GM is the most vertically integrated and they're showing very good progress relative to the competition, they're in the best position to deploy at scale. Their acquisition of Cruise was money well spent. GM has a legit opportunity to achieve dominance.
And really, if anybody is spreading hype and BS about autonomous vehicles it's Tesla. Developing an autonomous OS to minimum viable product is a ~5 year job, depending on how well or poorly things go.
Musk was tweeting in the spring that they'd be able to demonstrate L5 capabilities on underpowered hardware by the end of this year. Which is total bullshit. Many car companies are making nebulous claims about when they expect to achieve autonomous capabilities, but Tesla lied outright to get people to reserve their Model 3 orders.
I've seen Waymo cars in SF around Market st, near Dolores Park and near Noe Valley. I assume that they're also testing heavily in their main cities, so (anecdotally) I don't think this is accurate.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous+/test...
For the level 4 driverless tests, yes. GM isn't even close to L4 driverless testing yet.
Also, Waymo has gathered enough road data that they're doing accelerated testing in simulation now. I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the self driving car tech when doing your comparison.
Cruise is also using simulation. They mentioned in their presentation yesterday that they have 3 simulation engines, and together they do 150 simulations/minute. I'm not sure exactly what that means but simulation is an integral part of their validation process just like with Waymo.
Also, GM nor Cruise have launched driverless L4 testing yet, which Waymo was the first company (ever) to do last month:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/fully-driverless-cars-a...
Thanks for posting that link though, I've been curious to read more about this.
"""At first, most of Waymo's driverless cars will have an employee in the back observing the vehicle's behavior. If something goes really wrong, they'll be able to push the "pull over" button to stop the car."""
I'm not sure why you're splitting hairs on that though, when there's a definitive difference between having testing with someone in the driver's seat and not having someone in the driver's seat.
When they run simulations, often they're running simulations of specific intersections or stretches of road. Using simulation dramatically condenses development timelines, but simulation is still anchored to physical testing on real roads.
Testing in multiple cities is necessary to avoid overfitting for a specific region.
When I compare Waymo and Cruise, I use every publicly available piece of data I can get my hands on. There actually wasn't much to know about Cruise's progress before the end of 2016, when the disengagement reports came out.
Waymo reported 5000 miles between unplanned disengagements on average. Cruise reported 180 miles of testing per disengagement out of much less overall miles. None of the other 2 dozen or so companies registered to test with the California DMV even mattered. Going 180 miles on busy downtown streets between disengagements was hard to believe coming from a non-entity like Cruise, but in spring of this year Cruise released a string of videos demoing their driving in SF, and sure enough, they were doing it. At that point it was time to regard Cruise as a contender. Mentioning them as a contender on forums like this one were generally met with derision.
On the 28th of this month Cruise did it's first driving demos for the press, and so we finally had people to independently verify the vehicle's performance. Out of a dozen articles written by various journalists, one reported an unplanned disengagement when one of Cruise's Bolt's was confused by a cherry picker. Most journalists commented that the ride was 'herky-jerky', and that Cruise's vehicles would often stop, sometimes suddenly and think for a long time before making a decision. One thing is clear, Waymo has put more effort into polish and ride feel. Cruise contends that ride feel is not a priority for them at the moment.
Cruise makes a big deal about focusing their testing efforts in downtown SF, and notes they encounter 40x the number of interesting situations per mile as in the more suburban Phoenix. They intend to launch in NYC next year, and to roll out 1000s of Bolts, with the aim of scaling up their testing to 1 million miles/month in prep for an initial commercial deployment sometime in 2019.
Waymo supposedly intends to begin their initial pilot commercial deployment early next year. Very exciting stuff, it will mark a major milestone, they'll be the first company to go from zero to one with fully autonomous vehicles.
Waymo doesn't have a vehicle manufacturing partnership, and until this is addressed it's a constraint on their ability to scale their deployment. Their current strategy of retrofitting Pacificas is not an efficient or long term solution.
One of the first things Krafcik did in his freshly minted role as Waymo CEO was blow off a promising manufacturing partnership with Ford. This left Ford in the lurch, and ultimately led to the replacement of Mark Fields with Jim Hackett. Then the Waymo team was given a series of massive bonuses that were promised them in exchange for meeting certain benchmarks. Then most of Waymo's key people left. Levandowski went to Uber. He was sharply criticized by Chris Urmson, who himself left to start Aurora.ai with Sterling Anderson (their website went live today). Brian Salesky, also a Google vet, left to start Argo.ai with Peter Rander (they had their first delivery of testing vehicles today). The only main guy left at Waymo is Dmitri Dolgov. Waymo's engineers are more loyal to Dolgov than Krafcik. There are reports of leadership conflicts between Krafcik and Dolgov.
Kyle Vogt and Justin Kahn, before founding Cruise started and scaled Justin.tv, which rapidly scaled and became Twitch. They sold it to Amazon and used their wealth to self-fund Cruise. Their initial plan was to develop a retrofit kit for the Audi A8, and they spent a few years working on that, growing their team to 90 people before being acquired by GM and showing an impressive ability to solve hard problems that many other established and well-capitalized development programs are struggling with. Vogt is legendary for locking himself in a room with a problem and not coming out until he has a solution, sometimes for days. For what it's worth, he's also an asshole with a giant ego, and still very young. He participated in the DARPA Grand challenge in 2004 as a 19 year old MIT junior, he's been into robotics since he was a kid.
https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...
Google and Tesla probably have easier access to top top talent because of the more attractive research & dev culture & hype/branding, but GM can probably just pay more and still get high grade talent, because they know it's worth it in the long term & they have capital.
.. some researchers must have been the target of pretty intense bidding wars. Like Karpathy at Tesla... I'd be really curious to know if his salary reached low 8 digits. Mid to high 7 for sure, right.
If they're able to isolate these researchers and executives from the cruft and bureaucracy that has built up in their ICE-based manufacturing, sure.
I've made a number of deliveries to their Warren, MI tech center. While I'm generally supportive of unionization efforts in most industries, the unions at GM cause a lot of work to take place at a tenth the pace and urgency of other companies.
I'd expect that if they hire a top-talent AI researcher, they'd then ask them to spend the first 3 weeks of their employment waiting around for IT to finally procure a laptop for them. And you'd better hope that it comes with a full battery charge, because plugging the charger for said laptop into the wall requires summoning the maintenance electrician. It's unfathomable the way weeks of delay can be added to tasks that would take an hour at most in a startup.