Self-driving car company, Waymo, is now valued at $30 billion which is $170 billion less than a $200 billion only 18 months ago.
Waymo raised $2.25 billion but at lower valuation. They have 600 self driving vehicles in Arizona.
Waymo CEO John Krafcik was reconsidering the business, focus on the driver, pivot away from robotaxi and might just sell technology to others.
Waymo CEO John Krafcik has stepped down.
The Waymo Driver has driven autonomously tens of millions of miles on public roads across 25 U.S. cities, and more than 20 billion miles in simulation; safely gets anyone in Phoenix with the Waymo One app to their destinations across thousands of miles each week; and is unlocking convenience and scale for our local delivery and freight partners through Waymo Via. We launched Waymo as an independent Alphabet subsidiary, partnered with an amazing group of OEM, supplier, and service companies, and raised our first external investment round of $3.25 billion. As co-CEOs, Tekedra and Dmitri will continue to drive Waymo’s technical and business leadership in the rapidly advancing autonomous industry.
Waymo might work with Renault-Nissan to launch robotaxi services in France and Japan.
Softbank-GM backed Cruise is worth $18 billion.
Google has cut back on funding non-search and non-online advertising businesses.
The pure self-driving car companies are getting new valuations.
SOURCES- Robb Report, Financial Times
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
You will never have full autonomy with the equipment now in place. Full autonomy will require data exchange between other vehicles, road sensors, traffic sensors…
Waymo has a more robust approach to full autonomy sell driving, the problem is that it requires adjustment to each zone, development is too slow to be generalized, if I were them I would invest placing taxi fleets in key places.
Errand running (as opposed to daily commuting, work trucks, etc) could be handled well by SD taxis – a 5x utilization there should be pretty easy. Maybe 50M 'second' or 'third' cars reduced to 10M SD taxis.
If maybe 60M go to half time commuting post-Covid and eventually use SD taxis, 30M cars could be cut. Some won't switch, but some with very short commutes would switch to SD taxis and those taxis can be used more than once per "rush hour".
So 70M fewer cars out of currently about ~190M personal vehicles. Not bad, but not 5x utilization overall.
Narrow vans having 3 tandem passenger compartments should be more popular than conventional commuter vans, with private space and far fewer delays. But they'd still be cheap enough to make a personal commuter car appear as an undesirable expense.
With 60M part-week commuters and 80M full week, each day there'd be about 110M daily commuters, or 37M narrow vans. Combined with "errand" taxis, call it 50M SD vans and taxis replacing ~190M personal vehicles – pretty close to 4x utilization.
Probably need some links
https://www.thedrive.com/news/38129/elon-musk-promised-1-million-tesla-robotaxis-by-the-end-of-2020-where-are-they
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/elon-musk-says-tesla-robotaxis-will-hit-the-market-next-year.html
It appears anyone with decent engineers and a few tens of millions in funding can get to some high level of competency with self driving and in a few years. I'm surprised he couldn't make a better showing with autopilot by now, he's been selling it for a long time. It looks like he's just starting out, depending on vision might be the drag. I think vision is solvable, just not very soon.
Eventually everyone will catch up with Waymo and then realize self driving isn't good enough to let it off the leash.
Um…."Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," said Musk on October 21, 2019. "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes."
Andrew .. Agreed with you to Mobileye (Which actually was Teslas FSD until it split in 2016) will find it harder to integrate with multi OEMs and of course will take large profits itself.
However
Musk has stated that by 2030 he expects every company to have good range EVs with FSD, he however expects Tesla to be head and shoulders above everyone else in manufacturing .. The `machine that makes the machine` .. its there that he is aiming for advantage
Waymo and everyone else using LIDAR and HD maps are stuck at Level 4. Tesla’s approach is much harder using just vision, but it’s a generalized scaleable solution. It’s never Level 4. Waymo’s valuation has plunged while Tesla’s market cap rises for a reason. The game is over.
They are perhaps quite close. You have to modulate for 'Elon time', but they seem confident.
The teslas will be completely legal to self drive without human intervention. This will be recognised by all governments on the planet.
On Mars.
No, he never said when it will be available. He's good as long as he delivers before Tesla goes out of business some time in the future.
They will not need one until they have a self driving car, all they have now is an advanced driver assistance system.
I'm guessing level 5 autonomy is at least 10 years off unfortunately. Elon is going to have to make some refunds.
The advantage is that Tesla is vertically integrating akin to Apple and will have the vehicle supply to blanket the market. I feel like mobileye will struggle to integrate with multiple OEMs and actually get their software is functioning vehicles on the road.
Tesla will build a million cars this year and wants to build 20M cars per year in ten years (a credible goal with the capital they have available to them). 20M cars per year at 5x the utilization of typical private cars is enough to replace all passenger vehicles globally. *poof* go the legacy OEMs.
What makes you think Tesla couldn't have remote backup?
Level 5 is impossible with existing ML technology.
Waymo actually has a robotaxi service with no driver, but with remote backup.
Magical thinking doesn't alter reality
On this agreed `Mobileye` is a very serious contender and should not be discounted .. I personally see it as a race between Tesla and Mobileye and in fact both could succeed this has happened numerous times in technology.
Just another datapoint confirming that only Tesla is in a position to achieve SAE Level 5 self driving and scale it to production vehicles. There is one real winner and a scramble for who is the Android equivalent.
Vehicles are the future of motorized travel.
No need to define autonomy in terms of Tesla vs. Waymo to show that there is only one winner (even without mentioning Tesla by name…). This is a Chinese mindset. Here is a company that is working on autonomy on all fronts, including full autonomy and is doing very well. And yes, they are under Intel, another company that was condemned here to lose because their microchips are not thick enough…
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/mobileye-is-bringing-its-autonomous-vehicle-test-fleets-to-at-least-four-more-cities-in-2021/