Waymo heads to Atlanta to test its self-driving cars

Some thought the direction was wrong - not gathering enough test data (unlike Tesla).

Some thought they didn't have a big enough slice of the pie, and by moving to a startup and replicating the work they could earn way more through an acquisition by a carmaker.

Some saw the tech as fairly old. Remember much of Waymo's code was written by Urmson 10 years ago. Probably all C/C++. Not very nimble and quick to extend.

Some saw the fundamental approach wrong. Why not use neural nets for path planning and decision making rather than hand coded rules which will never cover enough cases to be good enough?

Some didn't want to be part of Googles risky approach. Too much pressure to get the cars on the road could kill people, and killing people, or the threat of it, is rather bad for morale. The leaders had this "even if it isn't perfect, it's better than current drivers" approach. Thats little comfort if it was your off by one error which caused the car to plough into a group of schoolchildren.

I disagree. Autonomous vehicles were/are a gold rush, and there are companies with lots of money willing to pay Waymo's engineers to... "replicate"... their success at Waymo. Many of them had an expectation to be acquired by a company with no software chops but a significant stake in self-driving, and that's proved to be a reasonable assumption over the past few years.

For the engineers, it's kind of like chefs at restaurants leaving to start new restaurants that are the same concept, but don't have the same volume or brand recognition.

Yes, you have to start from scratch at the new company, but you also stand to profit much more (and do interesting, early-stage work).

you possess an internal IMU that provides instant and accurate feedback on acceleration and rotation.

you lose out on both of those when you perceive the world through any kind of display, whether that be a screen or even a VR headset.

think about your field of view when you look out the windshield of a car. including peripheral vision that's a 150° field of view. compress that fov to a screen, even a really good one. maybe three of them set side by side. can you still make out a street sign with 6" tall text from 200 feet away?

Essentially, the legislature of the state in question passes a law defining what's required for truly autonomous operation. That can be pretty much anything they want. The really interesting stuff starts happening when there's enough of these things driving around that we start getting accidents. How will insurance companies or the sponsor companies deal with that? What will happen in any lawsuits resulting from any accidents? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

It's a bit sad, but it's probably for the best that there's big companies with deep pockets and big legal departments behind this.

I'm still of the opinion that this is pretty far out except maybe on highways but good to see experimentation under a variety of conditions.