Alphabet’s Waymo Cuts Cost of Key Self-Driving Sensor by 90%
Ok, that was a fairly odd press release. I thought that Waymo might be going to sell a LIDAR sensor that anyone could use in their projects, but that isn't the case.They mention that they have stuck in Chrysler's Pacifica minivan (but this from a previous partnership agreement) and there isn't anyone else participating. And Krafcik says again and again things like "potential", "some day", and "we can imagine". He mentions their LIDAR tech can tell which way a pedestrian is facing.But since there are no prices, there are no products, there are no actual announcements, it seems to boil down to Google feeling the heat as the company that used to be associated with the notion of bring Self Driving cars to the market. I wonder if they have been doing consumer surveys on what people think about Self Driving cars and finding out that Google is rapidly dropping from the radar of most people.They don't make cars, they can't get people to partner with them, and they haven't been successful at showing meaningful progress. Meanwhile in the bay area you can't drive down any freeway and not see some chortling Tesla owner talking to their friends while the car moves them along in rush hour traffic.Additionally:For me the interesting thing is that Tesla has spent perhaps 5B$ on developing a self driving Model S between 2011 and 2016. And in that same time period Google went from $45B of cash on hand to $83B by Q3 of 2016, so they picked up and literally sat on nearly $40B over the last 5 years. Guess what? Cash sitting in the bank doesn't invent things, it doesn't build things, it doesn't "change the world" and it doesn't make you a leader. Can you imagine where they would be if they had used $10B of that to build a competitive electric car company?