Waymo closes $5.6B investment round

Posted by ra7 10/25/2024

Waymo closes $5.6B investment round(waymo.com)

88 points | 212 commentspage 2

ronnier 10/25/2024|

Google controls/dominates search, much of the mobile phone market, OS on many devices, some of our programming languages, build tools, infrastructure, maps, ads, video, email, and now transportation? Anything I’m missing?

Zigurd 10/25/2024|

Google (and Amazon, and probably a few Chinese players) have multiple revenue add-ons they can use with robotaxis.

Tombradley2025 10/25/2024||

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lopkeny12ko 10/25/2024|

Telling that this comes right on the heels of the Robotaxi unveil. Google sees a threat.

ra7 10/25/2024||

This was first announced in July: https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/23/alphabet-to-invest-another...

Pretty sure Waymo sees very little threat from Tesla, who don't even have a single driverless mile on public roads.

sublimefire 10/25/2024|||

You are being disingenuous, "summon" could be considered as fully driverless, so there are a couple of miles. They are getting there for sure, just not at the similar level, which is expected because customers do not care about it that much.

ra7 10/25/2024|||

This is silly. The conversation is about L4 autonomy. Summon isn't fully driverless by any stretch of imagination. It requires the driver to be within a few feet and hold down a button in the app (essentially a kill switch). Moreover, the liability is still with the driver.

devmor 10/25/2024|||

Disingenuous would be trying to counter an argument that Tesla has no driverless operations on public roads with a suggestion that a parking lot party trick counts.

gmm1990 10/25/2024|||

average miles between intervention in similar driving scenarios would be a better metric. I’m struggling to understand how anyone thinks the robotaxi thing is competition though

VikingCoder 10/25/2024||

There's a few other metrics people should care about:

"As of June 2024, there have been forty-four verified fatalities involving Autopilot and hundreds of nonfatal incidents."

Have there been any for Waymo? None that I can find.

jqpabc123 10/25/2024|||

Waymo is currently providing over 100K driverless rides a week.

Tesla has "concepts of a plan" to do something similar --- about where Waymo was in 2016.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/10/11/tesla-...

cal5k 10/25/2024|||

> In reality Tesla FSD is still in very primitive shape.

From the article. Have the people saying this actually tried the most recent FSD build?

I used it yesterday, and it reacted flawlessly to road construction that blocked a lane, then had cones demarcating a lane that didn't follow existing road markings. Then it saw that a driver wanted to turn left from parking lot while approaching a stop light and made space for the driver to turn out. It also flawlessly executed a merge involving turning into a suicide lane and waiting for traffic to pass.

It's very good at adapting to changes and can work on roads its never seen before. There is no other production car that can do what FSD can do currently.

Does this mean it's ready for full autonomy tomorrow? No, but I could use supervised FSD today if I wanted to drive 1600 miles from Austin to Toronto with hands mostly off the wheel.

The pace at which FSD is now improving is quite remarkable. In the long run it's clear that this approach is going to be WAY more flexible than Waymo's, because Tesla has so many more vehicles on the road collecting so much more data, and throwing vast amounts of compute at vast amounts of data is basically the best way to see rapid improvement for the foreseeable future.

But sure, "concepts of a plan".

jqpabc123 10/25/2024|||

No, but I could use supervised FSD today if I wanted ...

Musk has invented his own oxymoron --- "supervised Full Self Driving" --- which means not really full self driving at all.

Your car is ready to be a robotaxi --- as long as you are behind the wheel to supervise it.

If a driver is required, it's not a robotaxi is it?

cal5k 10/25/2024||

It drives itself with zero control input from me, hands literally off the wheel and feet off the pedals. That's the definition of "full self driving".

It's bizarre how people are so adamant about this when they haven't even tried it. Every passenger I've shown this to have had their minds blown.

jqpabc123 10/25/2024||

So sit in the back seat and let the car drive and my mind will be blown --- if you don't get arrested either before or after the crash.

Waymo actually does this today. Musk has plans to do this --- someday. It's mind blowing that you can't see the difference.

Zigurd 10/25/2024|||

Would you have sat in the back seat? How about in a Waymo?

cal5k 10/25/2024||

Could you drive at all in a Waymo outside of a strictly geofenced area in a handful of US cities?

How about in a Tesla?

They are approaching this from two fundamentally different directions.

jqpabc123 10/25/2024|||

Could you drive at all in a Waymo outside of a strictly geofenced area in a handful of US cities?

Absolutely not. But how many people want to hire a taxi to drive them cross country? Near zero.

They are approaching this from two fundamentally different directions.

Correct. One has a working robotaxi. The other has some marketing concepts.

lopkeny12ko 10/25/2024|||

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fellowniusmonk 10/25/2024||||

It's crazy that when I walk to the taco stand down the street in my sleepy little neighborhood I'll see waymos just hanging out waiting for a ride, and if I wanted I could just hop in one and be robot chauffeured around the city.

It's funny how the future arrives and intermingles with the present. Stuff I could only dream of as a kid, things that seemed impossibly far off are here right now.

I'll probably have a Rosie in my house before I die and that's pretty incredible.

stormfather 10/25/2024||||

Are the cars still teleoperated though?

atopal 10/25/2024|||

If you mean "driven or steered remotely": They were never teleoperated. I'm assuming that would be completely reckless given the nature of radio networks and possibly because of regulations. The car will call a service once it can't make a decision (this is only when the car is fully stopped), and a human will decide to send out a driver or make a decision in the moment.

bryanlarsen 10/25/2024|||

They never were. They get occasional labeling / decision making support from humans.

sixQuarks 10/25/2024|||

It’s funny, my Tesla drove me 30 miles yesterday and I didn’t have to do a thing. People in this thread have no idea how good FSD has gotten

ra7 10/25/2024|||

You're still in the driver's seat ready to intervene. Others are doing it every 13 miles: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/tesla-full-self-driving...

lopkeny12ko 10/25/2024|||

Waymo's remote operators are still sitting in an office intervening and as a passenger you don't even know that it's happening

ra7 10/25/2024|||

Except they can't make the kinds of safety critical interventions Tesla driver's in the seat can make i.e. prevent accidents. That's just physics.

We know exactly how their remote operation works: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

minwcnt5 10/25/2024|||

If my Tesla swerves into oncoming traffic with no warning and I get in a crash, who is responsible?

If my Waymo ride does the same, who is responsible?

sixQuarks 10/25/2024|||

Yeah, so? You don't think they're going to keep improving it until supervision isn't required?

ra7 10/26/2024||

13 miles per intervention after 8 years of development suggests it’s not happening anytime soon.

nobunaga 10/27/2024||

These guys are all talk and no action. They wouldn’t dare risk their life in the backseat while fsd is turned on but happy to be a keyboard warrior for Elon. It’s hilarious.

cal5k 10/25/2024|||

Yup, this. I use FSD almost every day now that it's available for Cybertruck, and it's already quite excellent. It pulls off human-like maneuvers that are kind of gobsmacking.

nobunaga 10/27/2024|||

Then jump in the backseat if it’s gobsmacking and just as good as a waymo. Tell it to drive you to the other side of the city while you sleep in the backseat. Put your money where your mouth is.

sixQuarks 10/25/2024|||

I can understand the average person not realizing what Teslas can do today, but I'm highly disappointed that so-called "tech" people on this message forum have no idea.

nobunaga 10/27/2024||

See the thing is they do and you don’t. If you don’t know and understand why waymo is far ahead of elons lies and will never catch up with its current tech direction and strategy for supervised fsd (which is an oxymoron) then you should only be disappointed in yourself. If you’re so confident of the tech go jump in the back of a Tesla and let it drive you 100kms. Let’s see if you live to tell the tale. I’m happy to also do the same but in a waymo.

Ragnarork 10/25/2024|||

The Robotaxi is a PR stunt which doesn't look remotely close to be a threat to Waymo right now.

misiti3780 10/25/2024||

lol ... right

echelon 10/25/2024||

Robotaxi hasn't deployed anywhere. There are lots of other startups ahead of them in terms of progress.

Waymo isn't afraid of a threat. Waymo is dominating the market they created. This is just another chess play to lock up the TAM.

cal5k 10/25/2024||

Robotaxi will use the same stack as other Tesla vehicles, which is deployed on millions of vehicles. The <$30k price point and lack of controls/supervision are the only things that truly differentiate it from a Model 3.