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Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Way

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

puranjay 9y ago
I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?
- Fricken 9y ago
  Last week Tesla began collecting short sections of video data from those with their new in-house Autopilot hardware. So really, Tesla's just getting started, and they're doing it with underpowered sensors and compute. https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-update-video-data-speed-restriction-lifted https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-u... Waymo was ahead of where Tesla is now back in 2012. In a demonstration capacity, Waymo's cars were working 5 years ago, but in the intermittent time Waymo has been validating their software against every possible edge case they might encounter on a real world situation, and Tesla will have to do the same one way or another before their autonomous OS can operate safely without a babysitter.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It is a matter of point of view, how many waymo car have been sold to customers ? how many waymo cars are out of the waymo car factories every months ? There are several things to tackle and different approaches to things, the DARPA grand challenge is the practical one and waymo did not took part in any edition AFAIK.
    - Zarel 9y ago
      From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
    - pythonaut_16 9y ago
      How many people have died in Waymo cars?
- kyrra 9y ago
  It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day). Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0]. So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research. [0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-collecting-video-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...
  - taneq 9y ago
    They may not be sending data back home via the mobile network, but you can bet your boots they make exhaustive logs of Autopilot disengagements and store them locally to be siphoned off at the next service. I wonder if they have WiFi base stations collecting data at Supercharger points? That's what I'd do.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Why not use owner's home network?
      - remus 9y ago
        The logs might be pretty big, so it might have a significant impact on people on metered internet connections.
        drcross 9y ago
        Not if it's only greyscale camera data and some point cloud data which is heavily compressible.
        nolok 9y ago
        But then you're back to square one : that data is much less detailed than what waymo gets.
- ma2rten 9y ago
  As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gbsec http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    You shouldn't need to upload the entire 1gb. The central AI can query the cars to get just the bits it has questions about. Part of the AI's job is learning which data to care about and which data to ignore. The fact that the trees got new leaves again this year and it's dark at 2am and the sign at the Chinese Restaurant is still red don't to be relayed. More data isn't automatically better. The hard part isn't getting some magical quantity of data the hard part is asking the right questions of it. A self driving system needs to solve this problem (the frame problem) anyway. So you get intelligence compression for "free". In a sense, intelligence is compression.
    - cycrutchfield 9y ago
      You have essentially just described distributed learning. Only transmit the gradients back to the central server, not the data.
      - erikpukinskis 9y ago
        That'd be one way of doing it. You could also just send the cars experimental queries to upload, and still do the leaning centrally.
    - solipsism 9y ago
      This is naive. You don't know what data you will care about in a year. The ability to have and keep all the data is incredibly valuable.
      - 9y ago
- yalogin 9y ago
  Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.
- tribby 9y ago
  teslas don't have lidar, so it's hard to say how useful their data will be in the long term
  - fleetingmoments 9y ago
    True, but if it turns out LIDAR is overkill and that self-driving can be done with only cheaper sensors (cameras), Waymo might be behind the curve on the use-case that the market will opt for.
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      When it comes to your safety, would you rather overkill or underkill? Especially when it comes to something as important as self-driving, I think it's absolutely reckless to try to "maximize profit" and "get it out there ASAP". It would be an absolutely disaster if the technology as a whole gets a horrible reputation, or even worse, banned in places, just because some company skipped some steps and wanted to be the first or cheapest to the market.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  The miles aren't equal, though. Waymo's cars have an amazing array of sensors on them, including 360 degree LiDAR, which Teslas don't have.
- amyjess 9y ago
  I'm sure that Google gathers so much data from human drivers using Google Maps and Waze that they can build a decent model.
  - komali2 9y ago
    Why do you think Google maps data would be as useful as the camera and steering input data Tesla can collect?
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      Why do you think Tesla is able to collect all or any of the camera and steering input data? And what proof do you have that the little they are able to get off is actually at all valuable.
      - komali2 9y ago
        Ok, fine, we don't know what either company is collecting, but google maps can ONLY collect GPS and speed data, whereas Tesla has the POTENTIAL to collect gps, speed, camera, steering input, braking input, and acceleration input.
BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
I'm assuming you mean the first ones without human chaperones? Because I've seen plenty of self-driving Uber cars shuttling passengers around the streets of SF over the past year.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I thought Uber stopped that program after the red light thing? I assume they mean the same though because Google have had self driving cars in Mountain View for years - this article claims 2 million miles last October : https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-car-program-odometer-reaches-2-million-miles-1475683321 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-car-progra... I'm not sure how that stacks against competitors but I imagine they're a long way ahead.
  - fragmede 9y ago
    Uber backed down, though I would say I've only seen them once and not "plenty". http://fortune.com/2017/03/27/uber-self-driving-cars-san-francisco-2/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/27/uber-self-driving-cars-san-fra...
  - vesrah 9y ago
    I see them running every day in Tempe, Az.
  - BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
    They did, but they've resumed again recently.
tim333 9y ago
Volvo / zenuity are also doing well. They'll probably have the first level 4 cars in public hands. It remains to see who can get to level 5. https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-autopilot-autonomous-self-driving-car https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-auto...
- ehsankia 9y ago
  Hmm, do they/you have any concrete numbers to back this up? For example, Uber has a disengagement rate of once per 0.9 mile, whereas Waymo shows numbers higher up at 5000+ miles. The California DMV report [0] has numbers for a couple other companies that tested in California. The other runners ups are Nissan and BMW with 247 and 638 miles respectively. Still an order of magnitude behind. But Volvo isn't there, and I'm curious to see concrete numbers. Because no amount of press and videos really means anything. Anyone can come up with a video of the car doing a nice ride. Google published one of those in 2009. It's spent the last 8 years perfectly that. That's the hard part, making it work in all cases, not just for one video. [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-disengagement/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - zardo 9y ago
    It's hard to say how comparable those numbers really are. One manufacturer could be only driving routes that they know are the most challenging for their system, and another could be running laps on the freeway.
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      That's a good point, though it's still the closest to a quantitative number we have. I would love if the government actually forced some more rigorous quantitative testing on these cars, some way we can compare apples to apples. A lot of companies are making all sorts of crazy bold claims but I'd like more concrete evidence before I put my life in their hands.
aedron 9y ago
> Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road Which are still way, way off in the future (if ever). I propose 'self-driving cars' are the 'flying cars' of our generation: Something that seems inevitable and just around the corner, yet here we are.
- keeptrying 9y ago
  5 years.
- ska 9y ago
  There is an important difference. "Flying cars" was always a media and popular culture thing - the vast majority of experts thought they were a long way off, if ever. This is not true of self driving cars. Self driving cars are also a pop culture thing - and the most aggressive deadlines and comprehensive deployments predictions are unlikely.
- elmar 9y ago
  Let me take the contrarian side and say you will have small 1-2 seat Self-Flying vehicles before Self-Driving Cars.
- themoonbus 9y ago
  Except flying cars would require an entirely new transportation infrastructure. Self-driving cars adapt to what's already in place.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Ever heard of the DARPA Grand challenge ? The first edition way in 2004 and the project aim is to have one third of US ground military vehicles autonomous by 2015. It seems the US DoD has a quite a headstart on waymo.
- icebraining 9y ago
  From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
- tome 9y ago
  > the project aim is to have one third of US ground military vehicles autonomous by 2015 And was it successful?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jboggan 9y ago
Waymo is going to win because of (1) better sensors and (2) better onboard computing power. Other companies can potentially compete in the former domain but literally no one in the world can go toe-to-toe with Waymo and siblings in the latter department. The ML powering Level 4 driving decisions is not cheap in dollars or power consumption and Google is already way ahead of the curve when it comes to custom fabrication of those type of systems.
- keeptrying 9y ago
  The hardware will become commodity. The software is where the action will be. Imagine what would happen with fighter jets if they only had 3 main sensors. Lidar, Radar and camera.
  - fixermark 9y ago
    The thing is: in the long run, yes; in the short run, Waymo is manufacturing its own chipsets that it has a patent on. It's not using COTS kit for on-board processing, which gives it a significant technical advantage that will be hard for competitors to match.
    - sova 9y ago
      Elon maintains that with just cameras you can achieve super-human (10x) performance with self-driving cars. Fact I nabbed when he spoke about Boring at TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...
      - lloydde 9y ago
        Sure, but what is the reduction in accidents for just cameras vs all three? Super-human might only be reglatorial approved in the absence of technology being available with high safety.
      - agildehaus 9y ago
        I wouldn't ever bet against Musk, but Musk says a lot of things. Yes we should be able to make self driving cars with just cameras because, after all, we do it with just two eyes. But in what world is computer vision perfect? Tesla's Autopilot already has a fatality on its record because it couldn't differentiate the color of the sky with the color of a truck. LIDAR solves a lot of problems.
Eridrus 9y ago
I believe that Waymo are killing it, but... their desire to not be a car company and just write the software makes me wonder what their plan is to become a serious driver of Alphabet profit. Unless they have made some real breakthroughs and are managing to somehow keep them under wraps (seems unlikely), optimistically they have a 5 year lead on their competitors. 5 years is a good amount of time to be the only people with self-driving tech, but unless they actually use it to muscle in on some other industry it seems like they will be reduced to just another component supplier when enough competitors eventually catch up.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  They seem to have gotten a lot more serious since forming Waymo. In just a few months, they started the actual public trial in Phoenix as well as make this deal with Lyft. Seems like they've finally understood the urgency and have stepped on the pedal. I don't understand your claim that they have to be a car company though. With this deal, it seems like they are (at least for now) targeting ride sharing, and arguably that's a much better use of the technology for many reasons. For example, you don't have to worry about parking, you can put limits on where the car drives, you own the cars so you can track them, collect data and transfer it as you wish. Also, wasn't Uber valued higher than Tesla, at least a few months back? So arguably as a business, it's as good if not better than being a car company, at least for now until the tech gets even better.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I don't think Waymo necessarily needs to build cars, they could try to be Uber, they could try to be FedEx, they could try to be Seamless. I don't really have a good opinion on what they should be, just that I don't think they will make enough money as a supplier to justify all the risk they've taken. Maybe they can make some deals where they give a company exclusive access to self-driving tech for a given industry for a significant equity stake in that company, but I feel like no-one would really want to take that deal.
  - kyrra 9y ago
    It does seem Waymo is going the path of the component supplier (at least right now). While they have the active partnership with Fiat Chrysler, there was a report[0] in December that they were in talks with Honda as well. Then from reddit pointed out a job posted for Waymo looking for people that speak Japanese[1]. [0] https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-honda-partnership https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-ho... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/67w27p/fiat_chryslers_ceo_is_betting_googles_selfdriving/dgu0dzf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/67w27p/fia...

Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road. They are so ahead of everyone. I think everyone including regular car companies buy the tech from Waymo in the short term.

puranjay 9y ago

I'm curious where Tesla fits into this scheme. In terms of road miles, I reckon Tesla would have Waymo beat easily. They have far too many cars on the road and thus, way more data. Does this factor into the quality of self-driving tech at all?

Fricken 9y ago
Last week Tesla began collecting short sections of video data from those with their new in-house Autopilot hardware. So really, Tesla's just getting started, and they're doing it with underpowered sensors and compute. https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-update-video-data-speed-restriction-lifted https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/8/15581094/tesla-autopilot-u... Waymo was ahead of where Tesla is now back in 2012. In a demonstration capacity, Waymo's cars were working 5 years ago, but in the intermittent time Waymo has been validating their software against every possible edge case they might encounter on a real world situation, and Tesla will have to do the same one way or another before their autonomous OS can operate safely without a babysitter.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It is a matter of point of view, how many waymo car have been sold to customers ? how many waymo cars are out of the waymo car factories every months ? There are several things to tackle and different approaches to things, the DARPA grand challenge is the practical one and waymo did not took part in any edition AFAIK.
  - Zarel 9y ago
    From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    How many people have died in Waymo cars?
kyrra 9y ago
It's not that simple though. What so you consider "data" when it comes to self driving cars? Waymo collects high resolution data with every car (multiple GB or possibly TB of data per car per day). Tesla hasn't sent very high resolution data back home yet. Though they are looking to get video from customers now to help make this go faster[0]. So while Tesla has more vehicles on the road, that doesn't mean they are getting better data for self driving car research. [0] https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-collecting-video-self-driving/ https://electrek.co/2017/05/06/tesla-data-sharing-policy-col...
- taneq 9y ago
  They may not be sending data back home via the mobile network, but you can bet your boots they make exhaustive logs of Autopilot disengagements and store them locally to be siphoned off at the next service. I wonder if they have WiFi base stations collecting data at Supercharger points? That's what I'd do.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Why not use owner's home network?
    - remus 9y ago
      The logs might be pretty big, so it might have a significant impact on people on metered internet connections.
      - drcross 9y ago
        Not if it's only greyscale camera data and some point cloud data which is heavily compressible.
        nolok 9y ago
        But then you're back to square one : that data is much less detailed than what waymo gets.
ma2rten 9y ago
As of 2013 Google's self-driving cars collected about 1 GB per second of data [1], today it must be even more. There is no way Telsa can upload nearly as much data from customer's cars. I also belief that their team is smaller and they started much later. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gbsec http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  You shouldn't need to upload the entire 1gb. The central AI can query the cars to get just the bits it has questions about. Part of the AI's job is learning which data to care about and which data to ignore. The fact that the trees got new leaves again this year and it's dark at 2am and the sign at the Chinese Restaurant is still red don't to be relayed. More data isn't automatically better. The hard part isn't getting some magical quantity of data the hard part is asking the right questions of it. A self driving system needs to solve this problem (the frame problem) anyway. So you get intelligence compression for "free". In a sense, intelligence is compression.
  - cycrutchfield 9y ago
    You have essentially just described distributed learning. Only transmit the gradients back to the central server, not the data.
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      That'd be one way of doing it. You could also just send the cars experimental queries to upload, and still do the leaning centrally.
  - solipsism 9y ago
    This is naive. You don't know what data you will care about in a year. The ability to have and keep all the data is incredibly valuable.
    - 9y ago
yalogin 9y ago
Yes and no. In the bay area and other big cities Teslas are definitely there but there are a lot of other areas in the country where Waymo probably spent the money to drive and collect data. So we probably will not know the reality.
tribby 9y ago
teslas don't have lidar, so it's hard to say how useful their data will be in the long term
- fleetingmoments 9y ago
  True, but if it turns out LIDAR is overkill and that self-driving can be done with only cheaper sensors (cameras), Waymo might be behind the curve on the use-case that the market will opt for.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    When it comes to your safety, would you rather overkill or underkill? Especially when it comes to something as important as self-driving, I think it's absolutely reckless to try to "maximize profit" and "get it out there ASAP". It would be an absolutely disaster if the technology as a whole gets a horrible reputation, or even worse, banned in places, just because some company skipped some steps and wanted to be the first or cheapest to the market.
CydeWeys 9y ago
The miles aren't equal, though. Waymo's cars have an amazing array of sensors on them, including 360 degree LiDAR, which Teslas don't have.
amyjess 9y ago
I'm sure that Google gathers so much data from human drivers using Google Maps and Waze that they can build a decent model.
- komali2 9y ago
  Why do you think Google maps data would be as useful as the camera and steering input data Tesla can collect?
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    Why do you think Tesla is able to collect all or any of the camera and steering input data? And what proof do you have that the little they are able to get off is actually at all valuable.
    - komali2 9y ago
      Ok, fine, we don't know what either company is collecting, but google maps can ONLY collect GPS and speed data, whereas Tesla has the POTENTIAL to collect gps, speed, camera, steering input, braking input, and acceleration input.

BHSPitMonkey 9y ago

I'm assuming you mean the first ones without human chaperones? Because I've seen plenty of self-driving Uber cars shuttling passengers around the streets of SF over the past year.

mcintyre1994 9y ago
I thought Uber stopped that program after the red light thing? I assume they mean the same though because Google have had self driving cars in Mountain View for years - this article claims 2 million miles last October : https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-car-program-odometer-reaches-2-million-miles-1475683321 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-self-driving-car-progra... I'm not sure how that stacks against competitors but I imagine they're a long way ahead.
- fragmede 9y ago
  Uber backed down, though I would say I've only seen them once and not "plenty". http://fortune.com/2017/03/27/uber-self-driving-cars-san-francisco-2/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/27/uber-self-driving-cars-san-fra...
- vesrah 9y ago
  I see them running every day in Tempe, Az.
- BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
  They did, but they've resumed again recently.

tim333 9y ago

Volvo / zenuity are also doing well. They'll probably have the first level 4 cars in public hands. It remains to see who can get to level 5. https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-autopilot-autonomous-self-driving-car https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/27/11518826/volvo-tesla-auto...

ehsankia 9y ago
Hmm, do they/you have any concrete numbers to back this up? For example, Uber has a disengagement rate of once per 0.9 mile, whereas Waymo shows numbers higher up at 5000+ miles. The California DMV report [0] has numbers for a couple other companies that tested in California. The other runners ups are Nissan and BMW with 247 and 638 miles respectively. Still an order of magnitude behind. But Volvo isn't there, and I'm curious to see concrete numbers. Because no amount of press and videos really means anything. Anyone can come up with a video of the car doing a nice ride. Google published one of those in 2009. It's spent the last 8 years perfectly that. That's the hard part, making it work in all cases, not just for one video. [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-disengagement/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zardo 9y ago
  It's hard to say how comparable those numbers really are. One manufacturer could be only driving routes that they know are the most challenging for their system, and another could be running laps on the freeway.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    That's a good point, though it's still the closest to a quantitative number we have. I would love if the government actually forced some more rigorous quantitative testing on these cars, some way we can compare apples to apples. A lot of companies are making all sorts of crazy bold claims but I'd like more concrete evidence before I put my life in their hands.

aedron 9y ago

> Waymo will have the first self driving cars on the road Which are still way, way off in the future (if ever). I propose 'self-driving cars' are the 'flying cars' of our generation: Something that seems inevitable and just around the corner, yet here we are.

keeptrying 9y ago
5 years.
ska 9y ago
There is an important difference. "Flying cars" was always a media and popular culture thing - the vast majority of experts thought they were a long way off, if ever. This is not true of self driving cars. Self driving cars are also a pop culture thing - and the most aggressive deadlines and comprehensive deployments predictions are unlikely.
elmar 9y ago
Let me take the contrarian side and say you will have small 1-2 seat Self-Flying vehicles before Self-Driving Cars.
themoonbus 9y ago
Except flying cars would require an entirely new transportation infrastructure. Self-driving cars adapt to what's already in place.

bigbugbag 9y ago

Ever heard of the DARPA Grand challenge ? The first edition way in 2004 and the project aim is to have one third of US ground military vehicles autonomous by 2015. It seems the US DoD has a quite a headstart on waymo.

icebraining 9y ago
From Waymo's wiki page: "Google's self driving car project was formerly led by Sebastian Thrun (...). Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges."
tome 9y ago
> the project aim is to have one third of US ground military vehicles autonomous by 2015 And was it successful?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jboggan 9y ago

Waymo is going to win because of (1) better sensors and (2) better onboard computing power. Other companies can potentially compete in the former domain but literally no one in the world can go toe-to-toe with Waymo and siblings in the latter department. The ML powering Level 4 driving decisions is not cheap in dollars or power consumption and Google is already way ahead of the curve when it comes to custom fabrication of those type of systems.

keeptrying 9y ago
The hardware will become commodity. The software is where the action will be. Imagine what would happen with fighter jets if they only had 3 main sensors. Lidar, Radar and camera.
- fixermark 9y ago
  The thing is: in the long run, yes; in the short run, Waymo is manufacturing its own chipsets that it has a patent on. It's not using COTS kit for on-board processing, which gives it a significant technical advantage that will be hard for competitors to match.
  - sova 9y ago
    Elon maintains that with just cameras you can achieve super-human (10x) performance with self-driving cars. Fact I nabbed when he spoke about Boring at TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...
    - lloydde 9y ago
      Sure, but what is the reduction in accidents for just cameras vs all three? Super-human might only be reglatorial approved in the absence of technology being available with high safety.
    - agildehaus 9y ago
      I wouldn't ever bet against Musk, but Musk says a lot of things. Yes we should be able to make self driving cars with just cameras because, after all, we do it with just two eyes. But in what world is computer vision perfect? Tesla's Autopilot already has a fatality on its record because it couldn't differentiate the color of the sky with the color of a truck. LIDAR solves a lot of problems.

Eridrus 9y ago

I believe that Waymo are killing it, but... their desire to not be a car company and just write the software makes me wonder what their plan is to become a serious driver of Alphabet profit. Unless they have made some real breakthroughs and are managing to somehow keep them under wraps (seems unlikely), optimistically they have a 5 year lead on their competitors. 5 years is a good amount of time to be the only people with self-driving tech, but unless they actually use it to muscle in on some other industry it seems like they will be reduced to just another component supplier when enough competitors eventually catch up.

ehsankia 9y ago
They seem to have gotten a lot more serious since forming Waymo. In just a few months, they started the actual public trial in Phoenix as well as make this deal with Lyft. Seems like they've finally understood the urgency and have stepped on the pedal. I don't understand your claim that they have to be a car company though. With this deal, it seems like they are (at least for now) targeting ride sharing, and arguably that's a much better use of the technology for many reasons. For example, you don't have to worry about parking, you can put limits on where the car drives, you own the cars so you can track them, collect data and transfer it as you wish. Also, wasn't Uber valued higher than Tesla, at least a few months back? So arguably as a business, it's as good if not better than being a car company, at least for now until the tech gets even better.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I don't think Waymo necessarily needs to build cars, they could try to be Uber, they could try to be FedEx, they could try to be Seamless. I don't really have a good opinion on what they should be, just that I don't think they will make enough money as a supplier to justify all the risk they've taken. Maybe they can make some deals where they give a company exclusive access to self-driving tech for a given industry for a significant equity stake in that company, but I feel like no-one would really want to take that deal.
- kyrra 9y ago
  It does seem Waymo is going the path of the component supplier (at least right now). While they have the active partnership with Fiat Chrysler, there was a report[0] in December that they were in talks with Honda as well. Then from reddit pointed out a job posted for Waymo looking for people that speak Japanese[1]. [0] https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-honda-partnership https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-ho... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/67w27p/fiat_chryslers_ceo_is_betting_googles_selfdriving/dgu0dzf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/67w27p/fia...