A comparison to Waymo’s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles

But my question was about being "one of the major players".

The market is huge. My rough guess is that every 10% of market share is worth $1T in market cap. Which is half of Google's overall current market cap.

Google hired a bunch of people who'd done well in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1] - including Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson who lead the winning team.

Thrun is also behind Google Street View which in some regards [2] looks a lot like a self-driving-car sensor suite. So Google was having LIDAR-equipped, high-precision-GPS-equipped cars drive every street in every prosperous country, starting back in 2007. Uber wasn't even founded until 2009.

Other Google hires had a similar background - such as Anthony Levandowski who competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge with an autonomous motorcycle. He later gained fame after being caught stealing a bunch of LIDAR schematics and similar trade secrets while leaving Google for Uber.

We also know from court documents that Google was throwing around mountains of cash, even when the self-driving-car division had no revenue. Waymo was set up as an "internal startup" giving employees "equity" so Levandowski left not just with internal documents but also with over $100 million.

That's a stark contrast to a lot of other players who'd need to show investors a lot more to get a lot less. This endless money was undoubtedly helpful in giving them the confidence to design for L5 autonomy from the start, no need to design a lesser system to get the money coming in early. And of course if you can pay $100 million for one guy, you're not going to baulk at the cost of a few $10k LIDARs so long as the people making them claim the price will fall to $200 for automotive quantities.

The 2005 Grand Challenge simplified the driving problem a great deal - no pedestrians or moving vehicles to deal with, safe and driveable route guaranteed to exist - but it did a lot to focus development efforts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005) [2] https://schlaff.com/wp/the-secret-to-googles-self-driving-ca...

If I were to hide something fishy, I’d define the shared coverage to include zip codes with fewer human accidents:

* zip codes are relatively small, so you have a lot of variance per code due to randomness of rare events;

* Waymo mostly covers urban areas and nearby suburban areas, so you can claim suburban zones were only recently covered by Waymo or that the insurance had too few members in certain zip codes to include them.

I don’t think that study is wrong, but it is in Waymo’s interest to claim they have few accidents and in insurers’ interest to claim there have many, or rather more, accidents to raise their premiums.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...