4 ms·

Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo b

by Zigurd 8mo ago

Before y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part. Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a human how to proceed. The difference between level two and level three driver assist and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
RockRobotRock 8mo ago
>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data enough that others will be able to compete.
- Zigurd 8mo ago
  Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car, overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against that.
  - Ajedi32 8mo ago
    I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area. Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
    - daemonologist 8mo ago
      They use LIDAR maps in service areas, but might be using Street View data for training? (I imagine it would be really, really difficult to build a useful simulator with just SV imagery, but probably also quite valuable to have the variety of environments.)
      - denimnerd42 8mo ago
        did you see this, they can build a simulator from sv images. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f... even the lidar part
xp84 8mo ago
I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsoft in the 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without all the capex of making their own cars.
- scarmig 8mo ago
  It would be smarter to take that approach. Google's core competency is technology, technical infrastructure, and research. More mundane things like manufacturing and customer service are... shall we say, less of a core competency. Take the high value add, leave other things to automakers to duke it out. Also good for avoiding attracting even more regulatory attention.
- Zigurd 8mo ago
  That is one plausible outcome. Waymo is experimenting with partnerships with ride hailing apps on the one hand, and building their software into Toyotas on the other hand. So far they have built a few thousand vehicles in a factory run by Magna, which specializes in low volume vehicles. Hyundai wants to sell Waymo tens of thousands of vehicles. That's going to look different in fundamental ways.
- Tempest1981 8mo ago
  Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+ apps/providers?
  - bigmadshoe 8mo ago
    I think they were referring to making personal vehicles self driving. Probably the rideshare market is just the start for Waymo.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support. Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse. For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome. Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla route and build everything from scratch. Either way has associated pros and cons. And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs. Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the support to even properly jack the car up, or because they lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50 meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters! Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time. Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars. And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money. tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available will be as part of established car brands. [1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren/fahren/systemgenehmigung-fuer-hochautomatisiertes-fahren.html https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren... [2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren/fahren/sae-level-4-peking.html https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...
StevenNunez 8mo ago
Time to extend comma.ai!
- dymk 8mo ago
  Yeah, imagine having, say, two of these LIDAR sensors, each pointed towards the car's blind spots. Comma already does well with the car's built-in radar + vision on straight freeway runs, but can't reliably change lanes on its own. The built in blind spot detectors on most cars are a binary "there is/not a car present", which doesn't reliably determine if it's safe to actually do a lane change.
Aperocky 8mo ago
> difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing. But suborbital flight and payload in orbit is much less of a difference than you might think. The delta V is not that significantly different. Scale is almost the same, and a little bit more power and (second stage) your payload is now hurtling around the earth instead of falling like an ballistic missile which was what their suborbital predecessors are.
- mapt 8mo ago
  Suborbital ballistic "travel" beyond continental distances, is almost as expensive as orbital. If you can make it to the antipode, you're basically almost orbital. Suborbital "trips" straight up, beyond the atmosphere, are very cheap.
MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems. If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.
- ra7 8mo ago
  > Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.
julianeon 8mo ago
I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0. And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.
- shireham 8mo ago
  Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.
  - julianeon 8mo ago
    The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply? Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.
- yayitswei 8mo ago
  I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.

by Zigurd 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

RockRobotRock 8mo ago

>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data enough that others will be able to compete.

Zigurd 8mo ago
Maybe. But Google has been there in a sensor laden car, overhead with an airplane, and buying all the access that is available in satellite imagery, and fusing that together in a continually updated model. Plus real time data from a billion maps and navigation users. I pity the fool going up against that.
- Ajedi32 8mo ago
  I don't think Waymo is using Street View / satellite data to drive. They have to build an HD map using a special LIDAR-equipped vehicle before deploying in a new area. Maybe their navigation system will be better than the competition due to real-time traffic data from Google Maps users, but I don't think it'll be so much better as to be an unbeatable advantage.
  - daemonologist 8mo ago
    They use LIDAR maps in service areas, but might be using Street View data for training? (I imagine it would be really, really difficult to build a useful simulator with just SV imagery, but probably also quite valuable to have the variety of environments.)
    - denimnerd42 8mo ago
      did you see this, they can build a simulator from sv images. https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simulation https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f... even the lidar part

xp84 8mo ago

I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsoft in the 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without all the capex of making their own cars.

scarmig 8mo ago
It would be smarter to take that approach. Google's core competency is technology, technical infrastructure, and research. More mundane things like manufacturing and customer service are... shall we say, less of a core competency. Take the high value add, leave other things to automakers to duke it out. Also good for avoiding attracting even more regulatory attention.
Zigurd 8mo ago
That is one plausible outcome. Waymo is experimenting with partnerships with ride hailing apps on the one hand, and building their software into Toyotas on the other hand. So far they have built a few thousand vehicles in a factory run by Magna, which specializes in low volume vehicles. Hyundai wants to sell Waymo tens of thousands of vehicles. That's going to look different in fundamental ways.
Tempest1981 8mo ago
Do OEMs want to manage their own ride-share platforms? 10+ apps/providers?
- bigmadshoe 8mo ago
  I think they were referring to making personal vehicles self driving. Probably the rideshare market is just the start for Waymo.
mschuster91 8mo ago
> but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Google doesn't do retail other than Chromecast and Pixel phones, and that is already annoying to them as it is because it involves something Google is notoriously bad at - actual customer support. Starting up a car brand is orders of magnitude worse. For one, people actually need to trust your brand to survive for at least five to ten years - cars are an investment, and a car that I can't trust to get safety-relevant spare parts (brake rotors, brake pads, axle bearings) all of a sudden is essentially an oversized paperweight. For a company such as Google, this alone (remember Killed By Google) is a huge obstacle to overcome. Then, you need production. Sure, you can go to Magna or other contract manufacturers, or have an established large brand build vehicles for you, or you say you have to go the Tesla route and build everything from scratch. Either way has associated pros and cons. And then, you need a nationwide network of spare parts, dealerships, repair shops and technicians that can fix the issues that people will get alone because the wide masses abuse cars in ways you might not even dare think about while testing, or because other people run into your cars and so your cars need repairs. Even being a derivative of an established car brand can be a royal PITA. Let's take Mercedes Benz as an example with the 2003-2009 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. On paper, it's a Mercedes vehicle, with a lot of the parts actually originating from stock Mercedes cars - but most dealerships will refuse to work on it. Either because they lack the support to even properly jack the car up, or because they lack the specialized tools for the AMG engine, or because they cannot even order the parts as Mercedes gates repairs for that thing to special shops. Or, again Mercedes, with Maybach luxury cars. The situation isn't as bad as with the McLaren, but their cars are challenging in another way - the S 650 Pullman weighs around 3 metric tons empty and is 6.50 meters long. Good luck finding a jack even capable of lifting that beast, most Mercedes sports-car shops don't carry jacks that are normally used to lift Mercedes Vito transporters! Even Tesla, and they've been at it for the better part of two decades, still struggles with that. Their shitty spare parts logistics actually drive up not just insurance prices for their own customers, but for everyone - hit a Tesla with your Dodge and be at fault, and now your insurance has to pay out for months of a rental car because Tesla can't be arsed to provide the body shop the Tesla ends up at with spare parts in any reasonable time. Established car brands however have all of that ironed out for many, many decades now. American, Asian, European, doesn't matter. And the spare parts don't even have to be made for cars: ask your local Volkswagen dealer to order a few pieces of "199 398 500 A" and one piece of "199 398 500 B" and you'll probably have a lead time of less than a day, at least in Germany - for the uninitiated: that part number belongs to the famous sausage, the second one to the accompanying curry ketchup, with more sausages being sold each year than actual cars. And established car brands also bring something to the table: their own experiences with integrating smart technology. Yes, particularly German carmakers are notoriously bad in that regard, but for example Mercedes Benz was the first car brand in the world to get a certified Level 3 system on the road [1] and are now working on a Level 4 certification [2]. That kind of experience in navigating bureaucracy, integration and testing cannot be paid for in money. tl;dr: I see no way in which Waymo goes to general availability regarding selling cars. They will run their own autonomous car fleets in select markets where they can fully control everything, but seeing Waymo tech generally available will be as part of established car brands. [1] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren/fahren/systemgenehmigung-fuer-hochautomatisiertes-fahren.html https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren... [2] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren/fahren/sae-level-4-peking.html https://group.mercedes-benz.com/technologie/autonomes-fahren...

StevenNunez 8mo ago

Time to extend comma.ai!

dymk 8mo ago
Yeah, imagine having, say, two of these LIDAR sensors, each pointed towards the car's blind spots. Comma already does well with the car's built-in radar + vision on straight freeway runs, but can't reliably change lanes on its own. The built in blind spot detectors on most cars are a binary "there is/not a car present", which doesn't reliably determine if it's safe to actually do a lane change.

Aperocky 8mo ago

> difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing. But suborbital flight and payload in orbit is much less of a difference than you might think. The delta V is not that significantly different. Scale is almost the same, and a little bit more power and (second stage) your payload is now hurtling around the earth instead of falling like an ballistic missile which was what their suborbital predecessors are.

mapt 8mo ago
Suborbital ballistic "travel" beyond continental distances, is almost as expensive as orbital. If you can make it to the antipode, you're basically almost orbital. Suborbital "trips" straight up, beyond the atmosphere, are very cheap.

MontyCarloHall 8mo ago

>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems. If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.

ra7 8mo ago
> Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. Not entirely true. From their recent "road trips" last year, the trend is they just deploy less than 10 cars in a city for a few weeks (3-4 weeks from what I recall) for mapping and validating. Then they come back after a few months to setup infrastructure for ride hailing (depot, charging, maintenance, etc.) and start service.

julianeon 8mo ago

I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0. And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.

shireham 8mo ago
Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.
- julianeon 8mo ago
  The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply? Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.
yayitswei 8mo ago
I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.