For those not in/near the automotive industry, this is very interesting for several reasons:
1) With this move, Alphabet is basically saying they a) don't want to continue funding the autonomous moonshot on their own, and b) want some partners to come on board for various reasons
2) $2.25B is a big round, and speaks to the level of confidence in Waymo as well as the massive cost to get to market
3) Magna is effectively an outsourced automotive production company. You can give them a vehicle design spec and they will spin up a production line to make it for you. This points to the possibility of Waymo stepping outside the "buy from an OEM and retrofit" plan, or of outsourcing the retrofit entirely to Magna for scale at some point
4) AutoNation is also an interesting investor here given that they are effectively an OEM-agnostic dealership network and they have a pretty strong fleet sales arm. This is another indicator that Waymo might be looking to sidestep the traditional OEM channels entirely.
1) With this move, Alphabet is basically saying they a) don't want to continue funding the autonomous moonshot on their own, and b) want some partners to come on board for various reasons
They need external investors to provide validation to the business and its valuation. Those $2.25B would have been a piece of cake for Alphabet (sitting on > $100B in cash).
But if it is Alphabet that's funding Waymo, everyone else (and in particular Alphabet investors) are left to guess what a fair valuation for Waymo would be.
Investment rounds are also about strategic alliances. It's important to get skin in the game from relevant industry players. You also tie said players up from making similar deals with Uber and Lyft (depends on the terms).
Agreed, you get more buy in from existing deals as well because it’s no longer just a contract to use X it’s a partnership so you get better support, back channels for feature requests, etc.
led by Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Mubadala Investment Company. Additional investors in this initial $2.25 billion close include Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, and AutoNation, as well as Alphabet.
Just because they have the money, doesn't mean they would take any deal. Think of all the companies they could buy with a $100bn+; they prefer to hold cash at -2% real return.
Expected returns are the crucial factor here. Alphabet is sharing risks, waiting for better opportunities to deploy the cash.
There's a realization that beating services like Uber and Lyft on cost per ride (to undercut on price) will be hard and require significant capital without a clear path to sustained profitability. The economics aren't hard to understand:
You can either pay one person (out of a - growing- pool of tens of millions of willing drivers) ~$15 an hour (depending on geography) in a $20k car or you can pay very little per hour in a 250k for the car + a gigantic engineering team + compute infrastructure. It can make sense on a large scale, but it'll be hard to do.
Alphabet is sitting on a golden goose: their ad & search business (and the network they've built around that) is the perfect monopoly. Close to unbreakable and getting stronger over time (you won't be able to build a better search engine than Google unless you have as much data as Google). Why would they dilute their superb EBIT margins, rapid growth and extreme salability with the low-margin, ultra-high competition ride-sharing market?
Think of paying a driver as renting compute on a extremely capable vision processing, decision making, robotic driver that costs you very little. As unemployment (eventually) increases again, the market will be flooded with unbelievable amounts of idle human minds.
There's a general theme here: It's not enough to teach a computer to do something as good as a human, you have to undercut on price as well. For this reason, I believe that hair dressers have less to fear from automation than Radiologists.
The "we need to sell to a third party so that our shareholders can figure out the valuation of this division"-argument is mute because it isn't applied to the countless other parts of Alphabet (or any other company). E.g. Youtube and Google Cloud can be valued based on financial data given to the SEC, though I admit, sometimes spinoffs do unlock value.
>> You can either pay one person (out of a - growing- pool of tens of millions of willing drivers) ~$15 an hour (depending on geography) in a $20k car or you can pay very little per hour in a 250k for the car + a gigantic engineering team + compute infrastructure. It can make sense on a large scale, but it'll be hard to do.
I believe this $250K figure will end up being off by a multiple of 2. As an example, the cost of LIDAR (the most expensive piece of many SDC's) has dropped by an order of magnitude over the past couple years. (A quick google search for a source on this claim yields: https://qz.com/924212/what-it-really-costs-to-turn-a-car-int...)
The biggest questions around SDC's seems to really be around safety & feasibility. If these criteria are met, I can't imagine the overall cost per mile driven will be higher than manual labor.
And, even if autonomous driving doesn't undercut on price, they will beat human drivers on both quality & convenience. Most people don't enjoy having a human driver who sometimes smells bad and tries to talk to you (not to mention the uptick in assault reports). And, since the cost of under-utilization will be much lower for SDC's, you can bet the average wait time for SDC's will be lower than Uber.
>> There's a general theme here: It's not enough to teach a computer to do something as good as a human, you have to undercut on price as well.
I think the more apt statement is: Consumers care about price, quality, safety, and convenience. A winning solution has to be significantly better in at least one of these categories (price being only one possibility).
Uber does 40m rides a month with human drivers, I don't believe people are generally turned off by the smell of their drivers. The rating system is pretty brutal. I've certainly never had this problem.
Uber doesn't pay for the downtime, its the drivers that take all the losses.
I find the security question interesting: Would you rather have a human in the car to potentially protect you from outside attackers, or is the general fear that the driver him/herself with assault you? I think with cameras and identity checks the risk from the driver can be reduced.
Regarding your last point:
Yes, do the same for less or something better for the same, both are possible paths to winning in the marketplace.
I'm not trained in any sort of finance, and not that this invalidates your point, but I believe it's not literal cash cash. It's just low-risk, liquid investments.
P. 50 of that has a balance sheet, where you can see that at the end of 2019, they had $18.5 billion in "Cash and cash equivalents" and $101.2 billion in "Marketable securities". So about 15% of it is cash, and the other 85% is some kind of investment.
Then, on p. 56, they give a little more detail what these categories mean:
> Cash equivalents and marketable securities consist primarily of time deposits, money market and other funds, highly liquid debt instruments of the U.S. government and its agencies, debt instruments issued by foreign governments, debt instruments issued by municipalities in the U.S., corporate debt securities, mortgage-backed securities, and asset-backed securities.
Anyway, they are probably getting a real return better than -2%. Maybe even slightly positive.
Yes, it's not $130bn in a checking account. Inflation measurements vary, but I see recent figures of around 2% for the US. Here are the returns of short term government debt from the treasury:
I doubt that they're investing in any kind of aggressive higher yielding or longer duration bonds or Asset backed securities.
So maybe the real yield is closer to -1% ? Studying the income and cash flow statement, we should be able to calculate their return on their "cash" position.
I agree with this in general, but a couple of points:
1. Suppose a vehicle operates in revenue service for 8 hours per day, 365 days per year, that's a labor cost of $44k. If the hardware lasts five years, you break even if the hardware/upkeep costs of the self driving part are less than $220k, which seems very doable.
2. I think that Alphabet's golden goose is more vulnerable than ever. Google's search results have become so ad-infested that the mere willingness to dial down the number of ads is enough. What good are great organic search results if the user never sees them because there are only one or two on the entire first page?
Self driving hardware is far cheaper then 200k these days. You can turn a Honda Civic into basically Tesla level self driving for like a grand with comma.ai
Close to unbreakable and getting stronger over time (you won't be able to build a better search engine than Google unless you have as much data as Google).
While it’s true that I don’t see anyone beating Google at search, Facebook and Amazon can deliver better targeted ads and they are harder to block.
No one beat MS on the desktop - the desktop became less relevant.
Highly questionable. Facebook has been serving me Spanish-language ads for years, just because I said in my profile that I live in Venezuela, a country I've never even visited. None of my friends ever post on FB in Spanish and I don't speak it. I don't think FB has any sophisticated ad targeting tech to speak of. To me it looks like they just go off your profile, which is pretty basic.
I have a similar experience with Instagram. I am an American male living in Japan, but most of the Instagram ads I see are in Hebrew and for female-targeted products (including menstruation supplies). I know no Hebrew and have no connection to Israel, but a Google search reveals that there is an Israeli woman with the same name as mine.
> Close to unbreakable and getting stronger over time (you won't be able to build a better search engine than Google unless you have as much data as Google).
Google actually lost market share of search last year, mostly to Amazon (lots of people just do their product-related searches on Amazon now).
What about for long distance rides? I could imagine wanting to pay basic car rental fees for a car that would drive me and my family across the state from Seattle to Spokane.
While I don't know about the infrastructure situation in the area you are referring to, I think that Waymo won't be competing against planes, trains and long-distance buses anytime soon.
Don't worry about radiologists. With a aging population and a growing cohort of the "worried well" there is effectively infinite demand for radiology. If the easy parts are automated that just means the total volume of images to be read will increase.
Given the demographic situation in the western world and China, nobody with medical skills will have to worry much about finding employment - I agree.
I wanted attack the "intuitive" point a lot of people make about AI: "The simpler your job, the more easily it will be replaced by a computer". I think this position only focuses on what is technologically feasible, not about the realities of the labor market. There are many people who work for so little, it won't be feasible to try to undercut them on price for a long time. So radiologists are so extremely expensive by comparison that they're a better target for automation solutions.
I have a great bridge to sell you. You’ll have exclusive rights to toll travelers and you’ll make a fortune off it. Just don’t read the fine print. Deal?
Validation of Waymo's valuation provides data for Alphabet stockholders and (hopefully) shows that all the money Alphabet has poured into Waymo has generated significant value. If you never show this validation, some shareholders become angry and demand you stop pouring cash into other bets that just chew up cash.
> 2) $2.25B is a big round, and speaks to the level of confidence in Waymo as well as the massive cost to get to market
It's a lot of money, but self-driving cars are notoriously overhyped. As someone who used to work in the industry and has worked at more than one of the "top" companies (Waymo, Zoox, Cruise, Argo, Nuro, etcetera), you don't have to talk to many engineers to realize there is a looooong way to go before a meaningful product is ready for market.
I'm not saying it'll never happen, but it's not going to happen before my kid is old enough to drive - and I don't have a kid yet. Before people bring up "we overestimate 1 year out and underestimate 10 years out," I was actually working on self-driving cars over a decade ago.
Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.
Sure, it'll be at least a decade (if ever) before they can do everything a human driver can do, but a "meaningful product" they pretty much already have.
They don't have to support driving in blizzards or on unmapped roads to be a meaningful product. Uber is useful even though it's only available in large Metro areas, Waymo can be a meaningful product even if it doesn't work in many places.
> Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.
If they were confident they'd lift the NDA. I really can't say much more, other than I disagree.
> Sure, it'll be at least a decade (if ever) before they can do everything a human driver can do, but a "meaningful product" they pretty much already have.
As per the blizzards, I'm not talking about a driverless car that can do anything a person can do. I'm talking about a driverless car in any environment (let's say Phoenix) that can compete with Uber or Lyft and possibly maybe someday somehow make a profit.
Another question to ask yourself - why is turnover so high if things are going so well? Nobody wants to stick around to become filthy rich and work on an awesome product that can change the world? Or maybe reality is a little different from the blog posts you read every few months.
> If they were confident they'd lift the NDA. I really can't say much more, other than I disagree.
Please say the little more you can (and thank you for sharing what you have already!) - there's been something overhanging Waymo for nearly 2 years and no one seems to want to even hint at what it is
(also, if you feel comfy, I wonder when you were last privy to the internal narrative there)
> why is turnover so high if things are going so well?
There's _so_ little external information other than Urmson saying this is far away, Cruise is pumping near-production status, Waymo (confusingly) is in production yet if they were, then they wouldn't been doing what they're doing now. Yet all the ride reviews in the latest PR round sounded awesome!
He’s said what matters. I’m adjacent to the field and agree. The main issue is that getting to 5 nines of reliability in SDC is extremely challenging AND it isn’t good enough. There are infinite random issues to deal with from a simulation/modeling perspective (construction, weather, rain/snow/mud/dust weirdly shaped vehicles, random Uber eats cars stopping in the middle of the street etc) then you also have issues with vehicle and sensor maintenance, maintaining enough bandwidth/compute to support a larger network of SDCs, change management in the vehicles that sees challenges w scale, HD map issues etc. All of these problems are solveable but there are a lot of them.
He and the public are familiar with Waymo's solution to edge cases, but after thinking on it, it's unacceptable to get into an accident every 20,000 miles just because the car doesn't realize it needs to dial out to a remote operator
Honestly they don't even have to support most roads and road conditions and still build a useful product. Thinks of malls, sports complexes, university complexes, airport etc. where you can have Waymo shuttles to help ferry people from fixed point A and point B.
Having self driving cars plying from airport to nearby transportation hubs alone could be pretty useful.
I also see the potential for building infra that is specifically for automated vehicles (private roads and such).
Waymo can still be 10 years away from a good autonomous vehicle and still deliver value to consumers.
> Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.
Unless the NDA is to keep customers from talking about when the remote safety monitor takes over.
but you don't have any first hand data on how much time it's spent with the remote safety driver engaged, while the NDA supports the idea that the ride is not ready for public scrutiny.
Your decade of experience doesn't support your projection. 10 years ago, AI didn't show a clear path toward meaningful products either. IMO product innovation isn't on a curve, it's a staircase.
> 10 years ago, AI didn't show a clear path toward meaningful products either
That's not entirely correct. It's just that, as techniques become mainstream, they tend to fall out of what's considered to be "AI". As an example, speech recognition used to be firmly in the AI camp. Now that it is commonplace, it is only ever mentioned in the AI context if it is paired with ML. Regardless, there are lots of useful products using that technology. Same goes for many others.
Both Waymo and Cruise have received California’s approval to remove the safety driver. Both can go tens of thousands of miles without driver intervention from the safety driver. Sounds like it’s right around the corner for level 4. Throw in remote drivers for the extremely rare scenarios where the car can’t figure it out. It’s less than 5 years away for city driving in the major city areas that have lidar maps. 10 years for nationwide.
You realize you're talking to a guy who's actually seen the internal deadlines, all of the secret data, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And you're telling me the PR talking points as if it's something I don't already know to be complete and utter bullshit.
Needs more data, you're asking us to go with the antagonistic anon account saying ~nothing new versus $3.5 bil of new money. Something is happening in the next decade or you have the responsibility to blow the whistle, and you gotta pick one
> Something is happening in the next decade or you have the responsibility to blow the whistle
Blow the whistle? There's nothing unethical here - I'm just saying it won't make money. It's not like children are being exploited for slavery and it's my moral duty to raise awareness to this issue. Why would I, or anyone, open myself to getting sued into bankruptcy over this?
There's a big difference between making some vague comments about how I know this won't work, and releasing trade secrets. I don't have to release any more data than I am comfortable with (not to mention it would be illegal), and you don't have to take me seriously if you don't want to. But if you think I'm full of shit, you have the opportunity to make a bet with me and make some money.
It's fraudulent to raise money and make the statements Alphabet has been making if there's no path to profitability in the next decade. I'm guessing you have a more limited proposition (won't be a profitable passenger carrier in next decade) and more perfect information on that (no way it can work in rain or snow; fixed cost of mobile compute > $XX,XXX)
It's not fraud, it's just a bad investment. Unless Waymo is saying "we guarantee to have this technology doing this impossible thing and making a trillion dollars in revenue in 5 years" there is nothing illegal about it. Being disingenuous is almost never the same thing as fraud. By simply prefacing each statement with "we hope to" it removes legal liability. It's not illegal to be optimistic.
Staging demos where the cars perform better than average isn't illegal, it's just misleading. Likewise, making projections about revenue isn't illegal, it's just not grounded in reality.
I'm not accusing Waymo of fraud. I'm saying their technology isn't going to be ready anytime soon, and they aren't making any legally binding statements to refute that - so why would it be fraud?
Just for fun I looked up the dictionary definition of fraud.
fraud, n., wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.
When Dmitri Dolgov said that Waymo's cars are safe enough to drive his children, I think that he committed fraud. Maybe not in the legal sense, but it's wrongful and deceptive and results in financial and personal gain.
Just came out. Is the data correct or are companies underreporting disengagements? Cruise is at 20,000 miles per disengagement. 4 years ago they were only at 50 miles.
Those disengagements are not representative of all the disengagements the vehicle makes. Basically, the company gets to decide for itself whether or not an incident is severe enough it needs to be reported.
Well I can also make an anon account and make contrary statement to all that you've said so they're not in a position to place more weight on a comment than they already have.
It's just a post by an anon person on a public forum, nothing more.
People underestimate how the exponential improvements in computing hardware creep up though. It's like computers were rubbish at facial recognition, chess, go and the like for years until suddenly they were not.
Magna also builds individual components for countless other cars. They could just as easily be onboard as a parts supplier for some sensor hardware or onboard computer componentry.
Waymo has been spending about a billion dollars a year, with zero revenue.
Over 15 years ago, I had an entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. I never dreamed that 15 year later, after all parties had spent about $18 billion, the self-driving industry would be at zero revenue.
I feel like with Google, once something gets into the hardware/infrastructure space and needs support, large amounts of money(they have 121.2 billion in cash!) and any bit of customer service they get lazy and either shut it down or try to have others do the heavy lifting/hard work.
Shuttered:
- Google glass
- Google fiber(mostly shut down)
- Google Express
Given this its not surprising that a majority of their workforce is contractors.
Alternative interpretation to inspire your ire and anger:
Self-driving is really hard and not going to be here anytime soon. A.I. is a hype bubble. Google now believe those two points and need greater fools to pare back their losses on this one and to avoid a lone P.R. disaster. "We were only starting the project and it's free to stand on it's own separate from us."
Computational Statistical Inference is amazing. Calling it Machine Learning was a mistake that led to this ridiculous A.I. nonsense because machine learning sure sounds like A.I. if you don't know any better. And it has been a tremendous hype opportunity that has been vigorously exploited. If you did, or if you intend to, consider repositioning your pitch. Doubling down may well be a reasonable option once you've thought it through.
I love these hottakes. Like there are thousands of researchers working tirelessly to resolve the issue in the affirmative or negative, writing papers, giving talks, publishing code, but we should take your word on it harry8 that the emperor has no clothes. How about anything in the way of evidence that what you're saying is insightful? Do you have literally any data to corroborate what you're saying? Because I can go to arxiv and find plenty of papers with validated metrics that contradict diametrically what you're saying.
How many billions of dollars have been spent on self-driving ai tech? How many self-driving cars do we have? How many execs have said we would have self-driving cars in <insert past year here>?
You're acting like it's your money they've spent or tax payer money that's been spent? Why does it matter how much has been spent? Is this like some kind of weird entitlement where you get to be upset because companies made aspirational promises (to their shareholders mind you, not to you)
"Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before."
Maybe not the emperor but one of the kings said, after talking with the other kings, that self-driving will come very late if ever, and the things that will come are electric and digitization. I don't even think they have a clear idea of what digitization would actually mean.
Machine learning is a powerful tool but it's really a force multiplier for flesh & blood humans. Filtering a lot of data, finding signals and patterns, giving you a first-pass analysis. And recently doing more interesting things like deep fakes.
But this... is not driving a car. Not even close! And it's not AGI. Not even close!
Why scale up hiring, buy 20k cars and a factory in Detroit to assemble the self driving kits? Sounds like they hit the finish line and now need capital to deploy it worldwide.
Why does Apple raise debt when they have the largest cash reserve? Company issuing stock or raising debt doesnt mean the product has failed. Cutting spending and reducing staff is a better indicator.
Issuing debt doesn’t give up any of the upside like selling stock does. This is more like Apple selling off some portion of the iPhone business in exchange for cash. I think most people would interpret that as bad news for iPhones.
I take this as a bad sign. If Alphabet felt the project was going well, they wouldn't want to give equity away unless the price was very, very high. It might be, I haven't looked.
I think situation like this test the limits of conglomerates, and are an interesting case study in corporate governance. Waymo is too big to fail -- even if it's not working, too many peoples' names and careers are on the line, such that they'll do everything they can to keep it going, even if doing so isn't in the shareholders interests. So Alphabet's board has to put some controls in place to ensure ongoing investment into this is, in fact, sound. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some requirement internally that a certain % of Alphabet capital be matched with external investment - that seems to get some of the disciplining effects of the market, but still lets Alphabet keep most/all of the ownership.
> they wouldn't want to give equity away unless the price was very, very high. It might be, I haven't looked.
We don't know the price, meaning how much was actually raised. All we know is that the capital raised divided by % of new shares issued is equal to $2.25B.
Waymo is likely trying to pull all the big money that would otherwise feed the other players. With Softbank out, there are only so many options. This round is probably a lot more about draining opportunities for capital from others and less about paying for cars (a factory would be about $1b) or cloud (which they get wholesale from G, not to mention software for free).
Employees are paid stock. It's hard for prospective/current employees to take the valuation seriously without some external validation. This is a problem for both employees and employer. The investors (SL and AH) are seen to be savvy. This round solves a specific problem for the company.
Does everyone get that treatment? Seems like it would hurt recruitment of experienced engineers. I won’t work for mystery bucks when there are plenty of companies (including Google) that pay well with liquid stock.
Self-driving tech is expensive. It's costly to design, create, and manage. I wonder how quickly that $2.25 billion will be used up.
For comparison (because I was curious how this ranks amongst other big funding rounds): Uber raised $7.7b from secondary funding in 2017. Airbnb series E was $1.5b. WeWork series G was $4.4b. And in 2018 Ant Financial raised a whopping $14.4b series C!
The key aspect is that this is a liquidity event that allows the execs and the engineers to cash out. That's what they've been working so hard for with the Chandler rollout and the remote-controlled driverless demos.
While there are probably wrinkles^, the gist is that instead of 100% of waymo shares being owned by Alphabet, there are now 2.25B/current_valuation % shares owned by the external investors. Alphabet shareholders now own (1-x%) of Waymo, but it will continue to be consolidated on Alphabets financial statements.
^ wrinkles might include different share classes of Waymo, rather than Alphabet stock, debt-like provisions that make the investment less like common stock ownership
dammit, does this imply that Alphabet stock grants can "leak" Waymo value while gaining nothing in return? (other than Ruth can have $1 bil less in expenses on next year's 10-Q?)
So in a normal case, Waymo itself wouldn't have a separate filing for incorporation, or tax status etc... which means it's wouldn't have it's own stock.
I don't know how it works, but it does. I have friends who worked at Waymo and got Waymo stock (well, options that can be exercised for stock). I suppose that would make it not a wholly owned subsidiary, considering that some of the employees own some of it?
Unless this changed recently (which it may well have), Waymo "stock" is just a special performance scheme that converts to Alphabet stock based on waymo, not alphabet, performance.
Xerox PARC existed with relatively little pressure to ship. They gave us many of the components of the modern tech industry. Their contributions were greater than perhaps any other epicenter for the computer revolution.
Xerox didn't benefit massively from the creations at PARC (a tiny fraction of what others did), and I'm entirely ok with that. I do not particularly care about the existence of the Xerox Corporation. Just as I'm ok with Google vaporizing $10 billion on Waymo and failing, if it helps push this technology forward in the process. Worst case scenario, over time Waymo will spin out hundreds of experienced employees that will go on to plant other technology seeds all over the place.
Google has $120 billion in cash, $35b in operating income, $160 billion in sales, a monopoly or two, and I do not care if they get punched in the face to the tune of $10 billion in losses on autonomous driving. The only thing that matters is that their expenditures move the ball forward. Maybe some start-up that doesn't exist yet, formed by ex Waymo employees two years from now, will be the company that builds a better Waymo. That'll be great.
I'd also rather that $10 billion go into engineer pockets and get deployed into the economy rather than sit in Google's monopoly money vault yielding jack squat interest, de facto being hoarded. Google has little idea what to do with their money, they're a trillion dollar corporation with not much imagination. I'm glad they're burning cash on something interesting.
I wouldn't say this results in zero pressure to ship. It might even increase the pressure since now external investors are looking for a return on their investment (eventually).
For self-driving tech, where people's lives are at stake, it's critical to get things right by exceeding the safety record of human drivers. Increased pressure to ship doesn't seem like the right strategy for that to happen.
Isn't it? It's not like there's a risk that the entire thing is vaporware; they have some driverless cars on public roads today. It seems like a good thing if they feel they have the luxury to polish up each incremental expansion.
>they have some driverless cars on public roads today. It seems like a good thing if they feel they have the luxury to polish up each incremental expansion.
I think this is a very optimistic description of the state of the art. As far as I'm aware most of their 'driverless' rides have safety drivers in the car who intervene, and the few fully autonomous rides were given to journalists or selected testers on predetermined routes (in areas that are basically tailored to self driving).
It's not really about 'polishing off' at this point. Autonomous cars still can't drive reliably in most areas.
The simple fact is that we don't really know the difference between "Can generally self-drive" and "Can reliably self-drive". People have different intuitions for how big that difference is, but no one truly knows- and informed participants in the market vehemently disagree (Musk thinks he can do it with a bit more big data and Waymo haven't really settled on a h/w platform).
I think we're still far out. There still hasn't been a solution proposed (that I've seen), of how to avoid multiple disaster scenarios (Ex. hit child chasing ball, or veer off of cliff).
As soon as this question shows up on a human driving test with an agreed-upon correct answer, it'll be fair game as a prerequisite for an L5 autonomous vehicle. For now, though, I can't imagine how it's a significant problem for self-driving cars to be able to solve.
It was on my driving test in Alberta 15 years ago. The correct answer is to remember that the people in the car are protected by a big cage of metal, and pedestrians aren't.
I think the actual question was whether or not you should drive into a wall instead of hitting a pedestrian, not drive off a cliff. But hitting a pedestrian was definitely not the right answer.
I mean, if that's the answer you want to program into a robot car, it doesn't sound hard to do.
Luckily I've never been faced with this choice, and if I did have a fraction of a second to decide I have no idea what would happen. Doesn't stop me from driving though.
That's not a real problem. The correct answer is to stop the car, in almost any realistic scenario. It's also not a big deal, because human drivers are really bad at surprise children jumping into the middle of roads near the edge of cliffs too.
maybe this is a joke, but really, no. Car AIs don't encounter trolley problems, because the trolley in the trolley problem is ALREADY out of control and unable to stop (besides the turning lever). If the Car AI is in a situation where it might lose control of the car, it should decide that it isn't safe to drive. Asking a car to be altruistic means the car is making value judgements about what's better to hit, which means there's a mode where the car decides to hit something. The car should not be allowed to decide to hit something, or even swerve wildly out of the way. It should drive at a slow enough speed that it can safely stop for reasonably encountered circumstances. And if someone teleports in front of your car, it should just try (and fail) to stop in time.
It depends. If someone runs a red light and swerving (assuming it knows it's safe) will avoid an accident I don't see why it shouldn't do it. But I agree this is an edge case and is not an important feature. There are more important things to focus on.
The idea is to add an element of randomness to the decision making. I don't mean to pick random decisions, but when there are decisions that weight approximately the same it should pick the decision based on personality/mood.
This would enable the algorithm to adapt and be flexible, instead of a deterministic algorithm that could cause chain unoptimal behavior.
The answer is probably that this isn't real. A self driving car with better vision, perfect attention, and instant reactions won't get itself into that kind of situation. And in any other case where an accident is unavoidable, the answer is to just hit the brakes because it won't matter anyway.
Another benefit will be that the self-driving car behind you will also instantly hit the brakes and won‘t cause you neck trauma, making this option a little bit more appealing than it is right now.
Also, it has about zero understanding of what's going on. And it also has the same laws of physics acting on it. Zero reaction time does not translate to zero braking distance. People understand the world around and can make predictions which gives them time to react.
Presumably a stepping stone towards spinoff. Waymo never really made business sense as a part Google. Even technically it only ever made sense in that both AVs and advertising require very complicated algorithms that almost no one understands.
I'll tell you what, the image on this press release is a perfect microcosm of American life. A couple of hugely expensive cars are parked on a dilapidated street in San Francisco, in front of two ancient examples of what used to be working-class housing but are now worth $3 million per door. Two of the three houses in the photo are owned by the same long-time and very vocal bicycling activist who wouldn't be caught dead in a self-driving or any other kind of car. The frontmost car is illegally parked; in San Francisco you are not permitted to park in a curb cut, even if it's your house.
Comma is great but drains the battery when when the car is stopped. I have to jump start my car almost once or twice a month. They really need to fix that issue.
This is a big deal, IMO. this starts the clock ticking. maybe Waymo wont care if it takes a long time to get return on their investment, but a lot of outside investors will want return quickly. Waymo going after investors tells me that they believe they can start rolling out soon enough to actually seem attractive to investors.
1) With this move, Alphabet is basically saying they a) don't want to continue funding the autonomous moonshot on their own, and b) want some partners to come on board for various reasons
2) $2.25B is a big round, and speaks to the level of confidence in Waymo as well as the massive cost to get to market
3) Magna is effectively an outsourced automotive production company. You can give them a vehicle design spec and they will spin up a production line to make it for you. This points to the possibility of Waymo stepping outside the "buy from an OEM and retrofit" plan, or of outsourcing the retrofit entirely to Magna for scale at some point
4) AutoNation is also an interesting investor here given that they are effectively an OEM-agnostic dealership network and they have a pretty strong fleet sales arm. This is another indicator that Waymo might be looking to sidestep the traditional OEM channels entirely.