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Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system.
$500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.
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Yes, because this announcement is a lot like their previous announcements -- fudging the language to make it sound like it's more available than it is. It's not even generally available in Phoenix yet. I'm sure someone on HN lives in Phoenix, and has never used Waymo before. Tell us if you can get a driverless ride. It's got a long way to go before it's something like Uber in Phoenix. It's got even longer to go befor…
I don't see the relationship between COVID and increased demand for self-driving. You're still sharing the same vehicle with potentially hundreds of people a day that are touching all the same surfaces. The driver is only a vector if they become infected. Other than that, the highest risk is touching doors and such.
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...so in what way do they have the lead?
I guess they have the lead in the sense that you can drive to a Tesla dealership today and buy a car that will kind of sort of drive you home. That's something!
Let's place skepticism aside for a second and assume that full driverless tech will be fully operating in major metros soon. What does that mean for the rideshare business? Are Uber/Lyft basically dead if they are years behind Waymo?
I don't think so at least not in the short term. Demand in major metros is much higher than supply. Google will never be able to expand fast enough, in terms of getting approvals from cities, getting the tech right to be able to handle cities, and just the amount of cars on the street. We are probably looking at awhile before it is an actual threat to these other services. Who knows what will happen in that time.
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I mean, if they can make this work well then you cut out the driver - which is very cost-saving. It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7. It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.
But it's a very different business model to ride share, which is based on externalising the costs of the car to the drivers.
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...so in what way do they have the lead?
I guess they have the lead in the sense that you can drive to a Tesla dealership today and buy a car that will kind of sort of drive you home. That's something!
Just a few months ago, I recall many skeptics on HN claiming that full driverless technology was 10-20 years away. Do those people still think that it's going to take 10-20 years for this tech to reach say, New York, now that it's live in Phoenix?
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They state the date pretty clearly in the article. >Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.
"Members of the public service" is different than "members of the public". This is still a closed beta. But now it seems you are allowed to have your friends along for the ride. I wonder if these friends and family persons are subject to any NDA.
According to the article: "take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world"
Fantastic. The reality is that good mapping and some level of lidar (which is getting cheaper faster for low res/angle sensors) is somewhat game changing in terms of self driving vehicle reliability. Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system. $500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.
However, I can see a scenario where, despite that, it is not the right choice for Tesla. It's important to remember that self-driving technology will be commodity at some point (like the lidar units themselves). Whoever offers the most affordable option meeting some baseline performance will dominate the market and licence to every self-driving fleet. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo ended up meeting that criteria first and licensing the tech to everyone from Uber to Toyota.
Once that tech is out, anyone else that succeeds in developing comparable tech effectively has an uphill battle ahead of them trying to sell their new, less proven version at a price and volume that can recoup their R&D investment. I think we'll see a lot of players leave the race once the first licensable product hits the market. In fact, I think we've seen a bit of that already.
Which brings me back to Tesla. My guess is their strategy is not just to develop self-driving - they'd lose on equal ground (due to not being first) - but to develop "2nd gen" self-driving which has a specific competitive advantage of not requiring lidar and thus having lower total cost per unit. This allows them to enter the market late but still have a significant edge in that market.
If a company lets their engineer's use lidar to develop self-driving tech, then the tech they build will be 100% dependent on lidar. That's Parkinson's law. If, on the other hand, the company adds a strict constraint that lidar is not an option, then the engineers might fail to build something that works - or else they will produce something with a unique advantage.