alt Hacker NewsBefore y'all say that now everyone will be able to get Waymo's sensor suite for hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that's the easy part.
Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data. Waymo also has a support architecture that doesn't depend on real time remote operation, which can't be implemented reliably in almost all cases. You can't be following your supposedly unsupervised cars with a supervisor in a chase car. You can't even be driving remotely. Your driver software has to be able to drive independently in all cases, even those where it needs to ask a human how to proceed.
The difference between level two and level three driver assist and level four autonomy is like the difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.
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>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
How much of Waymo's training data is based on LIDAR mapping versus satellite/aerial/street view imagery? Before Waymo deploys in a new city, it deploys a huge fleet of cars that spend months of driving completely supervised, presumably to construct a detailed LIDAR map of the city. The fact that this needs to happen suggests Google's geospatial data moat is not as wide as it seems.
If LIDAR becomes cheap, you could imagine other car manufacturers would add it cars, initially and ostensibly to help with L2 driver aids, but with the ulterior motive of making a continuously updated map of the roads. If LIDAR were cheap enough that it could be added to every new Toyota or Ford as an afterthought, it would generate a hell of a lot more continuous mapping data than Waymo will ever have.
> difference between suborbital flight and putting a payload in orbit. What looks like a next logical step actually takes 10X or more effort, scale, and testing.
But suborbital flight and payload in orbit is much less of a difference than you might think.
The delta V is not that significantly different. Scale is almost the same, and a little bit more power and (second stage) your payload is now hurtling around the earth instead of falling like an ballistic missile which was what their suborbital predecessors are.
>Waymo benefits from Google's unparalleled geospatial data.
That's true, and they have a huge headstart, but I wonder if all these cubesat companies can bring the price down on data enough that others will be able to compete.
I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.
And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.
I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but does Alphabet actually intend Waymo to be a trillion dollar retail car business itself, selling cars to everyone? Or would they be happy to sell all those super cool things to OEMs? In a world where “everyone” can make a car affordable that can run Waymo’s software, they may be happy to license all that to “everyone” and simply collect fat royalty checks, à la Microsoft in the 90s, allowing them to make a ton of incremental money without all the capex of making their own cars.