I wish they had invested 500 million into buying a self-driving startup or something instead. Or just opening up a new AI branch for Toyota / Lexus. It's not like people en masse are driving around in self driving cars while asleep at the wheel yet so the race for self-driving is still a turtle race. They have the resources imho to do great things, maybe they're afraid after the software issues where cars would keep accelerating, but that shouldn't stop them from getting in on the game.
Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.
Someone really needs to explain to me what the thought process behind this acquisition was.
Self driving car technologies have has actively developed by almost every car company for years now. Many of the beginnings of this work has already made it to market e.g. Parallel Park Assist, Auto Emergency Breaking, Lane Merge Detection, Adaptive Cruise Control. And companies like Volvo are already testing their self driving cars in real world, difficult conditions in Sweden. And because there are only a few car conglomerates they will simply share technology within each group.
They are far, far behind in autonomous driving business. They tried to catch up, by being super reckless, and they killed a person.
Using self driving car to justify their valuation is very risky - it's huge project, tons of competition, no idea about when it could even become a product, etc.
The self driving car program seems like reaching for immortality. Just because your company identifies something that will eventually kill it on a long enough timeline doesn’t mean you need to develop that product yourself. Wonder how much better off they could have been if they had focused on tweaking aspects of their current service.
There was a startup that for $10,000 it was a third party option package that was self driving. I wonder how it is doing with all these car companies that create their own options for self-driving.
Google and Apple are going to licenses their autonomous tech. Tessa, GM and Volvo are going to sell autonomous cars.
No one who reaches stage 4 is going to build tens of millions of their own cars within months and build the parking/service infrastructure nationwide to boot. No one is going to download their app till they do.
The idea that the company that is first and best at developing autonomous tech is going to also simultaneously build huge factories and make good cars is ludicrous.
if that is such a great driver of value, they could have set themselves up purely as a car builder that could partner with companies doing self driving cars..
So this video features a self-driving car developed by Yandex. Does someone have insight into why so many big tech companies seem to all be in agreement that developing self-driving cars is an area they need to be pursuing? Is it mostly everyone looking at what Google is doing and replicating that? Or is it the getting swept up by the Uber hype? Or is working on self-driving car software just such a natural extension to what these tech companies have been doing all along in their main areas of expertise anyway?
(I feel like this question must have been brought up a number of times already, since these projects have been going on for a while by now.)
They are developing the technology to make car self-driving. They are not developing the cars. They use Toyota Prius and I think some Lexus model too. I could see them partnering with Tesla to make it the first company to use the technology though.
I don’t understand the obsession or even the belief that fully autonomous driving is around the corner.
When has anyone, much less Google, released a product that worked at such advanced levels from day 1 and starting from no product in the market?
They should deploy autonomous cars at limited production scales in specific environments, and build it out from there—but we haven’t even seen that yet.
The real question here is, why not Toyota? Their autonomous driving division is also a trash fire. Why don't traditional car companies seem to be able to manage "self-driving" projects?
I don't understand the current state of self driving cars.
First we have tesla which already has a self driving car. They were the first to build one and now everyone is playing catch up, or are they?
Waymo has been building something for a really long time too but I have no idea how close they are to an actual product.
Now there is this new company that gets a bunch of money to build something.
It feels to me like the self driving car market will go to the first player who can make a self driving car -- which is tesla.
Or maybe no one is close to making a really good self driving car yet, and even if they did, they would have to convince people like me that I can sleep at the wheel while surrounded by massholes.
This will go against the grain here on HN. I don't know how anyone can imagine self driving even succeeding in real world, leave alone in the so called third world, unless all vehicles are self driven and operate in a controlled environment. There are some really important things pending, like accurate NLP and computer vision, but no, we need something shiny and useless. I think some smart computer scientists are getting rich by carrot sticking some gullible billionaire investors. Good for them. I hope some of the really useful stuff piggy back on this rather lofty endeavor.
I believe another self driving car company, Aurora, also raised $500mn recently [1] I don't really understand how these companies are attracting these massive sums, given that even a company like Google has made limited progress in 10 years after investing several billions. On top of that there are heavy weight car manufacturers like VW and BMW who are also investing in this technology.
Ah well, I'm nobody anyway, just a guy hungry to see tech companies compete and see less of tech being monopolized between a few companies.
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