Waymo and Hyundai enter multi-year, strategic partnership
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- Hyundai/Genesis has some of the best cars on the market right now between the GV line and Ionic lines, and they seem to be improving faster than other manufacturers
- Waymo is now the clear leader in self-driving in my mind after visiting SF recently and opting for Waymo driver over human driver 60% of the time.
I have a Mercedes on a short lease now but my hope/expectation is that in 3 years Hyundai will be making my ideal car since the GV80 is so close, but I’d like to see an electric-first design from them in the space.
I wish the Waymo deal meant I could buy a Waymo-equipped Hyundai myself though :-(
People are going to say that if they own it they should be able to mod it as they please, is that actually practical with a self driving car? What if they mod it in some way that makes it dangerous? Who's liable?
There's a whole host of issues like this and most of them go away completely if you can't buy a self driving car but you can rent it per ride. Plus, if they do run it as a taxi service I think they can iterate everything from hardware, software and even infrastructure that supports it much faster than if they're selling it.
I think google will be content to run a taxi service and let others sell self driving cars if and when they catch up because honestly it's a better business than outright selling cars.
People also use vehicles as cargo carriages, not simply human transport devices. I know I don't always immediately unload my vehicle when I transport things, sometimes it gets stored there. Sometimes the load time and the unload time don't even make sense to do back to back. Sometimes I load something knowing I will unload it next week. Some things I just carry around with me on the off chance I might need them while out and about. Anyway, there's a lot of nuance to this type of change and why owning a car might still make sense for a lot of people.
3-4 are kid activities sports/birthdays/play dates (we only have 1 kid but he’s a busy guy!)
2 weekly dog grooming appointment (doodle!) have to drop her off then pick her up later, so it’s counts as 2
2 we eat out twice on Saturday and once Sunday
Rest are other social, family visits, or hobby activities along with a plethora of random errands; groceries, home center, and a long tail of specialty stores that are individually irregular but always a few every weekend (pool supplies, makeup for my wife, post office/UPS, etc.)
We shop online so mostly avoid malls and department stores unless it’s more of a boutique thing or something we want to see before buying. We don’t do food delivery or groceries unless it’s just curbside thing which is another trip. I hate the online/app shopping experience for things like groceries.
Sometimes I just drive half a mile to get a Big Gulp fountain drink or an ice cream cone with the kid. I could walk or bike, but it’s car centric and 100F outside.
It’s also a huge range and varies a lot by season. We certainly have some weekends we barely leave the house.
> a long tail of specialty stores that are individually irregular but always a few every weekend (pool supplies, makeup for my wife, post office/UPS, etc.)
I always save stuff like that up so I don't need to make an extra trip out
Hobby time has suffered the most. My philosophy is spend as much time as possible with my kid while he actually wants to be around me. So that’s my hobby now. But I’m also a nocturnal person so I do hobbies from 9pm-3am. Helps that I have a low stress low demand job. I work about 30 hours a week and can do that any time I want. Some weeks I’ll do a 2 on / 5 off schedule. Or work a lot for a month then take the summer off. I realized that’s a luxury most people don’t have.
I do the bulk purchase thing too on lots of stuff but still it seems like there’s always a few places we need to go on any given weekend.
Plus lets be honest Americans love their cars, a lot of them are never going to give them up on the principle of the thing, but their kids are likely to reach an age where they would need to learn to drive and just not see the point, self driving robo taxi's will be good enough.
I have a hard time (for myself, not doubting you) imagining that many things to do.
I’m in the suburban core of Dallas Texas. The area that was originally developed in 1950s as suburbs. It’s very much considered “in town” now as the area has sprawled greatly since. But it’s still very neighborhood-like. Most of my trips are 10 minutes or less from my house of total drive time.
Before having a kid I never understood the busy parenting thing, but I’m actually finding myself want to be at all the things and it’s a huge social thing that nothing since college/high school compares too. Meeting new friends as an adult is actually very easy if you have kids and want to be involved in things.
It seems to make much more sense to have a fleet owned and operated by a corporation. I actually doubt that any company that achieves proper self-driving will sell vehicles. Renting makes much more money, and corporations like money. Do you see Google selling their search engine as software that you can deploy on-premise? Do you see Amazon selling the internet store software? Microsoft was selling Windows and Office, and what do we see? They are trying to move as many customers as they can to the rent model. Logitech mentioned subscription for a mouse.
Nobody will sell self-driving cars, if they can make them.
I think its much more likely that we see premium cars for purchase with L2 and advanced safety features at no additional charge and a yearly subscription model for L3/L4 like we see with hands-free and L3 tech from Ford, GM, and Mercedes right now. Even so Ford now offers a one-time purchase option for Blue Cruise so maybe consumers are going to push back on that model as well.
Ideally the internet could be host to actual marketplaces, versus the up-in-the-cloud data-keepd that dictate to the down-below dwellers.
They did, until pretty recently.
I suspect it'll be some kind of AI-powered assistant that will take self-driving vehicles to people, like [1]. You retrofit a device onto your car, which'll hook to the car's sensors (as well as bring it's own sensors, like camera) and get a better experience in self-driving. Still nowhere near reliable to just stop paying attention though.
Hopefully, they'll make reliable self-driving vehicles within the next 10 years or so...
They scaled from 10k to 100k per week in a year.
They've been operating successfully on highways for months now.
Once they can do highways, a huge fraction of the US will open up. And generally speaking, driving outside of cities is quite a bit more easy.
They seem like they're moving very quicky to massive deployment. Comma is still just driver assist.
Custom vehicles that can strip out all the complexity of a steering wheel will reduce costs pretty aggressively.
1. Availability. How many vehicles are in an area, that can respond to dispatch?
2. Demand. Can't have too many idle vehicles scooting around and taking up space.
3. Service. Must establish depots where the vehicles can return for charging, cleaning and maintenance.
4. Support. Waymo Support is a tap away, and if a vehicle gets particularly jammed up, they will dispatch a technician in their own vehicle. Support can also monitor telemetry and push commands to give nudges (but cannot remotely drive a car).
So with the current model, I do not envision Waymo service areas expanding beyond the reach of their depots, or offering long-haul trips between urban centers.
Of course, I don't have enough trust in self-driving to even use the things. I know a lot of people love them, and have a couple acquaintances working on self-driving stuff. Just me being a bit hesitant with new tech in general.
I have similar feelings on a lot of the smart home stuff, well justified after companies dropping, deprecating hardware or outright dying. Maybe in another decade we might see better options all around.
I worked in the space 5ish years ago, and the LiDAR sensors were monstrously expensive. They were the most expensive component we put in the car; if I'm remembering right, a single LiDAR sensor cost more than the car itself and there were half a dozen or so of them on the car. I want to say it was ballpark $500k to build out one of the cars, with the majority of that being LiDAR sensors followed by the servers in the car.
Comma doesn't appear terribly close to cracking that based on their features. It's certainly a neat project, but I wouldn't put them much closer to cracking self-driving than someone just starting out today.
LiDAR sensors are no longer expensive. We are seeing automakers including sub $1000 LiDARs. Granted they only offer L2 ADAS, but the rapid price cratering means it's only a matter of time for consumer-owned self driving cars.
To be clear, I'm talking about the point where normal people get new cars that have self-driving. It's affordable for wealthy people now, and was available to the super wealthy before that. I think the whole package is going to have to get somewhere in the $5k-$10k range before it's "normal" to have a self-driving car and be able to afford the maintenance.
Even those super cheap LiDARs may be over $10k installed by the time you add the other sensors, compute, labor, etc. I have no idea what the lifetime of a LiDAR sensor is, so maintenance is a concern too.
I think we'll get there, but it'll be a while after robotaxis become a thing. The news seems to think LiDAR sensors will settle around $200, which would definitely be affordable.
This price from 5 years ago. How confident are you the unit price is still $7,500?
Only the "dome" LiDAR at the top costs $7500. The smaller perimeter LiDARs are much cheaper.
Some of that was Tesla/Elon propaganda when he was talking about being camera-only.
This also includes Kia, and the sibling to the Ioniq 5, the EV6
Always has been.
Tesla is never going to ship fully automated driving IMo
(Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. That makes Google a sister company. Google doesn't operate Waymo.)
Google has built infrastructure and experience from the get-go, from driving Street View cars and building Maps, operating their own data centers, plenty of GPU application experience, teams of human support agents (yes they exist and respond), and just being really good at collecting, organizing, analyzing telemetry.
That's why I have confidence in the vehicles and Waymo Driver. This service is an iteration and evolutionary step. The Hive Mind behind the car has everything well in hand. Everyone else is just makin' cars and drivin' around alone. NO COMPARISON!
FSD is probably the leading Level 2 autonomy system. As you point out it covers a massively broader set of geographies and conditions than Waymo can. On the flip side, it won't even take you around the block if you just get in the back seat and expect it to handle everything. Perhaps next week we will see major update from Tesla towards Level 4, but until FSD breaks past L2 supervised capabilities they are different products solving for massively different trade-offs.
Best in what ways? I don't follow the car market so I'm curious for more specifics here.
I’m not super into cars though so I don’t have much to compare to.
When I see a Waymo, it feels like it's aware of me and always stops at a safe distance, and I don't fear a collision. It doesn't give off the hostile or dangerously clueless vibe I often get from human drivers in the city.
I prefer to sit in the front passenger seat. Once I've programmed my music and adjusted climate control, I sit back, relax, and watch the little icons of vehicles, pedestrians, roads and lanes, and the immediate route plan ahead.
The icons include pylons detected, as well as cyclists and emergency vehicles. There are some rather ghostly fades in/out at the peripheries, but it's clear that the Waymo Driver has perpetual 360° situational awareness.
This weekend, I'm celebrating 1 year with Waymo: 144 rides and 805 miles logged.
The Jaguar I-PACE is very comfortable, includes 2x USB-C charging ports, electric reclining front seat, plenty of cargo in trunk (and no cab driver storing his stuff) so I look forward to how the Hyundais measure up.
Hyundai/Kia have had multiple scandals over the past 10 years due to widespread engine failures, fatal vehicle fires, and becoming a huge theft target due to failing to install even the most basic anti-theft technology (RFID key+immobilizer). Each of these has resulted in recalls and lawsuits.
And besides that, Consumer Reports ranks them #10 on the reliability chart.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
But I would rather it is distributed in personally-owned cars than in fleet models. Would be a shame if the only access is through effectively "renting" rides from big corporations. Rooting for Comma and Tesla to get there and put it in vehicles which individuals own. Don't want some corporation to control mobility--their use policy could be restrictive to individual freedoms.
If self-driving tech becomes cheap enough, and there’s enough demand for it, then competitive pressures will ensure that people can own self-driving cars. That being said, the same competitive forces can make using a fleet much cheaper than owning a car, and you might want a subscription to the Mercedes fleet rather than owning an autonomous mid-tier car if those things are equivalently priced and you live in a fleet-dense area.
If competitive forces do make using a fleet much cheaper than owning a car, then individually-owned cars lose the economies of scale that keep them affordable for the middle class. The costs of supporting and distributing to private owners go way up; the risk of liabilities from private owners making unlicensed modifications to their vehicles becomes a heavy burden, and eventually privately-owned cars becomes a luxury market only available to the very top. They become impractical even for the people who own them, as homes and destinations gradually stop being built with parking lots and garages, as most vehicles drive off after dropping off their riders.
Changes in the equilibrium can really shift things, and when a replacement comes into the market, it can also make things expensive that used to be cheap. For example, public payphones used to be ubiquitous; now they're rare and expensive to maintain relative to the income they bring in, and their rarity has made the remaining ones become targets for vandalism. The segment of people who would use them has shrank, and the supply of parts has decreased too, and that means that it becomes unaffordable to provide them at all.
Now even if you prefer payphones, and even if your phone company would gladly provide them for you for the right price, you can no longer find a price point that makes that deal work out, merely because of the shift in preferences of a sufficient quantity of third-party individuals.
I'm a little skeptical- taxi companies and ride share companies both have a reputation for sloughing off a ton of maintenance costs on drivers. If you own end to end, you can't play that trick.
JLR is also owned by India's Tata Group, and most of the upcoming EV models share components with Tata Motor's EVs (eg. Batteries, power electronics, etc).
It can be treated as part of JLR's long term pivot towards the India market, where SUVs and CUVs tend to have strong PMF unlike Sedans, and I-Pace, being manufactured in Austria, is difficult to operate in for an Indian company because of the lack of EU-India FTA.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...
The uptake is both have these problems and to be extremely wary of either either until they concretely show they can be trusted again. Having worked in several different software shops my experience has been software culture and security culture are extremely hard to change. It absolutely requires major restructuring in people and often major investments in reworking of software with the right priorities.
I won't be holding my breath. The most common solution (practically the only solution I've ever seen happen) is to put bandaids on and just keep reworking the big ball of mud.