9 ms·

Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

124 points by mcspecter 9y ago

Fricken 9y ago
I wonder if this includes the 'Fuck you money' engineers on project Chauffeur received for passing certain milestones. Earlier in the depositions it was disclosed that Levandowski was paid a 120 million dollar bonus, though it wasn't revealed how much was given to others on the project. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reason-staffers-quit-google-s-car-project-the-company-paid-them-so-much https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reaso...
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Levandowski's $120M was an earn-out from the acquisition of his startup: https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t... (Note the date: this is well before Otto and the Uber/Waymo flap.) It probably is counted in the $1.1B spent on self-driving tech though.
  - Fricken 9y ago
    It was disclosed in the depositions that the 510 systems acquisition was worth about $20 million: http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engineer-sparked-war-between-google-2.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engi... The bonuses were paid out at the end of 2015. It was shortly after that that Levandowski revealed Otto to the world. Plus Chris Urmson started Aurora, and Brian Salesky went on to become CEO of Argo, which is Ford's autonomous Driving subsidiary. They all got some kind of huge bonus. It supposedly amounted to a 14% rise in the aggregated quarterly expenses of Alphabets 'other bets', which lumps together a bunch of Alphabet's moonshot subsidiaries.
amaks 9y ago
And $120 million of that amount got paid to Anthony Levandovski?
siddarthd2919 9y ago
It is not really that much! 1.1 B in 6 years on a moonshot project.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Seriously, I'm mean what else are you going to do with a bit more than a billion dollars? Develop a full line of Google rockets and disrupt the space industry or something? :-) But you raise an interesting point, what should we expect from 6 years of effort and 1.1B$ ? [1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/17-billion-dollar-companies-created-in-less-than-five-years-2016-5/ http://www.businessinsider.com/17-billion-dollar-companies-c...
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  It's a lot if it doesn't pay off eventually.
  - visarga 9y ago
    The same tech that is being used in self driving cars could be repurposed for autonomous robots, and end up with a market much bigger than that of transportation. SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots.
    - robotresearcher 9y ago
      > SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots. That's a claim I have never heard before and I don't agree with. You have some kind of argument to support that drive-by claim? Since there are no fully autonomous SDCs yet you'd have to explain away any existing autonomous robots.
      - the8472 9y ago
        Roads are a fairly structured and rule-based environment already designed with machines operating on them in mind. And those aspects that are not designed for the physical properties of cars are still designed to be easily perceptible by the human operators, e.g. signs, lane markings. That can't be said for many other environments in which autonomous robots would have to operate.
tuna-piano 9y ago
I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far more than an axle maker. 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. Given 1-4, $1.1B doesn't seem like much. Even if by chance it doesn't turn out to be a positive ROI, it seems crazy to think the $1.1B was a bad bet. And given current prices for self-driving startups (example, Gm's acquisition of Cruise for >$1B), the current market value for Waymo would likely be >$10B.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  How do you come to that first conclusion? It seems difficult to tell who is the “furthest ahead” because it’s a pretty complex race. For starters, we can’t even say with certainty who all of the competitors are. Some are very quiet or at early stages but could be working on a breakthrough problem that turns out to be a pivot point. Some are specializing. Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar? There’s a whole list of key problems being worked on. Do you mean hardware or software? Just the algorithms are a huge piece. Just hardware is a huge pieces. Beyond price and performance, it’s common that unforeseen factors end up being important in determining who becomes the most successful in selling traditional manufacturers components or whole systems. Surely we don’t realize all of them yet. Also there is so much still being held close to the vest. These guys are keeping lots of secrets about how far along they are truly, roadblocks, etc.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Indeed, the only comparison we have for Google's progress in most cases is what they claim. The few times other parties have stepped in and spoken up, there's been some less rosy truths in there. It's in all of these companies' best interests to look like they're in the lead. The tech we can judge the progress of is the tech we can actually test and use.
adventured 9y ago
$94 billion in cash burning a hole in their pocket. $20x billion in new cash pouring in annually, expanding by 10%-20% per year. In another two years they'll be net cash richer than Apple is (as unlike Apple they pay no dividend and have almost entirely avoided taking on debt). There aren't very many large companies they can buy with that money, due to perpetually increasing anti-trust concerns. I suppose they could maul ~$25 billion buying Snap and probably get away with it due to Facebook (but comeon). So what to do? Burn $1.1 billion on self-driving tech. Will it pan out? Doesn't really matter. Their search monopoly isn't going anywhere near-term (probably) and they'll have $200 billion in net cash in another 4 or 5 years. They could vaporize $11.1 billion on self-driving tech in the next couple of years and it would not matter, either to shareholders (oh, some would pretend to be upset) or to their operations.
- SapphireSun 9y ago
  That's amazing. Would it be fair to say that at this point it's a dollar optimizer with no reasoning beyond it?
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    I can't remember if it was Lazlo Bock or Eric Schmidt, but in one of their books (both?) someone reports a board member opining "You've created the first self-replicating talent machine." Having worked with those cats, that might actually be true.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  >So what to do? They've spent over 30 billion building GCP. I'd rather they continue expanding GCP than waste a dime on Snap.
coldtea 9y ago
Don't know about how it's in the US, but if it's anything like in some European countries, a question is: How much of that $1.1 are recouped as "investments in research" etc. and thus contributing to tax-deductions (and in some cases even subsidies)?
- jellicle 9y ago
  100% of it would be tax-deductible. Corporations don't pay tax on any money spent on salaries, equipment, expenses, etc. Whether there would be ADDITIONAL subsidies, I do not know.
mempko 9y ago
Only $1B? Kind of highlights that they are not that serious yet about the technology yet.
simonsarris 9y ago
Serious question: Why not acquire Tesla and position yourself leaps and bounds ahead of the other tech giants?
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Because Tesla is a money losing, capital intensive business they don't know how to run. See e.g. their Motorola debacle.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  I rather seriously doubt Elon is selling Tesla.
  - Salgat 9y ago
    He owns 22% of shares.
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  Maybe because Google's self driving tech is fundamentally different than that Of Tesla's. Tesla relies on sensors and vision based system whereas Google relies on LIDAR. So I don't think they'd able to integrate the Tesla's self-driving tech into Waymo in any ways.
- tybit 9y ago
  I think while the technical differences could be resolved the biggest blocker would be cultural. Musk has been super aggresive in rolling out more and more self driving features, where as Google and everyone else seems to be much more cautious.
davesque 9y ago
Can anyone put this figure in context? I'm inclined to imagine that $1.1B is chicken feed for Google.
- jldugger 9y ago
  https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=ii&ei=BX68WZm5FNT82AbHrI-4AQ https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=i... Google made 3.5 billion in their most recently reported quarter. It would have been even higher, except for a nearly 3 billion dollar 'unusual expense'. It's not exactly chicken feed, but 1.1B isn't an unexpected number given their focus on 'other bets'.
0xbear 9y ago
Meh. Less than Hillary's presidential campaign.
userbinator 9y ago
Google already has a huge amount of power over where people go on the Internet. It seems having power, however indirect, of where people go in the real world is their next goal, and it is quite deeply unsettling to consider. Imagine self-driving cars that will be cheaper but take you to "sponsored places" before going to your destination, refuse certain destinations "for your safety", and play ads continuously while you're helplessly transported around. Given that amount of power they will have if they succeed, spending $1B on the (very real) possibility of getting to that situation is definitely expected. And very very scary for everyone else.
- jellicle 9y ago
  "Since you uploaded a video which was removed from Youtube, your Google Driving account has been permanently revoked."
slewis 9y ago
They've likely spent way more than that, since the article's number is only through the end of 2015: "Between Project Chauffeur’s inception in 2009 and the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware"
anigbrowl 9y ago
It's a lot and yet it somehow seems cheap at the price. DAROA seems to invest on a similar scale.
asdfologist 9y ago
And over 10% of it went to Anthony Levandowski.
Animats 9y ago
Probably more since the end of 2015, since they've been increasing the number of vehicles.
lpolovets 9y ago
To put this in context, $1.1b is about 3 weeks of operating profit for Google. Considering the upside for Google if their experiment pays off, this seems like a pretty smart bet.
known 9y ago
And Uber won over Google's self-driving tech;
dingo_bat 9y ago
With literally nothing to show for it except litigation with Uber.
cmarschner 9y ago
The top German car suppliers and car makers have accrued 10x the patents on autonomous driving Google has [0]. Bosch alone has 3x the number of patents. Yet hardly anybody talks about Bosch and Continental and Mercedes/Audi/BMW etc. [0] http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in-developing-self-driving-car-technologies-Hint-its-not-Google/amp_articleshow/60284606.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in-developing...
- discreteevent 9y ago
  They do generally tend to keep things very quiet until they launch.
bukgoogle 9y ago
you really trust your family to be in car that doesn't have a steeringwheel and it's controlled by "don't be evil" google ??? Seriously people, wakeup!
siscia 9y ago
But am I the only one thinking that maybe we are trying to solve the wrong kind of problem? If we had spent the same amount of money into creating a grid of mini-train I believe that most cities would already have some working prototype... And mini-train is a control problem that we could solve yesterday... (With mini train I mean something roughly big as a car but that is constrained to move in some predefined path, it will means that they could move way faster than cars and be more space efficients...)

124 points by mcspecter 9y ago

I wonder if this includes the 'Fuck you money' engineers on project Chauffeur received for passing certain milestones. Earlier in the depositions it was disclosed that Levandowski was paid a 120 million dollar bonus, though it wasn't revealed how much was given to others on the project. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reason-staffers-quit-google-s-car-project-the-company-paid-them-so-much https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reaso...

nostrademons 9y ago
Levandowski's $120M was an earn-out from the acquisition of his startup: https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t... (Note the date: this is well before Otto and the Uber/Waymo flap.) It probably is counted in the $1.1B spent on self-driving tech though.
- Fricken 9y ago
  It was disclosed in the depositions that the 510 systems acquisition was worth about $20 million: http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engineer-sparked-war-between-google-2.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engi... The bonuses were paid out at the end of 2015. It was shortly after that that Levandowski revealed Otto to the world. Plus Chris Urmson started Aurora, and Brian Salesky went on to become CEO of Argo, which is Ford's autonomous Driving subsidiary. They all got some kind of huge bonus. It supposedly amounted to a 14% rise in the aggregated quarterly expenses of Alphabets 'other bets', which lumps together a bunch of Alphabet's moonshot subsidiaries.

amaks 9y ago

And $120 million of that amount got paid to Anthony Levandovski?

siddarthd2919 9y ago

It is not really that much! 1.1 B in 6 years on a moonshot project.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
Seriously, I'm mean what else are you going to do with a bit more than a billion dollars? Develop a full line of Google rockets and disrupt the space industry or something? :-) But you raise an interesting point, what should we expect from 6 years of effort and 1.1B$ ? [1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/586023main_8-3-11_NAFCOM.pdf [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/17-billion-dollar-companies-created-in-less-than-five-years-2016-5/ http://www.businessinsider.com/17-billion-dollar-companies-c...
robotresearcher 9y ago
It's a lot if it doesn't pay off eventually.
- visarga 9y ago
  The same tech that is being used in self driving cars could be repurposed for autonomous robots, and end up with a market much bigger than that of transportation. SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    > SDCs are just the easiest form of autonomous robots. That's a claim I have never heard before and I don't agree with. You have some kind of argument to support that drive-by claim? Since there are no fully autonomous SDCs yet you'd have to explain away any existing autonomous robots.
    - the8472 9y ago
      Roads are a fairly structured and rule-based environment already designed with machines operating on them in mind. And those aspects that are not designed for the physical properties of cars are still designed to be easily perceptible by the human operators, e.g. signs, lane markings. That can't be said for many other environments in which autonomous robots would have to operate.

tuna-piano 9y ago

I think by most accounts - 1) Google / Waymo is by far the furthest ahead in self-driving tech. 2) Self-driving is possible in at least certain circumstances in the next decade or two (already is to an extent today). 3) Transportation / automobiles is an absolutely massive industry. Even companies like Dana, Inc (maker of axles) have $4bil valuations. It's easy to see how a self-driving tech maker would be worth far more than an axle maker. 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. Given 1-4, $1.1B doesn't seem like much. Even if by chance it doesn't turn out to be a positive ROI, it seems crazy to think the $1.1B was a bad bet. And given current prices for self-driving startups (example, Gm's acquisition of Cruise for >$1B), the current market value for Waymo would likely be >$10B.

WhitneyLand 9y ago
How do you come to that first conclusion? It seems difficult to tell who is the “furthest ahead” because it’s a pretty complex race. For starters, we can’t even say with certainty who all of the competitors are. Some are very quiet or at early stages but could be working on a breakthrough problem that turns out to be a pivot point. Some are specializing. Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar? There’s a whole list of key problems being worked on. Do you mean hardware or software? Just the algorithms are a huge piece. Just hardware is a huge pieces. Beyond price and performance, it’s common that unforeseen factors end up being important in determining who becomes the most successful in selling traditional manufacturers components or whole systems. Surely we don’t realize all of them yet. Also there is so much still being held close to the vest. These guys are keeping lots of secrets about how far along they are truly, roadblocks, etc.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Indeed, the only comparison we have for Google's progress in most cases is what they claim. The few times other parties have stepped in and spoken up, there's been some less rosy truths in there. It's in all of these companies' best interests to look like they're in the lead. The tech we can judge the progress of is the tech we can actually test and use.

adventured 9y ago

$94 billion in cash burning a hole in their pocket. $20x billion in new cash pouring in annually, expanding by 10%-20% per year. In another two years they'll be net cash richer than Apple is (as unlike Apple they pay no dividend and have almost entirely avoided taking on debt). There aren't very many large companies they can buy with that money, due to perpetually increasing anti-trust concerns. I suppose they could maul ~$25 billion buying Snap and probably get away with it due to Facebook (but comeon). So what to do? Burn $1.1 billion on self-driving tech. Will it pan out? Doesn't really matter. Their search monopoly isn't going anywhere near-term (probably) and they'll have $200 billion in net cash in another 4 or 5 years. They could vaporize $11.1 billion on self-driving tech in the next couple of years and it would not matter, either to shareholders (oh, some would pretend to be upset) or to their operations.

SapphireSun 9y ago
That's amazing. Would it be fair to say that at this point it's a dollar optimizer with no reasoning beyond it?
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  I can't remember if it was Lazlo Bock or Eric Schmidt, but in one of their books (both?) someone reports a board member opining "You've created the first self-replicating talent machine." Having worked with those cats, that might actually be true.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>So what to do? They've spent over 30 billion building GCP. I'd rather they continue expanding GCP than waste a dime on Snap.

coldtea 9y ago

Don't know about how it's in the US, but if it's anything like in some European countries, a question is: How much of that $1.1 are recouped as "investments in research" etc. and thus contributing to tax-deductions (and in some cases even subsidies)?

jellicle 9y ago
100% of it would be tax-deductible. Corporations don't pay tax on any money spent on salaries, equipment, expenses, etc. Whether there would be ADDITIONAL subsidies, I do not know.

mempko 9y ago

Only $1B? Kind of highlights that they are not that serious yet about the technology yet.

simonsarris 9y ago

Serious question: Why not acquire Tesla and position yourself leaps and bounds ahead of the other tech giants?

0xbear 9y ago
Because Tesla is a money losing, capital intensive business they don't know how to run. See e.g. their Motorola debacle.
killjoywashere 9y ago
I rather seriously doubt Elon is selling Tesla.
- Salgat 9y ago
  He owns 22% of shares.
gordon_freeman 9y ago
Maybe because Google's self driving tech is fundamentally different than that Of Tesla's. Tesla relies on sensors and vision based system whereas Google relies on LIDAR. So I don't think they'd able to integrate the Tesla's self-driving tech into Waymo in any ways.
tybit 9y ago
I think while the technical differences could be resolved the biggest blocker would be cultural. Musk has been super aggresive in rolling out more and more self driving features, where as Google and everyone else seems to be much more cautious.

davesque 9y ago

Can anyone put this figure in context? I'm inclined to imagine that $1.1B is chicken feed for Google.

jldugger 9y ago
https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=ii&ei=BX68WZm5FNT82AbHrI-4AQ https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL&fstype=i... Google made 3.5 billion in their most recently reported quarter. It would have been even higher, except for a nearly 3 billion dollar 'unusual expense'. It's not exactly chicken feed, but 1.1B isn't an unexpected number given their focus on 'other bets'.

0xbear 9y ago

Meh. Less than Hillary's presidential campaign.

userbinator 9y ago

Google already has a huge amount of power over where people go on the Internet. It seems having power, however indirect, of where people go in the real world is their next goal, and it is quite deeply unsettling to consider. Imagine self-driving cars that will be cheaper but take you to "sponsored places" before going to your destination, refuse certain destinations "for your safety", and play ads continuously while you're helplessly transported around. Given that amount of power they will have if they succeed, spending $1B on the (very real) possibility of getting to that situation is definitely expected. And very very scary for everyone else.

jellicle 9y ago
"Since you uploaded a video which was removed from Youtube, your Google Driving account has been permanently revoked."

slewis 9y ago

They've likely spent way more than that, since the article's number is only through the end of 2015: "Between Project Chauffeur’s inception in 2009 and the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware"

anigbrowl 9y ago

It's a lot and yet it somehow seems cheap at the price. DAROA seems to invest on a similar scale.

asdfologist 9y ago

And over 10% of it went to Anthony Levandowski.

Animats 9y ago

Probably more since the end of 2015, since they've been increasing the number of vehicles.

lpolovets 9y ago

To put this in context, $1.1b is about 3 weeks of operating profit for Google. Considering the upside for Google if their experiment pays off, this seems like a pretty smart bet.

known 9y ago

And Uber won over Google's self-driving tech;

dingo_bat 9y ago

With literally nothing to show for it except litigation with Uber.

cmarschner 9y ago

The top German car suppliers and car makers have accrued 10x the patents on autonomous driving Google has [0]. Bosch alone has 3x the number of patents. Yet hardly anybody talks about Bosch and Continental and Mercedes/Audi/BMW etc. [0] http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in-developing-self-driving-car-technologies-Hint-its-not-Google/amp_articleshow/60284606.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/Whos-in-the-lead-in-developing...

discreteevent 9y ago
They do generally tend to keep things very quiet until they launch.

bukgoogle 9y ago

you really trust your family to be in car that doesn't have a steeringwheel and it's controlled by "don't be evil" google ??? Seriously people, wakeup!

siscia 9y ago

But am I the only one thinking that maybe we are trying to solve the wrong kind of problem? If we had spent the same amount of money into creating a grid of mini-train I believe that most cities would already have some working prototype... And mini-train is a control problem that we could solve yesterday... (With mini train I mean something roughly big as a car but that is constrained to move in some predefined path, it will means that they could move way faster than cars and be more space efficients...)