The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicked off yesterday and, what once was a show about consumer electronics, is now the most important auto show in the world. Here’s what the future of cars looks like according to the auto industry itself.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
The Future Of Cars Is Car Karaoke
Chrysler will debut a two-seat car today with no steering wheel, no doors, no roof, no motor and no wheels. Technically, this is because the Chrysler Synthesis (great name!) is just a technology demonstrator meant to show off the brand’s cabin of the future, but it gives you a good idea of where the industry is heading and where its focus is at the moment.
As far as infotainment systems go, the “smart cockpit” looks much like other modern designs with a massive 37.2-inch screen that serves both the driver and passenger. It’s not going into a production car so it’s a little sleeker than what you’d find in a Mercedes EQS and more dynamic than what’s in a Tesla Model X.
The setup is created to operate with “Level 3 autonomous driving,” better known as nonsense garbage. The promise of Level 3 does allow Chrysler’s new system to use AI to plan your day. They call this MyDay. Here’s how they describe it being used in their press release:
MyDay – Synthesizes and syncs multiple aspects of the customer experience, including calendars and schedules, vehicle status info such as charge status, home smart tech features, weather updates and more, helping to organize and map out an intelligent trip plan for the day
Vehicle Welcome – Delivers a “welcome” via virtual personal assistant based on biometric recognition
Driving – Vehicle operates with Level 3 autonomous driving, allowing the driver to multitask and access a suite of productivity-based activities, such as video conferencing; recommends lunch locations with convenient parking and charging options; returns home at end of day and performs a smart home “wake up” upon arrival
Chill/Zen/Fun Modes – Creates a sensory experience, including in-vehicle fun and wellness experiences (meditation, karaoke, DJ game), while the vehicle is stationary or driving autonomously. The demonstrator will feature the Synthesis Music Experience, which allows customers to create and synthesize their own music
It is quite possible this is the future. It’s also quite possible that most of what people do will continue to be through Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
Of course, saying something is “the future” and basing it on CES is a little self-selecting. Obviously, no one is going to bring a bunch of muscle cars to Las Vegas.
::Touches earpiece::
Oops. I was wrong. I’m just hearing that Dodge is going to have a “Last Call” performance festival in Las Vegas to celebrate the Last Call models and introduce a “final 2023 Dodge ‘Last Call’ special-edition model and also highlight Dodge brand’s drive toward an electrified future.” From what I can see in the press release it’s not clear what that Last Call model is. I assume it’s Challenger-based, but perhaps we’ll get the Dodge Dart SRT4 the company teased and never built.
They should have done it during CES! Still sounds like a cool party.
The Future Of Cars Is Fewer Chips
The average new car has more than 1,000 semiconductors (or chips), with some featuring as many as 3,000 of them. This adds power requirements, cost, and complexity to the creation of a modern automobile. This complexity has resulted in a massive decline in car production and feature offerings due to the global chip shortage.
Chipmaker Qualcomm’s solution? The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC (System-on-Chip) product family. Basically, Ride Flex SoC aims to combine a bunch of major features into one chip. You can read their press release to see how excited they are about this.
The Flex SoC is engineered to support mixed-criticality workloads across heterogenous compute resources, allowing for the digital cockpit, ADAS and AD functions to co-exist on a single SoC. Designed to meet the highest level of automotive safety, the Flex SoC enables a hardware architecture to support isolation, freedom from interference, and quality-of-service (QoS) for specific ADAS functions and comes equipped with a dedicated Automotive Safety Integrity Level D (ASIL-D) safety island. Furthermore, the Flex SoC pre-integrates a software platform that supports multi-operating system operating concurrently, hypervisor enablement with isolated virtual machines, and real-time operating system (OS) with an Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) to meet the mixed criticality workload requirements for driver assistance safety systems, digital reconfigurable clusters, infotainment systems, driver monitoring systems (DMS), and park-assist systems.
That is a lot of acronyms and terms thrown together to basically say (I think) that a bunch of systems that once worked semi-independently of one another can be combined into one environment. Their graphic is actually quite helpful to see how all the disparate systems that fit together.
The Future Of Cars Is More Cars
The auto industry had another bad year. Even as things began to improve in the second half of 2022 it wasn’t enough. Here’s the first look at the scorecard from Reuters:
Full-year U.S. auto sales are forecast to be about 13.9 million units, down 8% from 2021 and 20% from the peak in 2016, according to industry consultant Cox Automotive.
Inventory shortages, caused by surging material costs and persistent chip shortage, spilled into 2022, hobbling production at many automakers. Tight supplies kept car and truck prices elevated, even as auto inventory improved in the second half of the year.
Hyundai-Kia were the biggest winner as the company was able to get cars delivered faster than pretty much everyone else at a time when its product portfolio is as good, or better, than most of the competition. The biggest hit by global shortages were the Japanese automakers, with Toyota likely losing its sales crown to GM this year.
Car companies will keep reporting sales throughout the week and we’ll keep updating as we have the info.
The Future Of Cars Is Autonomous Trucking
This isn’t explicitly a CES story, but it fits in nicely with the theme. According to Reuters sources, Microsoft is going to invest in autonomous trucking startup Gatik.
Microsoft plans to invest over $10 million in a financing round that values Gatik at more than $700 million, the sources added. As part of the deal, Gatik will use Microsoft’s cloud and edge computing platform Azure in developing autonomous delivery technology for trucks.
Ford and VW bailing on Argo AI hasn’t slowed down Microsoft, which also invested in GM’s Cruise. Something autonomous is coming and Microsoft wants a piece of it. Trucking is also the environment where this makes the most sense and Gatik is focused on the “middle mile” of B2B.
The Flush
How long do you think it’ll be before you can buy a car without a steering wheel? Will you ever buy a car without a steering wheel?
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Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage.
Photos: Qualcomm, Stellantis, Gatik
When I was an independent consultant on the way to a client, I would have loved to put my car in automatic mode and started working billable hours on my laptop. Without a payday, self driving cars aren’t very valuable to the average consumer.
Well, I built in travel to the client for billable hours so that was never the problem. The problem was that the office I billed from was clear across the metropolitan area and two very large bodies of water, so I got screwed on mileage.
Flush: I’ll never buy a car without a steering wheel, because to me the entire point of autonomous vehicle technology is to make cars a service not an asset. So I’ll gladly hire a car without a steering wheel to take me somewhere, I’m sure as heck not going to own it.
Based on conversations I have had with people working on one of the Big 3’s autonomous program a vehicle without a steering wheel will absolutely be for sale in the next 5 years. Whether that vehicle will be available for purchase by the general public is a different matter. Based on current programs that are running they will be deployed in restricted or fixed areas for taxi type services. They hope that they will be able to have them fully available in 10 years but that seems awfully ambitious for general use to me.
Microsoft providing software for autonomous driving. The blue screen of death, figurative to literal.
“Chrysler will debut a two-seat car today with no steering wheel, no doors, no roof, no motor and no wheels.”
So it’s not a car. I mean seriously. What else do you want me to say? It’s not a car. It’s a pile of parts that might or might not go in a car, but probably won’t.
“Chipmaker Qualcomm’s solution? The Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC (System-on-Chip) product family. Basically, Ride Flex SoC aims to combine a bunch of major features into one chip.”
Holy shit, this is beyond terrible on so many levels. Ease of design? Somewhat improved. Every other aspect is a total shitshow. Snapdragon means going to extremely modern fabrication process, something that is extremely untested in automotive applications and when tested, has failed spectacularly. It’s much more expensive. It’s far less tested. It makes repairs cost a lot more, and it means smaller problems render the car completely inoperable.
There’s a REASON cars do not use very highly integrated systems like this. There’s a REASON your ACM, BCM, PCM, and infotainment are separate pluggable components.
“The biggest hit by global shortages were the Japanese automakers, with Toyota likely losing its sales crown to GM this year.”
VERY IMPORTANT ITEM that we did not cover on today’s or yesterday’s Morning Dump which seriously, people, this is fucking important. Manufacturers are starting to report sales data for December and Q4. Mazda North America (covering US, CA, MX) down over 11% YoY across the board. Toyota 4Runner, -51% from Dec 2021 and -16% YoY. Toyota Rav4, -3.24% MYtMY, -10% YoY. Chevrolet Silverado? -1.67% YoY. Hyundai Kona, which is very hot? -28% YoY. Toyota Prius? Up 24.35% compared to Dec 2021, -43.5% YoY.
It’s an absolute bloodbath. Consumers cannot afford the stickers even without ADM, and they definitely can’t afford a 96 month loan at 6%+ interest. The only thing that was keeping the profiteering going was free money. That free money is gone, likely for good. And many manufacturers have been launching even higher priced models right into the face of a recession.
There is going to be a lot of very, very nasty fallout.
“How long do you think it’ll be before you can buy a car without a steering wheel? Will you ever buy a car without a steering wheel?”
The only right answer here is ‘not in my lifetime’ and ‘not in my lifetime.’ Period. Unless that car travels on a set of specially built roads that don’t let it-oh, wait. That’s just a railroad. We had those in the 1800’s.
Yeah, transport where you’re not driving is a fuckin solved problem. Your personal 2-ton mobile hut is not the future of “mobility”
Just got back from a nice morning drive with Virgil, my 1932 Chevrolet Confederate. Then I got home and read this article. Hmm, Virgil without a steering wheel? Very scary concept. I have built in muscle memory that allows me to make automatic corrections to keep him on his side of the road, but still not ready to give up the wheel. Nor am I ready to give up on my mechanical brakes or my dashboard controls for throttle and choke. All in all Virgil is not a good candidate for an autonomous vehicle.
I’m in my late 20s and I’m still not convinced I’ll ever see a full autonomous car with no steering wheel or anything on sale in my lifetime. If it does happen, I certainly don’t want one. The most comprise I can see myself making is something I can still drive myself but switch autonomous driving on and off at will.
Car without a steering wheel, think that’s called a Trolley or Metro or Subway or Railway…car. Which I’m not averse to riding in, just it’s been around for like 200(ok 198) years so not exactly new tech, think they’re a bit outside my budget though.
The 1,000 chips in 1 car is a lot but wondering how much that’s to segregate critical systems from things like infotainment systems for security, not that it seems like that’s actually a thing what with the hackers able to hack cars already.
I’m not worried about having to buy a vehicle with no steering wheel because I will be long dead from old age before a true autonomous level 5 vehicle hits the market. There is no chance processing or coding will be able to match even a horse’s level of transportation skill in at least the next fifty years.
The shitty part is that they’re half-assing the “right now” cars while they’re focusing on the “someday” cars.
I’m holding out for Level 6 autonomy. I want to be able to get in my car without even having to wear pants and then lie there is a semi-catatonic state while the car plays video games (for me) on a big screen. It should also be able to recite beat poetry to me in Elmer Fudd’s voice.
No..just..no
The Flush: Nope… not ever buying a car without a steering wheel/steering square and pedals.
If I buy a car with autonomous capability, I want to have the ability to take control in the event that the automatic system wants to do something stupid.
As it stands, I have often ignored some of the more stupid route recommendations the GPS on my phone advises me to do.
I fully expect autonomous driving tech will also have the same type of occasional stupidity.
Chryslers vision is what happens when you put some UX-guys without any vehicle experience in charge of asking people with no drivers licenses what they would like to do in a car. A total bunch of nonsense that will never work.
Video meetings, games, freaking kareoke…i mean, level 3 automation means that the vehicle need to alert the driver of a takeover with “sufficient” amount of time to react. Let’s wait for the first accident to happen where the driver was howling “fear of the dark” when running over a pedestrian.
I feel like we’re in a strange spot with cars. The current trend is to make cars for people who don’t want to drive them. Which makes sense if all you do in a car is drive from point A to point B and sit in traffic most of the time. On the other hand, the work from home “revolution” and proliferation of delivery services means that less people actually have a need to sit in traffic every day to get to the office or run errands, but instead can go on drives for enjoyment. I’m interested to see what car manufacturers have to offer this second group of people, the driving enthusiasts. Maybe we’re relegated to driving older cars, which is fine by me, but hopefully there will still be some new (and affordable) options for us in the future.
The split between appliances and drivers isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As long as there’s sufficient drivers they will be catered to by manufacturers.
Last time I was in moderate Chicago traffic it was hilarious to see how well they’ve embraced vehicles with adaptive cruise control being a green light to just wedge car after car in front of them, since the gap always re-extends itself. I see that as a probable version of the future, with slow but safe conveyances automatically yielding to manually controlled ones, and the owners of the slow ones accepting that as a fair trade.
A car without a steering wheel that can be used like a normal car is probably many decades out. I’m never going to buy one. The fringe case situations that make Level 5 difficult are just extremely common in places with a real winter, a view that I’ve held since self-driving first became a real goal.
A month ago, we got three big dumps of snow in a row, and the city/state plows could not keep up. Even three weeks later, two-lanes per direction suddenly/unexpectedly go to one due to unremoved snow/now ice berms. Cul-de-sacs have centers piled snow higher than cars. Visibility around snow piles when backing up is very limited. Other winters, the snow and ice on the ground can get so rutted, the ruts are a foot deep. Lanes don’t follow the summer painted lines (so GPS-mapped and verified systems don’t work). They follow the drivable winter line that might straddle the painted lines. You need a real human brain to figure things out enough to drive safely in poor winter conditions. Just to map the road in winter, camera-only systems are a definite no-go with all the white-on-white and unexpected ruts and berms, so at minimum you need LIDAR.
How will cars without steering wheels deal with positioning a car off the road, such as parking in an open field or lot without lines? I imagine something like a 360-degree camera system and pointing to the spot you want. But you’d likely want to specify which way the car is pointed in that spot, or that you’d like to back in or go head in or parallel to a wall (or picnic table, or towards/away from the sun, etc.). It would just be much easier to position your car exactly how you want to position it by yourself by driving a car with a steering wheel.
I’ve also been, on occasion, the person doing work in the roadway, installing or collecting samples from wells for monitoring contaminants in groundwater. Depending on the location, I might to have to file traffic control plans, and hire a traffic control company or just stick a few traffic cones out if in middle of nowhere. Now with self-driving cars, I don’t want to be that person in the road with a dumb computer driven car that may or may not recognize the situation and could potentially just plow into me. Similar situations could pop up when there are break downs in the lanes. A Level 5 car would need to 100% recognize there is a breakdown or a worker in the road.
I was lucky when I was sampling wells with traffic control that it was on low speed roadways. I heard some horror stories from the highway jobs. Did a lot of railroad work sampling and testing and those guys do NOT fuck around with track access or obstructions.
About fifteen years ago I bought a 1970 SAAB 95 without a steering wheel but when I went back to retrieve it I brought one along to make it easier to get on the trailer.
Oh goodie. Stuff more items into fewer chips so that when one portion of it goes bad you can buy the whole module again, then when the next portion goes bad you can… buy the whole thing again.
Repeat ad nauseam.
More than 1,000 chips in one automobile is ridiculous, but also a result of methodical engineering. Fewer chips is inevitable. The competition between chip developers will be fun to watch.
It’s also pure bullshit.
Hi. Remember? I do IT and cars and part of what I do is engineering this shit.
The only way you get to a thousand “chips” in cars is by counting parts that the SoC still needs anyways. Things like MOSFETs, drivers, serial interfaces, DSPs, encoder/decoders. The small shit that when in short supply is the most painful, but which is still 100% required with an SoC design. In fact, the SoC designs invariably require far more complex, far more expensive versions of these things. You save maybe 3-4 MOSFETs or DrMOSes, and end up with four times as many multiplexers and retimers and the like.
The actual number of complex ICs in a car is very small. And they are not generally very complex ICs at all.
PCM’s usually a single hardened (automotive) MIPS or RISC (with some ARM) family microprocessor which in terms of raw performance is actually about equivalent to say, a desktop computer of 25 years ago. Ford’s EEC-IV was extremely advanced for the time – setting aside TFI – which used an Intel 8061. Which was commercially sold in a variation as the Intel 8096.
That’s not a CPU. It’s a microcontroller. It has a 16 bit register, operates at a maximum 12MHz, and supports 64Kb of memory. Not 640. Not MB. 1/10th the DRAM of an Intel 8088. Yeaaaaaah.
The new EEC-VII system? Despite me not being a Ford guy, I’m quite familiar, because it’s a PowerPC based design. From Freescale – now NXP. It’s a PowerQUICC family, based on the PPC 603e core. The PPC 603e is a 32 bit core that was introduced in – hang on, I gotta dust these off – 1993.
That’s what’s controlling everything in your 2022 Ford Mustang. A literal 30 year old processor core.
This is why you have a separate SoC (System on Chip) for the Infotainment and a separate one for the LCD IPC module; most commonly these are built by Renesas of Japan. For a low-cost IPC application, it’s the RH850/D1M 32-bit microcontroller which operates at a top speed of 120MHz, offers a whole 1MB of ROM, and 128Kb of RAM. Well hell! 10 times the clock and twice the RAM, now we’re cooking with gas! Oh wait. It’s 120MHz to cut down on panel sync timing issues. Ayup.
So you’ve got a bunch of 30+ year old chips that are cheap as dirt. How many? In a ‘full digital’ Ford, it’s actually between four and six. EEC-VII, IPC, infotainment, BCM (typically similar to the Renesas RH850,) TCM (again, low end microcontroller,) and ACM. In fact, the most complicated chip and PCB assembly in your entire car is almost always… your infotainment. That’s usually an R-Car, mid-range ARM (think Raspberry Pi 2,) or similar performance level SoC. R-Car M3 features two whole Cortex-A57’s, PCI Express 1.0 for a Wifi/BT module, USB2.0, and up to 4GB of LPDDR4!
Yeah. Your car’s computerized, but it sure as shit ain’t ‘high end cutting edge’ computerized. The latest gen iPhone offers more computational power than the PCM in a Ford Raptor. And it’s only a thousand chips if we count every single IC and that’s still not enough so we’ll have to count all the passives like capacitors and resistors and you get the idea. (Especially as CANbus drastically reduced wiring and circuitry requirements.)
Thanks for the background information. I have a history in computer technology outside of the automotive industry, and intuitively knew modern vehicles do not have a thousand general-purpose CPUs.
I have no idea if the Snapdragon Ride Flex, which is vaporware today, will ever be produced or answers questions no one asks. It seems to depend on one or more virtual machines, which gives me pause when used with programs (such as antilock braking, autonomous driving) running on real-time operating systems. Maybe someone with experience running RTOS on VMs can chime in and tell me deterministic scheduling isn’t an issue and STFU.
My comment is based on the observation that in consumer technology, over time, central resources fulfill needs as hardware designers add more capabilities to SoCs. A PPC 603e core may be a viable device 30 years on, but I’ll bet it won’t be in 2033.
MyDay just sounds like EDI from Mass Effect
I have a car without a steering wheel. Somewhere, and I really really cannot remember where I must have a steering wheel without a car. This has been annoying the crap out of me for months!
My ideal future car is a concept Nissan made a commercial for a few years ago. The car lives in a tight garage space, coming out to meet you when you want to go somewhere. Going to the city through traffic? Just punch in the destination and relax. Out on the open road and you see some fun twisties? Press a button for the steering wheel to unlock and go have a blast. I still want that second option to be there, no matter how advanced the car is.
It’s almost as if corporations think the only purpose of progress towards the future is to distill all visceral pleasure from life experiences.
You know Wall-E? Buy-N-Large and the pod people in the spaceship? That’s the ideal corporate capitalist future they want. I’m not having it, I simply am not.
If you’re American I don’t think you get to choose.
aka marriage?
I would actually consider an autonomous car for some of the mundane long drives I have to do semi-regularly. With all the normal caveats about not being a first adapter, and vetting reliability, etc. of course. I’m not so arrogant as to assume that a computer couldn’t be developed that would drive better than me during my lifetime.
I don’t see the above as any kind of repudiation of car enthusiasm, any more than the current situation of driving a boring vehicle most days and a fun car less often.
I should add that part of the reason for my openness to the idea is that I don’t find EVs very engaging to drive anyways, so if they are our inevitable future, might as well go all the way, and save the old ICE vehicles for cruising on nice days.
For those of us who enjoy driving, a future of self driving cars seems like those movies where everyone wears a silver lame’ jumpsuit and eats meals in pill form. Pretty joyless.
Funny you should mention this. “Demolition Man” was on last night and I watched a bit of it to see how many elements of the future (2032) for which they look to be on target. They also went with the super-small servings of engineered food (served at Taco Bell, the only remaining restaurant) and the spacy fashions that will never be in style (you’d think by now Hollywood would recognize that fashion trends are simply recycled).
As for cars, they were acceptably accurate. There were still a wide variety and seemed to be all-electric and aerodynamic. Biggest miss was the lack of SUVs and trucks and massive obnoxious grilles. Auto-drive was an option during which the steering wheel would shrink to a point to be unusable, and presumably, less threatening in an accident. But there was still a self-drive option during which the wheel expands to a normal, usable size. Certainly a better choice than a yoke.
As for steering-wheelless cars:
I just turned 56 and I don’t foresee a 100% autonomous (i.e., autonomous on all roads/parking lots/makeshift parking in fields, etc.) vehicle being available in my lifetime (hopefully at least 30 more years). If I’m wrong, would I buy one? Maybe, if I get to the point where I shouldn’t be driving myself.
Yeah, but they also thought drowning a person in a (hopefully non-toxic) foam was better than an airbag, which I don’t buy.
The sewer rat burgers are probably gonna be accurate, though!
I dunno, I think I might prefer getting Great Stuff expanding foam sprayed in my face versus shrapnel from an exploding Takata airbag.
Jumpsuits seem like a good idea until you have to take a shit. You made me think of the 2002 film Equilibrium where humans exist in a sterile, emotionless world.
Wore a jumpsuit at a previous job, can confirm taking a shit is problematic.
So were you just a regular guy in a red jumpsuit?
It was a little bleak, but they did have gun-foo and sweet-ass ’92 Cadillac Sevilles to cruise around in!
I can’t see myself ever buying or owning something without a steering wheel. But I’m also not much of a tech guy and I’ve bought exactly one new car in my life so I’m probably not the right demographic to ask.
I’m sure my kids will grow up happy to buy/ride in autonomous appliances and they’ll get sick of me talking about ‘the old days’ when cars had ICEs, pedals and steering wheels. Hopefully my S197 keeps on chugging along until then!
I think my kids current plan to be the only kid in school that can drive a manual trans will probably fade, but who knows. I know I will likely never get a car without a steering wheel, but I also acknowledge that the biggest detractor to autonomous driving is the other people rolling around doing anything but actually driving. so I suspect it will be a requirement in say California and then eventually trickle down via the other armpit of America over time
In other Snapdragon/Qualcomm news, they will no longer be sponsoring Scuderia Ferrari.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more-sports/ferrari-will-have-lost-sponsors-who-guaranteed-55-million-dollars/ar-AA15X2Vn
I’m sure la Scuderia will be fine.
Interesting that of the two lost sponsors, it seems one left because Ferrari refused to cave in to NFT nonsense. Good !
Now they can bring back a Marlboro-colour-themed sponsor that isn’t in tabacky