Hardware is hard. As engineers, we’ve all experienced that project that took entirely too long to deploy or, in the worst case, didn’t deploy at all—simply because it never worked well enough. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating on our city streets and highways present all of the typical problems of an incredibly complex engineering project—and then some.
Automobiles must work reliably and safely 100% of the time. If your iPhone crashes, it’s mildly inconvenient for a few seconds, but if an AV crashes, people could be seriously hurt or worse. To reach the goal of fully autonomous vehicles, engineers will have to solve an array of challenges and minimize the delays and costs normally associated with scaling safety-critical infrastructure.
At Faction, we’ve decided to separate the problem of autonomy from vehicle production and engineering.