Gadgetory

our next email comes in from Haroon kay who says I noticed that Tesla cars with autopilot partial self-driving upload their self-driving data to the cloud and that is shared with all other Tesla's that have autopilot he says imagine if there was a way for cars other than Tesla's to tap into that data as well and use their own driving assistance tech - perhaps warn drivers about dangerous Road or other conditions ahead maybe Prime the car for an impact he says could this sort of hivemind technology be adapted for our normal cars a lot of things going on here both technologically and in terms of policy and competition in the auto business first of all we have something called DSRC digital short range communications it is set to be proposed formally in the US and 2016 for formal adoption as standard equipment some number of model years after that that's one piece that allows cars to doovy to the vehicle to vehicle they can talk to each other and say hey I'm here I'm stopping short so you car behind me should know that things like that the bigger picture what you're talking about is more of a cloud technology where cars talk up to the cloud to some sort of master control that shares their wisdom with all other cars three things to look at that could get in the way of that pretty credibly first Wallis idea of Auto learning starts with connectivity you gotta have cars that are connected Tesla's do have connectivity to the cloud so they can report what they've learned and then it can be shared back down to them as well most cars don't have that it's still pretty rare to find a car with built-in 3G or 4G I'm not talking about pairing your phone is a different thing it's gotta be really built into the car for robustness and that's still quite a rare vehicle the next thing is you've got to have standards so that one car is learning this can be uploaded and downloaded to another one car maker does one thing nothing there's another thing and they're not talking the same language they're not talking into the same cloud servers they have basically complete silo ization the third thing is even if we answered the connectivity and the standard space you've got this one of cooperation or competition car makers like to be different than others in as many ways as they can you're asking for Tesla to use their data their proprietary information to make another competing car company's self-driving tech work better Tesla does not want to help her Sadie's work better they want to die so this is a very cutthroat competitive industry BMW Mercedes Tesla outie infinity they are not in the business of making each other's cars better so I really gets a long shot to say that's gonna happen until and unless self-driving become so much of a commodity so much of an expected technology that the regulator's get in there and say okay it's time for us to require this on all cars require it be common and consistent on all cars and that starts to lay the ground for a more unanimous system where everybody is talking the same language and perhaps would start sharing some of that data but to be honest it's relatively unprecedented Leon