qasar

Agreed. AV regulation is early and we're involved in that conversation. We (and I think many in this business) deeply care about safety and believe better technical understanding among lawmakers around software safety will result in better laws. Re: mythical man-month and pareto - 100% true for all AV makers but theory and practice is different. I imagine both their investors and their perception of market forces drive decisions to some degree. This is where you see some gaps (not always) between traditional software lineage companies and traditional OEMs.

We're super familiar with CarMaker -- great for dynamics and some level 2 stuff but there are some big difference between autonomy levels (from simulation perspective at least). At higher levels, autonomy algo development is more like modern software development. CarMarker is a fantastic product (along with CarSim, dSpace ASM...etc) but they were built for a different use cases. A very crude analogy would be tools for J2MEE vs modern tools for iOS/Android. Our product is available, just not very public about our more detailed approaches because that is really where our IP is. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat. Obv, i'm super interested in the topic.

Qasar here (x-YC founder and partner). So im building a simulation company. Not commenting on Uber specifically but the reason lots of companies don't have great efforts is simulation is actually really hard. It’s not building a web application (tested methodologies, established best practices, lots of experienced engineers in the space...etc).

You can get a lot done (and get wonderful demos) through research vehicles. The issue with sim is similar to the issues with AVs as a whole - getting to 90% is much easier than getting to 99.9999%.

Also, there is this weird thing in AV (and specifically in-house sim) where pointy-haired managers think "if we put 30 SWEs on the problem - we'll make progress!". While raw eng horsepower matters in some software problems, when you are on the line between research and engineering, more SWEs might actually make getting a robust product up harder.

Another thing we've seen is in-house efforts overfit solutions. They don't really have a wide viewpoint (nature of how secretive the space is), and therefore go down paths which are just plain wrong but no one is there to challenge them.