A couple of years ago there was a new article on the front page pretty much every day about the great new thing that will change our lives--3D printing. I'm worried that whatever happened to 3D printing is about to happen to self driving. What did happen to 3D printing?
What happened to 3D printing (ran and sold a small startup in this space):
We realized that the vision of a 3D printer in every house was absurd. Consumer ≠ designer. Amazon is cheaper, faster, easier, higher quality unless I am putting on my design/engineering hat and doing R&D/NPI.
We realized that 3D printers are just manufacturing tools, albeit really interesting ones. They belong in places where you might find CNC machines, laser cutters, etc.
Lots of technologies are maturing and costs are coming down as the ecosystem moves from a high margin low volume prototyping mindset to a low margin high volume manufacturing mindset (look up MJF, EBAM, DMLS, EBM, CLIP, LOM, etc. in addition to the well known FDM and SLA technologies).
I second this. I'm part of an university team building a racecar and we mostly use additive manufacturing for carbon fibre parts that are difficult to lay by hands, such as the intake and certain wings. For this we just need basic polymers. It's a cost issue.
However, this year we are starting to build functional components. We are looking at printing the brake cooling ducts - they need to survive 200 C and 400 bar.
The biggest problem in AM right now that I hear about is "how do we scale up"? Batches are very small and take a long time - to be truly useful, one needs to print a part in minutes, not days.
Most race car brake cooling air ducts are made of silicone and rated to at most 20psi (125kPa). Brake cooling ducts are powered primarily through ram air effect, and cost a few bucks a foot.
Not sure what OP is referring to, but if they're talking about a replacement to the 10-12cm high-temp diameter silicone air hose that typically gets routed to just front of brake rotors (and rated to 230C sustained, 260C intermittent), those measurements are MUCH higher than anything I've seen on genuine, real race cars, including WEC prototypes.
Now, the initial ducting may be made of a composite (including carbon fiber), which obviously can be tremendously strong, but the last bit of it is usually silicone.
Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).
You CAN use self-driving in limited circumstances, but those limitations are precisely the ones that make driving yourself around more attractive. The expense doesn't go down as quickly as anticipated because of this. They are a niche technology for DECADES.
Just like 3D printing -- the tech obviously works to an extent, but it's just not appealing for many use cases. Same with VR -- the tech works to an extent, but the content is not appealing to general audiences.
I'm happy to be proven wrong though, because I would be the first one to buy a self-driving car where I could fall asleep behind the wheel. I would love to take a trip from SF to Portland or LA like this.
> because I would be the first one to buy a self-driving car where I could fall asleep behind the wheel. I would love to take a trip from SF to Portland or LA like this.
You likely wouldn't be buying a car anymore when this becomes possible... this entire video series is about the replacement of individual car ownership with fleet based systems.
This is the big thing people don't factor in:
- the AI "problem" gets easier and easier the more cars talk to each other
- the average person won't need to 'afford' self-driving cars or buy add-ons for their cars, they'll just use Uber/Waymo and save money
- mass produced smaller fleet cars designed specifically for the job reduce costs per car
- fleet subscription prices to become cheaper and cheaper than owning a car (via competition, technical progress, etc), further increasing adoption
- 10x more developers/designers/traffic engineers start focusing on the problem (with real life/death consequences)
- 100x more real-time data is shared, thousands of new unexpected events become optimized each day
- AI cars get safer and safer, creating great social and altruistic pressure to not drive non-AI cars
- creating public health incentives as less traffic fatalities and law enforcement reduce expenditures
- countless businesses get wealthy off it (Waymo/Amazon/etc) and reinvest in the industry and R&D
- hundreds of billions in capital gets poured in rather than tens of billions
- traffic/infrastructure begins to be designed around them, dedicated lanes are built, further increasing the utility of using fleets/self-driving > manual
Once it hits a certain inflection point of adoption and utility it will be explosively exponential rate of adoption, just like smartphones.
Even if self-driving is AI complete , a taxi that knows how to self drive in the highway and easy areas of the city, but is remotely operated otherwise is extremely useful.
Add the ability to remotely drive a platoon of cars and it's even more interesting.
I think it will halve as the tech progresses, just due to optimization. Also, no windshield means better aerodynamic possibilities that could compensate for the loss.
Self-driving trucks that make 95% of the route on highways automatically, and only take a driver for a couple last miles and the loading-unloading operations would still be a huge disruptor.
It’s the same thing that’s happening to VR and lots of other things that are getting hyped before the hard problems are solved.
There’s been a serious epidemic in the last decade or so of mistaking solving the low hanging fruit for being “almost there.”
3D printing works ok for prototyping in certain scenarios, but it got hyped up for things it was nowhere near doing. Similarly everyone jumped all over VR assuming solving the hard problems that have always plagued it were just around the corner. Willfully ignorant over-optimism has been way too prevelant and I hope it is replaced with measured, informed pragmatism with lofty goals instead.
I agree that VR got a bit hyped. AM, however, is alive and well. The biggest issues are cost and time - AM takes a long time and requires an expensive machine. Thus you can print super-intricate structural parts of an airplane, but not brake pedals for common cars.
What happened to 2D printing? If you want a paperback copy of a book, do you download a PDF and then print it on your laser printer, or do you order a copy from Amazon / a store?
Cheap 3D printers produce only useless plastic trinkets. There isn't a big market for replacement parts that can't take any load, because those things don't break very often. Very few people need to print cases or the like in exotic forms. Buying traditionally manufactured stuff is cheaper than printing it yourself.
However, 3D printers are used in the industry. Not only for prototyping but also for producing parts that can't be machined easily.
Not disaagreeing. It is possible to print useful plastic items. But what I found interesting when doing the research for a product we where producing, was that the price per item on a €1800 3D printer was about the same as producing them in quantities up to 2500-5000 units in India. The difference obviously was how many you could produce in a month, and higher quality from the injection moulded stuff.
I had expected the price difference to be more. In the end we didn’t go to larger volumes due to weak interest in the product.
The main benefit, as you point out, was the fast turnaround in prototyping.
It went back to being an industrial tool, which is what it was before the "replicator" fad. There are now quite good 3D printers that can print strong parts. They're industrial machines found in factories. 3D printing as a job shop service is doing moderately well. The home 3D printer remains a niche product.
I have a 3D printer and never use it simply because I have more money than time. It can take hours to print anything useful. One problem and you have to start all over.
3D printing is a real technology that just doesn't make sense for a consumer product. Autonomous vehicles make a little more sense as a consumer product, but aren't anywhere close to being a real technology.
In particular, I'm always confused about how autonomous vehicles are supposed to solve congestion. There wouldn't be fewer cars on the road. Actually there would be more, because some percentage of the fleet would be en route to pick someone up rather than in use. And I see no chance of them reducing total trips.
But it's impossible to respond to a string of videos, so I don't know if this is relevant to the posted "article", which, it should be noted, is from a VC group that's _heavily_ invested in this tech and benefits from prolonging the hype.
3D printing is alive and kicking, and is a fantastic tool for the hacker/maker to have in his workshop. I use my cheap basic FDM printer (DaVinci 1.0) on a regular basis to make all sorts of things for my hobbies and business.
The manufacturing capabilities it has given me has absolutely revolutionized the way I think. I think back to before I purchased one, and I was so skeptical about whether it could produce any value at all. I assumed everything it would produce would be too weak to be of any value, and that the limitations of FDM would make parts too difficult to design. Well I was completely wrong and I only wish I had started down this path sooner.
I think my fantastic experiences with 3D printers is in part because I'm an experienced maker and a competent 3d modeller. I can knock up a prototype (like the Lipo balance charger circutry cradle I just finished) in an hour and have it on my desk in another half a dozen. Once I'm happy with that I can have another half a dozen ready for when I wake up in the morning.
Best of all it's just a tool. I never wanted a 3D printing hobby, and I haven't had to take one on. I put filament, power and my STLs in, and parts come out. I've had to repair the wiring loom on one stepper motor as it's a basic unit with no cable chains, but other than that it has been operated like a hammer or a soldering iron, on when I need it, off and on a shelf when I don't.
Sure 3D printers came out much cheaper (talking of FFF Fused Filament Fabrication or FDM Fused Deposition Modeling ) and much more precise/accurate, but still they are way too slow for any practical "final customer" use, outside the pure fun of it.
Other technologies are still too expensive (or again still too slow) to get anywhere soon in "every household".
In the professional world, set aside the "quick prototyping" field, and possibly a few other "narrow" fields, like jewelry and dentistry they can make "products" that either miss the mechanical capabilities of the "real" thing or that - if you can make them with suitable characteristics or materials - still cost tens of times as much as a same product manufactured industrially with more traditional means.
3D printers aren't material reassemblers. They replace milling and lathing when those methods take a day or more per part. You won't see it in your cupboard but rather a flight engineer might use it.
And yes, there is some use for such printers, but given their cost (and the cost per piece manufactured) they are limited to other very narrow and "rich" fields like aerospace.
I'm sure self driving will have a MUCH bigger impact on our lives than 3D printing. But it could take a pretty long time (really curious to see how long).
On the plus side, much less stress and much more time to do things we like/find useful; many less accidents. On the minus side, many, many lost jobs. In any case, considering how important cars are in our lives, it's a trasformative technology.
EDIT: It's 34%. And the cost per bus passenger trip is
$3.63. Yeah, I could see automatic cars (and buses) being cheaper that that, unless the average trip is very long.
The IRS reimbursement rate for auto expenses for business is about $0.50/mi. Uber rates (likely subsidized) are in the $1 - $1.50 range. You can argue about the details but your floor for self-driving cars is around what the cost to operate a vehicle is. Fleet operations have some economies of scale but they also have management and staffing costs.
Electric vehicles may someday bring down costs across the board.
Bottom line is that autonomous driving isn't a path to "too cheap to meter" transportation especially as it increases congestion in various ways.
My friend bought 3D printer to print a plastic kitchen cabinet hinge part he could not find elsewhere. After few days of ramping up he produced a near perfect replacement for a broken plastic part. That was a bit of an overkill, but it was more fun than anything. I don't think he printed anything useful since then.
I cannot think of anything that I would need to print. If anything, I need fewer plastic things in my life, not more.
3D printing is here, just not in the form envisioned by the media. Autonomous vehicles may be here soon, or they may take decades to be ready for prime time. There seem to be indications that autonomy, real autonomy, is hard and distant.
