Live Updates from CES Day 2 – Automated Driving is Still the Hot Pursuit

The day ended for the automotive enthusiasts and analysts with the new VW CEO starting off its press conference with a long drawn out apology for the diesel mess and the measures the brand is taking to rectify it in Europe and US. Long story short, it was a good idea to get to it straight away before unveiling what VW actually brought to the show.

Instead of going by different automakers and other company announcement, I will try and bucket the showcases from today into larger trend areas. Here is the list

1. Automated Driving Roadmaps and Launches – Again announcement around sensor strategies, artificial intelligence efforts and partial and full automation launch timelines stole the limelight today and the three OEMs that belong to this bucket are Ford, Toyota and Kia.
   1. Ford announced a rather different initiative (and not the rumored Google partnership that might be reserved for the Detroit showJ) with Velodyne adopting its third generation solid state LiDAR for its 30 Fusion automated driving prototypes. Priced much more aggressively, these pucks have decreased so much in size that Ford mentioned easy integration into the side view mirrors giving them atleast a 200 meter range. This definitely squashes the belief that vision only ADAS and automated driving program will thrive because of the cost advantage and LiDAR will be more reserved for the premium automakers that can afford it.
   2. Toyota unveiled the billion dollar Toyota Research Institute (TRI) that has Stanford and MIT as the two university partners and offices therefore at Silicon Valley and Cambridge, MA. The overarching objective of this effort is to research the space of AI and robotics in a variety of use cases ranging from safety to automated mobility for the physically challenged and researching material sciences. Two experiments that were showcased (rather similar to NVIDIA’s AI efforts) centered on the car learning much more than just objects and the example was debris. Nevertheless the interesting conclusion here is that AI will be the next big battleground for suppliers and technology vendors like NVIDIA and the long standing automotive principle of “may the lowest price win” most probably won’t apply here.
   3. The third and an interesting showcase was the Drive Wise automated driving platform from Kia. Remember this is a brand that had a record 2015 with over 600,000 in sales and a parent owner that recently made a lot of splash around its automated driving chips and a new luxury brand. Kia is not to be left behind and the Drive Wise (a rather broad term to cover everything that Kia is trying to bring) is a set of ADAS features, semi-automated features like traffic jam assist to partial, all leading to full automation by 2030. Kia is apparently investing a staggering $2 billion into this effort and is fast progressing on procuring licenses to test its vehicles on road (Nevada is in already). The sensors behind the Drive Wise includes radar, camera and LiDAR and a host of suppliers ranging from Mobis to Quanergy to TRW to many others are listed as the development partners and suppliers for this initiative. The most interesting aspect of Kia’s philosophy to automated driving is the incremental approach its taking and the combination of active safety, driver distraction and driver support its brining through features like emergency vehicle stopping that happens through a combination of driver detection and automated driving.
2. Embedded LTE and AT&T are here to Stay – AT&T formally announced Ford as a customer today and the intent is to connect almost 10 million Ford vehicles in the next 5 years through high speed 4G LTE. This rather ambitious plan takes AT&T to an amazing pole position in the embedded connectivity race where competing carriers like Verizon (& Verizon Telematics) and Sprint have literally slowed down carrying their current contracts with the likes of Hyundai, VW and FCA. And AT&T officially also announced Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago as three customers for its smart city program and with the pace at which they are connecting cars with LTE (Despite the spotty connectivity), the merger of the car and smart city and smart homes will give AT&T another strong business to pursue with automakers.
3. Another automaker joins the mapping domain for automated driving –GM and Mobileye are exploring a partnership where the former will use Mobileye’s Road Experience Management (sounds similar to Continental’s road database?) where the EyeQ SOC’s extract road attributes at apparently very low bandwidths and at accuracy of 10 cm. The basis for this technology is the OnStar platform which will serve as the back end link that will store this information, update it and create literally live maps. With over 3 million sales in 2015, GM definitely has the volume to generate a robust crowdsourced map but what about alternatives from HERE and GeoDigital that already have several thousand miles covered at that accuracy. HERE today unveiled its HD live maps officially and keeps making more progress towards its vision as a crucial asset for highly automated driving. GM is not alone in this (they are relying on Mobileye here) because Toyota and Tesla are also doing their own mapping efforts. One clear conclusion here is that vision based systems augmented with LiDAR level imagery is still not sufficient, that very question of bad weather and poor visibility and so on makes the maps (besides other reasons) and continuously updated maps (not the GPS maps we have in our cars) a crucial piece of information for the car to react on. This race is also truly on.
4. Smart home and car integration – The last few years witnessed the isolated cases of automakers like Mercedes Benz and Ford showcasing Nest integration with their in-car platforms. Ford took it a step above today by announcing integration of Amazon Echo platform in the vehicle and using Alexa virtual assistant. This is a very interesting and growing use case where consumers might actually see the value in paying for integration in the vehicle (either through smartphone or in-vehicle). Frost & Sullivan expects the connected home market to be valued at more than $111 billion by 2020 and with over 90% of cars expected to be connected by then; definitely there are synergistic opportunities to pursue and hats off to Ford for once again exploring new angles.
5. Suppliers beefing up software and security capabilities – Not directly related to a press event, Harman made its third acquisition in a year and this time it was Towersec, the budding cybersecurity company from Israel with offices in Detroit and Germany. Towersec which was building a name for its SW only security approach for ECU’s and TCU’s was acquired by Harman for $75 million with intent to strengthen its 5+1 security framework. The clear message from Harman is the showcase of moving away from being just an high end branded audio supplier (still a large chunk of its automotive business) to more a solution provider that can bring software, cloud, connected services, security and productivity (the Microsoft office integration announcement) to the table besides just HW. Key conclusion here is expect other tier 1’s to pursue similar inorganic strategies as there are still many takers available in the area of security, connected services, apps ,etc.
6. HMI Innovations, some real some far away – Similar to FCA that announced yesterday a new Uconnect system with a larger display, advanced graphics and faster boot-up and processing, VW announced a similar system called e-Golf Touch (on the electric Golf). This one unlike the VW showcase last year that had tacky gestures showcased more production ready features such as 9.2 inch touchscreen, air gestures still to control a few basic functions, wireless charging (a feature that more than 50% US customers are willing to pay for according to Frost & Sullivan research). The interesting part is the integration of a cloud-based personalization feature (interior settings, etc.) that puts a rather nice shared mobility touch to it. Kia is also showcasing HMI innovations that are quite far away from being road ready on its NOVO automated driving concept that includes gestures and fingerprint tracking under a concept called “blind control”. And lastly am deliberately ignoring the VW Budd-e concept because a lot of what was showcased inside is literally very far away from launching in the market and honestly was not appealing.

Samsung was expected to atleast show a glimpse of its automotive business but that was not to be today as its press event was solely focused on its consumer products and its IOT platform. And there were a few other interesting ones like Ford’s drone communication experiment that sounded very ambitious and innovative but the route to market is the real challenge there.

The show floor, booth runs and interview frenzy starts tomorrow officially and more updates then.