All of the 2026 cars are out by now, I think. Are there any Japanese cars on the market that offers features comparable to the American leaders in self-driving (“advanced driver-assistance systems” or “ADAS” if we want to be precise)?
Tesla has the non-self-driving full self-driving for any road. GM has Super Cruise for a recent claim of 600,000 miles of mapped roads. Ford has Blue Cruise for about 130,000 miles of mapped roads.
Toyota has its 2018 “Safety Sense 2.0” on the Sienna minivan and a couple of slightly more refined versions on other models. Honda has “Honda Sensing” from 2015, with slight refinements.
If Toyota and Honda can’t do this in-house why wouldn’t they partner with Tesla, GM, or Ford? Toyota actually did partner with Intel/Mobileye during coronapanic (May 2021 press release), but that partnership seems to have been only about as productive as Intel’s DEI programs (“We’ve focused lots more on gender than race, and now we need to put emphasis on those areas together,” Gelsinger said at the CNBC event [in 2020, just as humans of all races and gender IDs were being felled by SARS-CoV-2]).
Here’s the GM Super Cruise map for the area near us. The system would make sense for doing the long trips that we currently very seldom do… maybe because we don’t have GM Super Cruise. It wouldn’t support 90 percent of the trips that we currently make. It also doesn’t seem like a system that could reduce accidents because it doesn’t even try to work on the kinds of roads where accidents typically happen.
Why are the Japanese engineering titans reduced to midget status in self-driving? Could it be that Japanese standards are too high? They don’t want to put their name on something that works well only some of the time? (This is how Apple was able to commercialize the Xerox PARC-developed WIMP (“windows, icons, menus, pointer”) style of computing. Xerox didn’t want to put its name on anything useless so it came up with a minimum price of $7,500 for a machine with ample memory and a hard drive. Apple didn’t have a reputation for building useful machines and thus was happy to ship a $2,500 machine with an absurd 128K of RAM and a floppy drive. Note that this January 1984 price is $8,000 adjusted to post-Biden dollars.)
Japan has never made a commercial quad copter or humanoid robot & hasn’t hit any annual AI blockbusters. The biggest feature in their cameras is now the DRM preventing aftermarket batteries from working. Quite the fall from the glorious 80’s.
Japanese engineering was often conservative, even in the “glorious 80’s.”
The Chrysler Electronic Voice Alert used TI speech synthesis chips (US-TX 1978):
https://yout.be/aW9nmuTqIE0
In contrast, Nissan used Edison’s phonograph (US-NJ 1877)
https://youtu.be/TGRP02cgOVM
The TI chip was credited to Larry Brantingham, Paul S. Breedlove, Richard H. Wiggins, and Gene A. Frantz, more than a decade before Indian H-1Bs began to bring their “skilled talents” in technology and innovation to these benighted shores.
https://www.edn.com/30-years-of-dsp-from-a-childs-toy-to-4g-and-beyond/