Audi spins out Holoride to put VR in every car

Audi has spun out a new company called Holoride that aims to bring a VR experience to the backseat of every car, no matter if it’s a Ford, Mercedes or Chrysler Pacifica minivan.

Holoride was announced Monday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas.

While Holoride says it’s an independent company, the roots of this startup are all Audi. The automaker holds a minority interest through subsidiary Audi Electronics Venture, which developed the technology. Audi will license the technology to Holoride and the startup will use an open platform to allow any automaker as well as content developers to create whatever reality formats they desire. 

Nils Wollny, head of digital business at Audi co-founded Holoride with Marcus Kühne, who was project lead of Audi’s VR experience and Daniel Profendiner, a software engineer at the company. Wollny is Holoride’s CEO.

Holoride’s founding story didn’t have one single starting point. Profendiner and Kühne didn’t know each other. But both were working on the same patent application to use VR as a sales application and for simulation purposes. “We came to the same idea because we wrote the same patent,” Profendiner said, who then built a prototype to show Kühne.

The pair introduced the idea to Wollny, who recognized a much bigger opportunity, the two said.

“Car entertainment today is limited, you have small screens, people get sick. Here we’re expanding this potential,” Profendiner told TechCrunch before a demo at CES 2019. “We wanted to create something that benefitted from moving.”

TechCrunch experienced what this VR future in the car might look and feel like. And it didn’t make either participant sick or nauseous. Part of the magic is that what users view through their VR headsets is matched with the movement of the vehicle. It’s what made TechCrunch guinea pigs Matt Burns, and myself, have trouble distinguishing just how fast we were moving while we had our VR headsets on. (It felt like 35 miles per hour during the 10 minute demo at Las Vegas Speedway. We learned the vehicle was traveling at speeds of up to 90 mph.)

AudiExperienceRide

The interesting piece is what Holoride plans to do with this tech. The company is keen on making this an open platform and agnostic in every way.

Holoride hopes to have a software development kit out by the end of the year that it can share to content and game developers. The SDK will serve as the interface to the vehicle data and transfer those into virtual realities. This allows the developer to create movies and games that will synchronize with the user’s motion as they sit in the backseat of a vehicle. Conventional movies, series or presentations can also be viewed with a significantly reduced chance of motion sickness, according to Audi. 

Holoride plans to launch the VR entertainment on the market within the next three years using standard VR glasses for backseat passengers. The company sees other opportunities to expand and incorporate the surrounding environment, like a traffic jam, becoming a part of the experience. For example, stopping at traffic lights could introduce unexpected obstacles to a game or interrupt a learning program with a quick quiz, the company said.

Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple is taking 3 to 5 commercial trips a day

A little more than a year ago, autonomous trucking startup TuSimple —flush with a fresh round of venture capital — was preparing to scale up its testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S.

TuSimple, a China-based company with an R&D facility in San Diego and test operations in Tucson, has put that money to use.

The startup, which launched in 2015, is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona, TuSimple said Monday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip.

That’s a milestone for TuSimple and the burgeoning autonomous trucking industry, which is getting increasingly crowded.

TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers. The company did say it has 12 contracted customers.

TuSimple isn’t slowing down either. The startup plans to expand from the 11 autonomous trucks it has operating in the U.S. today to 40 by June. An additional route from Arizona to Texas will come online in early 2019, the company said.

“Exactly one year after debuting our prototype system at CES 2018, we’re now running up to five commercial trips a day in Arizona, expanding our fleet and moving quickly toward our goal of creating the first commercial self-driving truck,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.tusimple truck

TuSimple, which is displaying a Navistar International LT semi-truck at CES, also announced that it’s working with Tier 1 supplier Cummins Inc.to enable powertrain integration with its autonomous technologies.

TuSimple, which is backed by Nvidia and Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is working on a “full-stack solution.” This wonky industry term means TuSimple is developing and bringing together all of the technological pieces required for autonomous driving. The startup is developing a Level 4 system, a designation by the SAE that means the vehicle takes over all of the driving in certain conditions.

An important piece of TuSimple’s approach is its camera-centric perception solution. Much of the autonomous vehicle tech industry has focused on LiDAR to improve the perception of the vehicle, arguably one of the most difficult tasks of automated driving. But LiDAR has its limitations, especially for trucks traveling at speeds of 55 miles per hour and faster on highways.

LiDAR can detect objects like cars to about 250 meters, although the optimal quality falters past 150 meters.  TuSimple’s camera-based system has a vision range of 1,000 meters, the company says.

Tesla breaks ground on Shanghai factory which will product Model 3 EVs for China

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company’s first overseas factory in Shanghai will focus on producing Model 3 vehicles for the Chinese market only.

Musk is currently in China to break ground on the new factory today, which is being developed in partnership with the Shanghai government — an ally that is likely to be incredibly useful. The deal was announced by Tesla in July and it was followed quickly by the opening of Model 3 pre-orders for China-based customers in November.

Initial construction of the Shanghai factory is set to be completed by the summer, according to Musk, who said that he expects production to begin before the end of this year. The facility is aimed at churning out 500,000 EVs a year when it reaches full production, which should happen during next year, all being well.

Musk clarified on Twitter — his go-to for public announcements — that Tesla’s U.S. facilities will continue to manufacture vehicles for the U.S. and other markets.

Tesla isn’t the only one planting manufacturing roots down in the country. Byton, a U.S-China rival founded by former BMW and Infiniti executives, said this week it is on track to complete production of a plant in Nanjing by May. The outpost will have a capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year, the company said.

In June, Byton secured a $500 million Series B funding round from investors FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. The company has raised $850 million from investors in addition to loans and subsidies from China.

Despite optimism behind the Shanghai project, China has been the source of concerns for Tesla in recent times.

The country has reduced subsidies for green vehicles while its ongoing trade spat with the U.S. is raising concerns for U.S. businesses looking to reach consumers in the middle kingdom. Tesla’s share price dropped by nearly eight percent before the New Year after the company reduced the price of the Model 3 by seven percent in China. That followed reductions to the Model X and Model S in November, and it also coincided with Musk pledging to reimburse tax credits to U.S. customers who miss them because their pre-December order isn’t delivered before the end of the year.

Still, the Chinese market is the largest in the world for electric vehicles and hugely important for future growth.

The country is said to already account for 35 percent of global EV sales, according to Bloomberg intelligence, which reports that cumulative sales reach four million in August 2018. That’s just the start. Chinese city Shenzhen, known as the world’s mecca for hardware technology, has replaced all buses with electric versions and 99 percent of its taxis, and the government wants 20 percent of all car sales to be plug-in hybrids or battery-powered models by 2025 — that’s around seven million cars per day.

Tesla breaks ground on Shanghai factory which will product Model 3 EVs for China

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company’s first overseas factory in Shanghai will focus on producing Model 3 vehicles for the Chinese market only.

Musk is currently in China to break ground on the new factory today, which is being developed in partnership with the Shanghai government — an ally that is likely to be incredibly useful. The deal was announced by Tesla in July and it was followed quickly by the opening of Model 3 pre-orders for China-based customers in November.

Initial construction of the Shanghai factory is set to be completed by the summer, according to Musk, who said that he expects production to begin before the end of this year. The facility is aimed at churning out 500,000 EVs a year when it reaches full production, which should happen during next year, all being well.

Musk clarified on Twitter — his go-to for public announcements — that Tesla’s U.S. facilities will continue to manufacture vehicles for the U.S. and other markets.

Tesla isn’t the only one planting manufacturing roots down in the country. Byton, a U.S-China rival founded by former BMW and Infiniti executives, said this week it is on track to complete production of a plant in Nanjing by May. The outpost will have a capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year, the company said.

In June, Byton secured a $500 million Series B funding round from investors FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. The company has raised $850 million from investors in addition to loans and subsidies from China.

Despite optimism behind the Shanghai project, China has been the source of concerns for Tesla in recent times.

The country has reduced subsidies for green vehicles while its ongoing trade spat with the U.S. is raising concerns for U.S. businesses looking to reach consumers in the middle kingdom. Tesla’s share price dropped by nearly eight percent before the New Year after the company reduced the price of the Model 3 by seven percent in China. That followed reductions to the Model X and Model S in November, and it also coincided with Musk pledging to reimburse tax credits to U.S. customers who miss them because their pre-December order isn’t delivered before the end of the year.

Still, the Chinese market is the largest in the world for electric vehicles and hugely important for future growth.

The country is said to already account for 35 percent of global EV sales, according to Bloomberg intelligence, which reports that cumulative sales reach four million in August 2018. That’s just the start. Chinese city Shenzhen, known as the world’s mecca for hardware technology, has replaced all buses with electric versions and 99 percent of its taxis, and the government wants 20 percent of all car sales to be plug-in hybrids or battery-powered models by 2025 — that’s around seven million cars per day.

Byton has added yet another screen to its upcoming all-electric M-Byte SUV

Byton, the China-based electric car startup that made its debut at CES last year, is back to show what the finalized interior of its upcoming M-Byte SUV will look like.

The giant 48-inch wraparound digital dashboard screen that received so much attention is staying. And so is the touchscreen drive tablet located at the center of the steering wheel — although its size and design has changed.

No, Byton didn’t remove anything. It’s adding more.

Byton is adding an 8-inch touch pad between the driver and the front seat passengers on the production model of the M-Byte, executives revealed Monday at the CES 2019 in Las Vegas.

That means the electric vehicle with an estimated range of about 325 miles has one massive screen that takes up the entire dashboard and two touch pads in front — one for the driver and another that’s accessible to the driver and front seat passenger. Then there’s the independent rear-seat entertainment touchscreens for the backseat passengers. There are seven tablets in all.Byton M-Byte interior CES 2019

Byton did decrease the size of the driver tablet, which is at the center of the steering wheel just above the driver airbag, to 7 inches and added some hard buttons.

Adding more to an already splashy and futuristic vehicle is unusual in an automotive world where automakers typically strip out these high-concept items once the vehicle heads production.

There is a reason for all of these screens, Byton says. And that’s a digital cloud platform that the company calls Byton Life, which connects apps and smart devices, and of course, all that data. Each seat will be equipped with facial recognition that recognizes the passenger and driver and delivers personalized information like their schedule and entertainment preferences. It can even take health diagnostics.

The vehicle will also be able to recognize voices of different users and sounds from different directions in the car. So everyone in the car can ask the vehicle to play their own music, for example. 

In North American and European markets, Byton is working with Amazon Alexa to jointly develop voice control. 

Byton CES 2019 interior

Byton is sticking with its rotating front seats that can move inward 12 degrees to make it easier interact and communicate with each other when the vehicle is not in motion. This might seem like an odd feature for a vehicle that will not be fully autonomous. It’s the kind of detail that shows up in a lot of autonomous vehicle design concepts.

The M Byte SUV will not come equipped with a Level 4 system, a designation by SAE International that means the car takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. Instead, it will have come out with Level 2 capabilities, which means the vehicle has combined automated features such as steering and acceleration, but still requires the human driver to remain and ultimately responsible.

The dashboard design has been tweaked as well. It now has hard buttons located in the center along with a driver monitoring system to ensure safety during assisted-driving modes.

Byton CES 2019

Back when Byton first revealed its SUV concept at CES in January 2018, founders Daniel Kirchert, who is president, and CEO Carsten Breitfeld said it was close to what the final production version would look like. It’s about 80% complete, Kirchert told TechCrunch back in August, adding that the prototype has modest changes from the concept, including a slight changes to the height and headlights as well as improvements to the door latches.

The company, which was founded in 2016, now has 1,500 employees and plans to produce the M-Byte by the end of this year.

Electric car startup Byton on track to complete China factory by May

China-based electric vehicle startup Byton is on track to complete construction of its factory by May, company executives said Sunday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas.

The plant is being constructed in Nanjing, China and will have a capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year. The main body of the factory, which includes the stamping, painting, welding, assembly and battery, is currently under construction.  Manufacturing equipment in the factory will be supplied by AIDA Engineering of Japan, and KUKA and DÜRR of Germany. The company is also working with key strategic investors FAW and CATL, and suppliers Bosch, BOE, and Faurecia.

Completing the construction of the plant is just the first step, albeit a big one.

“We have made solid progress in the construction of our Nanjing plant and prototype vehicle testing,” Byton co-founder and president Daniel Kirchert said Sunday. “This is a vital year for Byton and our global team is sparing no efforts to achieve our goal of volume production.”

The company, which was founded by former BMW and Infiniti executives, is planning to debut a production version of its upcoming M-Byte SUV in mid-2019 with mass production to begin at the end of the year. The company is testing its vehicle in China, Europe, and the United States in a lead up to production.

In June, Byton secured a $500 million Series B funding round from investors FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. The company has raised $850 million as well as loans and subsidies from China.

Elon Musk angles to keep his ex and ‘420’ Twitter drama out of lawsuit

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking to keep his ex-girlfriend Grimes and alleged acquaintance Azealia Banks out of the official record of a lawsuit concerning his “420” “joke” that brought the SEC down on him. An attempt to subpoena both Grimes and Banks was met with stiff opposition by Musk’s lawyer, who accused the plaintiffs of attempting to sensationalize the case.

As you may remember — though it seems so long ago now — Musk tweeted that he was “considering taking Tesla private at $420,” adding “Funding secured.”

Those initiated in weed culture recognized the nod to the official time of day for getting high, and soon afterwords came Instagram posts from Azealia Banks claiming that she had been staying at his place at the time at the invite of Grimes, that he had been high at the time of the tweet and that the share price was chosen as a clumsy joke to impress his girlfriend.

There were also questions as to the actual existence of funding, the wisdom of announcing such an important thing on Twitter without telling his board, and so on, leading to action by the SEC and shareholders. As part of a lawsuit filed by the latter, the plaintiffs wanted to subpoena Banks and Grimes (real name Claire Elise Boucher), whom they suggested had relevant evidence. Musk’s attorney, Dean Kristy, pushed back in a motion of opposition.

He first complains that the plaintiffs did not follow procedure, but then suggests that Grimes is uninvolved and Banks is a “rapper” (in shade quotes) and a crank. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

Moreover, by targeting Mr. Musk’s girlfriend at the time (who has never worked for Tesla) and, according to published reports, a “rapper” who, based on the articles plaintiff has submitted, has a “history of making bold and sometimes unverified claims,” is a “veteran of long and nonsensical beefs [and has] feuded with everyone from Sarah Palin to Nick Cannon,” and has been “banned” from Twitter (see Pl. Exs. A, B), it is readily apparent that this is more of an effort to sensationalize these proceedings than a serious, legitimate effort to preserve “electronic documents” of third parties with first-hand knowledge of important facts.

A history of Banks’s greatest hits on social media followed, which I need not recap here.

Not only that, but there is no evidence, Kristy wrote, that Grimes, Banks or the media outlets also named were likely to discard any relevant evidence (Gizmodo, for example, is not going to delete its post on the whole affair, which is no doubt still getting traffic), for which additional reason the request should be denied.

Whether the plaintiffs will succeed in officially involving the parties in question is not for me to say, but it seems clear that at the very least they have unofficially involved them. Whether that proves a benefit or hindrance to their case in the end is similarly up in the air.

Cruise and DoorDash to test food delivery using self-driving cars in San Francisco

Cruise is partnering with DoorDash to pilot food and grocery delivery in San Francisco using self-driving vehicles.

The companies announced Thursday that the testing program will begin in early 2019 with an initial focus on the San Francisco market.

“Delivery is a significant opportunity for Cruise as we prepare to commercialize our autonomous vehicle technology and transform transportation,” said Dan Ammann, who became CEO of Cruise late last year. “Partnering with DoorDash will provide us with critical learnings as we further our mission to deliver technology that makes people’s lives better and more convenient.” Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt stepped down as CEO and now holds the CTO position at the company.

The program will be available to select DoorDash customers, who will be able to receive deliveries from restaurants via a Cruise autonomous vehicle. The partnership will also explore grocery fulfillment via Cruise vehicles for select grocers already partnered with DoorDash.

“We see autonomous vehicles playing a major role in the future of delivery as consumer behaviors continue to shift online, and we are confident Cruise’s leading technology will help us scale to meet growing consumer demand,”  DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said in a statement.

The pilot program adds an interesting twist to Cruise’s plans to launch a self-driving ride-hailing service in 2019. The partnership with DoorDash could be viewed as a way for Cruise to perfect its tech and how it can be used in different ways, particularly how it interacts with people.

Auto marketplace CarDekho grabs $110M to double down on insurance and financial services

CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round from a clutch of existing investors to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Sequoia India, Hillhouse and Alphabet’s CapitalG led the round which also saw participation from Axis Bank, one of CarDekho’s financing partners.

[Update] The company confirmed that the deals gives it a valuation of $400-$500 million, that’s in line with a report from Economic Times one month ago. The figure is up slightly on a reported $360 million valuation from CarDekho’s previous fundraising in 2016.

The deal takes the company to $185 million to date from investors, which also include Times Internet, Ratan Tata — Tata Group’s Chairman Emeritus — HDFC Bank and Dentsu.

Founded in 2005 as GirnarSoft, CarDekho operates a range of online portals that sell new and second-hand cars and motorbikes in India. The company has also branched out into Southeast Asia where it operates portals in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia and, on the content side, it operates a YouTube channel and an auto blog and reviews site.

CarDekho claims 39 million monthly unique visitors to its websites, and six million downloads of its apps. On the finance side, it said revenue went from 114 crores ($16.3 million) in the 2016-2017 financial year to 160 crore ($22.8 million) in 2017-18. (The Indian financial calendar runs from April 1 to March 31.)

CarDekho claims to work “actively” with 5,000 dealerships in India while it has direct retail partnerships with eight car and motorbike makers. It claims to influence 42 percent of sales for those dealerships and 15-30 percent of annual sales for those auto- and bike makers, although the company didn’t provide specific details on how it calculates those figures.

Beyond helping facilitate sales, it also offers car financing in partnership with over 10 financial entities who offer terms to its customers. It has provided insurance options too since 2017 and, with this new funding in the bag, it said that it intends to double down and build out more “transaction services” that go hand-in-hand with auto sales.

“Our contribution to a person buying a new car has grown manifold and this will continue to be a bulwark for us. Our used cars engine has scaled up tremendously and has also enabled us to incubate allied businesses like insurance and finance business as they are one of the largest opportunities ahead of us. The opportunity lies in extending formal credit and insurance coverage to the new-to-formal economy population and will continue to be a focus area for us” said CEO and co-founder Amit Jain in a statement.

CarDheko is rivaled by the likes of CarTrade, which is backed Temasek and Warburg Pincus and previous gobbled up rival CarWale, Truebil and Cars24, a service that buys cars from consumers and resells them to dealers. Notably, Sequoia India is also an investor in Cars24.

Tesla stock price crashes 10% on vehicle price cut, missed delivery estimates

Tesla is starting out 2019 in the red following news it missed Wall Street’s delivery estimates. The company said in a letter to investors that it delivered 90,700 vehicles during the fourth quarter. That’s a bit shy of what analysts expected. This, in part, caused the company’s stock to open nearly 8 percent down on the day.

Tesla stock price is down 10 percent as of publication.

The company also announced before the bell that it is cutting $2,000 off the price of a Model S, Model X and Model 3. This is likely in response to the sunsetting of the $7,500 federal tax credit that helped offset the price of Tesla’s vehicles. Starting on January 1, that tax credit is now worth only $3,750.

In the last few days of 2018, Tesla made a large push to get buyers into vehicles to take advantage of the original tax credit. It even kept 44 Tesla showrooms open on New Year’s Eve until midnight to give buyers as much time as possible.

Tesla managed to increase the amount of vehicles it delivered during the last quarter, increasing the amount by 8 percent. In a letter to investors, the company said it delivered 13,500 Model S sedans, 14,050 Model X SUVs and 63,150 Model 3s. It was a record quarter for Tesla, but the numbers still fell short of what Wall Street expected, according to research firm, FactSet.

The company is facing headwinds as it attempts to scale production and fight off an increasing amount of competitors in its space.