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Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Is Losing Out to Rivals

265 points by antouank 10y ago

vblord 10y ago
Am I the only one that it kinda bothers that this is a race to be the first one to market? In something like this, I'd rather wait a little bit and wait to see who has the best product rather than the first product.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I think it's more differentiated than that. There were big efforts to have convoys of trucks drive themselves on freeways many years ago. Freeway driving seems pretty solved and save at this point and probably more reliable than human drives. So not realising that does no good. Driving on icy country roads with pedestrians walking on the side is a totally different story. So I think we need to look at this by functionality. We will only learn sooner by releasing mature functionality sooner and can fund research toward more automation. I don't think this is fundamentally different than releasing a web site with all the features you could want on day one. Granted it's like a website handling incredibly important operations that you don't want to go wrong. But that's similar to banking websites, health care applications etc. We didn't insist surgery robots to be a full surgery replacement day one.
cesis 10y ago
I would love some simple self driving - pick me up in the front of the supermarket, automatically find a parking spot etc.
- rtkwe 10y ago
  There's not a lot of space between that and full self driving on highways and surface streets really. You get rid of a few sign reading needs but your car still has to have the full suite of sensors and compute power to monitor its surroundings.
calebm 10y ago
Google likes data... I wonder if they're considering giving Chauffeur away to automakers, contingent on building in the ability to gather data from it.
mdorazio 10y ago
Google is "losing out" in the sense that it's actually making an effort to perfect the technology to the point where a car can safely drive itself with no driver, while everyone else (Tesla, Uber, etc.) is happy to rush to market with options that still require an attentive person behind the wheel. These are different focuses that have different outcomes and time scales, as the last part of the article says.
- mcphilip 10y ago
  Agreed. My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon as competitors claim. For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge. How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention?
  - pinko 10y ago
    I agree with your point, but I'm not sure about your example! Can't self-driving cars "see" around the blind corner much earlier than a human could due to the fact that they have sensors on the very front of the car, as opposed to our "sensors" (eyes) back behind the windshield? They might do better!
    - Strom 10y ago
      Not only the placement, but with radars [1] you can see through a bunch of objects like trees, wooden fences, and indeed also hedges. Of course making sense of the data in a completely new environment is hard. This is where fleet learning helps a lot. [1] This one police radar seems to also nicely work through stone http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38 http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38
    - smileysteve 10y ago
      The self driving car can also react without a >=.7 second reaction time; which, at 60 mph is nearly 100 feet.
camillomiller 10y ago
There's a curious amount of FUD going on lately about every non-automotive company's efforts in the field of car automation.
gthtjtkt 10y ago
> it could be 20 to 25 years before most trips in cities will be provided by autonomous vehicles, he added. Ouch, I had no idea it was that far away. Hard to believe that when Uber is already testing with passengers in cities, though.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  The average lifespan of a car in California is 19 years. Let X = # of years before true class 4 self driving cars are available to buy Let Y = # of years after introduction before class 4 self driving cars are the majority sold Let Z = # of years after Y where self driving cars provide the majority of trips. Z could be 19/2, but we can probably assume that newer cars are used for more miles than the older ones, so Z is probably somewhere between 5 and 10. That could mean that X+Y is as little as ten years away. X=5 and Y=5 both seem fairly optimistic to me.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I fully expect it will be decades before I could order a self-driving car with no driver aboard in Manhattan or Boston. It's certainly possible that fully autonomous driving systems under some subset of conditions like limited access highways will be available sooner--maybe much sooner--but, of course, that doesn't enable the use cases that excites people who don't want to own cars etc.
  - kilroy123 10y ago
    I agree with you. However, I do think it _is_ possible to have it sooner. However, not without a massive investment and effort from many different players working together. Government involvement, etc.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      That's probably fair. One the one hand, nine women, one baby etc. On the other hand, if there were widespread adoption of standards, infrastructure were modified to smooth over some of the hard bits (e.g. transponders in construction zones), possibly remote operators setup for if cars get stuck, etc. adoption could be accelerated at least somewhat. I still think the generalized door-to-door driverless experience is a lot harder than many are giving it credit for though. The government involvement in a positive direction will probably be somewhat tough. It's not hard to frame this as a job-destroying technology initially primarily for the benefit of the better off.
CPLX 10y ago
> Uber Technologies Inc., founded in 2009, will soon let users of its popular ride-sharing app hail autonomous Volvo SUVs in Pittsburgh. I have a feeling that piece of news requires extraordinarily loose interpretations of the words "autonomous" or "soon".
- nsgoetz 10y ago
  "Soon" actually is already. Source: I live in Pittsburgh, have seen the self-driving cars on the road, and friends have driven in then. I unfortunately, have not lucked into a ride in one yet.
- svantana 10y ago
  Actually it will begin any day now [1], however they failed to mention that there will be a driver behind the wheel -- i.e. doing what google has been doing for years already, but also picking up passengers. Seems to me it's mainly a PR move... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring-it-on-how-pittsburgh-became-ubers-testing-ground.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring...
  - criddell 10y ago
    The cynic in me would say it's a PR move. The nerd would say it's a way to gather real world data and offset some of the costs of doing so.
    - gthtjtkt 10y ago
      Rides are free if you get one of the self-driving cars.
      - petra 10y ago
        That's step 1. Later rides will be cheaper and than at the same cost ,and I'm sure Uber could get plenty of people .
  - CPLX 10y ago
pilooch 10y ago
Google wants car-bots to roam the streets and crawl the real world, much as they did in the digital space. They just need a flow of automated cars to blend into.
frogpelt 10y ago
I have so many questions about the Uber program in Pittsburgh. Does it take instructions? Can the rider change his mind? What happens if a fight breaks out in the car? Will there be a hotline you can call if your car goes rogue? Or just parks and won't move? I guess these questions are why they are doing a pilot program.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- graupel 10y ago
  I think there's still going to be a human in the drivers seat, at least for the foreseeable future?
- hammock 10y ago
  Ignoring the fact that there will be a driver in the car, these are all previously solved problems for autonomous rail transit.
  - frogpelt 10y ago
    Yes rails make things a lot simpler.
- smileysteve 10y ago
  > What happens if a fight breaks out in the car? What happens if a fight breaks out in the car of an Uber driver?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Fricken 10y ago
Classic Google troll. Get everyone salivating for glorious, apocolyptic disruption, scare the crap out of the traditional auto industry, incite a mad scramble that mobilizes billions of dollars and thousands of men, and then turn around and say 'well, actually... this is really hard, guys.'
- josefresco 10y ago
  Can you name another Google instance of "well, actually... this is really hard, guys.". The only thing that jumps to my mind is Google Glass?
  - akerro 10y ago
    Modular phone project abandoned a few days ago. I really hoped it would bring to the end stupid era of endless consumption where you have to replace your whole phone just to get better camera or remove micro-jack.
    - Zigurd 10y ago
      I called that shot the first time I read about it. There are zero successful modular consumer electronics products. The near-trivial analog connectivity between stereo components is as close as modularity has ever come in that business, and that's really an example of how, at best, modularity attracts customers that resemble audiophiles (and wannabes), which may not be an ideal target market.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        And in the case of stereos, bigger and heavier components wasn't really a bug. In fact, to many it was seen as something of a feature.
      - mhermher 10y ago
        Desktop computers are still pretty popular. Especially among PC gamers. That is the only example I can think of to refute your comment. Edit: but it only works because of the space in a PC tower. It doesn't work for laptops, and I was sort of in the same boat as you. I couldn't imagine it would work for phones. Specifically that they are so space constrained.
jonnat 10y ago
Google has no intention to beat its competitors in the self-driving cars space, and I suspect it has never actually wanted to produce such cars for mass use. What it does want is to make self-driving cars widely used, because that would mean that the time currently wasted in commuting by car could turn into increased internet usage, which drives Google's revenue. That's why Google was an early investor in Uber. Its efforts in building self-driving technology are intended as a catalyst for the industry, in which case it seem to have been a success.
- visarga 10y ago
  If Google wanted to increase internet usage, instead of self driving cars it would invest more in decent remote working technology. Not needing to drive beats laptoping in your car. But I think Google imagines itself as an "AI company", and self driving cars are just one of the goalposts of AI. I have to admit, I am frustrated by the secrecy of their development process, years passed and nothing of essence was announced about their progress.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    I think Google's got chips in both games. https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/ https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/
- aetherson 10y ago
  This is an absurd claim. The idea that Google has poured billions into a decade-long project to solve an extremely hard technology problem in order to lure people into marginally more internet use that will help Facebook as much as Google? When, if that technology problem is solved by Google, there is genuinely a big business in it?
devy 10y ago
The two main ways for Google to commercialize the technology are by including Chauffeur, the name for its self-driving software, in cars made in high volume by existing auto manufacturers ... Is Chauffeur a generic name for driving log software or it's just so incidental that it happens to be same name Comma.ai picked for their own driving log app? [1] [1]: http://comma.ai/ http://comma.ai/
- kersny 10y ago
  Google has been using that name semi-publicly since at least 2011.
- seren 10y ago
  Chauffeur comes from French and means "hired driver". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur It would be like calling a generic domestic robot 'Butler'. So it makes sense for an autonomous driving solution.
sharemywin 10y ago
I think this just show that these tech companies hoarding 100s of Billions dollars so they can defeat the next threat is just a complete waste and would be much better in the hands of investors as dividends.
PinguTS 10y ago
> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology. Always wondering who writes up that shit. Car makers are way long before in autonomous driving. It is a huge difference in "just doing things and not talking about as long as technology is not ready" vs. "talking about technology and presenting even unfinished products." Especially Tesla is very big in the later once. Car makers are in self driving since technology went into cars. Without that research we would not had any driving assistants these days. I remember mid 1990s when I was an intern at then DASA (Daimler Benz Aerospace) and they worked with a self-driving S-class powered by a new chipset developed by then TEMIC (now Continental) based on Radar technology. Today we have this technology in any decent new car as part of the adaptive cruise control. Back then the test drives where made on a airport runway.
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  It's pretty interesting how little the tech press seems to know about the efforts of the established car manufacturers. > Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology. Luxury cars (Audis / Mercedes / Jaguars / BMWs) have had semi-autonomous options for at least 10 years with lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, etc. They've been working on the technology for decades. Improvements in the accuracy and cost of sensors along with processing power makes this a much easier problem now but to say they hadn't considered this before is so silly.
- csours 10y ago
  1956 GM Motorama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak It looks kind of (extremely) ridiculous now, but think about all the things that changed between then and now. The iPhone is ubiquitous now, but it only came out in 2007, and we really only got modern cellular internet after that. I think that the Smartphone revolution had a huge impact on the way most people think, to the point where it is hard to remember what life was like before them. The autonomous, decentralized nature of smartphones, along with the cloud for updates and backup is beyond game changing, and software designed before this REALLY shows its age. DISCLAIMER: I work for GM, any opinions are solely my own, etc.
simonsarris 10y ago
It seems like both Google and Apple are having big troubles with their car programs. For either of them, why not attempt to acquire Tesla? Wouldn't that launch point give them a huge leg up against the other?
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  I'm not sure either of them really wants to be in the car business.
- PinguTS 10y ago
  Google has no interest in actually building cars. Google has an interest to collect the data and for such sell (or even may giving it for free) the software collecting the data. Google is a data driven company and not a hardware manufacturer. Even that Google is building their own hardware in regards of server, server racks, and such think. But all that is only to support their data driven model. The problem here is, that car makers have no interest to buying this software from Google and as such selling the data to Google. They want to keep the data to them-self.
- rhino369 10y ago
  Telsa is still a niche car company, and despite their PR their autonomous tech isn't really better than other luxury car companies. In fact it might be worse and Tesla is more willing to just beta test in production. But I doubt either company wants to actually deal with automotive manufacturing and sales. They'd be better off just being a supplier to car companies. You'd go buy a Ford Fusion with the Google Self Driving package, or something similar. There were rumors Apple would actually build cars, but I think they were either wrong or Apple gave up. It's not that profitable of an industry.
georgeecollins 10y ago
From a strategy perspective it always seems like you develop better with a clear incremental goal, even when the increments are huge. In that sense, Tesla has a clear goal to incrementally improve its cars. Uber has a clear goal to augment its service. Next steps for Google? Apple? I'm not surprised they are drifting.
Jabbles 10y ago
Is there any (non-PR) advantage of driving around with a passenger as well as a backup-driver?
- IanCal 10y ago
  Feedback from users, a measure of how comfortable people are with the idea, and if people are OK with it, then spreading the idea of driverless cars being safe and normal (which I consider differently to PR, but feel free to ignore it). You also ensure that you're taking the same type and length of trips at the same time of day as you otherwise would be. You now also don't need an extra car. Instead of one car taking passengers and one gathering data, you only need a single car doing both. So it's cheaper and you get more information, as well as more accurate information from it.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  If you look around the internet at objections to self-driving cars, many of those objections are based on fear. So finding out if self driving cars actually scare people is probably a good thing. Even if they don't outright scare people, the behavior of a self-driving car will be different, and maybe some of those differences are unpleasant for riders.
  - kmonsen 10y ago
    Once there are uber rides for half price if self driving, it is going to change a lot of opinions.
gourou 10y ago
> Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence They completely left out that Google has a lot of Waze data (50 million users)
- kevin_b_er 10y ago
  This is because the statement is utterly deceptive. They're comparing miles driven with an uber app being on vs google's autonomous car driving miles. It would've been a much better comparison to compare uber app miles with waze or google maps. They probably don't because that comparison would not fit with their goal of attacking google.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  But not Waze data with a camera or sensors outside of GPS
  - gberger 10y ago
    The same can be said for Uber.
    - a13n 10y ago
      But not for Tesla
- monocasa 10y ago
  Uber also bought all of the data from Bing Maps, and hand categorizing the lot of it. I'm sure Google is doing something similar with their maps data.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Very true. People don't realize how popular waze is, in other countries. In some countries, no on uses Google Maps, only waze.
- jonknee 10y ago
  And Google Maps which has hundreds of millions of users. You won't beat Google by having access to more information.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwaway7767 10y ago
So google's falling behind in self-driving car development because other companies have scaled back their expectations and are now focusing on vehicles that can't actually drive themselves? We seriously need new words to seperate "self-driving car" from "vehicle with driving assist systems". Something the marketers can't fuck up by diluting it. I suggest "Fully autonomous vehicle". This is like saying ITER has been overtaken in fusion power development because Dubai just installed a large solar collector plant that generates quite a lot of power. It's a ridiculous comparison and shifting of the goalposts.
- chadgeidel 10y ago
  There are already industry-defined standards for autonomy levels. Of course, there are multiple standards... https://www.2025ad.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Evergreen/Technology/Levels_of_Automation/Levels_Grafik_Lightbox.jpg https://www.2025ad.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Evergreen/Techn...
- rtkwe 10y ago
  There is a scale that's been defined but getting news and articles to use them appropriately is an uphill battle. It'll help when it becomes a more common thing so more people get used to the difference. http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Department+of+Transportation+Releases+Policy+on+Automated+Vehicle+Development http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Departm...
nkoren 10y ago
Bloody hell... when are journalists going to learn the difference between a car that doesn't always require a driver's hands on its steering wheel, and a car that doesn't require a driver. It's as fundamental as the difference between a carriage that has a extra-cool harness for the horse, and a carriage that doesn't have a horse.
- IMcD23 10y ago
  A carriage with no horse would be a car with no engine. I think you mean a carriage with no harness needed.
  - jm_l 10y ago
    perhaps a horse-drawn carriage in which the horses require only broad instruction
empath75 10y ago
It seems like the ideal endgame for something like this for google is patent licensing, in which case they don't actually need to produce a product themselves.
yalogin 10y ago
I understand Tesla's rush to market as it wants to sell cars to make money to feed its research/work. So it needs the marketing gimmick/advantage to sell more cars. But I don't get what Uber is getting by using partial autonomous vehicles. Their only goal is to replace its fleet with fully autonomous cars. To that end, outside of getting data I don't see anything else. By that logic I would be really surprised if they expanded their partial autonomous offering beyond what they have today.
- linkregister 10y ago
  It makes sense for Uber because it has unique legal issues. Every PR win and deal with a municipality decreases its headwinds for the next deal it makes with a city. Also it gives Uber an opportunity to debug the experience before actually releasing a fully autonomous vehicle. This service is different from the Tesla autopilot feature since it is aspirationally an autonomous vehicle. In Uber's case, it is expected the driver will have to actually take over in some corner case situations.
samfisher83 10y ago
A big issue with Autonomous tech is liability. I mean with a human you have a person you can blame. With a computer how will liability be handled? Is the companies fault. Is it owner of the car.
- FryHigh 10y ago
  Yes. This is also the problem with all Automation tech from the early days of AI.
danielmorozoff 10y ago
This is like claiming Amazon is building rockets better than spacex. Ones rockets go up and down , the others actually put things in orbit. Not the same, though they both use rockets. Comparing apples to oranges.
danielmorozoff 10y ago
This is like claiming Amazon is building rockets better than spacex. Ones rockets go up and down , the others actually put things in orbit. Not the same, though they both use rockets. Comparing apples to oranges.
muzster 10y ago
We all know how technology in Formula One cars improves road cars - why don't they (Google, Tesla, Apple etc ) compete on the race track ? - They could take baby steps first and compete in the time trials. It might even bring a whole new audience to the sport. Just a thought. Source: http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technology-improves-your-road-car_sto4975756/story.shtml http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technol...
- escoz 10y ago
  I love F1, but driving on a closed track (or highways, for what matters) is many orders of magnitude easier than dealing with traffic, people, bikes, other drivers, etc. BMW created this many years ago, and the car was better than most drivers already. Advancing track days doesn't really help much on bringing cars to cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA
ChuckMcM 10y ago
This is not something I expect to read in a Google story: "Tesla, with thousands of internet-connected cars on the road, has a similar data advantage, one former member of the Google car project said." But it is absolutely the case that data here trumps brilliance. Its really too bad that Google isn't still partnering with Uber rather than trying to compete with them.
Animats 10y ago
Google/Alphabet's corporate problem is that they have no clue about how to sell anything except ads. Even when Google sells something in a B2B context, Google expects to control the terms and offer the customer little recourse.[1] Automotive doesn't work like that. GM, for example, insists that if a supplier's part causes a recall, the supplier is responsible for the costs of the recall.[2] Auto manufacturers demand the right to send their inspectors into a supplier's plant. If supplier quality slips, the oversight becomes tougher. It has to be that way; a car has thousands of suppliers, many of whom can make the final product defective. The new head of Google's self-driving project is a car guy from Hyundai. He understands this. Google now has a center in Novi, MI where 100 self-driving mini-vans are being built in a joint venture with Fiat Chrysler. That's step 1. This is more of a management ego problem than a technical problem. Selling self-driving technology as an auto parts supplier doesn't fit with the "change the world" mentality. The automaker gets all the credit. Few people know the names of the major Tier I automotive suppliers. Microsoft ran into this once. Microsoft wanted the Microsoft logo to appear when the dashboard display booted up. They were insistent about this. The automaker involved went with QNX instead. [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla [2] http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-new-purchasing-contract/ http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-ne...
- karpodiem 10y ago
  Precisely. Manufacturing is hard/messy - the cavalier attitude that Apple/Google have with quality doesn't fly here. I'll believe that Tesla is a real player if they're able to scale to 500K/units a year.
  - FabHK 10y ago
    To be fair, Apple has been doing hardware since, well, the Apple I in 1976.
    - mey 10y ago
      Consumer electronics has slightly different engineering requirements, liabilities and scope than automobiles.
knodi123 10y ago
My wife and I now refer to this phenomenon as "getting oculused". When you come up with an amazing moonshot project, make a ton of amazing progress, and then, from an apparent outside perspective, completely stop making progress, at which point your competitors start from scratch, surpass you, and get to market first with something that has more features. Are there other big examples in history of this phenomenon? When a company announces a lot of genuinely pioneering progress at something, and then is immediately beaten to market by a competitor who was paying close attention and moving more nimbly?
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  This sounds a lot like "Second Mover Advantage".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- hwang89 10y ago
  Why Pioneers Have Arrows In Their Backs: https://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-with-the-arrows-in-their-backs/ https://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-...
- vacri 10y ago
  It happens with technology in general. Secondary markets wait longer, but then technologically leap-frog the primary markets.
skywhopper 10y ago
Not sure how you can be losing at this point. Self-driving cars are far from a reality. The claim that they need a "sales force" now when they don't yet have a product is disturbing. The Uber experiment in Pittsburgh has made for some outstanding PR, but let's see how it actually goes before we praise them for solving the problem. You can bet they are minimizing as many variables as they can (only operating in perfect weather, and only along routes with no construction and very well painted lines that has been laser-mapped to the centimeter). Fact is, it's extremely unlikely we'll see self-driving cars outside the most constricted of environments for decades yet. This should be obvious to anyone who (1) has driven and (2) works with computers. It's scary to me that everyone is eating up the hype and pretending they're imminent.
- m3koval 10y ago
  As someone who lives in Pittsburgh - and likes the city quite a bit - I can attest to the fact that: (1) the weather is rarely perfect, (2) the entire city is under perpetual construction, and (3) the lines have not been painted in years. It took me quite some time to comfortably drive in the city because to the narrow streets, poor road maintenance, and bizarre traffic patterns induced by the many bridges and tunnels. It will indeed be interesting to see how the well the Uber deployment goes in practice. They certainly did not choose an easy place to start.
uxcn 10y ago
I would be genuinely curious what the development methodologies for Chauffeur look like, if anyone can point me in the right direction.
vorthrwy 10y ago
Google is so perplexing. I hoped their green-field research divisions would become drivers of innovation in the mold of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc. They had the resources and prestige to acquire the world's top talent. All we've got are the world's dorkiest glasses. Where did things go wrong? Thiel argues that monopoly is a necessary condition of innovation, and Google can qualify as a monopoly under any reasonable measure. But it's starting to feel like PARC and Bell Labs were an accident of history; both were perfectly positioned at the cusp of the digital computer revolution. If we're approaching a similar technical revolution, it's not clear at all. Machine learning, chat bots, drones, ride-hailing apps, etc., are great, but we're in the midst of evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- progress. That's fine. It's the normal state of affairs, progress marching slowly on. Whether Google wants to do long-term green-field research or it wants to incubate new businesses, it's not clear. From the outside, it looks like a bit of an identity crisis.
- lijason 10y ago
  If you look at PARC and Bell Labs, the innovations from those teams didn't necessarily become ubiquitous while within those companies. They started there, but left before they found their market and adoption success. I get the feeling we may see that with Google's green field projects as well. Google R&D may identify important areas of the future but be unable to monetize and grow them in ways that make sense in the current business. Otto (and Uber's acquisition of it) might end up being an example of that in the self-driving car side. Google incubates that vision, unable or unwilling to release it as the founders of Otto wanted; they leave and eventually find commercial success elsewhere.
intrasight 10y ago
They should just buy Uber
ilaksh 10y ago
If they wanted to Google could probably pick a few very low risk streets or neighborhoods, distribute an app that makes you waive liability, and provide a self driving taxi service with no driver during good weather. The technology is much safer and more advanced than competitors. I think it boils down to actually getting rid of the driver entirely means it had to handle 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 situations. It also means there is no person to blame in the event of an accidents, which are impossible to avoid 100% regardless of how good the system is, due to the laws of physics. None of that would be a problem if we had a tech-savvy and tech-friendly, carefully considering public. But we don't have that really. When it comes down to it, many people depend on cars for a living and almost everyone has accepted them as a daily part of life. Google knows that any collisions could result in a massive angry mob out to get them. I actually hope articles like this one can gode them into letting us use their system and if it does the occassional Google-had-a-collision mobs turn out to be short lived and relatively tame.
- aphextron 10y ago
  > waive liability Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. Those papers you sign are nothing more than a placebo deterrence. Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day.
  - kevin_b_er 10y ago
    You can wait your right to sue in a court of law. You will instead go to a sham court where the "judge" is only paid if the company still wants them to be an arbiter and the results are secret. You may want to look up "mandatory binding arbitration" for its ability to stop lawsuits. You may also note the Supreme Court of the United States of America has already decided that no meeting of the minds was necessary to lose your right to the courts.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. That's technically true (you disclaim liability or waive the right to recover for particular torts), but substantively false. > Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day. There are limits on what liability can be signed away, and certainly many go beyond that, and certainly there are disputes over whether the requirements for others to be effect are met which results in lawsuits where that is a threshold issue. But it is not the case that signing away the right to collect on certain claims generally has no legal effect in the US, even though it might not always have the full effect it would seem from the text viewed in isolation.
trapperkeeper79 10y ago
I'm going to say something that will going to downvote me into oblivion ... but I think self-driving tech needs to be given away for free. This is not unprecedented. Volvo gave away the seat belt. Edward Jenner gave away the smallpox vaccine. More recently, Toyota is "giving away" their patents with respect to hydrogen fuel cells and Tesla is doing this for batteries. How many people die of traffic fatalities? We are so close to a world where such deaths are the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. If only we had truly bold individuals at the helm.

265 points by antouank 10y ago

Am I the only one that it kinda bothers that this is a race to be the first one to market? In something like this, I'd rather wait a little bit and wait to see who has the best product rather than the first product.

ajmurmann 10y ago
I think it's more differentiated than that. There were big efforts to have convoys of trucks drive themselves on freeways many years ago. Freeway driving seems pretty solved and save at this point and probably more reliable than human drives. So not realising that does no good. Driving on icy country roads with pedestrians walking on the side is a totally different story. So I think we need to look at this by functionality. We will only learn sooner by releasing mature functionality sooner and can fund research toward more automation. I don't think this is fundamentally different than releasing a web site with all the features you could want on day one. Granted it's like a website handling incredibly important operations that you don't want to go wrong. But that's similar to banking websites, health care applications etc. We didn't insist surgery robots to be a full surgery replacement day one.

cesis 10y ago

I would love some simple self driving - pick me up in the front of the supermarket, automatically find a parking spot etc.

rtkwe 10y ago
There's not a lot of space between that and full self driving on highways and surface streets really. You get rid of a few sign reading needs but your car still has to have the full suite of sensors and compute power to monitor its surroundings.

calebm 10y ago

Google likes data... I wonder if they're considering giving Chauffeur away to automakers, contingent on building in the ability to gather data from it.

mdorazio 10y ago

Google is "losing out" in the sense that it's actually making an effort to perfect the technology to the point where a car can safely drive itself with no driver, while everyone else (Tesla, Uber, etc.) is happy to rush to market with options that still require an attentive person behind the wheel. These are different focuses that have different outcomes and time scales, as the last part of the article says.

mcphilip 10y ago
Agreed. My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon as competitors claim. For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge. How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention?
- pinko 10y ago
  I agree with your point, but I'm not sure about your example! Can't self-driving cars "see" around the blind corner much earlier than a human could due to the fact that they have sensors on the very front of the car, as opposed to our "sensors" (eyes) back behind the windshield? They might do better!
  - Strom 10y ago
    Not only the placement, but with radars [1] you can see through a bunch of objects like trees, wooden fences, and indeed also hedges. Of course making sense of the data in a completely new environment is hard. This is where fleet learning helps a lot. [1] This one police radar seems to also nicely work through stone http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38 http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38
  - smileysteve 10y ago
    The self driving car can also react without a >=.7 second reaction time; which, at 60 mph is nearly 100 feet.

camillomiller 10y ago

There's a curious amount of FUD going on lately about every non-automotive company's efforts in the field of car automation.

gthtjtkt 10y ago

> it could be 20 to 25 years before most trips in cities will be provided by autonomous vehicles, he added. Ouch, I had no idea it was that far away. Hard to believe that when Uber is already testing with passengers in cities, though.

bryanlarsen 10y ago
The average lifespan of a car in California is 19 years. Let X = # of years before true class 4 self driving cars are available to buy Let Y = # of years after introduction before class 4 self driving cars are the majority sold Let Z = # of years after Y where self driving cars provide the majority of trips. Z could be 19/2, but we can probably assume that newer cars are used for more miles than the older ones, so Z is probably somewhere between 5 and 10. That could mean that X+Y is as little as ten years away. X=5 and Y=5 both seem fairly optimistic to me.
ghaff 10y ago
I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I fully expect it will be decades before I could order a self-driving car with no driver aboard in Manhattan or Boston. It's certainly possible that fully autonomous driving systems under some subset of conditions like limited access highways will be available sooner--maybe much sooner--but, of course, that doesn't enable the use cases that excites people who don't want to own cars etc.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  I agree with you. However, I do think it _is_ possible to have it sooner. However, not without a massive investment and effort from many different players working together. Government involvement, etc.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    That's probably fair. One the one hand, nine women, one baby etc. On the other hand, if there were widespread adoption of standards, infrastructure were modified to smooth over some of the hard bits (e.g. transponders in construction zones), possibly remote operators setup for if cars get stuck, etc. adoption could be accelerated at least somewhat. I still think the generalized door-to-door driverless experience is a lot harder than many are giving it credit for though. The government involvement in a positive direction will probably be somewhat tough. It's not hard to frame this as a job-destroying technology initially primarily for the benefit of the better off.

CPLX 10y ago

> Uber Technologies Inc., founded in 2009, will soon let users of its popular ride-sharing app hail autonomous Volvo SUVs in Pittsburgh. I have a feeling that piece of news requires extraordinarily loose interpretations of the words "autonomous" or "soon".

nsgoetz 10y ago
"Soon" actually is already. Source: I live in Pittsburgh, have seen the self-driving cars on the road, and friends have driven in then. I unfortunately, have not lucked into a ride in one yet.
svantana 10y ago
Actually it will begin any day now [1], however they failed to mention that there will be a driver behind the wheel -- i.e. doing what google has been doing for years already, but also picking up passengers. Seems to me it's mainly a PR move... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring-it-on-how-pittsburgh-became-ubers-testing-ground.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring...
- criddell 10y ago
  The cynic in me would say it's a PR move. The nerd would say it's a way to gather real world data and offset some of the costs of doing so.
  - gthtjtkt 10y ago
    Rides are free if you get one of the self-driving cars.
    - petra 10y ago
      That's step 1. Later rides will be cheaper and than at the same cost ,and I'm sure Uber could get plenty of people .
- CPLX 10y ago

pilooch 10y ago

Google wants car-bots to roam the streets and crawl the real world, much as they did in the digital space. They just need a flow of automated cars to blend into.

frogpelt 10y ago

I have so many questions about the Uber program in Pittsburgh. Does it take instructions? Can the rider change his mind? What happens if a fight breaks out in the car? Will there be a hotline you can call if your car goes rogue? Or just parks and won't move? I guess these questions are why they are doing a pilot program.

deleted 10y ago
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graupel 10y ago
I think there's still going to be a human in the drivers seat, at least for the foreseeable future?
hammock 10y ago
Ignoring the fact that there will be a driver in the car, these are all previously solved problems for autonomous rail transit.
- frogpelt 10y ago
  Yes rails make things a lot simpler.
smileysteve 10y ago
> What happens if a fight breaks out in the car? What happens if a fight breaks out in the car of an Uber driver?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Fricken 10y ago

Classic Google troll. Get everyone salivating for glorious, apocolyptic disruption, scare the crap out of the traditional auto industry, incite a mad scramble that mobilizes billions of dollars and thousands of men, and then turn around and say 'well, actually... this is really hard, guys.'

josefresco 10y ago
Can you name another Google instance of "well, actually... this is really hard, guys.". The only thing that jumps to my mind is Google Glass?
- akerro 10y ago
  Modular phone project abandoned a few days ago. I really hoped it would bring to the end stupid era of endless consumption where you have to replace your whole phone just to get better camera or remove micro-jack.
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    I called that shot the first time I read about it. There are zero successful modular consumer electronics products. The near-trivial analog connectivity between stereo components is as close as modularity has ever come in that business, and that's really an example of how, at best, modularity attracts customers that resemble audiophiles (and wannabes), which may not be an ideal target market.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      And in the case of stereos, bigger and heavier components wasn't really a bug. In fact, to many it was seen as something of a feature.
    - mhermher 10y ago
      Desktop computers are still pretty popular. Especially among PC gamers. That is the only example I can think of to refute your comment. Edit: but it only works because of the space in a PC tower. It doesn't work for laptops, and I was sort of in the same boat as you. I couldn't imagine it would work for phones. Specifically that they are so space constrained.

jonnat 10y ago

Google has no intention to beat its competitors in the self-driving cars space, and I suspect it has never actually wanted to produce such cars for mass use. What it does want is to make self-driving cars widely used, because that would mean that the time currently wasted in commuting by car could turn into increased internet usage, which drives Google's revenue. That's why Google was an early investor in Uber. Its efforts in building self-driving technology are intended as a catalyst for the industry, in which case it seem to have been a success.

visarga 10y ago
If Google wanted to increase internet usage, instead of self driving cars it would invest more in decent remote working technology. Not needing to drive beats laptoping in your car. But I think Google imagines itself as an "AI company", and self driving cars are just one of the goalposts of AI. I have to admit, I am frustrated by the secrecy of their development process, years passed and nothing of essence was announced about their progress.
- fixermark 10y ago
  I think Google's got chips in both games. https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/ https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/
aetherson 10y ago
This is an absurd claim. The idea that Google has poured billions into a decade-long project to solve an extremely hard technology problem in order to lure people into marginally more internet use that will help Facebook as much as Google? When, if that technology problem is solved by Google, there is genuinely a big business in it?

devy 10y ago

The two main ways for Google to commercialize the technology are by including Chauffeur, the name for its self-driving software, in cars made in high volume by existing auto manufacturers ... Is Chauffeur a generic name for driving log software or it's just so incidental that it happens to be same name Comma.ai picked for their own driving log app? [1] [1]: http://comma.ai/ http://comma.ai/

kersny 10y ago
Google has been using that name semi-publicly since at least 2011.
seren 10y ago
Chauffeur comes from French and means "hired driver". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur It would be like calling a generic domestic robot 'Butler'. So it makes sense for an autonomous driving solution.

sharemywin 10y ago

I think this just show that these tech companies hoarding 100s of Billions dollars so they can defeat the next threat is just a complete waste and would be much better in the hands of investors as dividends.

PinguTS 10y ago

> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology. Always wondering who writes up that shit. Car makers are way long before in autonomous driving. It is a huge difference in "just doing things and not talking about as long as technology is not ready" vs. "talking about technology and presenting even unfinished products." Especially Tesla is very big in the later once. Car makers are in self driving since technology went into cars. Without that research we would not had any driving assistants these days. I remember mid 1990s when I was an intern at then DASA (Daimler Benz Aerospace) and they worked with a self-driving S-class powered by a new chipset developed by then TEMIC (now Continental) based on Radar technology. Today we have this technology in any decent new car as part of the adaptive cruise control. Back then the test drives where made on a airport runway.

mikeyouse 10y ago
It's pretty interesting how little the tech press seems to know about the efforts of the established car manufacturers. > Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology. Luxury cars (Audis / Mercedes / Jaguars / BMWs) have had semi-autonomous options for at least 10 years with lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, etc. They've been working on the technology for decades. Improvements in the accuracy and cost of sensors along with processing power makes this a much easier problem now but to say they hadn't considered this before is so silly.
csours 10y ago
1956 GM Motorama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak It looks kind of (extremely) ridiculous now, but think about all the things that changed between then and now. The iPhone is ubiquitous now, but it only came out in 2007, and we really only got modern cellular internet after that. I think that the Smartphone revolution had a huge impact on the way most people think, to the point where it is hard to remember what life was like before them. The autonomous, decentralized nature of smartphones, along with the cloud for updates and backup is beyond game changing, and software designed before this REALLY shows its age. DISCLAIMER: I work for GM, any opinions are solely my own, etc.

simonsarris 10y ago

It seems like both Google and Apple are having big troubles with their car programs. For either of them, why not attempt to acquire Tesla? Wouldn't that launch point give them a huge leg up against the other?

tonyedgecombe 10y ago
I'm not sure either of them really wants to be in the car business.
PinguTS 10y ago
Google has no interest in actually building cars. Google has an interest to collect the data and for such sell (or even may giving it for free) the software collecting the data. Google is a data driven company and not a hardware manufacturer. Even that Google is building their own hardware in regards of server, server racks, and such think. But all that is only to support their data driven model. The problem here is, that car makers have no interest to buying this software from Google and as such selling the data to Google. They want to keep the data to them-self.
rhino369 10y ago
Telsa is still a niche car company, and despite their PR their autonomous tech isn't really better than other luxury car companies. In fact it might be worse and Tesla is more willing to just beta test in production. But I doubt either company wants to actually deal with automotive manufacturing and sales. They'd be better off just being a supplier to car companies. You'd go buy a Ford Fusion with the Google Self Driving package, or something similar. There were rumors Apple would actually build cars, but I think they were either wrong or Apple gave up. It's not that profitable of an industry.

georgeecollins 10y ago

From a strategy perspective it always seems like you develop better with a clear incremental goal, even when the increments are huge. In that sense, Tesla has a clear goal to incrementally improve its cars. Uber has a clear goal to augment its service. Next steps for Google? Apple? I'm not surprised they are drifting.

Jabbles 10y ago

Is there any (non-PR) advantage of driving around with a passenger as well as a backup-driver?

IanCal 10y ago
Feedback from users, a measure of how comfortable people are with the idea, and if people are OK with it, then spreading the idea of driverless cars being safe and normal (which I consider differently to PR, but feel free to ignore it). You also ensure that you're taking the same type and length of trips at the same time of day as you otherwise would be. You now also don't need an extra car. Instead of one car taking passengers and one gathering data, you only need a single car doing both. So it's cheaper and you get more information, as well as more accurate information from it.
Zigurd 10y ago
If you look around the internet at objections to self-driving cars, many of those objections are based on fear. So finding out if self driving cars actually scare people is probably a good thing. Even if they don't outright scare people, the behavior of a self-driving car will be different, and maybe some of those differences are unpleasant for riders.
- kmonsen 10y ago
  Once there are uber rides for half price if self driving, it is going to change a lot of opinions.

gourou 10y ago

> Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have logged in their existence They completely left out that Google has a lot of Waze data (50 million users)

kevin_b_er 10y ago
This is because the statement is utterly deceptive. They're comparing miles driven with an uber app being on vs google's autonomous car driving miles. It would've been a much better comparison to compare uber app miles with waze or google maps. They probably don't because that comparison would not fit with their goal of attacking google.
JBReefer 10y ago
But not Waze data with a camera or sensors outside of GPS
- gberger 10y ago
  The same can be said for Uber.
  - a13n 10y ago
    But not for Tesla
monocasa 10y ago
Uber also bought all of the data from Bing Maps, and hand categorizing the lot of it. I'm sure Google is doing something similar with their maps data.
kilroy123 10y ago
Very true. People don't realize how popular waze is, in other countries. In some countries, no on uses Google Maps, only waze.
jonknee 10y ago
And Google Maps which has hundreds of millions of users. You won't beat Google by having access to more information.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwaway7767 10y ago

So google's falling behind in self-driving car development because other companies have scaled back their expectations and are now focusing on vehicles that can't actually drive themselves? We seriously need new words to seperate "self-driving car" from "vehicle with driving assist systems". Something the marketers can't fuck up by diluting it. I suggest "Fully autonomous vehicle". This is like saying ITER has been overtaken in fusion power development because Dubai just installed a large solar collector plant that generates quite a lot of power. It's a ridiculous comparison and shifting of the goalposts.

chadgeidel 10y ago
There are already industry-defined standards for autonomy levels. Of course, there are multiple standards... https://www.2025ad.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Evergreen/Technology/Levels_of_Automation/Levels_Grafik_Lightbox.jpg https://www.2025ad.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Evergreen/Techn...
rtkwe 10y ago
There is a scale that's been defined but getting news and articles to use them appropriately is an uphill battle. It'll help when it becomes a more common thing so more people get used to the difference. http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Department+of+Transportation+Releases+Policy+on+Automated+Vehicle+Development http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Departm...

nkoren 10y ago

Bloody hell... when are journalists going to learn the difference between a car that doesn't always require a driver's hands on its steering wheel, and a car that doesn't require a driver. It's as fundamental as the difference between a carriage that has a extra-cool harness for the horse, and a carriage that doesn't have a horse.

IMcD23 10y ago
A carriage with no horse would be a car with no engine. I think you mean a carriage with no harness needed.
- jm_l 10y ago
  perhaps a horse-drawn carriage in which the horses require only broad instruction

empath75 10y ago

It seems like the ideal endgame for something like this for google is patent licensing, in which case they don't actually need to produce a product themselves.

yalogin 10y ago

I understand Tesla's rush to market as it wants to sell cars to make money to feed its research/work. So it needs the marketing gimmick/advantage to sell more cars. But I don't get what Uber is getting by using partial autonomous vehicles. Their only goal is to replace its fleet with fully autonomous cars. To that end, outside of getting data I don't see anything else. By that logic I would be really surprised if they expanded their partial autonomous offering beyond what they have today.

linkregister 10y ago
It makes sense for Uber because it has unique legal issues. Every PR win and deal with a municipality decreases its headwinds for the next deal it makes with a city. Also it gives Uber an opportunity to debug the experience before actually releasing a fully autonomous vehicle. This service is different from the Tesla autopilot feature since it is aspirationally an autonomous vehicle. In Uber's case, it is expected the driver will have to actually take over in some corner case situations.

samfisher83 10y ago

A big issue with Autonomous tech is liability. I mean with a human you have a person you can blame. With a computer how will liability be handled? Is the companies fault. Is it owner of the car.

FryHigh 10y ago
Yes. This is also the problem with all Automation tech from the early days of AI.

danielmorozoff 10y ago

This is like claiming Amazon is building rockets better than spacex. Ones rockets go up and down , the others actually put things in orbit. Not the same, though they both use rockets. Comparing apples to oranges.

danielmorozoff 10y ago

muzster 10y ago

We all know how technology in Formula One cars improves road cars - why don't they (Google, Tesla, Apple etc ) compete on the race track ? - They could take baby steps first and compete in the time trials. It might even bring a whole new audience to the sport. Just a thought. Source: http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technology-improves-your-road-car_sto4975756/story.shtml http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technol...

escoz 10y ago
I love F1, but driving on a closed track (or highways, for what matters) is many orders of magnitude easier than dealing with traffic, people, bikes, other drivers, etc. BMW created this many years ago, and the car was better than most drivers already. Advancing track days doesn't really help much on bringing cars to cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA

ChuckMcM 10y ago

This is not something I expect to read in a Google story: "Tesla, with thousands of internet-connected cars on the road, has a similar data advantage, one former member of the Google car project said." But it is absolutely the case that data here trumps brilliance. Its really too bad that Google isn't still partnering with Uber rather than trying to compete with them.

Animats 10y ago

Google/Alphabet's corporate problem is that they have no clue about how to sell anything except ads. Even when Google sells something in a B2B context, Google expects to control the terms and offer the customer little recourse.[1] Automotive doesn't work like that. GM, for example, insists that if a supplier's part causes a recall, the supplier is responsible for the costs of the recall.[2] Auto manufacturers demand the right to send their inspectors into a supplier's plant. If supplier quality slips, the oversight becomes tougher. It has to be that way; a car has thousands of suppliers, many of whom can make the final product defective. The new head of Google's self-driving project is a car guy from Hyundai. He understands this. Google now has a center in Novi, MI where 100 self-driving mini-vans are being built in a joint venture with Fiat Chrysler. That's step 1. This is more of a management ego problem than a technical problem. Selling self-driving technology as an auto parts supplier doesn't fit with the "change the world" mentality. The automaker gets all the credit. Few people know the names of the major Tier I automotive suppliers. Microsoft ran into this once. Microsoft wanted the Microsoft logo to appear when the dashboard display booted up. They were insistent about this. The automaker involved went with QNX instead. [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla [2] http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-new-purchasing-contract/ http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-ne...

karpodiem 10y ago
Precisely. Manufacturing is hard/messy - the cavalier attitude that Apple/Google have with quality doesn't fly here. I'll believe that Tesla is a real player if they're able to scale to 500K/units a year.
- FabHK 10y ago
  To be fair, Apple has been doing hardware since, well, the Apple I in 1976.
  - mey 10y ago
    Consumer electronics has slightly different engineering requirements, liabilities and scope than automobiles.

knodi123 10y ago

My wife and I now refer to this phenomenon as "getting oculused". When you come up with an amazing moonshot project, make a ton of amazing progress, and then, from an apparent outside perspective, completely stop making progress, at which point your competitors start from scratch, surpass you, and get to market first with something that has more features. Are there other big examples in history of this phenomenon? When a company announces a lot of genuinely pioneering progress at something, and then is immediately beaten to market by a competitor who was paying close attention and moving more nimbly?

BurningFrog 10y ago
This sounds a lot like "Second Mover Advantage".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hwang89 10y ago
Why Pioneers Have Arrows In Their Backs: https://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-with-the-arrows-in-their-backs/ https://steveblank.com/2010/10/04/why-pioneers-are-the-ones-...
vacri 10y ago
It happens with technology in general. Secondary markets wait longer, but then technologically leap-frog the primary markets.

skywhopper 10y ago

Not sure how you can be losing at this point. Self-driving cars are far from a reality. The claim that they need a "sales force" now when they don't yet have a product is disturbing. The Uber experiment in Pittsburgh has made for some outstanding PR, but let's see how it actually goes before we praise them for solving the problem. You can bet they are minimizing as many variables as they can (only operating in perfect weather, and only along routes with no construction and very well painted lines that has been laser-mapped to the centimeter). Fact is, it's extremely unlikely we'll see self-driving cars outside the most constricted of environments for decades yet. This should be obvious to anyone who (1) has driven and (2) works with computers. It's scary to me that everyone is eating up the hype and pretending they're imminent.

m3koval 10y ago
As someone who lives in Pittsburgh - and likes the city quite a bit - I can attest to the fact that: (1) the weather is rarely perfect, (2) the entire city is under perpetual construction, and (3) the lines have not been painted in years. It took me quite some time to comfortably drive in the city because to the narrow streets, poor road maintenance, and bizarre traffic patterns induced by the many bridges and tunnels. It will indeed be interesting to see how the well the Uber deployment goes in practice. They certainly did not choose an easy place to start.

uxcn 10y ago

I would be genuinely curious what the development methodologies for Chauffeur look like, if anyone can point me in the right direction.

vorthrwy 10y ago

Google is so perplexing. I hoped their green-field research divisions would become drivers of innovation in the mold of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc. They had the resources and prestige to acquire the world's top talent. All we've got are the world's dorkiest glasses. Where did things go wrong? Thiel argues that monopoly is a necessary condition of innovation, and Google can qualify as a monopoly under any reasonable measure. But it's starting to feel like PARC and Bell Labs were an accident of history; both were perfectly positioned at the cusp of the digital computer revolution. If we're approaching a similar technical revolution, it's not clear at all. Machine learning, chat bots, drones, ride-hailing apps, etc., are great, but we're in the midst of evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- progress. That's fine. It's the normal state of affairs, progress marching slowly on. Whether Google wants to do long-term green-field research or it wants to incubate new businesses, it's not clear. From the outside, it looks like a bit of an identity crisis.

lijason 10y ago
If you look at PARC and Bell Labs, the innovations from those teams didn't necessarily become ubiquitous while within those companies. They started there, but left before they found their market and adoption success. I get the feeling we may see that with Google's green field projects as well. Google R&D may identify important areas of the future but be unable to monetize and grow them in ways that make sense in the current business. Otto (and Uber's acquisition of it) might end up being an example of that in the self-driving car side. Google incubates that vision, unable or unwilling to release it as the founders of Otto wanted; they leave and eventually find commercial success elsewhere.

intrasight 10y ago

They should just buy Uber

ilaksh 10y ago

If they wanted to Google could probably pick a few very low risk streets or neighborhoods, distribute an app that makes you waive liability, and provide a self driving taxi service with no driver during good weather. The technology is much safer and more advanced than competitors. I think it boils down to actually getting rid of the driver entirely means it had to handle 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 situations. It also means there is no person to blame in the event of an accidents, which are impossible to avoid 100% regardless of how good the system is, due to the laws of physics. None of that would be a problem if we had a tech-savvy and tech-friendly, carefully considering public. But we don't have that really. When it comes down to it, many people depend on cars for a living and almost everyone has accepted them as a daily part of life. Google knows that any collisions could result in a massive angry mob out to get them. I actually hope articles like this one can gode them into letting us use their system and if it does the occassional Google-had-a-collision mobs turn out to be short lived and relatively tame.

aphextron 10y ago
> waive liability Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. Those papers you sign are nothing more than a placebo deterrence. Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day.
- kevin_b_er 10y ago
  You can wait your right to sue in a court of law. You will instead go to a sham court where the "judge" is only paid if the company still wants them to be an arbiter and the results are secret. You may want to look up "mandatory binding arbitration" for its ability to stop lawsuits. You may also note the Supreme Court of the United States of America has already decided that no meeting of the minds was necessary to lose your right to the courts.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. That's technically true (you disclaim liability or waive the right to recover for particular torts), but substantively false. > Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day. There are limits on what liability can be signed away, and certainly many go beyond that, and certainly there are disputes over whether the requirements for others to be effect are met which results in lawsuits where that is a threshold issue. But it is not the case that signing away the right to collect on certain claims generally has no legal effect in the US, even though it might not always have the full effect it would seem from the text viewed in isolation.

trapperkeeper79 10y ago

I'm going to say something that will going to downvote me into oblivion ... but I think self-driving tech needs to be given away for free. This is not unprecedented. Volvo gave away the seat belt. Edward Jenner gave away the smallpox vaccine. More recently, Toyota is "giving away" their patents with respect to hydrogen fuel cells and Tesla is doing this for batteries. How many people die of traffic fatalities? We are so close to a world where such deaths are the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. If only we had truly bold individuals at the helm.