robotaxi business model, etc. And I'm thinking, "Wow. Crunchbase is the leading destination for millions of users to discover industry trends, investments, and news about global companies–from startups to the Fortune 1000. While the number of autonomous trucking companies is now smaller as the market matures, the amount and pace of investment going into that smaller group of companies is increasing. In his blog post, he said the space was too overwhelmed “with the unmet promise of AI to focus on a practical solution.”, “As those breakthroughs failed to appear, the downpour of investor interest became a drizzle. The absence of an actual driver in the cab. Five years ago it seemed like every other software engineer in Silicon Valley was loading up on some venture capital money in hopes of striking it rich with automated driving (AD). Supervised machine learning (under the auspices of being “AI”) was advancing so quickly — in just a few years it had gone from mostly recognizing cats to more-or-less driving. Who's making sure they're not throwing something unsafe on the road? The data collected by every truck, along every mile, it's uploaded and used by TuSimple, they say only to perfect performance on the road. Jon Wertheim: Right now we've got safety operators in the cab. Far from being “an ominous sign,” Starsky’s fate is an anomaly not representative of the overall truck ADS space. To that point, Chuck Price is emphatic that driverless trucks pose fewer dangers. It seemed that AI was following a Moore’s Law Curve. He also claimed that Starsky’s “heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.”. Starsky Robotics co-founder Stefan Seltz-Axmacher announced Thursday that the company’s quest to build autonomous trucks was ending. In his blog post, Seltz-Axmacher discusses the challenges of trying to break through these ML barriers and speculates on where AD systems are today relative to human drivers. Their original premise to relocate the driver from cab to office was of interest at the time. We may focus on the self-driving car, but autonomous trucking is not an if, it's a when. He ended the blog with a pessimistic view about the industry’s ability to reach Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles. Most of her two million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Or this is a laboratory. the AV industry to detail here: the professorial pace at which most teams work, He's concerned that federal, state and local governments have only limited access to the driverless technology. While Starsky was seeking to raise funds last summer, they were competing with Embark, which raised an oversubscribed Series C at $70M for self-driving trucks, and TuSimple, which raised $120M in their Series D. Earlier in 2019 Outrider raised $53M in their Series A. Founded three years ago, Starsky $52 million in Series A funding, and Embark, Waymo and others have been able to Sweeping claims don't hold up well in this space. That deal came just 10 months after rival self-driving car outfit Cruise raised roughly $1.15 billion at an approximate $18 billion post-money valuation. Chuck Price: There are no drunk computers. As we first reported in March, companies have been quietly testing their prototypes on public roads. Starsky Robotics had “hustle,” which stems directly from his leadership. Waymo. personnel. In 2019, our truck became the first fully-unmanned truck to drive on a live highway. “Five years later and AV professionals are no longer promising Artificial General Intelligence after the next code commit. "Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license. (LAUGH) But that's not your job. “As those breakthroughs failed to appear, the downpour of investor interest became a drizzle. #Stefan_Seltz-Axmache You got this right: , founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher announced that Starsky Robotics was shutting down after 5 years of effort trying to build robust automated trucks. © 2020 Forbes Media LLC. technology IPOs last year hurt. On the contrary, we see significant investor interest.” As another ADS company put it, “several other companies successfully raised money during and since Starsky’s failed round, which suggests the problem is less with waning enthusiasm for the industry, and more with Starsky specifically.” Yet another noted “we’ve seen from Amazon to Uber and everywhere in between, VC investors are willing to give startups a lot of money and many years to reach revenue targets/profitability if they think the company is sufficiently focused on a business idea that has significant value in the long term. His approach was to focus on trying to deploy where there was a very high degree of confidence that the system could work safely and reliably. The aging workforce which will almost certainly start to limit economic growth in the next 5–10 years; the 4,000 people who die every year in truck accidents seem a needless sacrifice. Well, you're going to be hearing a lot less honking in the future. Asked about driverless trucks, they feel like they are being run off the road. But we see smarter investors in the space start to emerge that are searching for teams that have the experience and maturity needed to build a compelling safety case. Starsky Robotics isn’t the first AD company to shut down and absolutely won’t be the last. Edited by April Wilson. TuSimple firmly stated “Our system was designed with safety as our first priority, not features. Steve Viscelli says the industry may be imperfect, but he thinks the solution should not depend on driverless technology alone. Though we may not give it a second thought when we click that free shipping icon, truckers move 70% of the nation's goods. At this depot, $12 million worth of gleaming self-driving semis are on the move. Linda Allen: I wasn't aware 'til I ran across one on the Florida Turnpike and that just-- it just scares me. The upshot of the “2019 reset” is a broadly held view that driverless trucks are the best bet, as also noted by Kaellenius. Humanising Autonomy. Nevertheless, I credit Seltz-Axmacher for charging ahead to develop a new market segment and attempt to launch an early form of driverless trucking. ", Steve Viscelli: I'd say that-- that's wonderful. Jon Wertheim: What segment do you think's gonna be hit first by driverless trucks? Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks. In 2015, I got obsessed with the idea of driverless trucks and started Starsky Robotics. After earning a mechanical engineering degree from GMI I spent the next 17 years working on electronic control systems that help cars stop, go and change direction before I drove away to write about what other engineers were creating. Tickers TECH UPS. Maybe just to be provocative, Seltz-Axmacher titled an entire section with “No One Really Likes Safety, they like Features.” Referring to Starsky’s heavy emphasis on good safety practices, he goes on to say “the problem is that all of that work is invisible. The technology will bring untold profits, but it may cost thousands of truckers their livelihoods. Copyright © 2020 CBS Interactive Inc.All rights reserved. Our Story. But Price points us to a network of sensors, cameras and radar devices strapped to the outside of the rig, all of it hardwired to an internal AI supercomputer that drives the truck. And those constitute about 200,000 trucking jobs. Exclusive: Mass Layoffs Reported After Starsky Robotics Fails To Find Buyer, Investors. These robot trucks will probably be safer than at least 50% of then the new breed of driver I’ve seen out there the past 5 years, seriously! Starsky’s competitors include Embark (which raised a $70 million Series C last September) and Canada’s Varden Labs. Starsky Robotics is shutting down, ending whatever prospects it had at becoming the world’s premier self-driving company for long-haul trucking. is what I think is to blame for our unfortunate fate,” he wrote. And while most would agree that a lot of the basic machine learning required to build an AV is fairly well-understood, what differentiates the great teams is having the experience to take a multi-disciplinary approach to building an AV that considers software and machine learning, hardware, functional safety analysis, testing and validation, and building a safety case.”, Seltz-Axmacher’s post over-generalizes about the tech industry and the investor community. Embed Graph. That’s the labelling and annotation part. “After Hurricane Irma hit southwestern Florida, the company used one of its trucks to aid recovery efforts, hauling water 68 miles from one end of the state to the other without human intervention.”. View Starsky Robotics profile. Right? Not long after, we met at the Blue Danube coffee shop in Alameda, CA so he could tell me about his vision for Starsky Robotics. I first rode in a self-driving vehicle in 1991. How's that gonna work? Chuck Price: Our primary sensor system is our array of cameras that you see along the top of the vehicle--. However, as technical development began to enable truly driverless trucking, the potential to replace, rather than re-locate, the driver created significant excitement. Jon Wertheim: I feel like it's our turn on Space Mountain. The low-road approach often wins. March 23, 2020. Starsky Robotics Co-Founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher is selling the company’s assets. Starsky Robotics Seeks … Here I offer a counterpoint based on my longtime involvement in truck automation plus discussions with many others in the truck Automated Driving Systems (ADS) startup space, many of them irate at what they see as unfounded assertions made in the original post. The autonomous trucking startup was founded in 2015 and raised about $21 million.

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