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.
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’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.