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Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars. If Waymo has truly s
by jtbayly 8y ago
Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars.
If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised.
Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.
- rbranson 8y agoI tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.
- Fricken 8y agoWaymo has also ordered 20k Jaguar I-paces. Rumour is they have invested about 11 billion in R&d so far, and I'm crudely estimating the cost of their 80k upcoming robotaxis to be around 12 billion. Alphabet is committed. Waymo estimates about 50 trips per day will be served per vehicle. At that rate, 80k robotaxis is enough to displace most of the taxi/rideshare services in the southwestern United States, though I'm not expecting to see all of them on the roads until 2022 or so. Waymo has a ton of work ahead of them. Mapping and validating in the ~100 square mile area of Chandler has taken them about 18 months so far, and supposedly they are on the verge of a commercial launch. Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.
- rbranson 8y agoIn this scenario there's no moat for Lyft/Uber either. If Waymo can meet demand, they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices so deeply that most consumers will switch overnight. Banks will be falling over themselves to provide the massive credit they'll need to bankroll the expansion.
- CPLX 8y ago> they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices Why? I see comments like this constantly. But does anyone ever do even a basic spreadsheet to explain the unit economics of this argument? Low skilled people who can drive are pretty cheap and plentiful. Even if self-driving tech is flawless (spoiler: it's not and won't be soon) it still only replaces part of their responsibilities. Someone will still have to clean the cars for example. Presumably there will be some required level of human monitoring, etc. Conversely, capital and highly reliable technology isn't free. You can calculate pretty easily the rate at which it's profitable to substitute technology for labor, this is a trade-off we've literally been making for centuries. One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs. Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?
- Fricken 8y agoWaymo doesn't have a business model if it isn't cheaper. It probably won't be much cheaper in the near term.
- CPLX 8y agoThat's not true at all. There are a lot more use cases for self driving technology than taxi services. In fact I'm continuously perplexed as to why this specific use case, which is obviously the most challenging and likely to be the last to reach the market, is always first in these discussions.
- jcfrei 8y agoWaymo might also tell a different story: They've realized that a fundamental breakthrough in self-driving cars is unlikely to happen in the next decade and therefore there's no point in waiting any longer to perfect the technology - and instead rely on remote controlling of the cars for difficult situations. They can still gradually improve the self-driving systems but from a business perspective it might make sense to capture as much market share as possible right now.
- saas_co_de 8y agoThis is right on. Waymo is not an autonomous car in the way people typically imagine them. More like a remote control street car on a digital track.
- Animats 8y agoIt doesn't work that way. Waymo's remote control does not even support direct manual remote control. It just lets the remote operator give some direction to the onboard systems.
- saas_co_de 8y agoI am giving an analogy. Street car on digital track is the first part of it. The remote control aspects are there as well. It is not "direct" remote control. It is like a drone. You give a direction and the onboard computers execute on it. Direct remote control is not possible because of latency. But it also seems that the commercial launches of these vehicles might be dependent on 5G networks being available (lower latency, better reliability) in which case the remote control capabilities will be greatly enhanced before launch.
- Animats 8y agoThere's another startup, for self-driving trucks, which does have direct remote control. Their idea is that the trucks are self-driving for long-haul, and then the final non-Interstate part is remote controlled.[1] [1] https://phantom.auto/ https://phantom.auto/
- a9a 8y agoIn all of these deal announcements, the key words are “up to”. That’s very different from a confirmed 62k order, and in all announcements related to that agreement timing of delivery was unconfirmed [0]. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysler-minivans.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysle...
- chrischen 8y agoYou can always sell the cars if it fails.
- brudgers 8y agoAt the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If all 60k vehicles were registered in California, it would look like rounding error on the 36,000,000 vehicles registered there. [3] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year [3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f-9453-0d353706cc9a/official.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f...
- Symmetry 8y agoCorporations like Alphabet don't spend 1% of their revenue on something unless they're very confident it will pan out.
- brudgers 8y agoAlphabet spent $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility in 2011 and sold it to Lenovo for $3 billion three years later. The lost $9+ billion? Nobody really noticed. For Alphabet, $1 billion is mad money, not the rent. Self driving cars are a moonshot.
- ipsum2 8y agoThe 9 billion was spent on patents. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_deal_by_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_dea... Specifically, this section: "According to the filing, Google and Motorola began discussions about Motorola's patent portfolio in early July, as well as the "intellectual property litigation and the potential impact of such litigation on the Android ecosystem". Although the two companies discussed the possibility of an acquisition after the initial contact by Mr. Rubin, it was only after Motorola pushed back on the idea of patent sale that the acquisition talks picked up steam. The turning point came during a meeting on July 6. At the meeting, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha discussed the protection of the Android ecosystem with Google senior vice president Nikesh Arora, and during that talk Jha told Arora that "it could be problematic for Motorola Mobility to continue to exist as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio". In connection with these discussions, the two companies signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that allowed Google to do due diligence on the company's patent portfolio."
- jellicle 8y agoNo. The annual production of Pacificas is only 65K vehicles or so. Google ordered those vehicles in the same way that airplanes are bought. The "62,000" is over many years, and is purely speculative, and cancellable/modifiable as needed. Google is buying a couple thousand Pacificas in the near future. That's it. It's more or less a commitment to keep buying a couple thousand a year for the next however-many years, in exchange for a discount. It is NOT the case that Google is going to open a big box and find 62,000 vehicles inside in late 2018.
- ebikelaw 8y agoAll journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not. This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.
- sandworm101 8y ago>> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place. So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.
- rifung 8y ago> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates. Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.
- the8472 8y agoAll we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.
- ianamartin 8y agoI don't really see Waymo as being far ahead at this point. Uber pretty clearly stole Waymo's work. So unless Waymo had a major breakthrough since then that wasn't related to the basically everything Uber got then everyone is pretty much on the same page: promising it's almost here but in reality still about 10 years out or more.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoUber stole a small portion of Waymos work several years ago. They supposedly stole some lidar designs. There’s also code and personnel that Uber doesn’t have. In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber.
- Judgmentality 8y ago> In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber. I'd say many millions of miles, actually :) https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-miles/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-mile...
- zwieback 8y agoI'm sure Waymo will make a lot of progress with their massive investment but using SV money as an indicator for a project's ultimate success seems unwise at this point. I think the real question is whether the big investors in self-driving cars will make progress creating virtual rails for their vehicles, e.g. roads where we can keep pedestrians out.
- the-dude 8y agoThat is a train or a tram, not a car.
- IanCal 8y ago> roads where we can keep pedestrians out. Aren't major roads pedestrian free in the US? Motorways and major roads are in the UK.
- dingaling 8y agoOnly motorways in the UK, and roads designated under special classification. I've walked and cycled along multilane A-roads. It's not fun but it's legal.
- Shivetya 8y agoWhile I agree they are closest of all the competitors with published numbers they are still very far off from human drivers and just looking at the linked articles within the original article do make it clear they have a long way to go. the key difference is the level of caution Waymo is exercising. So how do we get a determination of which disengagement events would have possibly lead to a crash? Plus I am still not convinced these numbers are even going to remotely similar over roads not heavily mapped and imaged. I think the hope many have for AV is that is allows for driving in the worst of conditions but in the end we will have AV for limited access or very tightly monitored road ways only. Which in itself is not a bad idea, rush hours could much safer and efficient with HOV/Express lanes redone to explicitly support AV. We certainly aren't going to be able to get people to drive more lawfully when most think they are the better driver when compared to others.
- TYPE_FASTER 8y ago> Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? I would hazard a guess that yes, that's pretty much the Southwestern US year round, if you include Southern CA. There are enough metro areas, and enough new sprawling development, to put those vehicles to work.
- czr 8y ago>Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? Waymo supposedly processes their lidar signals to detect other cars with reasonable accuracy even in snow/rain(https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s). They only operate in pre-mapped areas so they should be able to follow lanes just fine even if the actual markings are obscured (by weather or by poor maintenance). This kind of approach (mapping everything beforehand and using lidar for perception) is used by other players as well, and seems the most likely to work for short term level 4. Trying to do everything without the benefits of lidar and high-res maps (what e.g. Tesla are doing) is a more general solution, and cheaper hardware-wise, but will take longer to get right.
- freerobby 8y agoThanks for posting that Waymo vid, that's the best processing of Lidar in adverse conditions that I've seen. I think the million dollar question is how far Waymo (or others) can push noise reduction with Lidar. The video seems impressive in isolation, but if you compare it to what Nvidia was doing with cameras two years ago (object recognition in snow/fog that appears to outperform humans[1]), it quickly becomes apparent that Lidar is still nowhere close. But maybe they can get it good enough to bridge us between specific and general techniques. Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant. 1: https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s
- sandworm101 8y agoRead the contract if you can. I guarantee that they have not put down a billion dollars for all those cars. This isn't like ordering from Amazon. This is a complicated delivery contract. It will have stages. Money will be owed according to a schedule. If things don't work out, there will be many places where delivery can be delayed or the order canceled. Waymo has to have a plan to pay for this in the long run, but they aren't today putting down all the cash. If you are buying 10,000 cars, what you are essentially doing is taking on that car manufacturer as a partner. You are betting that you will need the cars, and they are bettering that you will be around to pay for them. Everything remains speculative.
- Zigurd 8y agoRe "It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work." Motorola?