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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

I still think it was a mistake to hire this guy and partner with the auto industry dinosaurs. Should have kept going down the path of being independent and building their own cars without steering wheels. I never liked "Waymo" as a brand either.

Maybe just retrofitting off the shelf cars made sense if they thought they needed hundreds of thousands of cars ASAP, but it turns out they would have had plenty of time to develop the car and even build factories for it while waiting for the technology to mature. And they didn't really need to partner with any manufacturers just to retrofit existing cars anyway.

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You are very, very wrong. I saw the sausage being made. The "koala" car was ... not a success.

Building a car is so hard. And Google mostly sucks at hardware manufacturing. There are good reasons why their market share of Chromebooks, Android phones, etc. is vanishingly small.

Not that building a car is easy, but there are contract manufacturers that can build cars and even design cars for you. And they won't have quite as much of a conflict of interest, in that their business model isn't selling cars direct to consumers, which Waymo is explicitly trying to disrupt.

The koala cars may not have been successful but that was many years ago, years that could have been spent making something better.

Do you know how insanely expensive building cars is? Waymo is already bleeding money. If they were making their own cars, they would be bleeding billions, maybe billions per quarter.

Are you following the car industry? Car startups get crushed regularly, and almost non are successful. Pretty much all of them bleed money like crazy.

Tesla went almost bankrupt over and over again.

This is a highly under rated take. The reason they didn't do so was industry pressure/competition.

The counter point could be that the technology is there, but the regulation is not.

Why must everything be retrofitted versus a complete system overhaul? The initial costs may be immense but the return on investment will be far greater.

Just my two cents.

Partnering with an existing car company helps a lot. They know how to build vehicles at scale and they also can provide a lot of support when it comes to interfacing with the control systems for the car. Controlling the car (engine, doors, wheels, wipers, lights, etc) is a surprisingly difficult task on its own. It requires a lot of control systems knowledge, a complex test infrastructure, and a lot of specialized talent that's probably hard to get. It could've been seen as too difficult to take on in addition to figuring out how to actually do all the self driving specific tasks (mapping, planning, detection, etc.).

> They know how to build vehicles at scale

The actual car companies also outsource lot of stuff to other manufactures e.g lights, wires etc. I would imagine understanding and maintaining those relations woulds also be a hassle for Google instead its just better a car companies does all that.

This is why full self driving coming from a company like Tesla matters. It's vertical integration with hardware, manufacturing, battery and chip production makes it so they don't need any of the OEM legacy auto companies. They are already building the best electric cars available. Nobody comes close. When FSD 9.x is released the zero-to-one moment happens and there'll be no going back. The other companies are going to do nothing but play catch-up and many will go bankrupt.

Tesla's FSD doesn't work and they basically admit it is a level 2 system and may never be more. It's been Elon with the football and Charlie Brown running for the kick over and over.

The only thing they said is that in California its a Level 2 system for now. Their long terms strategy is the same it has always been.

The idea that they believe it will never be more then Level 2 is factually wrong. You might believe that, but they don't.

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