Posts Tagged: "automotive technologies"

The new Elon Musk master plan for Tesla reeks of overconfidence

Elon Musk’s updated master plan reeks of overconfidence. He envisions entire fleets of autonomous Tesla vehicles while missing recent sales targets by thousands of units. He wants to pump massive amounts of money into R&D for autonomous technologies and new types of vehicles, but the company is having trouble with bleeding warranty costs which are double the amount seen at Ford or GM. The lack of timeline details in the master plan was not well received by financial analysts and Tesla stock was down by 3 percent in the days after the announcement.

The patent ‘troll’ fables of the automobile industry

The “troll” narrative of Nakajima and Snow will have us believe that any patent lawsuit to resolve a dispute constitutes abusive litigation. Economic folklore devoid of scale and proportion should not mislead this blog’s readers. First, even if one takes at face value Nakajima’s “six to seven figure” cost for settling per suit, those costs amounted to about $100 million in 2014. This is less than 0.01% of the $1.1 trillion in U.S. automobile sales in 2014, hardly a “serious drain on the automobile industry.” The growth in number of suits may simply be a result of the automotive industry shifting from traditional incremental improvement into adoption of new technologies developed outside that industry such as radar, sensors, navigation, video imaging, smart displays, batteries, electric propulsion, and computer-controlled systems. Second, we have shown that allegations that the Selden patent litigation “stifled the infant automobile industry” are false. We do so in-depth elsewhere by marshalling historical empirical evidence from primary sources in our article The “Overly-broad” Selden patent, Henry Ford and Development in the Early US Automobile Industry.

Eagle Harbor Holdings to sell second-largest portfolio of U.S. patents related to autonomous cars

Eagle Harbor Holdings (EHH) had amassed the second-largest portfolio of patents related to self-driving and autonomous cars, only trailing high tech developer Google in that field. Eagle Harbor was formed in 2010 by the father-son engineering team of Dan and Joe Preston. Their work in the field extends at least as far back as 1997, when they formed the vehicle tech development firm which became known as Airbiquity. EHH is now looking for prospective buyers for a portfolio with 74 total assets, including 42 patents issued and 17 patent families.

Looking at text blockers and textalyzers during Distracted Driving Awareness Month

April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month and many organizations are gearing up their pitch for greater safety on the roads by avoiding the need to text or take a phone call while driving. Here on IPWatchdog, we’ve discussed the topic of distracted driving and how autonomous vehicles and device disablement technologies might be able to address some concerns of distracted driving. With the month-long observation of this issue upon us, it’s a good time to revisit the world of innovation to find if new answers to the problem of distracted driving are being developed.

How Autonomous Vehicles Work: The different shades of autonomy ranging up to a fully self-driving car

When considering what makes an autonomous vehicle truly autonomous, it’s important to note that there are different shades of autonomy leading up to the fully self-driving car. One of the organizations which maintains a rubric helping to define autonomous vehicles is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which recognizes five different levels of autonomy for vehicles, starting with Level 0, the most basic tier in which the driver controls all operations, as is the case for conventional vehicles today. Level 1 function-specific automation is reached when a single control function is automated, such as when electronic stability control systems help drivers maintain vehicle control, without completely replacing the need for driver vigilance. Level 2 combined function automation occurs when two primary control functions are designed to work together to relieve a driver…