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I don't know if this is a fair point of view but from an outsider's perspective it seems like any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money. What compan

I don't know if this is a fair point of view but from an outsider's perspective it seems like any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money. What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? Anyone have a list of real contenders free of the marketing bs?

ForHackernews 8y ago
GM Cruise is a strong contender.
- mi_lk 8y ago
  Curious, what makes you claim that?
  - tedsanders 8y ago
    One piece of evidence is disengagement rates. In 2017, Waymo led with ~6,000 miles per disengagement. Cruise was in second with ~1,000 miles per disengagement. Also, if you look only at the last few months of 2017, Cruise had improved to around ~3,000 or so as I recall. The other players testing in CA are far behind Waymo and Cruise. Of course, there are many caveats to comparing disengagement rates. These are self-reported by companies, and each company may have different policies about which disengagements are serious enough to report. Also, not all miles are equal. Cruise likes to emphasize that its SF miles are more difficult than Waymo's more suburban Mountain View miles. Here's a nice summary of the 2017 data I found for you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/02/01/disengagement-report-2017-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/02/01/disengagem...
    - logical42 8y ago
      To be fair, I feel like I, as a human, get confused about what I’m supposed to be doing driving in SF at a rate worse than once every thousand miles.
      - Nition 8y ago
        It might be interesting to know in what percent of disengagements the car was actually doing the right thing, and only the human driver thought it was wrong and intervened anyway.
        azundo 8y ago
        Those are actually already removed from the disengagement count if the operator can show (with simulation) that the car would have done the right thing without intervention. If it didn't work this way you would be incentivizing operators to train their drivers to take risks in order to hit disengagement metrics which would be bad.
        inferiorhuman 8y ago
        I've seen a few where the car was right and a few where the driver was right, but my assumption is that the car just got lucky because, in my experience, the Cruise cars are very hesitant to make left turns.
        ghaff 8y ago
        >in my experience, the Cruise cars are very hesitant to make left turns I'm sure unprotected (i.e. no arrow) left hand turns remain one of the more difficult routine scenarios to fine tune. What works in (I assume) Chandler Arizona and San Francisco are probably two very different things. A large busy city like San Francisco simply requires a degree of aggression--Pittsburgh lefts, cutting through fairly small gaps, etc.--that would be inappropriate in a calmer and less busy environment.
        inferiorhuman 8y ago
        Well one failure was at 19th and Mission where left turns are illegal, another was at 13th and Folsom which I think is a protected turn, another was on 11th street where the drivers decided to make an illegal u-turn.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      The only times I've come across Cruise vehicles they've been under manual control — and their drivers certainly aren't making much of an attempt to follow the traffic laws. Illegal left turn off of Mission? Why not? Illegal u-turn on 11th St? Sure. Run a red light because the car wouldn't make a legal turn on its own? Of course! Note: I've already got a negative opinion of Cruise regardless of their purported abilities. I followed up on some headhunter spam from Cruise a year or so ago. I bailed before even getting to a phone screen because as persistent as they were, they bailed or were late every time I agreed to one of their proposed times.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    Most publicly available statistics https://qz.com/1220576/the-race-to-build-a-self-driving-car-charted/ https://qz.com/1220576/the-race-to-build-a-self-driving-car-...
- sounds_ironic 8y ago
  No, I was almost t-boned by one coincidentally by their corporate office...Top speed 25 mph and they drive clueless while autonomous.
ebikelaw 8y ago
There's still plenty of execution risk ahead for Waymo and a narrow opportunity for a very focused competitor to catch up to their technology. I don't think Uber is that competitor and I don't think that competitor exists, but it's possible. Cruise would be the obvious candidate and they have a big war chest from Softbank.
mantas 8y ago
Audi is already selling autonomous-on-autobahns A8 so I guess VW is a strong contender too.
- newfocogi 8y ago
  Tesla is selling autonomous-but-don't-quote-us but that doesn't qualify them as a strong contender. The autobahn system isn't large enough to be difficult to map out, and highway driving is the easy case.
  - mantas 8y ago
    AFAIK Audi's driver is legally allowed to keep hands off the wheel in specific circumstances. Meanwhile Tesla's driver is theoretically driving even when "autopilot" is engaged.
  - hocuspocus 8y ago
    You're right. But Audi (with BMW and Daimler) acquired the only provider that can compete against Google Maps in completeness and accuracy. Traditional car makers work in their own ways, which might look outdated from the typical point of view on HN (and justly so). It's pretty hard to estimate how far they've reached.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    Highway driving is indeed the easy case. But even if autonomous vehicles only ever worked on the highway, that would still be a world changing technology.
- nradov 8y ago
  Does the Audi system work safely in severe weather?
gilbetron 8y ago
Argo AI seems to be the place where any good researcher/engineer not in Waymo has gone to.
qeternity 8y ago
The upside to solving driverless is so huge that companies feel they can't miss out on it. It's still very early in the game. Uber is a great example, everyone assumed with all their VC money that they were serious contenders to Waymo...then the crash happened and we get a (literal) glimpse under the hood and realize things aint so pretty. These operations are opaque by necessity and from an investor perspective, it's not a guarantee that Waymo won't have their own setback which becomes Uber's saving grace (however unlikely that seems at the moment).
- pwaai 8y ago
  I doubt it. It seems like a top down strategy outside of Waymo. Operate in silence training on vast amounts of data while your competitors are splashing in VC money thinking if they throw money at it they can solve it.
dzdt 8y ago
Consider the smartphone revolution. Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone. The Android team was already up and working in that area and were able to pivot quickly to mimic the iphone. Both Apple and Android became huge businesses. Being prepared as a second mover once a trailblazer demonstrates a good path can be good business. It even has some advantages over trying to lead and possibly wasting lots of R&D money on dead ends.
- patrickaljord 8y ago
  > Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone The first iPhone was revolutionary and ahead of its time, but copying a user experience, a grid of square icons, fancy animations and double touch is a lot easier than copying Waymo. You can't just copy Waymo by looking at it like you could by looking at an iPhone. Waymo's code is all in a black box of compiled code and how it works really is anyone's guess besides neural network and all the captors and millions of hours of simulations and drives etc.
  - enitihas 8y ago
    It's not just about the compiled code, which shouldn't be impossible to reverse engineer, although very difficult. It is more about the data, which will be the uncopyable advantage.
    - ORioN63 8y ago
      Most cars being released come with a variety of sensors, a number that feels to be ever increasing. Data doesn't need to come from AI.
      - stevenhuang 8y ago
        We aren't talking about AI or how the data is collected. The point is that this data would have been collected by the first-movers the entire time they are on the road. Such data would not be made available to newcomers. If a new self driving car company would join the scene, they would need to gather all this data again themselves, somehow. This is the "uncopyable advantage" mentioned by OP.
kerng 8y ago
>> What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? What chances does a regular human driver have in killing someone else while they cross the street? Its pretty high, given the number of casualties per day. All the people on their phones while driving and being otherwise distracted it's an enormous risk... Chances will never be 0, but autonomous cars have the potential to be safer then majority of human drivers.
- noobermin 8y ago
  >have the potential At least you're honest. Low number statistics so far but AV's have been worse per car per year compared to human drivers. And you certainly can't trust Uber's engineering department given they literally raised the detection threshold because their computer vision sucked.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Way too many people die in traffic, but per mile an unimpaired human is actually not that dangerous. In the US there are about seven deaths per billion(!) miles and that includes drunk drivers. It's not trivial to beat human drivers.
wpietri 8y ago
Purely from a financial perspective, I think Uber can't possibly admit that. They are gunning for an IPO at a valuation where they are most definitely selling the dream. That dream has to include autonomous vehicles. I think it's not nearly as exciting a dream if they're just buying the tech like everybody else. Aside from a strong brand and a lot of customer relationships, Uber doesn't have much in the way of assets. Google's got a stronger brand [1] and a lot more customer relationships, as do many others. If Uber is just one of many companies slapping labels on other people's tech, I'm not sure what makes it worth $75-100bn. [1] https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank
vertline3 8y ago
Toyota plays closer to their vests, so I'm not sure we even know enough about what they have. I suppose I should clarify since I was downvoted, Forbes wrote a story "what Ubers crash tells us about Japan's silent strategy for driverless cars" "it illustrates a very important distinction between how U.S. and Japanese companies are approaching the research and deployment of autonomous vehicles. Japanese firms have maintained a much lower profile in autonomous vehicles than their American counterparts, and many outside the industry assume this lack of publicity is a sign of lagging technology. Speaking with several industry leaders, however, makes it clear that this is not the case. "While American firms have been grabbing the headlines, Japanese firms have been making steady progress behind the scenes. The fact that they have been less anxious to promote that progress outside of Japan is more a reflection of go-to-market strategy than the state of the underlying technology.""
- pwaai 8y ago
  This is an interesting perspective but knowing Japanese culture, it's more to do with risk aversion and losing face by announcing something and then having it blow up in public. Very different environment. In the US you can commit white collar crimes and still have people invest and give you the benefit of the doubt. There's no sense of shame rather glee and glorification, the i-get-money-fuck-you attitude. In Japan, people will commit suicide for way less or even perceived wrong because there is a great deal of shame imposed on the individual for fucking up. Tough to innovate when failure is so taboo, people are willing to remove themselves from earth.
  - tlear 8y ago
    I think that is a bit of a trope if somewhat true one. Thing is that Toyota and all of the other Japanese car companies are invested in self driving and have been pumping money and buying/investing/contracting every ML related shop they can get their hands on in Tokyo to work on it. I recently talked to a guy who just finished his PhD focusing in NLP, started a company trying to do some clever autonomous agent app, got given bunch of cash to work on self driving instead(not by Toyota) Japan has some unique advantage for go to market self driving cars. Japanese highway system is MUCH MUCH simpler to deal with then US one. If Toyota or Nissan or whoever can come up with a system that can drive you from Tokyo IC to wherever on Honshu following highways(mostly 2 lane, clearly marked, meticulously maintained..) this is going to be a huge deal. And few of them do have the whole thing mapped out.. we do know that. Is Waymo might win.. RIM also seemed unassailable as was Nokia.
drawkbox 8y ago
> any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money Waymo/Google is winning and has self-driving vehicles all over Chandler, Tempe and Gilbert Arizona at any given time. For the most part it is going well, sometimes they act too safe but that isn't a bad idea for now, there have been a few complaints of Waymos going when fire engines or safety vehicles are on the road not slowing and in normal traffic slowing more than needed, or cars partially in a lane and slowing or stopping for them too much. I think the more grandma driving any self-driving is right now is good. The biggest win of Waymo which is a competitive advantage and huge bonus is that by being Google/Alphabet, they also have access to tons of data and the best maps / map data i.e. speed limits, traffic, routes, dark/light changes to behavior, weather detection, data outside the CV/LIDAR that may be hugely beneficial. Other companies are going to have to pay for that or use Google, which they will collect immensely on in addition to use for free. Think of that Tesla crash where other Teslas commonly had the same issue by drifting towards the ramp, Waymo/Google could correct that quicker it seems with their access. They need to be autonomous but also a neural network that can learn from other vehicles. They also need to tie into other systems like weather, day/night, emergency vehicles, traffic, routes etc etc. That Uber crash in Tempe, with day/night data and known pedestrian trails nearby + across the road, it may have been more cautious through that area and Waymo has that data with Google. Waymo is leading in multiple ways not just the self-driving part.
- pwaai 8y ago
  This. Google's economic moat is their data. Proprietary data they've accumulated for the past two decades for various products and strategies. We should see a serious google competitor but we don't. Bing tried it and failed because they just cannot match Google's superior data. So whoever is trying to emulate Tesla is in for a nasty surprise, Tesla is automation 2.89. The last miles is the hardest and requires an ever increasing amount of data. while safer than humans driving Tesla's autopilot failures have done far more damage to the brand than accounted in the stock price. Google/Alphabet/Waymo figured out their end game was to build the data that their competitors will not be able to emulate easily or costly. So far Uber is spinning its wheels and Tesla has lost focus of the killer feature of their car, coming dead last in terms of automation ranking when compared to other major luxury brand manufacturers. But this is HN, and they love Don Papi Musk
cornellwright 8y ago
I don't see how the market is winner take all and it's certainly big enough for more than one player. Everyone who comes after whoever's first to market will have the advantage of a clear regulatory pathway and an example of what works, simplifying many (though clearly not all) decisions.
Someone 8y ago
A Chinese competitor doesn’t even have to be truly competitive with Waymo to stand a chance. Also, I don’t think Waymo is guaranteed to be the first to reach fully autonomous driving. What I know of their approach (which is fairly little, but wat does anybody outside Waymo know for sure there?), to me, seems they are building not cars that are autonomous, but networked. That has advantages (if one car notices a bump in the road, one riding the same road 10 minutes later can slow down), but also has the disadvantages that their software may depend too much on always having that network knowledge available. That may leave space for a competitor to grow in regions where roads barely exist. Waymo also spends a lot on things that, in a few years, autonomous cars may not need not do at all. For example, countries that want to speed up adoption of autonomous cars may make detecting traffic signs and traffic lights easier (e.g. by superimposing a high-frequency signal on LED traffic lights or by giving cars read access to a city’s traffic light infrastructure), make la e detection easier (e.g. by embedding cat eyes in the center of lanes) or require cars to better signal their intentions. If that happens, a lot of the work Waymo does on detecting all kinds of ‘static’ infrastructure becomes worth less.
- nopinsight 8y ago
  How long would changing infrastructure and cars to better support self-driving take? Many cars will continue to be on the road for many years. What are the costs of adapting all of them? IF that really happens, it would take at least a decade and Waymo's lead from network effects, more mature tech, more self-driving data, etc would be enormous by then.
  - Someone 8y ago
    A few weeks or so, for the first stretches of road. Self-driving cars can be useful even if limited to limited stretches of road (for example, many people would pay for the ability to read a book or play a video game in the 30 minutes they spend on the highway to work, even if that initially were the only stretch of road where their car were autonomous), and such roads could be made off limits to older cars. And cost? Not that large, compared to the cost of building roads.
BurningFrog 8y ago
Waymo is killing it in the press releases, but what's to say other players aren't doing just as well while not telling the world all about it? Also, is this really going to be just one "Self Driving Vehicle Systems" market? I can imagine Waymo being great in one segment, and other companies doing well in others.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
samstave 8y ago
how can one get a ride in a waymo car, right now, with an app that is installed on millions of phones? I just see the inertia uber has with their install base will carry some considerable weight. but seriously, how can i get a ride in a waymo so i can experience it?
- sytelus 8y ago
  Go to Phoenix, AZ and apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/ Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet the Teen Who Rides One Every Day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-the-life-of-waymo-s-driverless-test-family https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...
ajross 8y ago
> a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? There are no such systems, even organic ones. I despair that the conventional wisdom here among the "hacker" intelligencia has pushed the burden so far. Autonomous vehicles are worth it if they are safeER than human drivers, not 100% free of accidents. And it's noisy data anyway. Waymo is notable for the fact that their measured fatal accident rate is still zero, where the others are hovering in the small integers. That's not the same thing as a true safety advantage (though I'll buy that they're way ahead technologically).
martinshen 8y ago
Waymo will be first to market and will not likely sell their self-driving software to other would-be rideshare players (or their suppliers) for several years. All other OEMs, Tier 1s and startups in this space will be quick to follow with a comparable self-driving system by 2021. With all the new regulatory hurdles in mobility (as seen with scooter mania), I doubt that Waymo will just be able to throw money to scale fast enough to push out future competitors. Once those self-driving systems hit around ~99.99% reliability, they will be indistinguishable from each other. Therefore, self-driving systems will be commoditized and sold to any vehicle manufacturer. Generally speaking, existing Tier 1/2 suppliers already plan to do this. From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides. Today, it doesn't make sense to build core self-driving technology unless you have a strong resume to do so. Just wait 4-5 years and you'll be able to buy it off the rack (more or less). I am very happy that Waymo isn't the only one building because otherwise we wouldn't have strong enough market forces to drive down the cost of mobility. Disclaimer: Founder of an AV related startup.
- lsc 8y ago
  >From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides. If you are willing to lose money like uber was, why wouldn't you be able to launch a competitor with drivers? I bet drivers would download a new app to make more money even faster than passengers would download such an app to save money. I mean, if anything, a system where you own (or lease in an inflexible way) the cars makes your up-front costs higher; I think new driver incentives right now are on the order of a few grand; a lot less than the cost of a new car with top-end tech. I mean, double the signup bonuses of uber, and you'll quickly get drivers to open your app, and you've still spent a lot less up-front. Of course, your long-term profitability looks a lot better if you can just own the cars, but make no mistake about it; uber's moat is that you have to lose money at first to build up a critical mass of vehicles (and that uber is willing to continue to operate at a loss) Directly owning/leasing the vehicles rather than paying owner-operators per mile might be cheaper long term, but it doesn't lower the up-front cost of getting a critical mass of vehicles on the road.

ForHackernews 8y ago

GM Cruise is a strong contender.

mi_lk 8y ago
Curious, what makes you claim that?
- tedsanders 8y ago
  One piece of evidence is disengagement rates. In 2017, Waymo led with ~6,000 miles per disengagement. Cruise was in second with ~1,000 miles per disengagement. Also, if you look only at the last few months of 2017, Cruise had improved to around ~3,000 or so as I recall. The other players testing in CA are far behind Waymo and Cruise. Of course, there are many caveats to comparing disengagement rates. These are self-reported by companies, and each company may have different policies about which disengagements are serious enough to report. Also, not all miles are equal. Cruise likes to emphasize that its SF miles are more difficult than Waymo's more suburban Mountain View miles. Here's a nice summary of the 2017 data I found for you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/02/01/disengagement-report-2017-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/02/01/disengagem...
  - logical42 8y ago
    To be fair, I feel like I, as a human, get confused about what I’m supposed to be doing driving in SF at a rate worse than once every thousand miles.
    - Nition 8y ago
      It might be interesting to know in what percent of disengagements the car was actually doing the right thing, and only the human driver thought it was wrong and intervened anyway.
      - azundo 8y ago
        Those are actually already removed from the disengagement count if the operator can show (with simulation) that the car would have done the right thing without intervention. If it didn't work this way you would be incentivizing operators to train their drivers to take risks in order to hit disengagement metrics which would be bad.
      - inferiorhuman 8y ago
        I've seen a few where the car was right and a few where the driver was right, but my assumption is that the car just got lucky because, in my experience, the Cruise cars are very hesitant to make left turns.
        ghaff 8y ago
        >in my experience, the Cruise cars are very hesitant to make left turns I'm sure unprotected (i.e. no arrow) left hand turns remain one of the more difficult routine scenarios to fine tune. What works in (I assume) Chandler Arizona and San Francisco are probably two very different things. A large busy city like San Francisco simply requires a degree of aggression--Pittsburgh lefts, cutting through fairly small gaps, etc.--that would be inappropriate in a calmer and less busy environment.
        inferiorhuman 8y ago
        Well one failure was at 19th and Mission where left turns are illegal, another was at 13th and Folsom which I think is a protected turn, another was on 11th street where the drivers decided to make an illegal u-turn.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    The only times I've come across Cruise vehicles they've been under manual control — and their drivers certainly aren't making much of an attempt to follow the traffic laws. Illegal left turn off of Mission? Why not? Illegal u-turn on 11th St? Sure. Run a red light because the car wouldn't make a legal turn on its own? Of course! Note: I've already got a negative opinion of Cruise regardless of their purported abilities. I followed up on some headhunter spam from Cruise a year or so ago. I bailed before even getting to a phone screen because as persistent as they were, they bailed or were late every time I agreed to one of their proposed times.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Most publicly available statistics https://qz.com/1220576/the-race-to-build-a-self-driving-car-charted/ https://qz.com/1220576/the-race-to-build-a-self-driving-car-...
sounds_ironic 8y ago
No, I was almost t-boned by one coincidentally by their corporate office...Top speed 25 mph and they drive clueless while autonomous.

ebikelaw 8y ago

There's still plenty of execution risk ahead for Waymo and a narrow opportunity for a very focused competitor to catch up to their technology. I don't think Uber is that competitor and I don't think that competitor exists, but it's possible. Cruise would be the obvious candidate and they have a big war chest from Softbank.

mantas 8y ago

Audi is already selling autonomous-on-autobahns A8 so I guess VW is a strong contender too.

newfocogi 8y ago
Tesla is selling autonomous-but-don't-quote-us but that doesn't qualify them as a strong contender. The autobahn system isn't large enough to be difficult to map out, and highway driving is the easy case.
- mantas 8y ago
  AFAIK Audi's driver is legally allowed to keep hands off the wheel in specific circumstances. Meanwhile Tesla's driver is theoretically driving even when "autopilot" is engaged.
- hocuspocus 8y ago
  You're right. But Audi (with BMW and Daimler) acquired the only provider that can compete against Google Maps in completeness and accuracy. Traditional car makers work in their own ways, which might look outdated from the typical point of view on HN (and justly so). It's pretty hard to estimate how far they've reached.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Highway driving is indeed the easy case. But even if autonomous vehicles only ever worked on the highway, that would still be a world changing technology.
nradov 8y ago
Does the Audi system work safely in severe weather?

gilbetron 8y ago

Argo AI seems to be the place where any good researcher/engineer not in Waymo has gone to.

qeternity 8y ago

The upside to solving driverless is so huge that companies feel they can't miss out on it. It's still very early in the game. Uber is a great example, everyone assumed with all their VC money that they were serious contenders to Waymo...then the crash happened and we get a (literal) glimpse under the hood and realize things aint so pretty. These operations are opaque by necessity and from an investor perspective, it's not a guarantee that Waymo won't have their own setback which becomes Uber's saving grace (however unlikely that seems at the moment).

pwaai 8y ago
I doubt it. It seems like a top down strategy outside of Waymo. Operate in silence training on vast amounts of data while your competitors are splashing in VC money thinking if they throw money at it they can solve it.

dzdt 8y ago

Consider the smartphone revolution. Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone. The Android team was already up and working in that area and were able to pivot quickly to mimic the iphone. Both Apple and Android became huge businesses. Being prepared as a second mover once a trailblazer demonstrates a good path can be good business. It even has some advantages over trying to lead and possibly wasting lots of R&D money on dead ends.

patrickaljord 8y ago
> Apple came out with a revolutionary design in the iphone The first iPhone was revolutionary and ahead of its time, but copying a user experience, a grid of square icons, fancy animations and double touch is a lot easier than copying Waymo. You can't just copy Waymo by looking at it like you could by looking at an iPhone. Waymo's code is all in a black box of compiled code and how it works really is anyone's guess besides neural network and all the captors and millions of hours of simulations and drives etc.
- enitihas 8y ago
  It's not just about the compiled code, which shouldn't be impossible to reverse engineer, although very difficult. It is more about the data, which will be the uncopyable advantage.
  - ORioN63 8y ago
    Most cars being released come with a variety of sensors, a number that feels to be ever increasing. Data doesn't need to come from AI.
    - stevenhuang 8y ago
      We aren't talking about AI or how the data is collected. The point is that this data would have been collected by the first-movers the entire time they are on the road. Such data would not be made available to newcomers. If a new self driving car company would join the scene, they would need to gather all this data again themselves, somehow. This is the "uncopyable advantage" mentioned by OP.

kerng 8y ago

>> What companies actually have a reasonable chance at developing a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? What chances does a regular human driver have in killing someone else while they cross the street? Its pretty high, given the number of casualties per day. All the people on their phones while driving and being otherwise distracted it's an enormous risk... Chances will never be 0, but autonomous cars have the potential to be safer then majority of human drivers.

noobermin 8y ago
>have the potential At least you're honest. Low number statistics so far but AV's have been worse per car per year compared to human drivers. And you certainly can't trust Uber's engineering department given they literally raised the detection threshold because their computer vision sucked.
adrianN 8y ago
Way too many people die in traffic, but per mile an unimpaired human is actually not that dangerous. In the US there are about seven deaths per billion(!) miles and that includes drunk drivers. It's not trivial to beat human drivers.

wpietri 8y ago

Purely from a financial perspective, I think Uber can't possibly admit that. They are gunning for an IPO at a valuation where they are most definitely selling the dream. That dream has to include autonomous vehicles. I think it's not nearly as exciting a dream if they're just buying the tech like everybody else. Aside from a strong brand and a lot of customer relationships, Uber doesn't have much in the way of assets. Google's got a stronger brand [1] and a lot more customer relationships, as do many others. If Uber is just one of many companies slapping labels on other people's tech, I'm not sure what makes it worth $75-100bn. [1] https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank

vertline3 8y ago

Toyota plays closer to their vests, so I'm not sure we even know enough about what they have. I suppose I should clarify since I was downvoted, Forbes wrote a story "what Ubers crash tells us about Japan's silent strategy for driverless cars" "it illustrates a very important distinction between how U.S. and Japanese companies are approaching the research and deployment of autonomous vehicles. Japanese firms have maintained a much lower profile in autonomous vehicles than their American counterparts, and many outside the industry assume this lack of publicity is a sign of lagging technology. Speaking with several industry leaders, however, makes it clear that this is not the case. "While American firms have been grabbing the headlines, Japanese firms have been making steady progress behind the scenes. The fact that they have been less anxious to promote that progress outside of Japan is more a reflection of go-to-market strategy than the state of the underlying technology.""

pwaai 8y ago
This is an interesting perspective but knowing Japanese culture, it's more to do with risk aversion and losing face by announcing something and then having it blow up in public. Very different environment. In the US you can commit white collar crimes and still have people invest and give you the benefit of the doubt. There's no sense of shame rather glee and glorification, the i-get-money-fuck-you attitude. In Japan, people will commit suicide for way less or even perceived wrong because there is a great deal of shame imposed on the individual for fucking up. Tough to innovate when failure is so taboo, people are willing to remove themselves from earth.
- tlear 8y ago
  I think that is a bit of a trope if somewhat true one. Thing is that Toyota and all of the other Japanese car companies are invested in self driving and have been pumping money and buying/investing/contracting every ML related shop they can get their hands on in Tokyo to work on it. I recently talked to a guy who just finished his PhD focusing in NLP, started a company trying to do some clever autonomous agent app, got given bunch of cash to work on self driving instead(not by Toyota) Japan has some unique advantage for go to market self driving cars. Japanese highway system is MUCH MUCH simpler to deal with then US one. If Toyota or Nissan or whoever can come up with a system that can drive you from Tokyo IC to wherever on Honshu following highways(mostly 2 lane, clearly marked, meticulously maintained..) this is going to be a huge deal. And few of them do have the whole thing mapped out.. we do know that. Is Waymo might win.. RIM also seemed unassailable as was Nokia.

drawkbox 8y ago

> any company that isn't Waymo is simply burning money Waymo/Google is winning and has self-driving vehicles all over Chandler, Tempe and Gilbert Arizona at any given time. For the most part it is going well, sometimes they act too safe but that isn't a bad idea for now, there have been a few complaints of Waymos going when fire engines or safety vehicles are on the road not slowing and in normal traffic slowing more than needed, or cars partially in a lane and slowing or stopping for them too much. I think the more grandma driving any self-driving is right now is good. The biggest win of Waymo which is a competitive advantage and huge bonus is that by being Google/Alphabet, they also have access to tons of data and the best maps / map data i.e. speed limits, traffic, routes, dark/light changes to behavior, weather detection, data outside the CV/LIDAR that may be hugely beneficial. Other companies are going to have to pay for that or use Google, which they will collect immensely on in addition to use for free. Think of that Tesla crash where other Teslas commonly had the same issue by drifting towards the ramp, Waymo/Google could correct that quicker it seems with their access. They need to be autonomous but also a neural network that can learn from other vehicles. They also need to tie into other systems like weather, day/night, emergency vehicles, traffic, routes etc etc. That Uber crash in Tempe, with day/night data and known pedestrian trails nearby + across the road, it may have been more cautious through that area and Waymo has that data with Google. Waymo is leading in multiple ways not just the self-driving part.

pwaai 8y ago
This. Google's economic moat is their data. Proprietary data they've accumulated for the past two decades for various products and strategies. We should see a serious google competitor but we don't. Bing tried it and failed because they just cannot match Google's superior data. So whoever is trying to emulate Tesla is in for a nasty surprise, Tesla is automation 2.89. The last miles is the hardest and requires an ever increasing amount of data. while safer than humans driving Tesla's autopilot failures have done far more damage to the brand than accounted in the stock price. Google/Alphabet/Waymo figured out their end game was to build the data that their competitors will not be able to emulate easily or costly. So far Uber is spinning its wheels and Tesla has lost focus of the killer feature of their car, coming dead last in terms of automation ranking when compared to other major luxury brand manufacturers. But this is HN, and they love Don Papi Musk

cornellwright 8y ago

I don't see how the market is winner take all and it's certainly big enough for more than one player. Everyone who comes after whoever's first to market will have the advantage of a clear regulatory pathway and an example of what works, simplifying many (though clearly not all) decisions.

Someone 8y ago

A Chinese competitor doesn’t even have to be truly competitive with Waymo to stand a chance. Also, I don’t think Waymo is guaranteed to be the first to reach fully autonomous driving. What I know of their approach (which is fairly little, but wat does anybody outside Waymo know for sure there?), to me, seems they are building not cars that are autonomous, but networked. That has advantages (if one car notices a bump in the road, one riding the same road 10 minutes later can slow down), but also has the disadvantages that their software may depend too much on always having that network knowledge available. That may leave space for a competitor to grow in regions where roads barely exist. Waymo also spends a lot on things that, in a few years, autonomous cars may not need not do at all. For example, countries that want to speed up adoption of autonomous cars may make detecting traffic signs and traffic lights easier (e.g. by superimposing a high-frequency signal on LED traffic lights or by giving cars read access to a city’s traffic light infrastructure), make la e detection easier (e.g. by embedding cat eyes in the center of lanes) or require cars to better signal their intentions. If that happens, a lot of the work Waymo does on detecting all kinds of ‘static’ infrastructure becomes worth less.

nopinsight 8y ago
How long would changing infrastructure and cars to better support self-driving take? Many cars will continue to be on the road for many years. What are the costs of adapting all of them? IF that really happens, it would take at least a decade and Waymo's lead from network effects, more mature tech, more self-driving data, etc would be enormous by then.
- Someone 8y ago
  A few weeks or so, for the first stretches of road. Self-driving cars can be useful even if limited to limited stretches of road (for example, many people would pay for the ability to read a book or play a video game in the 30 minutes they spend on the highway to work, even if that initially were the only stretch of road where their car were autonomous), and such roads could be made off limits to older cars. And cost? Not that large, compared to the cost of building roads.

BurningFrog 8y ago

Waymo is killing it in the press releases, but what's to say other players aren't doing just as well while not telling the world all about it? Also, is this really going to be just one "Self Driving Vehicle Systems" market? I can imagine Waymo being great in one segment, and other companies doing well in others.

deleted 8y ago

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samstave 8y ago

how can one get a ride in a waymo car, right now, with an app that is installed on millions of phones? I just see the inertia uber has with their install base will carry some considerable weight. but seriously, how can i get a ride in a waymo so i can experience it?

sytelus 8y ago
Go to Phoenix, AZ and apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/ https://waymo.com/apply/ Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet the Teen Who Rides One Every Day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-the-life-of-waymo-s-driverless-test-family https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

ajross 8y ago

> a usable autonomous driving system that won't kill me while I cross a street and won't kill the driver while on the highway? There are no such systems, even organic ones. I despair that the conventional wisdom here among the "hacker" intelligencia has pushed the burden so far. Autonomous vehicles are worth it if they are safeER than human drivers, not 100% free of accidents. And it's noisy data anyway. Waymo is notable for the fact that their measured fatal accident rate is still zero, where the others are hovering in the small integers. That's not the same thing as a true safety advantage (though I'll buy that they're way ahead technologically).

martinshen 8y ago

Waymo will be first to market and will not likely sell their self-driving software to other would-be rideshare players (or their suppliers) for several years. All other OEMs, Tier 1s and startups in this space will be quick to follow with a comparable self-driving system by 2021. With all the new regulatory hurdles in mobility (as seen with scooter mania), I doubt that Waymo will just be able to throw money to scale fast enough to push out future competitors. Once those self-driving systems hit around ~99.99% reliability, they will be indistinguishable from each other. Therefore, self-driving systems will be commoditized and sold to any vehicle manufacturer. Generally speaking, existing Tier 1/2 suppliers already plan to do this. From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides. Today, it doesn't make sense to build core self-driving technology unless you have a strong resume to do so. Just wait 4-5 years and you'll be able to buy it off the rack (more or less). I am very happy that Waymo isn't the only one building because otherwise we wouldn't have strong enough market forces to drive down the cost of mobility. Disclaimer: Founder of an AV related startup.

lsc 8y ago
>From there, anyone with $25M can probably just lease a bunch of vehicles, software, parking space and routing software to launch a regional TNC. Given a single region focus, these new regional TNCs should be able to outcompete Uber/Lyft. Remember that Uber/Lyft's greatest advantage is their supply of drivers; riders will happily download an app that delivers cheaper rides. If you are willing to lose money like uber was, why wouldn't you be able to launch a competitor with drivers? I bet drivers would download a new app to make more money even faster than passengers would download such an app to save money. I mean, if anything, a system where you own (or lease in an inflexible way) the cars makes your up-front costs higher; I think new driver incentives right now are on the order of a few grand; a lot less than the cost of a new car with top-end tech. I mean, double the signup bonuses of uber, and you'll quickly get drivers to open your app, and you've still spent a lot less up-front. Of course, your long-term profitability looks a lot better if you can just own the cars, but make no mistake about it; uber's moat is that you have to lose money at first to build up a critical mass of vehicles (and that uber is willing to continue to operate at a loss) Directly owning/leasing the vehicles rather than paying owner-operators per mile might be cheaper long term, but it doesn't lower the up-front cost of getting a critical mass of vehicles on the road.