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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars.

If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised.

Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads? It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work. One last option would be that they intend to put 10's of thousands of them on the road just to exponentially speed up the data collection that they've decided is necessary to truly get the system up to par.

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All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not.

This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.

Nobody has self-driving cars, not even Waymo. Every "self-driving car" has "disengagements" (a euphemism for "it stopped working") periodically every few thousand miles. That's simply unacceptable and needs to be sorted out. If a human driver was performing a panic stop for no reason or hitting a pedestrian or another car every 3 months or so we would take away their license.

Waymo is doing better than almost everyone else, a testament to their skill and their rigor, but they are still a long distance away from truly autonomous vehicles. The temptation is to say "well, they are so close, I'm sure they'll finish up the niggling details", but the reality is that the stuff they are failing at are some of the hardest remaining problems and will probably require at least as much work as they've put in already, if not significantly more, to tackle. I think we'll end up with self-driving cars eventually but probably not on a time scale of within the next 5-10 years, more likely it'll take that long or longer for the technology to reach maturity and then yet another decade plus for it to start seeing practical application.

I repeat this again and again, and am always surprised that nobody else likes to raise the unfair comparisons.

I am willing to assume that waymo/Tesla etc have found the holy Grail, and made a driverless car safer than the average current human driver on the road. I'm not convinced that we should still allow these driverless cars on the road with no human backups. Not because of expectations or liability, but because the benchmark is wrong. We should compare them to a human assisted by the same driverless technology being used passively to prevent accidents. And it's not clear if a driverless car with no human backup is safer than a human assisted by the same technology.

Interesting. Maybe instead of humans intervening in the AI, the AI should intervene in the human's driving.

That sort of already happens with lane assist, auto parallel parking, brake warnings, adaptive cruise control, etc.

This. Flipping the semantics around because Marketing thinks it will attract more customers is disingenuous at best, murderous at worst.

It's the classic problem of truly appreciating magnitude and scale. Humans are amazing at it within a very narrow realm, and then terrible beyond that narrow range.

This is the sad realization I had about brain-computer interfaces towards the end of my research. 99.9% is NOT good enough when the stakes are life and death and the factors within events that the environment throws at you are basically independent and continuous.

At least with self driving cars we can enforce some hard boundaries. In BCIs implementing boundaries is tantamount to denying the user of their free will.

The cars that have been driving around Phoenix certainly seem self driving. Humans also drive imperfectly and that doesn't mean they don't exist.

see

>A select group of Arizonans has been shuttling around the Phoenix area in self-driving cars for the past year, providing insight into the future of the technology. http://ktar.com/story/2105890/waymo-early-rider-program-prov...

Is part of Waymo's perceived success in that they are more conservative with deploying their technology? I.e. it is tested at lower speed, on specific routes, in specific weather etc.?

>> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles.

Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happen when I see one accurately obey hand signals from a human directing traffic. Not youtube vids. It will happen when I see it with my own eyes. Just like electric cars, we will have to see them on the roads playing the game we all play every day. Until that tipping point, driverless remains a myth that happens in a faraway place.

So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.

Living around the Mountain View area, this is one of those moments where I'm like "Oh, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."

I've been driving next to these cars for the past 7 years. A number of my friends & former coworkers have ridden in them; a couple of them work on them. They've stopped for me at pedestrian crosswalks. I've gotten stuck behind them, driving 25mph on El Camino. I've waved them on to make a left in front of me (I'm still not entirely sure how they do that, but I think that if they detect that the driver at the intersection is stopped and has not gone within any reasonable time period, they creep out and eventually go if no movement is detected). I saw one last week attempt to switch lanes, find that the car behind it had sped up and it was no longer safe to make the lane change, turn off its blinker, pull ahead in its own lane, and then make the lane change safely several cars up.

They are on the road, and they work pretty well. I trust them a lot more than cars that say "Student Driver Onboard", or even the average Californian driver.

> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates.

Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.

And people will die anyways. It would be the biggest miracle on earth I think if those things ended up being perfect (at least, the ones that work.. not Uber, obviously).

So it's all a numbers game. What's acceptable, and what we can improve on.

I had a famous cancer researcher at a world famous cancer treatment hospital tell me (paraphrasing) “we won’t ever see the kinds of breakthroughs we saw in the past because we were reckless back then, foolish even. It was the Wild West.”

I’m not saying I want the highways to be a Wild West for self driving cars, but it’s worth admitting it would probably accelerate the pace of innovation.

All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.

>> Assuming ride-sharing

Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).

Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.

Carpooling has already become much more practical with Lyft Line, etc. No driver would mean even cheaper rides. Also, there's no reason your car couldn't park itself at work...or rent itself out (via Lyft/Uber) while you're at work. Assuming we get to that level of tech.

If cars which require no effort whatsoever to operate and cost significantly less than taxis are on the market, it's a safe bet that being slightly less dangerous per passenger mile will kill far more people than are currently killed on the roads due to more, longer car journeys. That's before we even get into the fact a car which is slightly less likely to cause a fatal accident than the average human driver on an accidents per mile basis is a lot more likely to cause a fatal accident than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver, the complications of estimating fatality rates from small test drive samples and the potential for new bugs to cause massive accident spikes.

Of course if people make more journeys, i.e. become more mobile, you could argue that the increased number of deaths should be balanced against life-hours of drivers freed up while also improving quality of life of passengers at the same time, i.e. it might still be QALY-neutral or even positive.

> than the average sober, careful and experienced human driver

But ultimately we do accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

The total distance driven also does not just depend on technology alone but on urban planning. AVs may change that dramatically over time.

True, there are QALY arguments for even unreliable SDVs (and also for other things like abolishing speed limits or allowing people to continue to operate older vehicles currently deemed unroadworthy if they can't afford better), but they're dependent on how you adjust for quality and at best orthogonal to standard safety arguments.

> But ultimately we do accept the fatility rates caused by all drivers and not just the good ones as a cost of having individual transportation. If we didn't only teetotalers would be allowed to operate cars to remove one risk factor. And we also accept the risk of inexperienced drivers because we have to teach them eventually, the same reasoning can be applied to autonomous cars (just substitute teaching with data gathering)

We don't accept the fatality rates caused by all drivers; we confiscate the licenses of or jail bad drivers on a regular basis, and we certainly don't permit drivers being taught to operate commercially. Driver accountability for accidents is part of the social contract that permits individual transportation despite its cost; an corollary of that is that the accident rate is higher than we believe it should be, and that some degree of negligence is involved in the current level of accidents which it would seem unreasonable to exonerate corporations from if they were to replicate them using software. And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

> And on a purely practical basis, if you estimate SDV safety based on narrowly beating the mean accident rate across all drivers in tests, and then early commercial adoption tends to be replacing experienced commercial drivers who drive the most miles with the fewest incidents first, you're certainly going to push that accident rate up in the short run even without additional miles driven.

Uber could be skewing statistics in similar ways.

Anyway, this is all handwavy speculation. What I'm trying to get at is that the overton window for AV behavior may be surprisingly large, especially if they exhibit their worst behavior in the learning years when the fleets are still small. For some metrics possibly even larger than that for humans.

No, that's a wrong benchmark. We shouldn't compare driverless cars with the average human driver. We should compare them with the average human driver assisted by the best technology (which is say waymo's driverless software running passively to prevent accidents).

That's an irrelevant benchmark except for people who pay premium to have the safest ride in the world.

Everyone else performs a tradeoff along multiple axes including price, convenience and safety. Not needing a driver, freeing up time and lowering prices increase utility which could even justify a slight increase in risk. But even if we don't want to increase risk then a self-driving system still only has to be as good as humans on average to result in no net-increase of deaths per passenger mile while still increasing overall utility.

And more simply, it is silly to expect the maximum possible value to be the minimum requirement.

Let's agree to disagree. But if we allow driverless cars on the road (with no backup), it should come after emergency braking, lane keeping assist, side collision assist etc have become mandatory. Just like airbags are mandatory now, and we enforce fuel efficiency on new cars but not existing cars.

Just to add. In a world where airbags are not mandatory,(autopilot+airbag) driverless technology would be safer than the average human (without airbags) on the road. So, you would be arguing for legalizing driverless cars completely overlooking that the gains are not because of driverless-ness but because of airbags. This holds true now too, almost all gains by driverless-ness can be had by emergency braking, lane keeping assists, side collision warning, and pedestrian detection etc.

You’re incorrectly assuming that a solution to the problem of self-driving a car is a superset of the problem of passive accident avoidance.

If the software is in active control pretty much everything that goes into that is different from software that is deciding if and when to emergency brake.

To put it another way, a self-driving system will become safer than human drivers, not because it knows how/when to emergency brake really well, but because it won’t have to emergency brake as frequently as a human does.

Sure, I understand that a driverless system might prevent accidents by strictly maintaining safe distances. But the benchmark still can't be unaided human, rather a human aided by the best assistive technology that can be built (say by the same company).

> Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue.

Jesus... Let's kill people because you're sick of the debate on whether self driving cars will work.

I tend to agree. Waymo ordered 62,000 Chrysler Pacificas with delivery slated for late 2018. Base retail on the hybrid model is $40,000USD. Even if they got an unbelievably generous 50% discount, that means they're $1.24B USD serious, excluding the cost of the additional autonomous driving equipment. So this will either be one of the biggest debacles in Google/Alphabet's history, or they really are ready to go.

Waymo has also ordered 20k Jaguar I-paces. Rumour is they have invested about 11 billion in R&d so far, and I'm crudely estimating the cost of their 80k upcoming robotaxis to be around 12 billion. Alphabet is committed.

Waymo estimates about 50 trips per day will be served per vehicle. At that rate, 80k robotaxis is enough to displace most of the taxi/rideshare services in the southwestern United States, though I'm not expecting to see all of them on the roads until 2022 or so. Waymo has a ton of work ahead of them. Mapping and validating in the ~100 square mile area of Chandler has taken them about 18 months so far, and supposedly they are on the verge of a commercial launch. Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.

In this scenario there's no moat for Lyft/Uber either. If Waymo can meet demand, they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices so deeply that most consumers will switch overnight. Banks will be falling over themselves to provide the massive credit they'll need to bankroll the expansion.

> they'll be able to undercut ride sharing prices

Why?

I see comments like this constantly. But does anyone ever do even a basic spreadsheet to explain the unit economics of this argument?

Low skilled people who can drive are pretty cheap and plentiful. Even if self-driving tech is flawless (spoiler: it's not and won't be soon) it still only replaces part of their responsibilities. Someone will still have to clean the cars for example. Presumably there will be some required level of human monitoring, etc.

Conversely, capital and highly reliable technology isn't free. You can calculate pretty easily the rate at which it's profitable to substitute technology for labor, this is a trade-off we've literally been making for centuries.

One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs.

Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?

I don't disagree that some may be over-estimating how much cost can pragmatically be cut, but I also think you may be glossing over some of the costs and inefficiencies that come with operating a large heterogenous operation comprised of individuals and personal or rented vehicles.

A company deploying large mostly-homogenous autonomous fleets may be able to benefit from:

  - we probably don't need to tip AVs
  - economies of scale on obtaining vehicles, fuel, maintenance, and cleaning
  - tuning maintenance/cleaning schedules across a fleet towards keeping vehicles in service for longer
  - may be able to perform cleaning/maintenance during off-hours, vs owners who'll often have to trade 
    working hours to do these tasks
  - autonomous systems may drive (and be tuned towards) in ways that also help preserve long-term vehicle 
    value and minimize costs
  - lower insurance, legal, and PR costs if they outperform human drivers, don't molest/murder 
    passengers, etc.
  - minimizing costs around acquiring and managing a human workforce
  - there are probably many small ways to optimize the positioning and functioning of an AV fleet that
    just won't work with a large contractor fleet

That said, the potential for a lot of these savings depends on current prices actually reflecting these components. It may very well be more expensive to perform some of these activities, no matter how efficiently, than to exploitively externalize their costs on drivers and riders.

I haven't looked for work on the price/demand relationship here, but it's also worth noting that price reductions may not just purely be a matter of cutting costs and passing those on at a static ridership and profit level. There are likely to be some price points that profoundly change user behavior

To give an example, my favorite coffee shop is about 7 minutes (+wait) from my apartment by car either way, and around 18-26 minutes (+wait) by bus (shorter there, longer back). Without a ride pass and with tip, it's probably around $7-8 to Uber this one way, vs. $1.25 for the bus.

At this price, I'll usually only Uber if heat or rain make getting to and from the bus miserable. I have a ride pass atm that knocks this down to around $6-7 with tip, which makes me marginally more likely to take Uber, but it isn't my default. I took the bus this past Sunday morning, planning to get some open source work done, but I'd forgotten my laptop wasn't in my bag. The time/sweat cost of the bus round trip and the money cost of the Uber round trip were high enough that I just sat and read a book instead.

I'm not sure exactly where, but somewhere between ~$2-5 total, I'd probably default to taking Uber both ways. Down at the low end of that range, I even would've gone back for the forgotten laptop.

People are expensive. Very expensive. Covering 24h/day requires 4.7 regular week workers, which in the UK will cost (for workers over 25) a minimum of £80k. That's just raw salary and basic taxes, other things push it up (as well as the fact that you can't get people to work exact hours consistently so well and people are I'll, etc). So per "baseload" taxi, that's likely £100k/year minimum in human costs in the UK. If the tech has only a few year lifespan you've still got north of a quarter of a million to spend on the self driving things alone.

The number of hours per day the car needs cleaning will be drastically lower than the hours it needs driving.

First, I've read over and over that the single largest cost in transportation is human labor (the driver). Low-skilled and low-paid they might be, but if you can replace them with a low-paid person behind a monitor that can handle 8-10 trips at once, you've saved a substantial portion of the labor cost.

Yes, that cost will be offset by the cost of the extra hardware, but that can be amortized over tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of miles. Likewise, the investment in software (programmers) will eat into profits, but once again, you can spread that cost out over hundreds of thousands or millions of cars. Besides, an awful lot of the latter is a sunk cost at this point.

> "One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs. Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?"

That's a weird thought to have. Humans need on the order of ~15K a year in the US. On the other hand, even an ultra high end SDC computer costs only around ~12K in production and much, much less to actually make since Waymo will no doubt use their own TPUs. Lasers are cheap, compact and efficient fiber lasers. Cameras are mass produced in immense volume and are dirt cheap for very high quality. The only other factor is software development costs which is mostly a fixed cost.

Uber currently pays these "low skilled people" ~75% of the fare which leaves a lot of headroom to lower prices and still pay for vehicles and cleaning.

Rental car companies show how few people it takes to maintain a very large fleet of vehicles and it will take even fewer if they can drive themselves (an autonomous car can go through a wash on its own, charge itself, show up at a detailing station on demand, etc).

What is the makeup of that 75% number?

Does that number reflect an analysis of the cost of the actual human work of driving the car only, or is that just the number for average actual remittances from Uber to the driver?

If so it includes assumption of capital risks, auto depreciation, gas, tire wear, broken glass, vandalism and cleaning, traffic tickets, maintenance, towing, and every other expense of physically delivering the ride.

Getting rid of the human driver only saves real money on driving labor. The payments to drivers have much more to them.

> One one side you have plentiful cheap low skilled labor. On the other you have lasers, fast computers, graphics cards, cameras, and the associated programming inspection and maintenance costs. Why do we think the latter side is going to be cheaper in anything remotely like the near term?

Because, other than inspection and maintenance costs, everything on your list has been getting much cheaper really quickly for a long time.

Waymo doesn't have a business model if it isn't cheaper. It probably won't be much cheaper in the near term.

That's not true at all. There are a lot more use cases for self driving technology than taxi services. In fact I'm continuously perplexed as to why this specific use case, which is obviously the most challenging and likely to be the last to reach the market, is always first in these discussions.

There are very good reasons as to why Waymo and all the other major players are focused on robotaxis.

A truck still needs to be able to drive in cities, and if you figure out how to automate all the other thing a trucker does you can replace 3 million of them. Big whoop. Robotaxis stand to challenge the economics of personal vehicle ownership, the potential market is many orders of magnitude larger.

Why can't they just have normal cars for sale that also drive themselves to start with? Like I have a car and recline and read a book on a commute most of the time. If snow gets crazy or there's very strange construction or a flooded road or a flat tire we go back to manual driving.

That's plausible and incremental. No cleaning problems, no homeless people living in them, no need for remote monitoring, a far simpler liability and insurance situation, and so on.

My assumption is we'll start talking seriously about robotaxis on the day this scenario is practical and battle tested. The idea of starting with taxis seems ludicrous in comparison.

> That's plausible and incremental. No cleaning problems, no homeless people living in them, no need for remote monitoring, a far simpler liability and insurance situation, and so on.

These are all solved problems, I mean when was the last time you saw a homeless person camped out in a Zip Car? BMW's ReachNow vehicles are all over Seattle and they are clean, insured, fueled/charged and exactly 0 people live in them.

I live in Brooklyn, where ReachNow launched with much excitement and pulled out within a year or so due to problems with maintenance, damage to cars, and difficulty with the technology.

Yup. I'd sell my car almost instantly if I could take a robotaxi to work/etc with zero hassle and near instant availability.

> Robotaxis stand to challenge the economics of personal vehicle ownership

I have yet to hear a compelling reason why I would give up my car, and if I did why public transit isn't a better option.

In suburban environments, robotaxis are likely to be a key firm of public transit rather than an alternative (rideshare as public transit if already a thing in some suburban environments.)

> Every city they hope to deploy in has differing signage, differing driving habits, and many funky intersections and road anomalies that need specific attention.

The very fact that those things do need specific attention tells me they don't have true autonomy yet; they just have a way to fake it using detailed maps of known areas.

I don't see how an autonomous vehicle can handle all the corner cases of real-world driving (construction zones, etc.) until it can also work reliably using only available sensor data, so that detailed mapping is no longer necessary.

The escalation of data collection will be immense though, once they deploy the fleet. Even if they have to have more human involvement than desired currently, I think the first few years will show growth they could have have dreamed of in the beginning.

Which must be worrisome for competition.

Waymo might also tell a different story: They've realized that a fundamental breakthrough in self-driving cars is unlikely to happen in the next decade and therefore there's no point in waiting any longer to perfect the technology - and instead rely on remote controlling of the cars for difficult situations. They can still gradually improve the self-driving systems but from a business perspective it might make sense to capture as much market share as possible right now.

This is right on. Waymo is not an autonomous car in the way people typically imagine them. More like a remote control street car on a digital track.

It doesn't work that way. Waymo's remote control does not even support direct manual remote control. It just lets the remote operator give some direction to the onboard systems.

I am giving an analogy. Street car on digital track is the first part of it. The remote control aspects are there as well. It is not "direct" remote control. It is like a drone. You give a direction and the onboard computers execute on it. Direct remote control is not possible because of latency. But it also seems that the commercial launches of these vehicles might be dependent on 5G networks being available (lower latency, better reliability) in which case the remote control capabilities will be greatly enhanced before launch.

There's another startup, for self-driving trucks, which does have direct remote control. Their idea is that the trucks are self-driving for long-haul, and then the final non-Interstate part is remote controlled.[1]

[1] https://phantom.auto/

No. The annual production of Pacificas is only 65K vehicles or so. Google ordered those vehicles in the same way that airplanes are bought. The "62,000" is over many years, and is purely speculative, and cancellable/modifiable as needed.

Google is buying a couple thousand Pacificas in the near future. That's it. It's more or less a commitment to keep buying a couple thousand a year for the next however-many years, in exchange for a discount.

It is NOT the case that Google is going to open a big box and find 62,000 vehicles inside in late 2018.

In all of these deal announcements, the key words are “up to”. That’s very different from a confirmed 62k order, and in all announcements related to that agreement timing of delivery was unconfirmed [0]. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/business/waymo-chrysle...

At the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If all 60k vehicles were registered in California, it would look like rounding error on the 36,000,000 vehicles registered there. [3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#By_year

[3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/5aa16cd3-39a5-402f...

The Alphabet-scale comparisons are fair wrt to whether this is a "big" bet or not, but trying to minimize this via comparison to total world sales or California registrations less so (given that a primary promise of transit AVs is that they may replace many privately-owned vehicles).

While some have projected how many traditional vehicles they can displace, I don't think anyone really knows how that'll play out. I doubt any of these companies will go making bets that obviously rival the scale of traditional vehicle sales/ownership at the time they're made, especially before they get a sense of how reliable AV transit affects the decisions individuals make about car ownership as they face major maintenance, repairs, and replacement.

I've read one projection that says each could replace 10 traditional vehicles. If that worked out, it seems like a bet on 10m vehicles, enough to replace all 100m sold worldwide, would be astonishingly bold. If you assumed an initial scope of the entire US, the equivalent bold bet would be 1.7m vehicles. If you reduced the scope to California, that bet would be about 200k vehicles. If we guess that the difference between "astonishingly bold" and "bold" is an order of magnitude, these would be reduced to 1m, 170k, and 20k...

Corporations like Alphabet don't spend 1% of their revenue on something unless they're very confident it will pan out.

Alphabet spent $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility in 2011 and sold it to Lenovo for $3 billion three years later. The lost $9+ billion? Nobody really noticed. For Alphabet, $1 billion is mad money, not the rent. Self driving cars are a moonshot.

The 9 billion was spent on patents. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Motorola_Mobility_dea...

Specifically, this section:

"According to the filing, Google and Motorola began discussions about Motorola's patent portfolio in early July, as well as the "intellectual property litigation and the potential impact of such litigation on the Android ecosystem".

Although the two companies discussed the possibility of an acquisition after the initial contact by Mr. Rubin, it was only after Motorola pushed back on the idea of patent sale that the acquisition talks picked up steam.

The turning point came during a meeting on July 6. At the meeting, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha discussed the protection of the Android ecosystem with Google senior vice president Nikesh Arora, and during that talk Jha told Arora that "it could be problematic for Motorola Mobility to continue to exist as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio".

In connection with these discussions, the two companies signed a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement that allowed Google to do due diligence on the company's patent portfolio."

On the other hand, irrespective of how confident they are that things will pan out, corporations like Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler have no problem whatsoever with issuing press releases saying that Fiat Chrysler is willing to sell up to 62k Pacificas to Alphabet within the next few years under an agreed framework if Alphabet decides it's made enough progress to actually spend 1% of its annual revenue on more cars.

You mean like Nest and Google Fiber?

You can always sell the cars if it fails.

>Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads?

Waymo supposedly processes their lidar signals to detect other cars with reasonable accuracy even in snow/rain(https://youtu.be/UrJ4-AUL4U0?t=9m41s). They only operate in pre-mapped areas so they should be able to follow lanes just fine even if the actual markings are obscured (by weather or by poor maintenance).

This kind of approach (mapping everything beforehand and using lidar for perception) is used by other players as well, and seems the most likely to work for short term level 4. Trying to do everything without the benefits of lidar and high-res maps (what e.g. Tesla are doing) is a more general solution, and cheaper hardware-wise, but will take longer to get right.

Thanks for posting that Waymo vid, that's the best processing of Lidar in adverse conditions that I've seen. I think the million dollar question is how far Waymo (or others) can push noise reduction with Lidar. The video seems impressive in isolation, but if you compare it to what Nvidia was doing with cameras two years ago (object recognition in snow/fog that appears to outperform humans[1]), it quickly becomes apparent that Lidar is still nowhere close. But maybe they can get it good enough to bridge us between specific and general techniques.

Personally, I'm long on the camera-based approach because I think reliable autonomy will require a generalized vision solution, and once you've achieved that, the Lidar is redundant.

1: https://youtu.be/HJ58dbd5g8g?t=7m20s

> Can they really use that many only in good-weather places with perfect roads?

I would hazard a guess that yes, that's pretty much the Southwestern US year round, if you include Southern CA. There are enough metro areas, and enough new sprawling development, to put those vehicles to work.

Read the contract if you can. I guarantee that they have not put down a billion dollars for all those cars. This isn't like ordering from Amazon. This is a complicated delivery contract. It will have stages. Money will be owed according to a schedule. If things don't work out, there will be many places where delivery can be delayed or the order canceled. Waymo has to have a plan to pay for this in the long run, but they aren't today putting down all the cash.

If you are buying 10,000 cars, what you are essentially doing is taking on that car manufacturer as a partner. You are betting that you will need the cars, and they are bettering that you will be around to pay for them. Everything remains speculative.

I'm sure Waymo will make a lot of progress with their massive investment but using SV money as an indicator for a project's ultimate success seems unwise at this point.

I think the real question is whether the big investors in self-driving cars will make progress creating virtual rails for their vehicles, e.g. roads where we can keep pedestrians out.

> roads where we can keep pedestrians out.

Aren't major roads pedestrian free in the US? Motorways and major roads are in the UK.

Only motorways in the UK, and roads designated under special classification.

I've walked and cycled along multilane A-roads. It's not fun but it's legal.

That is a train or a tram, not a car.

yeah, a tram for one or a few passengers that can go off the rails for the final quarter mile

And? (Oh wait, not-a-car is the scariest thing ever on that continent)

While I agree they are closest of all the competitors with published numbers they are still very far off from human drivers and just looking at the linked articles within the original article do make it clear they have a long way to go. the key difference is the level of caution Waymo is exercising.

So how do we get a determination of which disengagement events would have possibly lead to a crash? Plus I am still not convinced these numbers are even going to remotely similar over roads not heavily mapped and imaged. I think the hope many have for AV is that is allows for driving in the worst of conditions but in the end we will have AV for limited access or very tightly monitored road ways only. Which in itself is not a bad idea, rush hours could much safer and efficient with HOV/Express lanes redone to explicitly support AV.

We certainly aren't going to be able to get people to drive more lawfully when most think they are the better driver when compared to others.

Re "It seems unlikely that they are just that stupid to spend that much money without being confident that their plan will work."

Motorola?

I don't really see Waymo as being far ahead at this point. Uber pretty clearly stole Waymo's work. So unless Waymo had a major breakthrough since then that wasn't related to the basically everything Uber got then everyone is pretty much on the same page: promising it's almost here but in reality still about 10 years out or more.

Uber stole a small portion of Waymos work several years ago. They supposedly stole some lidar designs. There’s also code and personnel that Uber doesn’t have. In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber.

> In my mind, Waymo is miles ahead of Uber.

I'd say many millions of miles, actually :)

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-7-million-test-mile...

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