AI in Automotive Podcast

Your EV is so much more than a car to take you from point A to point B. The energy it stores in its battery is a whole world of possibilities when you are not using the car. Which, let’s face it, for most of us, is the vast majority of the day. During these times, your EV is a ‘decentralised energy resource’ - one that can help the grid in a variety of ways.

One of the most interesting ways in which EVs are accelerating the mobility...

Range anxiety. Charger anxiety. This anxiety and that anxiety. There seems to be a lot of anxiety in the mainstream adoption of EVs.

One of the biggest behaviour changes someone migrating from years of driving an ICE to an EV has to make is the refuelling behaviour. You refuel an ICE when you have. You recharge an EV when you can. You charge every time you park. At home, at your workplace, at your gym, your shopping center, at the r...

If you needed a surprise in the new year, this is it! We are back!! It’s been a longish hiatus. I needed the time to recharge and think about where the industry is headed. We also welcomed a new member to our family, and I have used the time to change over a thousand nappies!!

So, what exactly happened in the last year? 

The AI in Automotive Podcast quietly - literally quietly - turned five. 

AI went properly mainstream. Like BOOM mai...

Till a few weeks back, Cruise was considered one of the big three of autonomous general driving. It was licensed to run a robotaxi service in San Francisco, and my LinkedIn feed was full of folks gushing over the magical experience of being driven around in a car without a driver.

Then the proverbial shit hit the fan. One of Cruise’s robotaxis got caught in a classic edge case, with a road user who was hit by another vehicle, fallin...

Since the beginning of time, cities have been incredibly important to civilization. Today, the World Bank estimates that cities contribute 80% of global GDP. Cities are central to our growth and prosperity, but every single major city in the world is facing challenges ranging from poor air quality to creaking infrastructure. 

So how do cities evolve to prepare for the future? And what role does AI play in this evolution?

On this uniq...

Vehicle quality issues that lead to recalls and lawsuits cost automotive OEMs tens of billions of dollars in cost and lost revenue each year. Given the explosion of connected vehicle data, one might expect that this data could be leveraged to reduce this cost. Things are rarely that straightforward. Why is that?

I invited David Hallac, CEO of Viaduct to the AI in Automotive Podcast to find out more. David’s 5-year old startup finds ...

Autonomous Driving is a big enough paradigm shift. But after years of research and billions of dollars spent trying to get cars to drive themselves, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift within a paradigm shift. What might this look like?

Daniel Langkilde, CEO of Kognic joins me on the AI in Automotive Podcast to discuss exactly this. Daniel and I talk about the current approach to autonomy, which involves breaking down a very com...

Radars have been evolving at a really rapid clip, helped in no small part by innovative companies like Arbe Robotics. On today’s episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I am talking to Ben Rathaus, VP of AI and Perception at Arbe.

Ben talks us through the history of radars, and how and why they found their way onto cars. We discuss how Arbe’s silicon and software is creating an order of magnitude improvement in the resolution and p...

Connected cars have been around for a while, but in-car services have strangely not really taken off. I learnt in my chat with Todd Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer at AiDEN Auto that there’s a good reason. Or four. Todd spoke to me about the evolution of the modern car to become a more mature connected device from its current state, and in the process we unearthed some real gems of insight. 

After today’s chat with Todd, I have a much...

Designing a car is hard. 🚙 🏎️ 🏁

It involves solving a series of multi-dimensional problems under a variety of constraints. I am oversimplifying here, but a problem with 8 dimensions and 5 values for each dimension will have 390,625 combinations to be experimented with. Real-world problems are usually way more complex, and testing every unique combination of inputs in an experiment is often not viable. So what is the sol...

Have you ever thought about how autonomy came to be? What were the origins of the idea of autonomous vehicles? Have you ever wondered what is next for autonomy, and how will this space evolve in the future?

Well, wonder no more. On this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, I am delighted to host an OG member of the autonomy gang, whose connection with autonomous driving goes way back to the heady days of the DARPA Gran...

In the world of autonomous driving, high-compute GPUs are all the rage. So I was incredibly delighted to learn of a company that is taking a very counter-intuitive approach to the perception stack. These guys have identified a number of use cases that do not require the 100% accuracy that autonomous driving demands, and are focused on making their vision perception stack work on smartphones you can buy for a hundred dollars.

LiDARs are an important piece of the autonomous driving and ADAS puzzle. While they boast impressive resolution and frame rates, they have also built a reputation for being big, bulky and expensive. Can there be another way?

Paul Drysch, CEO of PreAct Technologies certainly thinks so. PreAct has been working behind the scenes for a number of years to develop their short-range LiDAR which aims to deliver all the functionality of a Li...

If you, like me, grew up using Windows 3.1, then you are familiar with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. One of the reasons for that blue screen - in simple terms - was that the computer had run out of resources to run all the tasks that were being demanded of it. 

I have news for you - that reality may be coming to your car sooner than you think. We are putting increasing amounts of computational demands on the modern vehicle. The ...

There has been a lot of talk recently about vision versus LiDARs and RADARs. I hosted Leaf Jiang, CEO of a company called NODAR to learn more about the advantages and limitations of each technology, and how NODAR's own technology overcomes them. Their name is a nice play on the fact that their product is not RADAR or LiDAR, but in fact, uses vision to achieve resolution and depth perception better than either of them.

Instead o...

Fancy waking up one fine day to find that your car, much like your smartphone, now has a better interface on the infotainment touchscreen, or that annoying niggle that was draining your battery has magically been resolved?

The essence of software-defined vehicles is their ability to keep getting better over time. A lot needs to happen behind the scenes, for this to work. How is data from a fleet of vehicles moved into the...

Buttons and physical interfaces disappearing from your car is now an inevitability. That said, we certainly can’t be fumbling with a touchscreen to change the fan speed or switch the radio station. There has to be a better way. That’s what makes me very bullish about voice as the primary human-machine interface in the modern car.

We have all gotten used to speaking to our smartphones and smart speakers, and getting a lot done - typi...

Electric Vehicles might look and drive like normal cars, but scratch beneath the surface and you will realise that they are fundamentally different at an architectural level. 

With the modern car being so much more than merely its mechanicals, I learnt that digital architecture in cars is a thing. The hardware - system on chip, or SoCs, processors and screens, combined with the software - the operating system, middleware and applica...

Connected vehicles to me, for the longest time meant a car that has a SIM card and is connected to the Internet as an IoT device. But connected vehicles are, and should be, so much more than that. In a world where vehicles are able to communicate with each other, with other participants on the road and with infrastructure, the possibilities that can unlock are endless. 

So what is coming in the way of that happening? Technology? Pol...