’s not possible to do so, it impacts not just those drivers’ take-home pay, but their allegiance to staying at the job. As a result, attrition rates are appalling for delivery drivers. Estimates vary but one report estimated that 15.8% of drivers operating on the dispatch model typically leave their jobs within 30 days, and 35.4% are gone within 90 days. Drivr cites research that claims that only 10% stay for a year. Put simply, the pay for many of them is not worth the effort involved. Initially, Drivr will operate its tips service by way of a pooled model: it uses algorithms and census data to determine “neighborhoods” around which it organizes both residents and the drivers who work in that area, and it will include in that data about where and how much drivers themselves work. “We track their location and time spent in any given neighborhood. We take that data and fairly distribute tips based on that,” said Lipman. Residents

Lyft increases service fees for riders amid rising insurance costs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Lyft, ridehail, TransportationNo Comments

Lyft is increasing the service fees its riders in the U.S. pay for each ride. The rise in cost, which will go directly to Lyft, aims to cover the higher costs of insurance, reports Reuters. Lyft’s service fees pay for overhead costs like driver insurance and security background checks. The company expected a rise in insurance costs to affect Q3 margins, according to Lyft’s Q2 earnings call, which is one of the reasons it lowered full year guidance. At the time, Lyft hinted at changing its pricing structure to accommodate — the company really needs to increase its per-rider revenue, which actually decreased from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, and remained flat from Q1 to Q2 despite a slight rise in active riders. But will this service fee increase be enough to help Lyft inch closer to traditional profitability, or will it only help offset the costs of rising insurance? Or worse, will the slight price increases send would-be Lyft riders into Uber’s cushioned seats? Uber told ZebethMedia that it has not increased its service fees, and according to data from YipitData, Uber’s service fee has stayed at $2.87 since 2020. “Lyft is facing insurance inflation pressures and we’ve nominally increased service fees to help offset these costs,” according to a statement shared with Reuters by a Lyft spokesperson. The spokesperson said the increase averages less than $0.50 per trip nationally, but YipitData’s numbers showed the service fee went up by an average of about $0.60, or an 18% increase, which implies a 3% increase in the cost of an average ride. The data also showed Lyft increased its service fee for riders in almost all 150 U.S. markets, except New York, in the first week of October. In San Francisco, Lyft’s service fee on a standard ride increased from $3.00 in January to $3.60 this week, according to data from web archiver Wayback Machine. For Lyft XL and Lux, the service fee increased from $2.75 to $3.35, and for Lux Black and Lux Black XL, it went from $2.05 to $2.65. In March, Lyft added a $0.55 surcharge that went directly to drivers to help cover the rising cost of fuel, which has since been dropped. Uber issued a similar surcharge at the time. While it shouldn’t affect riders too much, the current price hike might mean that Lyft takes a larger share of each fare in proportion to Lyft drivers, YipitData analysts said, according to Reuters. Lyft did not respond to ZebethMedia in time to comment.

Driverless in Phoenix and GM takes its EV offensive beyond vehicles • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in TransportationNo Comments

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. ZebethMedia Disrupt is finally here! We’re back in person and I couldn’t be more excited about the guests we’ll have on our multiple stages and all the folks I will meet there. I hope you’re one of them. Earlier this week, I took a quick jaunt over to Phoenix to check out what Waymo is up to on the trucking and robotaxi fronts. It’s been a minute since I took a driverless ride in a Waymo. And the last time it was a Chrysler Pacifica. This time, I took a spin in downtown Phoenix in a driverless Jaguar I-Pace (sans human safety driver). The driverless rides in downtown Phoenix are not open to the public just yet. For now, only vetted people who have signed non-disclosure agreements and are part of Waymo’s “trusted tester” program can hail these rides. That meant I had a Waymo employee use their phone to hail the ride for me. We spent about 30 minutes driving around, reaching a destination, departing the vehicle and then hailing it again. A few months ago, Waymo rolled out an important improvement to its self-driving system. The specific change was the planning piece (as in planning and perception) of the software, according to senior product manager Pablo Abad. This newer version leans more heavily on machine learning and neural nets than it has in the past. Adad explains: “Coding for all these different scenarios more manually can take time, as you can imagine,” Adad said. “As you build up more and more and more of these heuristics, it becomes harder for other developers to come in and tweak certain parameters without affecting other parts of the system. So instead, you give the system all of this training data, allow it to learn the best behavior in certain situations on its own, rather than having to manually get in there and insert heuristics.” The result is a system that can handle more dynamic situations and improves more quickly. During my ride, the vehicle was able to smoothly execute trickier situations (like double parked vehicles) than I remember. It also allows Waymo to more easily fold new features in. For instance, as I was exiting, the robotaxi gave me a visual and audio alert that another vehicle was approaching from behind to ensure I didn’t whip my door open to wide on the busy street. It will also alert riders to upcoming cyclists. My experience in downtown Phoenix has me curious (more than ever) about how Waymo’s robotaxis operate in San Francisco. And Cruise, for that matter. You can always email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions, or tips. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec Micromobbin’ Amazon plans to double the number of micromobility hubs it has in Europe as it explores ways to clean up its logistics network. What if Apple decided to screw the secretive electric car project and actually just make an e-bike? Bloomberg explores that question. Bird published an independently verified Life Cycle Analysis for its Bird Three 2-scooter, which shows the scooter has a lifespan of up to five years after refurbishment and is one of the lowest GHG emitters in Europe compared to public transport, cars and other shared micromobility vehicles. Radio Flyer, the toy company famous for its little red wagon, has launched a folding cargo e-bike. The bike has a 5-level pedal assist and a throttle, and comes with the option to add on accessories like storage bins, cargo container and child seats. Waymo joins Argo AI in endorsing the six technical guidelines for safe autonomous vehicle-cyclist interactions from the League of American Bicyclists. You’re reading an abbreviated version of micromobbin’. Subscribe for free to the newsletter and you’ll get a lot more. Deal of the week No big deal of the week this time around. Instead, here’s a list of the ones that got my attention. Ascendant Mobility Acquisition I, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) focused on mobility, withdrew its plans for an initial public offering. The SPAC was co-led by former Tesla execs Peter Bardenfleth-Hansen and Jochen Rudat. Bird amended its $150 million vehicle financing credit facility so that it doesn’t have to pay money back during the slow, dead winter months and can ramp up payments during the spring and summer months, which the company says will help reduce interest and amortization payments. Interesting news as we get closer to Q3 earnings. Delta Air Lines invested $60 million into Joby Aviation and announced plans to launch an eVTOL service that will transport Delta passengers from local vertiports directly to airports, starting in Los Angeles and New York. Kodiak Robotics secured a $30 million growth capital credit facility from Horizon Technology Finance Corporation. Zoomcar, the Indian car rental startup, plans to go public in the United States through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Innovative International Acquisition Corp. The combined company is valued at $456 million including debt. Want more deals? A whole list of them, including info on Aptiv, TerraWatt and TruckSmarter, were in the subscription version this week. Subscribe for free here. Notable reads and other tidbits Autonomous vehicles Akshay Jaising, Motional’s vp of commercialization, chatted with ZebethMedia about the company’s go-to-market strategy after its most recent deal with Uber. Starship Technologies is partnering with Grubhub to deliver food via sidewalk delivery robots in college campuses across the U.S. Waymo cafeteria workers at the Mountain View-based company site are forming a union, citing the high cost of living in the Bay Area and the

Why Cruise is making its own chips, and a lot more besides • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in TransportationNo Comments

Cruise never planned to make its own silicon. But in the quest to commercialize robotaxis — and make money doing it — those never planned pursuits can suddenly seem a lot more appealing. Cruise realized that the price of chips from suppliers was too high, the parts were too big and the reliability of the third-party technology just wasn’t there, Carl Jenkins, Cruise’s vice president of hardware, told ZebethMedia during a tour of the company’s hardware lab last month. Amid a hiring spree that began in 2019 and continued into 2020, Cruise doubled down on its own hardware, including its own board and sensors. The investment has helped the company develop smaller, lower cost hardware for its vehicles. It has also resulted in its first production board the C5, which is powering the current generation of autonomous Chevy Bolts. When the company’s purpose-built Origin robotaxi starts hitting the streets in 2023, it will be outfitted with the C6 board. That board will eventually be replaced with the C7 which will have Cruise’s Dune chip. Dune will process all of the sensor data for the system, according to Cruise. Typically, automakers use parts and sensors from Tier 1 suppliers in order to reduce R&D and manufacturing costs. Cruise couldn’t see a way to launch its autonomous ride-hailing without doing more of the work itself. The result is that the C7 board is 90% cheaper, has a 70% reduction in mass, and uses 60% less power than chips provided by a supplier. It’s not just chips that are being taken care of by the company. While long-range lidars and ultrasonic sensors are still sourced from third parties, nearly everything else, including cameras, short-range lidar, and radar, are also being developed in-house. Cruise found that off-the-shelf radar just didn’t have the resolution they needed for their vehicles to operate. Like the board, there’s a long-term cost reduction of about 90%, according to Jenkins. “I was told the price point I have to meet this hardware for 2025,” Jenkins said. “So I went to all the CTOs of Bosch, Continental and ZF over in Germany. ‘What do you have in your research tanks that you’re doing that meets this?’ Nothing, not even started. ‘Okay, if you start today, how long should I take?’ Seven years.” At that point, Jenkins was able to increase his 20-person team to 550. When asked about the costs of building the Origin with in-house developed hardware versus pieces sourced from suppliers, CEO Kyle Vogt told ZebethMedia, “we couldn’t do it. It doesn’t exist.” That’s not to say that Cruise doesn’t want to be able to buy the hardware it needs, however. “What we found in the AV industry is a lot of the components that have the robustness needed to operate in a harsh automotive environment, didn’t have the capabilities needed for an AV. The components that did have the (AV) capabilities needed weren’t capable of operating in those harsh environments,” Vogt said. Made at Cruise, used at GM? Automakers (not counting Tesla) have taken a more cautious approach to autonomous vehicles that would be sold to consumers. The technology built and proven out by Cruise could eventually make its way into a GM product sold to a customer. And there is reason to believe it will. GM CEO and Chairman Mary Barra has repeatedly said that the automaker will make and sell personal autonomous vehicles by mid-decade. “We use Cruise as a bellwether for us for autonomous vehicle technology and the stack and how it operates,” GM president Mark Reuss told ZebethMedia editor Kirsten Korosec in a recent interview. As Cruise develops its AV tech, its parent company has focused its efforts on advanced driver assistance systems Super Cruise and now Ultra Cruise. “When we start researching and looking at personal autonomous vehicles there are choices like does the car have pedals or does it have pedals that are deployable or does it not have pedals at all,” Reuss said. “And so we’re looking at what people want and those aren’t easy questions to answer.” Just a few years shy of its mid-decade goal, GM still has to considerable work to do, including its go-to-market strategy for these personal autonomous vehicles (or as Reuss calls them, PAVs). The feedback from its recent InnerSpace autonomous concept for Cadillac GM hasn’t decided whether these PAVs will launch as an up-market product or whether it will be attached to an existing vehicle model or a dedicated vehicle, Ruess added. Bumps in the road Image Credits: Roberto Baldwin Cruise currently runs an autonomous ride-hailing business in San Francisco but only during the middle of the night (10 p.m. until 5:30 a.m.) and only within 30% of the city. The company notes that this decision was based more on making sure its vehicles work during less hectic traffic times. It’s currently working to expand those area and time constraints. It’s not just San Francisco that will see more driverless Chevy Bolts ferrying passengers around. Cruise plans to expand to Phoenix, Arizona and Austin, Texas in the next 90 days. Scaling is Cruise’s next chapter. However, the hiccups keep coming. There have been multiple reports of Cruise robotaxis blocking intersections and other issues. One vehicle was involved in a collision at an intersection which prompted the company to update the software on 80 of its vehicles. In April of this year, a Bolt was pulled over for not having its headlights on and at one point pulled away from the police officer. And of course, there is the infamous group of over a half dozen Cruise Bolts that were assembled at an intersection and unable to determine where to go next causing traffic issues. When asked about the bunching up of the vehicles, Vogt noted, “This is part of operating, parting of scaling. It’s a normal bump in the road.” The CEO noted that it was an inconvenience and not a safety issue. Vogt said that AVs have a lot of back-end services

Inside Sono Motors’ family-friendly $25,000 solar EV • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 15, 2022Posted in Climate, electric vehicle, Sion, solar-powered EV, Sono Motors, TransportationNo Comments

Sono Motors, the company building an electric vehicle that’s partially powered by the sun, debuted its flagship Sion in New York City this week as part of a multi-city tour throughout the U.S. The company aims to launch the $25,000 five-seater hatchback in Europe first — production is expected to start in the second half next year, with initial deliveries to customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland before the year is out — but wanted to explore demand for the vehicle among Americans. After a marketing event in Times Square, Sono brought its Sion to a lot in Greenpoint overlooking the East River and Manhattan’s skyline. It was a sunny day, a good omen for a car that runs off solar energy, and in a strange but happy twist of events, Whoopi Goldberg was there to check out the car, too. Even though most of the final design of the Sion has been determined, the car Sono brought to Brooklyn was still a prototype, so there were still a few kinks to work out. The company told me there would be one last design iteration before it goes to series production next year. It’s not exactly a sexy-looking car, but it looks and feels capable, sturdy even, and the semi-finished product, which Sono markets as perfect for families and commuters, was impressive. Deceptively spacious Whoopi Goldberg and Rebecca Bellan posing in front of the Sion EV. Image Credits: Rebecca Bellan “This car would be great if you have a family,” Goldberg said to me. “You can put eight people in there and the dog!” While eight people would certainly stretch the limits of what Sono is advertising, I could see what she meant. The hatchback, while small enough to drive around in an urban setting, is roomier on the inside than it looks. A tall person would certainly have enough headroom and might have just enough legroom to be totally at ease. The trunk is also large enough to fit at least one ZebethMedia reporter comfortably. Beneath the trunk is a hidden compartment for additional storage, although a spare tire wouldn’t go amiss should Sono decide to add that in. The back seats go down flat — perfect to chuck a bed in the back in case someone really wanted to test the limits of a solar powered battery and go camping with the Sion. “This can replace the mini van,” said Goldberg. “You can go shopping in it. You can feel comfortable parking it. And because it’s so inexpensive I think it makes it a lot easier for families. I have grandkids who can afford this. This is what I’d recommend for my family.” The inexpensiveness of the car also explains why the interior is, if not Spartan, then simple. The seats are comfortable enough, but nothing plush and soft like you’d find in a luxury car. I didn’t see a cupholder in the backseat, only two in the front, which may put off American families, but there were little pockets on the backs of the driver and passenger seats. The dashboard was also simple, with a 10-inch touch display screen which controls the infotainment system. The system has Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integrations, Bluetooth hands-free calling, climate control, and apps that display information about solar power, energy consumption and charging/discharging control. The only notable flourish in the cabin was a line of decorative moss, placed behind some sort of plexiglass, just ’cause. Goodbye, range anxiety? Sono Motors Sion charging port. Image Credits: Rebecca Bellan The Sion’s matte black outer shell consists of 456 integrated solar half-cells that collect energy from the sun and drip feed that energy into the battery. The car’s display features an image of the car that’s constantly updating to show how much solar power is being collected from the different panels and how that contributes to the total range. The Sion’s 54 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery — made by BYD — offers a 190-mile battery range, with an additional 70 to 150 miles extra per week from the sun. This is made possible by the Sion’s proprietary motor control unit (MCU), which Christian Scheckenbach, Sono’s head of communications, told me is the brain of the solar system. “We have low voltage coming from the solar panels, with seven circuits going to the MCU, and then you get high voltage into the DCU,” said Scheckenbach. “You can get a lot of energy yield this way compared to solar panels that are on a house. And it allows us to update in real time rather than every few minutes so we can see what is the max yield we can get out of the system. So it’s a mix of hardware engineering and software to create the overall solar system.” The battery, which charges in the front of the car, has plugs for 75 kW DC and 11 kW AC chargers, as well as a plug that allows for bidirectional charging up to 11 kW. Sono says this allows the Sion to charge your e-bike, power your home, put energy back into the grid or even charge another EV. A smooth enough ride I didn’t get to drive the vehicle myself, and we were only doing laps in an empty lot, but the drive seemed…smooth enough. It certainly seemed like it had a nice turn radius, which is always helpful when making sketchy U-turns on city streets. There was an unfortunate moment when the vehicle stopped entirely and starting making a sound not unlike the noise my freezer makes when it’s trying, and failing, to make ice. “This is why this is a prototype and not a show car,” said Scheckenbach. He also said the Sion is not designed to be an EV race car — Sono is capping the speed limit at 140 kph, or about 87 mph. So it can still go on the highway, but maybe couldn’t hold its own in the fast lane. A direct to consumer car The Sion will

Volkswagen to plough €2.4B into vehicle automation in China and form JV with Horizon Robotics • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in ADAS, auto, autonomous driving, China, chip, nvidia, Robotics & AI, semiconductor, Transportation, volkswagenNo Comments

Volkswagen is accelerating the pace to automate its electric vehicles for Chinese customers. CARIAD, a wholly-owned automotive software company of the German auto behemoth, intends to set up a joint venture with Horizon Robotics, one of China’s most serious auto chip developers, the company said on Thursday. The German automaker plans to deploy around €2.4 billion to its cooperation with Horizon Robotics, a transaction that’s expected to be completed by 2023 and is subject to regulatory approval. Following the deal, CARIAD will hold a majority stake of 60% in the JV. It wasn’t until 2020 that China moved to ease the rules that had previously barred foreign companies from owning majority stakes in local auto firms. The tie-up comes at a time of global chip shortage and surging semiconductor costs. A handful of automakers are already moving some of their chip production in-house to counter supply chain uncertainties. China’s electric vehicle upstarts Xpeng and Nio have both assembled sizable teams to develop auto-grade chips, according to Chinese tech business publication LatePost. The deal came just weeks after Horizon announced it had received a strategic investment from China’s state-owned automaker Chery Automobile. Together with Horizon Robotics, Volkswagen will be working on full-stack advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving solutions for the Chinese market. The goal is to “drive forward the integration of numerous functions on one chip, increasing the stability of the system, saving costs, and reducing energy consumption.” The vision is reminiscent of Nvidia’s recently announced next-generation auto-grade chip that’s designed to unify autonomous driving and in-car technologies. It’s interesting to see Volkswagen forming close ties with a Chinese startup, while Nvidia’s state-of-the-art auto chip is widely recognized as the most cutting-edge in the industry. Given the escalation of U.S. chip limits on China, it won’t be surprising that supply chain diversification is on the mind of VW executives. The question is whether Horizon can deliver something that’s up to par with its American counterpart. In any case, having an on-the-ground partner will likely help VW create more customized solutions for the world’s largest auto market. As Ralf Brandstätter, member of the management board of Volkswagen AG for China, remarks in a statement: “Localized technology development grants the region more autonomy to further expand its position in the dynamic automotive market. Cutting-edge technology comprising the full software and hardware stack, which the new joint venture will develop, will enable us to tailor our products and services even faster and more consistently to the needs of our Chinese customers. Teaming up with Horizon Robotics will allow Volkswagen to accelerate the development of automated driving solutions as part of our NEW AUTO strategy and drive the repositioning of our China business.”

Inside Motional’s strategy to bring robotaxis to market • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in akshay jaising, Motional, robotaxi, Robotics & AI, TransportationNo Comments

Motional, the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture that aims to commercialize autonomous driving technology, announced last week its partnership with Uber to bring robotaxi services to North American cities over the next 10 years. The Uber deal comes off the back of similar partnerships with Via and Lyft to launch robotaxi services in Las Vegas. Sensing a pattern emerging, we reached out to Akshay Jaising, Motional’s new VP of commercialization, who joined the company in July after doing a stint as the director of business development at Kitty Hawk, the electric aviation startup backed by Larry Page that shut down last month. Jaising ran us through the different aspects of Motional’s go-to-market strategy. The upshot? Motional sees partnerships as a way to meet the customer where they already are. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. ZebethMedia: Lyft, Via and now Uber. It looks like Motional thinks partnerships are really the way to go. Can you walk me through your thinking? Akshay Jaising: The way we view it is we have limited resources. Our core competency is building the autonomy stack, right? We want to stay focused on doing that piece. There’s other companies like Uber and Lyft that have developed a network for folks to hail rides. We think it makes sense to partner with them especially as the technology matures because we’re taking a very customer-centric view. As a customer, you want to go to one app to get from point A to point B and you want all the options you need to get there. So we want to be part of that concentration set. It allows us to make our technology accessible to millions of riders. People who are used to using an app are now going to be delighted and surprised to see ‘Oh, there’s an option to take an autonomous car from Motional!’ It also gives us a little bit more runway as the technology matures. Initially, we expect smaller deployments. As we mature, you will have larger scale, and you’ll be able to sell more routes. Taking the pathway of trying to create our own app would be more challenging from a customer perspective. If you open an app and there’s not always a ride available, it doesn’t meet your needs and you’re going to stop checking that application. Versus seamlessly integrating into your day-to-day mode of transportation and you get an option now to use an autonomous vehicle. Cruise and Waymo seem to be more vertically integrated at this stage, as both the tech provider and operator. Is that something Motional would consider in the long run? When it comes to scaling, it’s a unit economics discussion, and that’s where I think partnerships become critical. The ecosystem includes mature businesses that have done pieces of that value chain over time, and have become really good at it. And with that, they’ve got cost efficiencies that they’re able to translate to value for a customer. Could we try to do everything? We could. But could we do it most efficiently and at a price point where the customer can actually benefit? How do we do it profitably and deploy at scale? And that’s where I think the partnerships are really important. What does it look like selling this technology to ride-hail platforms? Like, is Motional essentially the gig worker with their own car in this scenario? Image Credits: Motional Without getting into the specifics of the agreement, at the high level, Motional is the provider for vehicles on the Uber or Lyft platform. That’s not to say this couldn’t change in the future. There are companies that are really good at fleet management, and maybe there’ll be merging partnerships in that space, as well. But right now we are doing the entire soup to nuts — not only developing the tech, but it’s our vehicles. It’s our partnership with Hyundai that allows us to offer a customized experience. Our value proposition is we have great technology but we also have thought about the customer and integrated key features into the vehicle based on that. So for example, we have cameras for in-cabin monitoring, which are well integrated. We have customer assistance buttons on the exterior of the car, so if you have issues with unlocking the car with your app, you can actually request assistance. So we bundle that as a service and we’re like okay, here’s why a partnership with us can help you scale and offer an additional option to your customers. Are you trying to come into cities fully driverless from the get-go? Everything we do is focused on safety and scaling when we are ready. At this stage, we feel the right approach is to go drivered first. So we’ll have a fleet of drivered vehicles and then as the technology matures — we’ve got certain metrics and milestones we have to hit — we’ll take the driver out of the vehicle, so it would be a phased approach. Would Motional be interested in working with an OEM to build a purpose-built AV, like Cruise with its Origin? We just launched our partnership with the Hyundai Ioniq 5s, and we’re focused on that. We have nothing to share beyond that, but we’re constantly thinking of what’s next. Would Motional pursue a commercialization route of integrating your tech into private passenger vehicles? Right now, the technology is expensive, which is why we’ve taken a fleet-first approach. When you look at personal car ownership, the challenge is because the cost is high, it’s gonna be a small segment who buy it, and people use their cars maybe two hours a day, right? So they’re not fully utilizing this expensive asset. Deploying it in a fleet, we get a lot of exposure to the technology, we have the chance to advance it and bring the cost down. So I think down the road, there will be an opportunity to start integrating Level 4 autonomy into mainstream vehicles, but we think that’s

Sony and Honda envision an EV that entertains while it takes the wheel • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in electric vehicles, honda, Media & Entertainment, Sony, TransportationNo Comments

Sony and Honda have officially launched their joint mobility venture that aims to start delivering premium electric vehicles with automated driving capabilities in the United States in the spring of 2026, followed by Japan in the second half of 2026. The joint venture from hardware, software and entertainment conglomerate Sony and automaker Honda to produce what the companies promise to be a wildly smart vehicle perfectly demonstrates the direction of the auto industry today. As the software-defined vehicle moves beyond car performance and into autonomous territory, cars are not just about transportation anymore — they’re about entertainment and automakers are scrambling to up the ante. The future of premium vehicles will focus less on torque and horsepower and leather seats, and more on what a driver can do to entertain themselves when they take their hands off the steering wheel. Earlier this week, BMW partnered with AirConsole to bring in-car gaming to the BMW 7 series next year, a series that will already be built with Amazon Fire TV for streaming. Volvo is working to integrate Google Home and YouTube into its vehicles. And let’s not even get started on the EVs that promise to mine crypto. The launch of the JV comes a few months after Sony and Honda signed a JV agreement to establish the new software-oriented “mobility tech company,” called simply Sony Honda Mobility Inc. (SHM). The JV will begin taking preorders for their first product in the first half of 2025 and start selling entirely online before the end of the same year, the companies said. The new EV, which will be initially manufactured at Honda’s North America factory, will be developed with Level 3 automated driving capabilities under limited conditions, and with Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems that can handle situations as complex as urban driving, according to the companies. According to SAE, Level 3 autonomy means the car is capable of driving in certain situations, like traffic jams, when automated features are engaged, but the human driver must take over when the system requests it. Sony will provide the sensors and tech for the autonomous capabilities, as well as all of the other software, from cloud-based services to entertainment, that drivers will hopefully be able to enjoy all the better for not having to actually drive the car all the time. The companies didn’t share too much about what the infotainment system would look like, but they did say the metaverse would be involved. “SHM aims to evolve mobility space into entertainment and emotional space, by seamlessly integrating real and virtual worlds, and exploring new entertainment possibilities through digital innovations such as the metaverse,” according to SHM. Neither Sony nor Honda responded to ZebethMedia’s request for more information about how, exactly, they plan to integrate the metaverse into a vehicle, however, it’s possible SHM will integrate augmented reality through safety features, as BMW has done. Part of SHM’s mission is to “create new mobility entertainment” and position mobility as a “mobility experience service.” What exactly does this mean? We don’t have all the facts yet, but it looks like SHM is subscribing to the same feature-bloat newsletter as other luxury brands that want to encourage drivers to interact with the vehicle more than they interact with their phones. Other details missing from the JV announcement include pricing, battery range or even what type of vehicle we’re looking at. Honda has been slow to push out its own electric vehicles, so the JV with Sony is also a move toward embracing not only EVs, but also the idea of the car as a connected device. The Sony Honda EV, if it makes it to market, will also help Honda get a foothold into the luxury vehicle market in the U.S.

Polestar steers towards the mass market with its first electric SUV • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in EV, Geely, Polestar, Polestar 3, Transportation, volvoNo Comments

EV maker Polestar has unveiled the Polestar 3, its first SUV designed to help propel the startup to bona fide mass market automaker. Priced from $83,900, the 489-horsepower Polestar 3 will achieve an estimated 300-mile range, according to Polestar – a competitive set of figures designed to compete with a forthcoming crop of battery-electric luxury SUVs from Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, and the like. Polestar’s five-passenger SUV is also available with a Performance Pack that raises output to 517 horsepower. The Swedish electric performance car company is still small by any measurement – delivering just 6,638 cars in the U.S. for the first nine months of the year, compared with Tesla’s 390,814. But so far the company seems to be one of the few EV SPACs still going strong, in part due to support from its largest shareholders, Volvo and Geely. Image Credits: Polestar Polestar went public in a SPAC deal with Gores Guggenheim in June. It has managed to avoid the pitfalls facing most other EV manufacturers that have opted to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company rather than completing an initial public offering – namely cash crunches, investor lawsuits, federal investigations and bankruptcies. It’s also one of the few EV SPACs with actual production vehicles on the road and more coming. Polestar has said it’s on track to deliver 50,000 cars worldwide this year, and plans to scale up to 290,000 cars annually by 2025 — about 10 times the automaker’s 2021 sales. Those are impressive targets given that the brand currently sells just one model, the 270-mile range Polestar 2 battery-electric sedan. Its debut model, 600-horsepower Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid, was discontinued in December. The arrival of the Polestar 3 SUV, a new entrant in a profitable, fast-growing segment, could be a game-changer, as it was for Maserati, Porsche, Lamborghini and other staunch sedan brands that took the leap into utility vehicles. Polestar 3 details Image Credits: Polestar The company will begin building the Polestar 3 at Volvo Cars’ plant in Chengdu, China, next summer and Ridgeville, South Carolina facility in mid-2024. The SUV is expected to arrive in showrooms in the U.S., Europe and China late next year, followed by the Middle East and Asia Pacific. All told, the automaker hopes to have showrooms in 30 countries by the end of 2023. Polestar plans to continue launching new models at a steady clip, starting with the 2024 arrival of the Polestar 4 SUV coupe. The Polestar 5 4-door GT and Polestar 6, an 884-horsepower hard-top convertible, are slated to follow. Polestar plans to sway SUV customers to the new brand with a cutting-edge technology palette, which includes hardware from lidar supplier Luminar and software from Zenseact, Volvo’s division for advanced driver assistance systems. Analysts note that certain new Volvo safety features may debut in Polestar models first. The Polestar 3 will share some equipment and features with Volvo’s upcoming EX90 battery-electric SUV, including bidirectional charging, which allows the car’s battery to feed power back to the grid when not in use. Polestar said the SUV will use centralized computing from Nvidia as its “AI brain,” processing data from its five radar modules, five external cameras and twelve external ultrasonic sensors to power its advanced safety features. An optional Pilot Pack features a lidar system lets the Polestar 3 scan its surroundings in greater detail, allowing for over-the-air updates as Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving becomes legal on public roads.