There's just so much about the competition in this space I find fascinating.
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.
There was a rumor that Urmson stole code from the Urban Challenge and took it to Google, but Carnegie Mellon and GM never pursued a lawsuit. Or were you just being lax with your timeline?
It's just a rumor though (and a largely forgotten one at that). I just found it interesting that this person may have nonchalantly unearthed it.
The usual big corp objections -- unsatisfied with agility, level of control, level of payoff and recognition if it succeeds -- seems a lot more likely.
[1] https://nytimes.com/2018/01/04/technology/self-driving-cars-...
FWIW if you gather a ton of data and don't have simulation it's pretty much useless. Also it's expensive to keep around large amounts of data. Tesla didn't even have a simulation team until relatively recently.
> 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.
Do you work in autonomous vehicles? Most teams are using C/C++. If you're not waymo you probably use ROS.
If you've ever worked at Google you'd know their C/C++ stack is among the most pleasant to deal with because much of the bad cruft from those languages is abstracted away in stable libraries.
is this true? ros works well for prototyping, but is it actually used in prod?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/13/14599186/google-waymo-sel...
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).