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AV shuttles, many trials and many interations

What Decades of Roboshuttle Misfires Teach Us

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
If you’ve been convinced that autonomous vehicles are the future for transportation systems, take a hard look at the humble roboshuttle, an early proving ground for AV concepts. Highly automated buses and shuttles have been around for a couple of decades, but few of those deployments have made it past trials to become sustained commercial enterprises. The self-driving van’s boxy build and plodding pace often get the blame for the riding public’s indifference. Unless developers and municipalities start paying proper attention to transportation market fundamentals, however, it may be naïve to assume that robotaxis will fare any better. We believe the chronic malaise of the roboshuttle business holds lessons for the broader AV industry.

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Who Does the Plumbing for IoT?

Who Does the Plumbing for IoT?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
At CES 2022, the IoT community was giddy over Matter, the new IoT application layer that unites wireless devices in a smart home. While Amazon, Google, Apple and Samsung are Matter’s headliners, who does the plumbing for the Internet of Things? Devils linger in the details.

The interoperability of consumer devices – whether installed in “smart homes” or traditional dumb houses – has long been a tough nut to crack.

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Straight From the Heart: Startup Celtro Eyes Self-Powered Pacemakers

Straight From the Heart: Startup Celtro Eyes Self-Powered Pacemakers

By Adele Hars

What’s at stake?
The pacemaker envisioned by Celtro is both leadless and battery-free. The company sees a big market opportunity, but there are miles to go to get there. A prototype is three years away.

Every year, about a million people around the world get a pacemaker implant – and every single one of those implants is battery powered. Celtro, an early-stage startup in Dresden, Germany, aims to create a new generation of pacemakers that run on energy harvested continuously and directly from the biochemical reactions that produce energy in cardiac cells.  Following Celtro’s recently announced seed-funding round, the Ojo-Yoshida Report had the opportunity to speak with the CEO, Gerd Teepe.

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Mobileye Radar Image

Imaging Radar Gets a Second Look for AVs

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
Mobileye is promising “true redundancy” for Level 4 consumer autonomous vehicles by adding a subsystem that pairs a single LiDAR with a blanket of software-defined radar sensors. The company believes its new 4D imaging radars will be pivotal in the push to L4, and the market indeed appears to be giving radar a second look. Given the rise of competing approaches and LiDAR’s installed base in L2/L2+ cars and robotaxis, the challenges for Mobileye are its own aggressive timetable and the relative cost and complexity of its approach.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this month, the auto industry got a dose of reality and a fresh outlook on what’s in — and what’s in store — for the automotive sensor market.

What’s in? Imaging radar.

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Amnon Shashua, Mobileye CEO, at CES 2022

Mobileye Consumer AV Push: Facts Behind the Math?

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
The AV industry has generally come to accept that the highly automated vehicle market will start with robotaxis, scheduled for rollout one city at a time. Consumer-owned AVs without human drivers are believed to be years — some say decades — away. But Mobileye, whose parent company Intel plans to take it public later this year, is pushing an aggressive timetable for consumer AVs, warning the industry that consumer and industrial AV development must proceed in tandem if both sectors are to succeed. For now, OEMs are left with the daunting task of checking Mobileye’s math.

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The Inscrutability of Black Ice

The Inscrutability of Black Ice

By David Benjamin

“As someone who doesn’t drive, I am not sure how an AI would handle icy road conditions… Autonomous cars are not going to get angry, commit road rage-related crimes, or panic when suddenly confronted with black ice.” —Johnna Crider, CleanTechnica, Dec. 23, 2021

Like many other folks, I’ve faced the prospect of death a number of times. But in none of those circumstances was I ever palpably scared — until the whole horror was over with and I had a chance to think of how close I’d come to strolling into the sunset hand-in-hand with the Grim Reaper.

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Automotive Chip Drought Alters OEM/Supplier Balance of Power

Automotive Chip Drought Alters OEM/Supplier Balance of Power

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
With last year’s chip shortage expected to linger well into 2022, any quick fix is fantasy. Automotive OEMs’ dramatic rethink of next-gen architectures extends to their IC partners, which face new expectations for interchangeable platforms and improved visibility into their business. OEMs are spending massively, and chip designers want that money. The questions come down to the accommodations chipmakers are willing to make, and how creative their solutions will be, as they pursue tighter OEM relationships.  

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Datacenter on Wheels

TOPS Priorities Shift for ‘Datacenter on Wheels’

By Junko Yoshida

What’s at stake?
As the activity around CES 2022 makes clear, tech suppliers are hurtling toward more computing power, AI acceleration, and higher-resolution sensors for automotive platforms. But as compute and sensor capabilities grow exponentially, so does the pressure on auto OEMs to pick the right building blocks and implement them to optimal effect in their next-generation cars.

Read More »TOPS Priorities Shift for ‘Datacenter on Wheels’