Some people may find it strange that the leader of autonomous driving technology is not a car company, but the mobile search giant Alphabet?
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Alphabet has a lot of cash flow, so it can act earlier than most competitors and invest in developing its own patented technology. In addition, Alphabet has never worried about the problem of manufacturing commercial vehicles, so it can directly develop 4 and 5 self-driving cars. Even other companies competing with it admit that Lighthouse, the autonomous driving company of Alphabet, has the best autonomous driving technology available today.
In the second half of 2015, Alphabet hired former Hyundai Motor Company's North American executive John Krafcik as the first CEO of Waymo and officially merged its autonomous driving research department in December 2016. This company is called Waymo. This series of initiatives means that Waymo will become an independent company, not just a research project. In fact, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak believes that Waymo's valuation may have reached $70 billion.
Here's why Alphabet can be a leader in this high-risk competitive arena and how it does it.
Longest mileage
As early as 2009, Alphabet began an automated driving experiment. The first-mover advantage makes Waymo the longest-running company with more than 3 million miles (about 4.82 million kilometers) on public roads, about 120 times the circumference of the Earth's equator, in a simulated environment. It has a mileage of more than 1 billion miles (about 1.6 billion kilometers) and is close to 40,000 times the circumference of the Earth's equator.
Such a huge amount of testing has driven a huge improvement in autonomous driving technology. In fact, Waymo's separation rate (the number of manual takeovers of cars) has dropped to 0.2 per thousand miles by 2016. In contrast, Nissan's separation rate in 2015 was approximately 71 per thousand miles.
Waymo is also the first company to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. In 2015, the company made a blind friend of a Google (microblogging) engineer into a self-driving car in Austin, Texas, driving on public roads without police escorts.
The self-driving car called "Firefly" has no steering wheel or pedals and is a veritable 5-level self-driving car.
Technical advantages
Waymo has invested heavily in its own lidar system, which it believes is critical to the long-term success of autonomous vehicles. In fact, the company claims it has reduced the cost of proprietary lidar sensors by 90%, and the previous manufacturing cost of the sensor was $75,000.
Waymo's technology solutions integrate three Lidar sensors for near, medium and long range detection, as well as 360-degree radar and several camera-based sensors. Data from these sensors is processed by an artificial intelligence system and then reacted accordingly.
As you can imagine, this requires strong artificial intelligence technology, and Waymo's parent company, Alphabet, is a leader in artificial intelligence and far ahead of other competitors.
Recent progress
Waymo is now collecting data on how humans interact with autonomous vehicles. To this end, the company launched a test drive project in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year. Although this is not the first of its kind, it is the largest of its kind.
Waymo has equipped its 100 Fiat Chrysler Pacificas with its technology and plans to reproduce 500 of these cars this year. Residents of Phoenix will be able to use the service for free, with an engineer in each car and manual intervention if necessary.
The goal of this project is to collect data on human responses to autonomous vehicles.
In addition, Waymo recently announced a partnership with the taxi company Lyft. The purpose of this collaboration is to bring autonomous vehicle technology to the mainstream market through a number of collaborative projects and product development.
This collaboration may make Uber's life more difficult as the latter is working hard to develop its own autonomous car project, which it believes may be a threat to future autonomous driving platforms.
In fact, Waymo is currently in a lawsuit with Uber. Waymo accused Uber of hiring former Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski, who stole Waymo's confidential information. Uber has fired Levandowski, but the case has to continue.
Lyft should be able to make up for some of the deficiencies in Waymo's capabilities, such as customer usage data, helping it determine the best route and connecting drivers to passengers. Interestingly, Lyft has been funded by General Motors on the condition that it must work with General Motors to develop autonomous driving technology.
One day, will we see Waymo, Lyft, and General Motors collaborate to develop autonomous driving technology, integrate Lyft's data into Waymo's sensors, and then mount the sensors on GM's cars?
Shenzhen Sunbeam New Energy Co., Ltd , https://www.sunbeambattery.com