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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Mapping isn’t a major issue because there’s surprisingly few roads across a country. The interstate highway system is 47,432 miles in the US, you could send a car down every lane every day without major issue.

The US has 4.09 million miles of road for 333 million people. If you assume it costs 10$ / mile / year which seems excessive that’s still a trivial expense.

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Why did Waymo survive and Cruise fail then?

From the outside, with no insider information, my impression is waymo was under a lot LESS pressure compared to others to exaggerate their successes. This is just my impression but to me it feels like waymo was able to do a lot better self-policing or was much better at marketing to appear keeping safety at a top priority. For example, I remember reading articles that said the equipment on early prototypes were multiple times the cost of the Toyota Prius cars they were mounted on. Things like this make me feel safer with a waymo.

The real answer though is money. Since none of these investments are close to breaking even, the only obvious answer as to why one succeeds vs fails is the continued additional investment of money.

Execution, having a good idea and lots of money doesn’t guarantee success.

Waymo is 4 years older than Cruise

Cruise severely botched an accident investigation which they might have been cleared of if they didn't try to hide evidence from CA regulators [0].

Follow the laws and it's fairly easy to operate.

I was a happy customer of Cruise's btw and they largely solved the self driving taxi problem at the city level at least, but Waymo does have access to better mapping because of Google.

[0] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-05/gms-cruise...

Theres a world outside US

The important bit is the ratio of customers to miles of road. The US has 80+ people per mile of road, that radio may be slightly higher or lower in each country but it’s never going to be prohibitive.

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