5 ms·

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

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.
  - jvolkman 9y ago
    > The few times other parties have stepped in and spoken up, there's been some less rosy truths in there. What are you referring to?
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      An excellent example is a 2014 article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... Consider that at the time, an engineer told him that the car was dependent on a level of mapping detail that was impractical at a nationwide level, that the car would run a red light if it wasn't on the car's map. The article also cites that the cars would have issues in bright sunlight, particularly determining the color of stoplights, that they couldn't handle construction sites consistently, etc. Now, in contrast, this is months after Google said it "didn't need pedals or steering anymore", in articles like this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/tech/innovation/google-self-driving-car/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/tech/innovation/google-self-dr... Also, consider the Slate article mentions Google Self-Driving Cars don't know how to park, two full years after the PR stunt which shows a blind man doing so in a Self-Driving Car. (Which was almost certainly a heavily staged operation.) It's safe to assume Google has improved upon some or probably all of these issues in the last couple of years, but I think that article shows a stunning difference between where a press team says a technology is and where it actually is.
      - Jyaif 9y ago
        Maybe they don't give a rat's ass about parking a car because it's trivial compared to the rest?
        obmelvin 9y ago
        Yeah, if you can create a good enough multi-task (which driving is) learner to know how to navigate city traffic, it will easily learn to park.
      - 9y ago
- agumonkey 9y ago
  They started early and seriously, unlike manufacturers who embraced it with marketing in mind and then put "beta" products on the road. Google were the first to gather massive amount of data on SDV. Maybe they're not the first right now, but they're safely in the lead, waiting for the others to fumble.
- eco 9y ago
  > How do you come to that first conclusion? I don't really trust any of the marketing (including videos) or friendly articles about how far along companies are. The best way to judge I've seen is by the mandatory reports companies testing in California must supply. By those, Waymo is far, far ahead as of 2016. They've driven 635,868 miles (two orders of magnitude more miles than their next closest competitor) and their miles driven per disengagement was 5,128 (an order of magnitude higher than the next closest, with many still in single digit miles per disengagement). I'm eager to see 2017 numbers. Perhaps one of the other major companies has caught up but I'm doubtful. That's a wide gap to close in a year. Sure, the numbers could be gamed a little (just drive on the same road you can do perfectly every time every day all year) but doing that will never let you improve your real world performance (important for the big companies heavily invested in this, not so much for the smaller companies looking to get acquired). I think it's reasonable to just ignore all the small companies working on this in stealth. It's all about testing for self driving cars. They can't perfect it just sitting in a garage and thinking really hard about what problems they may encounter and maybe a few prototype vehicles. They need as many cars as they can on the road driving and collecting data on real world situations.
  - xyzzy_plugh 9y ago
    Isn't Uber testing in Pittsburgh and Phoenix? They wouldn't report those miles to California. What about R&D outside of the US? I don't think California reports are an adequate measure of progress. Additionally, I am not sure mileage matters as much -- you even suggest why in the next paragraph.
  - bsurmanski 9y ago
    Here's an article from February covering the California DMV reports: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-disengagement/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
  - aphextron 9y ago
    >They've driven 635,868 miles (two orders of magnitude more miles than their next closest competitor) and their miles driven per disengagement was 5,128 (an order of magnitude higher than the next closest, with many still in single digit miles per disengagement). Making the assumption that "disengagements == bad" is a bit suspect though. We have no way of knowing if the reason for disengagement among competitors is purposeful, or due to more strenuous testing environments. It's not like this is a performance metric we know they are trying to optimize. Without knowing the testing methodology, it's meaningless to compare these numbers.
- throwa893243 9y ago
  I work for one such "early stage" startup - all we do is bullshit VCs by showing them research done by other people, and then passing them off as our own.
- Animats 9y ago
  Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar? Probably some big auto parts company. Continental [1] and Denso [2] are both building solid state LIDARs. Quanergy seems to be all hype. Maybe automatic driving is just going to be a set of components Tier I auto parts makers sell to auto companies. That's how ABS braking and stability control works. Those are the companies that can make electronics work reliably in the automotive environment. It may not be a race, either. Many major auto manufacturers expect to ship some form of automated driving in the 2020-2021 model year. There's no reason to expect one big winner here. As for "transportation as a service", Avis, the car rental company, is getting ready to do that. They're servicing Google's self-driving test fleet in Austin, so they'll be ready to go into that business when the time comes. [1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/Chassis-Safety/Advanced-Driver-Assistance-Systems/Lidars/High-Resolution-3D-Flash-Lidar https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-biggest-supplier-to-take-majority-stake-in-self-driving-technology-firm-1473423082 https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-biggest-supplier-to-tak...
naasking 9y ago
> Given 1-4, $1.1B doesn't seem like much. Seriously, they'd make trillions from self-driving tech. They'd end up spinning off an Uber-like self-driving ride service, and then they can track you and serve ads to you wherever you go. The data mining potential alone is huge.
- AJ007 9y ago
  Bill every business for each delivered customer. Don't care to participate? Your steakhouse will show up on Google Maps if the user knows precisely where to zoom in or the exact name of the restaurant. Otherwise, "Hey Google, take me to a great steakhouse" and off we go..
  - discreteevent 9y ago
    No. Otherwise- Google's car doesn't have my favorite steakhouse, where I am going to meet my friends. I'm buying a Mazda.
- muzani 9y ago
  lol my first instinct was that they would charge a fee, but forcing you to watch YouTube commercials sounds so Google.
eighthnate 9y ago
> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. Yeah. I think this is it. I remember when google paid $1.6B for Youtube 10 years ago, people thought they were insane. Look at them now. Youtube dominates the web as video platform. Pretty much the successful self-driving AI platform will probably dominate the market and will be installed in most cars. Like how Android dominates the smartphone market. In tech/software, it seems to be winner-take-all market.
- madisfun 9y ago
  > Youtube dominates the web as video platform. Is it profitable?
tanilama 9y ago
Apparently Tesla is the furthest ahead in terms of having a sellable product. Google however, no matter how fancy their technology maybe, they don't have a window to demonstrate yet and need to rely on existing auto manufacturers, which is developing their own arms of self-driving rapidly and they have vast advantage as to collect data.
- mycall 9y ago
  Then look at Apple, buying up all the tech they need.
MarkMc 9y ago
> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. That's true of software generally, but not will not be true of automated driving software. Windows, iOS, Facebook and YouTube have strong network effects. Google search and Microsoft Office offer a familiar user interface and superior features. Self driving software will have none of these benefits - there is no network effect, no significant user interface, and no feature differentiation. As soon as there are 3 self driving software products on the market that meet minimum safety standards, competition will force the price down to little more than the cost of development. What's more, that cost of development will diminish over time: If in 2027 a company decides to develop self driving software, the development cost will be much less than the $1.1 billion Google has paid. So over the long term the economics will be similar to airlines - suppliers offering a commodity product and generating thin margins. Although the long-term trend is bleak, Waymo does have two short-term advantages: 1) possibly being first to market; 2) its suite of patents on self-driving tech. Personally I don't place much weight on these advantages so I would value Waymo much less than the stock market. As an Alphabet shareholder I very much hope that they spin off Waymo so I can sell my interest in self-driving tech.
- georgeglue1 9y ago
  There are massive economies of scale. If Google is first to mass market, they will have a large information lead. From there, their cars could take better routes and handle more edge cases. There's a similar network effect and economy of scale that applies to Waze + Google Maps' lead in mapping.
- ballenf 9y ago
  Agree for the most part, but question the lack of network effects here: Is there not a potential interoperability / safety gain if all the cars on the road know how all the others will react? In a game of chicken they know they should each veer right to avoid an accident, so to speak. I guess the answer depends to some degree on just how much inter-car communication is part of the future and whether those will be fully standardized. And even if standardized whether additional proprietary communications will be permitted between the same species. Finally, isn't there a race on to collect as much detailed driving data as possible to train these systems? So the more a system is deployed the faster it will improve and therefore be more attractive? I guess my question is really whether meeting minimum safety standards is going to be the sole question that purchasers of self-driving tech ask before buying. It's not too hard to fathom different techs being a "smoother" drive or maybe even able to handle more side roads (and thus more shortcut options) that other techs aren't ready for yet.
nojk88 9y ago
pfft...self driving cars aren't like smartphones. If you think of our road and traffic networks across the world the places this stuff is going to work is going to be very very low, i.e. there are upper limits on scalability. It's going to be costly and in the hands of a few for a long time to come.
flexie 9y ago
I agree that 1.1B isn't that much given the potential size of the market (and given the size of Google's profits, it's a surprisingly small bet they've made). But how do you arrive at the conclusion that Google is way ahead? I cannot buy a Google car with self-driving capabilities. I can't even buy a car from any other manufacturer with Google's self-driving software in it. I can buy several other cars with some degree of self-driving tech in them, most notably Tesla, but also Volvo and Audi and others. Already now, you have tens of thousands of Teslas driving around in either self-driving mode or in what is in essence a "recording" mode where they record and simulate. They drive in all kind of traffic, roads, rules, weather, light etc. Meanwhile, you have a few hundred Waymobiles mostly driving around the perfect, dry and pristine Northern Californian roads with 25 mph. They have merely logged in 3M miles in almost 10 years. That's the equivalent of 10,000 Teslas driving 10 miles per day for a month. In a couple of years you will have a million Teslas driving on the roads. And you probably still just have a few hundred Google cars driving around engineers. Google is losing the number game with its boutique approach. Waymo is WayBehind.
- jvolkman 9y ago
  The Tesla data recording sounds great on paper, but despite all that hypothetical data Autopilot still can't stay in its lane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ALEMd9WZJtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ALEMd9WZJtE

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.
- jvolkman 9y ago
  > The few times other parties have stepped in and spoken up, there's been some less rosy truths in there. What are you referring to?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    An excellent example is a 2014 article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... Consider that at the time, an engineer told him that the car was dependent on a level of mapping detail that was impractical at a nationwide level, that the car would run a red light if it wasn't on the car's map. The article also cites that the cars would have issues in bright sunlight, particularly determining the color of stoplights, that they couldn't handle construction sites consistently, etc. Now, in contrast, this is months after Google said it "didn't need pedals or steering anymore", in articles like this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/tech/innovation/google-self-driving-car/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/tech/innovation/google-self-dr... Also, consider the Slate article mentions Google Self-Driving Cars don't know how to park, two full years after the PR stunt which shows a blind man doing so in a Self-Driving Car. (Which was almost certainly a heavily staged operation.) It's safe to assume Google has improved upon some or probably all of these issues in the last couple of years, but I think that article shows a stunning difference between where a press team says a technology is and where it actually is.
    - Jyaif 9y ago
      Maybe they don't give a rat's ass about parking a car because it's trivial compared to the rest?
      - obmelvin 9y ago
        Yeah, if you can create a good enough multi-task (which driving is) learner to know how to navigate city traffic, it will easily learn to park.
    - 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
They started early and seriously, unlike manufacturers who embraced it with marketing in mind and then put "beta" products on the road. Google were the first to gather massive amount of data on SDV. Maybe they're not the first right now, but they're safely in the lead, waiting for the others to fumble.
eco 9y ago
> How do you come to that first conclusion? I don't really trust any of the marketing (including videos) or friendly articles about how far along companies are. The best way to judge I've seen is by the mandatory reports companies testing in California must supply. By those, Waymo is far, far ahead as of 2016. They've driven 635,868 miles (two orders of magnitude more miles than their next closest competitor) and their miles driven per disengagement was 5,128 (an order of magnitude higher than the next closest, with many still in single digit miles per disengagement). I'm eager to see 2017 numbers. Perhaps one of the other major companies has caught up but I'm doubtful. That's a wide gap to close in a year. Sure, the numbers could be gamed a little (just drive on the same road you can do perfectly every time every day all year) but doing that will never let you improve your real world performance (important for the big companies heavily invested in this, not so much for the smaller companies looking to get acquired). I think it's reasonable to just ignore all the small companies working on this in stealth. It's all about testing for self driving cars. They can't perfect it just sitting in a garage and thinking really hard about what problems they may encounter and maybe a few prototype vehicles. They need as many cars as they can on the road driving and collecting data on real world situations.
- xyzzy_plugh 9y ago
  Isn't Uber testing in Pittsburgh and Phoenix? They wouldn't report those miles to California. What about R&D outside of the US? I don't think California reports are an adequate measure of progress. Additionally, I am not sure mileage matters as much -- you even suggest why in the next paragraph.
- bsurmanski 9y ago
  Here's an article from February covering the California DMV reports: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-disengagement/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...
- aphextron 9y ago
  >They've driven 635,868 miles (two orders of magnitude more miles than their next closest competitor) and their miles driven per disengagement was 5,128 (an order of magnitude higher than the next closest, with many still in single digit miles per disengagement). Making the assumption that "disengagements == bad" is a bit suspect though. We have no way of knowing if the reason for disengagement among competitors is purposeful, or due to more strenuous testing environments. It's not like this is a performance metric we know they are trying to optimize. Without knowing the testing methodology, it's meaningless to compare these numbers.
throwa893243 9y ago
I work for one such "early stage" startup - all we do is bullshit VCs by showing them research done by other people, and then passing them off as our own.
Animats 9y ago
Who is going to scale up the best and most cost efficient solid state lidar? Probably some big auto parts company. Continental [1] and Denso [2] are both building solid state LIDARs. Quanergy seems to be all hype. Maybe automatic driving is just going to be a set of components Tier I auto parts makers sell to auto companies. That's how ABS braking and stability control works. Those are the companies that can make electronics work reliably in the automotive environment. It may not be a race, either. Many major auto manufacturers expect to ship some form of automated driving in the 2020-2021 model year. There's no reason to expect one big winner here. As for "transportation as a service", Avis, the car rental company, is getting ready to do that. They're servicing Google's self-driving test fleet in Austin, so they'll be ready to go into that business when the time comes. [1] https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/Chassis-Safety/Advanced-Driver-Assistance-Systems/Lidars/High-Resolution-3D-Flash-Lidar https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Passenger-Cars/... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-biggest-supplier-to-take-majority-stake-in-self-driving-technology-firm-1473423082 https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-biggest-supplier-to-tak...

naasking 9y ago

> Given 1-4, $1.1B doesn't seem like much. Seriously, they'd make trillions from self-driving tech. They'd end up spinning off an Uber-like self-driving ride service, and then they can track you and serve ads to you wherever you go. The data mining potential alone is huge.

AJ007 9y ago
Bill every business for each delivered customer. Don't care to participate? Your steakhouse will show up on Google Maps if the user knows precisely where to zoom in or the exact name of the restaurant. Otherwise, "Hey Google, take me to a great steakhouse" and off we go..
- discreteevent 9y ago
  No. Otherwise- Google's car doesn't have my favorite steakhouse, where I am going to meet my friends. I'm buying a Mazda.
muzani 9y ago
lol my first instinct was that they would charge a fee, but forcing you to watch YouTube commercials sounds so Google.

eighthnate 9y ago

> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. Yeah. I think this is it. I remember when google paid $1.6B for Youtube 10 years ago, people thought they were insane. Look at them now. Youtube dominates the web as video platform. Pretty much the successful self-driving AI platform will probably dominate the market and will be installed in most cars. Like how Android dominates the smartphone market. In tech/software, it seems to be winner-take-all market.

madisfun 9y ago
> Youtube dominates the web as video platform. Is it profitable?

tanilama 9y ago

Apparently Tesla is the furthest ahead in terms of having a sellable product. Google however, no matter how fancy their technology maybe, they don't have a window to demonstrate yet and need to rely on existing auto manufacturers, which is developing their own arms of self-driving rapidly and they have vast advantage as to collect data.

mycall 9y ago
Then look at Apple, buying up all the tech they need.

MarkMc 9y ago

> 4) Software tends to be a winner-take-most industry. That's true of software generally, but not will not be true of automated driving software. Windows, iOS, Facebook and YouTube have strong network effects. Google search and Microsoft Office offer a familiar user interface and superior features. Self driving software will have none of these benefits - there is no network effect, no significant user interface, and no feature differentiation. As soon as there are 3 self driving software products on the market that meet minimum safety standards, competition will force the price down to little more than the cost of development. What's more, that cost of development will diminish over time: If in 2027 a company decides to develop self driving software, the development cost will be much less than the $1.1 billion Google has paid. So over the long term the economics will be similar to airlines - suppliers offering a commodity product and generating thin margins. Although the long-term trend is bleak, Waymo does have two short-term advantages: 1) possibly being first to market; 2) its suite of patents on self-driving tech. Personally I don't place much weight on these advantages so I would value Waymo much less than the stock market. As an Alphabet shareholder I very much hope that they spin off Waymo so I can sell my interest in self-driving tech.

georgeglue1 9y ago
There are massive economies of scale. If Google is first to mass market, they will have a large information lead. From there, their cars could take better routes and handle more edge cases. There's a similar network effect and economy of scale that applies to Waze + Google Maps' lead in mapping.
ballenf 9y ago
Agree for the most part, but question the lack of network effects here: Is there not a potential interoperability / safety gain if all the cars on the road know how all the others will react? In a game of chicken they know they should each veer right to avoid an accident, so to speak. I guess the answer depends to some degree on just how much inter-car communication is part of the future and whether those will be fully standardized. And even if standardized whether additional proprietary communications will be permitted between the same species. Finally, isn't there a race on to collect as much detailed driving data as possible to train these systems? So the more a system is deployed the faster it will improve and therefore be more attractive? I guess my question is really whether meeting minimum safety standards is going to be the sole question that purchasers of self-driving tech ask before buying. It's not too hard to fathom different techs being a "smoother" drive or maybe even able to handle more side roads (and thus more shortcut options) that other techs aren't ready for yet.

nojk88 9y ago

pfft...self driving cars aren't like smartphones. If you think of our road and traffic networks across the world the places this stuff is going to work is going to be very very low, i.e. there are upper limits on scalability. It's going to be costly and in the hands of a few for a long time to come.

flexie 9y ago

I agree that 1.1B isn't that much given the potential size of the market (and given the size of Google's profits, it's a surprisingly small bet they've made). But how do you arrive at the conclusion that Google is way ahead? I cannot buy a Google car with self-driving capabilities. I can't even buy a car from any other manufacturer with Google's self-driving software in it. I can buy several other cars with some degree of self-driving tech in them, most notably Tesla, but also Volvo and Audi and others. Already now, you have tens of thousands of Teslas driving around in either self-driving mode or in what is in essence a "recording" mode where they record and simulate. They drive in all kind of traffic, roads, rules, weather, light etc. Meanwhile, you have a few hundred Waymobiles mostly driving around the perfect, dry and pristine Northern Californian roads with 25 mph. They have merely logged in 3M miles in almost 10 years. That's the equivalent of 10,000 Teslas driving 10 miles per day for a month. In a couple of years you will have a million Teslas driving on the roads. And you probably still just have a few hundred Google cars driving around engineers. Google is losing the number game with its boutique approach. Waymo is WayBehind.

jvolkman 9y ago
The Tesla data recording sounds great on paper, but despite all that hypothetical data Autopilot still can't stay in its lane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ALEMd9WZJtE https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ALEMd9WZJtE