Tesla's Semi launch puts autonomous trucking in the spotlight: One thing Tesla founder Elon Musk is good at doing is garnering amazing amounts of attention for his company's product launches, even when they won't be reality for years. It was no different this week with the unveiling of Tesla Semi, an electric, semi-autonomous tractor trailer Tesla says will be in production by 2019.
That timeline gives Tesla more than two years from today to actually deliver the first Semi, and it's no stretch to wonder whether it will meet even that mark, given problems the company has had scaling up production on its passenger vehicle lines. But Tesla is far from the only player in electric-powered trucking, with Daimler Automotive Group and Volvo two other notable entries with prototypes well underway.
What Tesla's announcement delivered is the kind of focused blast of hype that will push electric and autonomous trucks further into the mainstream conversation. Here's a look at some of the key issues at hand.
- Finding their range: Volvo has said its initial electric trucks will have a base range of about 150 miles, with the potential for 300 miles through additional battery packs. Tesla claims the Semi will have a 500-mile range, a distance that puts electric trucks in the long-haul game by circumventing the lack of a pervasive national charging system. While the trend in trucking over recent years has been to atomize routes into more regional runs, longer-range electric trucks will no doubt find appeal in the market.
- Expect consolidation and partnerships: What Tesla brings in sizzle to the trucking industry, it lacks in certain key substances like well-established channel relationships with semi-truck buyers, which range from retailers like Walmart to thousands of trucking firms large and small. This week, Tesla grabbed headlines noting that Walmart and other firms have already placed preorders for the Semi, but in the long run—no pun intended—the electric truck market will probably be dominated by the incumbent players, with Tesla and others partnering or licensing their innovations. However, stay tuned for marketing efforts aimed at the many independent truck owner-operators out there, who hitch their rigs to trailers from many different customers.
- What do truckers think?: Trucking industry jobs remain in high demand and despite predictions of an autonomous trucking future, major changes will take decades to implement. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of veteran truckers and ones just entering the workforce have to contemplate what the electric revolution could mean. Tesla's announcement of Semi drew quite a bit of attention this week from truckers on a popular industry forum.
Some of it was skeptical and even mocking, with posters questioning the effect of large numbers of electric trucks on the nation's power grid, or how they would be designed to handle situations like long wait and idling times at major loading ports. But others argued that the introduction of electric truck alternatives should serve as a wakeup call to traditional truck makers who have slipped on quality and safety metrics. The voices on the ground are important to hear in any major call for change, and trucking is no different.
Microsoft launching Cassandra-as-a-service: In one of several notable database-related announcements this week, Microsoft is prepping support for Cassandra in CosmosDB, its globally distributed database service. It will allow developers to use CosmosDB with the Cassandra SDKs and tools they're already familiar with, Microsoft said.
POV: With CosmosDB, Microsoft has delivered a next-generation, globally scalable database offering consistency and other performance advantages over NoSQL databases, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. It has also made this very new database accessible to developers by exposing it through familiar, open-source APIs, including those of MongoDB, DocumentDB, Gremlin Graph and Spark. "The Cassandra API adds yet another option, but one that's most consistent with the attributes of CosmosDB," Henschen adds. "Both Cassandra and CosmosDB excel in powering globally distributed applications, so the offering of a Cassandra-based cloud service on Azure running on CosmosDB is particularly attractive."
While CosmosDB is quite new, Microsoft executives insist that it's able to support all the features of the Cassandra API and will deliver performance that meets or, in the case of consistency, exceeds what's possible with a Cassandra database deployment. To that end, any company considering Cassandra as a managed service will surely put Microsoft's option on CosmosDB on its short list to try, Henschen says. "For now they'll be pioneers, as there’s not a long list of CosmosDB customers, and even fewer with experience using it with the Cassandra API. But with both CosmosDB and Google Spanner raising expectations for global database deployments without performance and consistency compromises, there will be plenty of tire kickers."
Amazon Web Services throws support behind neural network interoperability: A few months ago, Facebook, Microsoft and other notable tech companies formed the Open Neural Network Exchange, a project geared at fostering interoperability between deep learning technologies. Now Amazon Web Services has joined ONNX and is contributing ONNX-MXNet, a Python package that adds ONNX learning models to the deep learning framework Apache MXNet.
POV: Putting the acronym alphabet soup aside, what this means is a significant step forward for cooperation between rivals in an important area of AI research. Rather than forcing developers to re-implement deep learning models framework by framework, ONNX seeks to reduce or even eliminate that type of gruntwork, enabling the focus to be on innovation.