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 …

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…

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 Viadu…

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 …

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 sili…

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 proces…

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 combi…

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 connecti…

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 …

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 …

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. W…

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…

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 sc…

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…

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 a…

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 ca…

What would you define as automotive? Sure there are the cars, motorbikes, vans, trucks and so on. But what about lawn mowers? We are stretching the definition of automotive in this edition of the AI in Automotive Podcast. And you will see why. Today we are speaking to Andres Milioto, a Senior Vision Engineer at Scythe Robotics. This company has dev…

Over ten years ago, an idea that captured our imagination was that software is eating the world. Well, software may not have eaten the automobile, but it is certainly transforming it in very profound ways. The modern car is incredibly complex - not just from a hardware perspective, but also from a software point of view. Today’s software-defined ve…

It has been just over three years since I started the AI in Automotive Podcast. With all of the interesting ways in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are shaping the future of the automotive and mobility industries, I am happy to have hosted quality conversations exploring this theme further. My intention with the AI in Automotive …

A number of companies are trying to crack the autonomous driving puzzle, and a variety of approaches have evolved. Some companies are taking a software-first approach, building an AD software stack that can work on any hardware environment. Others are taking a hardware-first approach, creating a sensor and hardware environment that can adopt any so…

The digital screens in the car are the latest battleground in the battle for the driver’s attention. The main competitor? The mobile phone. Each time you choose to connect your smartphone to your car’s infotainment system using CarPlay or Android Auto, the mobile phone wins. The car’s digital surfaces are reduced to dumb screens that mirror the pho…

90% of all the data in the world was generated in the last 2 years. I have read this statistic in a news report from 2012, and a news report from 2019 and a news report from 2021. If this statement is true every year, you can begin to imagine the rate at which data generation and use is expanding. Actually that number is so big, you probably can’t …

Automotive product development is not just incredibly expensive, but also an extraordinarily complex process. Everything you see on a production vehicle is, at the end of the day, the result of hundreds of tug-of-war contests. Design and cost, manufacturability and serviceability, power and weight. The list goes on. Dozens of teams with hundreds of…

In this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, we are following the incredible journey of Ocado from a retailer to a global technology business that offers a cutting-edge technology platform to other retailers. We talk to David Sharp, Head of Head of Autonomous Mobility at Ocado Technology, and he talks to us about their journey - bold and audaci…

Have you ever thought about all the things that go on behind the scenes when you file an insurance claim for your car? Probably not. And that’s a good thing, because if you did have to think about the complexity that lies behind, you would not be a happy customer. The reality, however, is that every insurance claim triggers hundreds of processes an…

If Elon Musk says something is hard, you can bet your bottom dollar that it is bloody hard. Automotive applications are some of the toughest, most unforgiving environments to deploy AI in. Most AI applications in automotive are mission critical - they just can’t go wrong. This requires that all the input they process is of a very high resolution or…

AI-powered ADAS and AD systems are getting more complex with every iteration. New sensors, higher resolution cameras and increasingly sophisticated deep learning algorithms have substantial computational requirements. Traditionally, they have relied on compute resources in the cloud. But as systems get more advanced, relying on the cloud alone carr…

GPS, or the Global Positioning System, is now ubiquitous as a way for us to pinpoint our location anywhere in the world, plot that location on a reference, often a map, and know where we are. Did you know, however, that even some advanced GPS systems can only deliver an accuracy of about 25 cm. This level of precision, while sufficient for you and …

Data is the lifeblood of Artificial Intelligence. Quite simply, the better and richer the quality of data, the more capable the algorithm. Now this applies to both, the training data available to train the algorithm, but importantly, also the input data that is available for the algorithm to do its job. Take the case of autonomous vehicles or advan…

Some sources estimate that over 500 billion dollars have been invested already in the quest for full autonomous driving, and an equal amount is likely to be invested over the next few years. Everyone is in this race - from tech companies, VCs and PE funds, sovereign wealth funds, neo manufacturers and traditional automotive industry players - OEMs …

In this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Venkat Sreeram, who shares his story and journey with us. Venkat is an all-out automotive guy and a serial entrepreneur. He shares his very inspiring entrepreneurial journey with us, and talks about what led to him starting his latest venture, ClearQuote. ClearQuote is using AI and computer vision to…

We suffer a million and a half fatalities on the roads every year. The number of people who are injured in road traffic incidents is orders of magnitude higher. These numbers are staggering. But also very, very avoidable. Today we are talking to Chris Van Dan Elzen. Chris is a Vice President at Veoneer, a global leader in automotive technology. Veo…

Like me, you’ve probably found yourself sitting in traffic, surrounded by vehicles of every size and shape, wondering why there isn’t a better way yet. The good news is that there is. In this episode of the AI in Automotive Podcast, we are speaking to Noam Maital, CEO of Waycare Technologies, a fabulous company that I came across recently, that use…

Why are Autonomous Vehicles a big deal? How far are they from reality, and what is the most likely path they will take to market? What sort of social, economic and cultural impact might they bring with them? We explore these themes in our conversation with Dr Reinhard Stolle. Reinhard is Vice President of Engineering at Autonomous Intelligent Drivi…

Autonomous driving is widely considered to be one of the toughest problems to solve, and whilst there have been some blips on the way, the technology is evolving rapidly. This is thanks mainly to the rapid hardware and software advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Traditional automotive brands, large automotive suppliers, hundreds of a…

In Part 1 of my conversation with Paul Eichenberg, Chief Strategist at Paul Eichenberg Strategic Consulting, we spoke about how data and technology are redrawing the traditional automotive landscape, and powering the rise of a new generation of industry participants. In Part 2, we talk about talent wars, car ownership in the age of data, and how an…

Data and technology are great levellers. The power of data and AI is redrawing the automotive industry landscape, dramatically altering relationships and equations between OEMs and their suppliers. AI is also creating a new generation of industry players - from startups to consumer electronics giants. What does the tech-driven redrawing of the auto…

The power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning presents a huge opportunity to make vehicle valuations more accurate and more dynamic. Cazana is a company that is doing just that. In part 1 of the interview with Tom Wood, CEO of Cazana, we talk about how Cazana uses AI to solve a problem that is as old as the industry itself, and how its …

The power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning presents a huge opportunity to make vehicle valuations more accurate and more dynamic. Cazana is a company that is doing just that. In part 1 of the interview with Tom Wood, CEO of Cazana, we spoke about how Cazana uses AI to solve a problem that is as old as the industry itself, and how its…

All around the world, hundreds of companies, big and small, are using AI technologies to bring an unprecedented level of innovation and disruption to the automotive industry. I am Jayesh Jagasia, and I host the AI in Automotive podcast. This is a platform for conversations about the rapidly growing role of AI in the automotive and mobility industri…