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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. Lida

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.
    - virgilp 9y ago
      There's another aspect of it though. As soon as Waymo makes self-driving cars more popular, and there are less humans on the road - you just need inferior technology to be able to operate. Bootstrapping this is the hardest - after self-driving cars are a thing, normally we'll see accelerated move towards fully automated driving. In the extreme case, if Waymo cars are 80%, Tesla cars can easily be 20% just based on the fact that Waymo cars will avoid most accidents made by Tesla software errors
      - galdosdi 9y ago
        You might be right, but I'll devil's advocate a bit, with a few possible predictions (none of which I believe in all THAT strongly, just speculation) - If there's a period where new self driving cars are popular but aftermarket self driving kits for older cars are unaffordable or nonexistant, then during this period, the price of non-self-driving cars will plummet dramatically. Who knows, you might be able to buy a 2 year old camry for $1000. The market for these cars will exclusively be (other than oddballs/enthusiasts) people whose wages are so low that driving yourself in a non-self-driving car is still cheaper in an overall sense than using self-driving cabs, so that will cap the possible value of such cars at a pretty low point. - As long as (possibly as a result of the above) the number of human driven cars on the road is at all significant (like, at least 1% or 0.1% or something), the benefits you mention will be hard to attain. In a given trip a car interacts with hundreds of other cars. - You forgot about pedestrians and cyclists. In many places, there are more of those than there are cars, anyway, so even if all cars are self driving, - There's going to be weather and construction and falling trees and runaway skateboards and runaway trucks on ice covered hills and wildfires and so on. This kind of software will operate at scale, so improbable events become important to handle. - Uber is probably dumb enough to hope your argument is true and think they can get away with half-assed self-driving, which is why they're going to fail miserably and go bankrupt. - There's going to be regulation. As a made up example, if the "Waymo patent tax" is "just" $5000 per car, it's going to be pretty hard for a car manufacturer to justify to regulators that they'll instead develop competing software that is somewhat inferior in safety, but "acceptable", for the sake of saving, say, half of that $5000 (it still costs the thrifty manufacturer money to develop or buy their lower quality software!). All it'll take is one fatality and people will be up in arms. If the "acceptable" technology was the first one out, it'd be different, but it'll be hard to convince anyone it's worth the risk when there's better tech already out there. BTW, Waymo management would obviously be clever about setting a good price point that captures lots of value but still is low enough to discourage this kind of competition. - My vague software and driving intuitions tell me it'd actually be easier to design a more general system anyway (massive handwaving). It's actually HUMANS (specifically those accustomed to easy suburban western driving conditions) who have a harder time driving when they can't assume everyone will follow the rules, not computers, and I think that's why so many people mistakenly (IMHO) imagine it'd be so easy to make self driving cars if only everyone followed the damned rules. The simplified laws of physics applicable to driving are simpler than the DMV manual anyway.
secfirstmd 9y ago
No doubt turning many car companies into the new Android phone developers.

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.
  - virgilp 9y ago
    There's another aspect of it though. As soon as Waymo makes self-driving cars more popular, and there are less humans on the road - you just need inferior technology to be able to operate. Bootstrapping this is the hardest - after self-driving cars are a thing, normally we'll see accelerated move towards fully automated driving. In the extreme case, if Waymo cars are 80%, Tesla cars can easily be 20% just based on the fact that Waymo cars will avoid most accidents made by Tesla software errors
    - galdosdi 9y ago
      You might be right, but I'll devil's advocate a bit, with a few possible predictions (none of which I believe in all THAT strongly, just speculation) - If there's a period where new self driving cars are popular but aftermarket self driving kits for older cars are unaffordable or nonexistant, then during this period, the price of non-self-driving cars will plummet dramatically. Who knows, you might be able to buy a 2 year old camry for $1000. The market for these cars will exclusively be (other than oddballs/enthusiasts) people whose wages are so low that driving yourself in a non-self-driving car is still cheaper in an overall sense than using self-driving cabs, so that will cap the possible value of such cars at a pretty low point. - As long as (possibly as a result of the above) the number of human driven cars on the road is at all significant (like, at least 1% or 0.1% or something), the benefits you mention will be hard to attain. In a given trip a car interacts with hundreds of other cars. - You forgot about pedestrians and cyclists. In many places, there are more of those than there are cars, anyway, so even if all cars are self driving, - There's going to be weather and construction and falling trees and runaway skateboards and runaway trucks on ice covered hills and wildfires and so on. This kind of software will operate at scale, so improbable events become important to handle. - Uber is probably dumb enough to hope your argument is true and think they can get away with half-assed self-driving, which is why they're going to fail miserably and go bankrupt. - There's going to be regulation. As a made up example, if the "Waymo patent tax" is "just" $5000 per car, it's going to be pretty hard for a car manufacturer to justify to regulators that they'll instead develop competing software that is somewhat inferior in safety, but "acceptable", for the sake of saving, say, half of that $5000 (it still costs the thrifty manufacturer money to develop or buy their lower quality software!). All it'll take is one fatality and people will be up in arms. If the "acceptable" technology was the first one out, it'd be different, but it'll be hard to convince anyone it's worth the risk when there's better tech already out there. BTW, Waymo management would obviously be clever about setting a good price point that captures lots of value but still is low enough to discourage this kind of competition. - My vague software and driving intuitions tell me it'd actually be easier to design a more general system anyway (massive handwaving). It's actually HUMANS (specifically those accustomed to easy suburban western driving conditions) who have a harder time driving when they can't assume everyone will follow the rules, not computers, and I think that's why so many people mistakenly (IMHO) imagine it'd be so easy to make self driving cars if only everyone followed the damned rules. The simplified laws of physics applicable to driving are simpler than the DMV manual anyway.

secfirstmd 9y ago

No doubt turning many car companies into the new Android phone developers.