Volkswagen's AI Revival: Can They Outrace Tesla in Self-Driving Technology?

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0:37Self-driving vehicles, this is something that has been worked on for quite a long time. Obviously, Tesla is a big player in this space. They've been working on their self-driving car for quite a while. But there is a new player in this space or a new company that's trying to crack into this space, and that is Volkswagen. So today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about a new self-driving initiative by Volkswagen, some controversies around it, where I think this really puts it into the future, and why it is so absolutely difficult for these cars to make really solid, safe, self-driving technology, AI.

1:10So let's dive into it. So the news that is coming out today is the fact that Volkswagen has launched an autonomous vehicle test program in Austin, Texas. they're going to be using a fleet of 10 of their all-electric id buzz vehicles if you don't know what the id buzz is it's essentially like their um it's kind of like their new modern version of the old vw bus you know the hippie bus that everyone knows is super iconic they made an electric version of that and they're going to be creating self-driving vehicles with this now they've partnered with mobilized technology but what i think is really interesting here is that This is coming around nine months after they shut down their autonomous vehicle technology startup Argo.

1:52And this is after Volkswagen and Ford both were former financial supporters of Argo. They pulled their financial support and they just pretty much grabbed whatever was left of the IP and whatever was left over from Argo. So Argo completely shut down. You know, at the time, a lot of people were saying, you know, well, it's the testament to Tesla and how hard it is to do self-driving. you know these big players ford and volkswagen are shutting down their uh their self-driving play this is just you know showing how hard these giant neural networks and these these self-driving ais are which i think it has a lot of truth to it but i think what a lot of people didn't um you know didn't expect here was the fact that while they might have shut that down this is it was probably more indicative of the the state of that company and not so much the state of volkswagen because Volkswagen seems to be right back at it, working on another self-driving startup.

2:43So obviously this kind of artificial intelligence, the self-driving artificial intelligence is very important to Volkswagen, but maybe Argo was just not the company to do it. So with this new plan, Volkswagen essentially has created a new subsidiary called Volkswagen 80 MT, Autonomous Driving Mobility and Transport. I'm not sure if they're starting a new subsidiary because they're worried about the legal liabilities of this, like perhaps that could be part of it. But in any case, they're going to have teams in Belmont, California, and Austin. And they said that they're planning to actually employ former Argo engineers, which is really interesting.

3:21So I wonder if, you know, if they're hiring former engineers, I'm wondering if that company had issues, but not the employees, or maybe they didn't like being in, you know, a direct partnership with Ford. I'm not 100 % sure what their issues are. But in any case, they're obviously right back at it, hiring the same people, essentially nine months later. So I think the plan, at least at the moment in the very early days of this, is to start testing the autonomous vehicle technology developed by Mobileye in Austin. Then Volkswagen is going to start with just a couple of vehicles in July and expand to about 10 by the end of the year.

3:53And the vehicles are going to have cameras, LiDAR, radar, and self-driving software. Now, this is interesting because, you know, Tesla and Elon Musk famously have this whole stand against lidar and radar and say all you need is a camera for um you know a tesla for a self-driving car so i think that's interesting obviously that technology is expensive um the lidar and radar and so you know some people say that's why he wanted to pull it off some people say you know when you see these waymo vehicles driving around with all these radar things on the top they look really goofy and so he wanted he didn't think it was aesthetically pleasing to be fair he's pulled off some really impressive feats on the you know self-driving just from the cameras.

4:30So I think it's left to be said if that will be pulled off and how much better that self-driving will get, which I mean, at the moment it keeps improving. So one can only assume it would get better. In any case, Volkswagen is not taking that exact same approach as Tesla. And to be fair, you know, I think that Volkswagen is making a slightly different play because they only have 10 vehicles. And I think like by the end of the year, they're only planning on having 10 vehicles. And so I think when you have a lot smaller of a fleet, it's harder to gather all that data at the moment. I think they're intending to just be more of a data capture right now with it.

5:04And I think it's pretty hard to compete with Tesla, who has, you know, hundreds of thousands of vehicles all on the road with cameras that are constantly capturing data, sending it back, and training their self-driving technology to become better and better. So I think it is going to be pretty interesting to see what they can do if they really are able to compete with such a small fleet that is gathering data and of course they are you know being able to lean on mobile eye who has a lot of this self-driving technology and data already in place so perhaps that will be able to compensate for it in any case i don't think this is uh just like an exclusive robo taxi move that they're making um volkswagen said that they are not building a dedicated ride uh hailing service at the time so they're not you know going for lyft or um uber with just robo taxis it would appear that what they're planning on doing is making money by selling an autonomous vehicle service, self-driving ID buzz vans and their fleet management software to other companies that want to use it for deliveries or ride hailing.

6:06So it would appear that they are going to be using this more for companies and people that would like to use their software. And this is a quote directly from them. They said, expanding our autonomous vehicle program to the North America region is the next step in our global strategic roadmap and the result of a long-term collaborative investment. So that was Christian Sanger, who's a member of the board of management at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. And Christian also said, moving into this next phase will help us test, validate, and refine technology, bringing us closer to establishing commercially available transportation offerings and eventually grow the diverse mobility portfolio of the Volkswagen group.

6:47So I think, you know, at the end of the day, Volkswagen can see that this is a very important area, self-driving, artificial intelligence, self-driving technology, autonomous driving. This is really important for where the space is going. Tesla obviously has made some really massive strides there. I think a lot of these, you know, legacy automakers know that they will eventually get beaten if they do not compete. So we see, you know, some like very preliminary basic kind of self-driving features getting added to a lot of these different cars. Nothing is, you know, quite up at the level that Tesla is at right now.

7:20And I think that they know that that's going to be a strategic weakness. But it is very, very hard to build these, you know, these big data sets and to train cars in this way. So I think this is going to be something that Volkswagen is going to be struggling with now and into the future if they don't figure a way to really scale this to their entire fleet of vehicles.