
Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Is Losing Out to Rivals - antouank
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-12/google-car-project-loses-leaders-and-advantage-as-rivals-gain
======
mdorazio
Google is "losing out" in the sense that it's actually making an effort to
perfect the technology to the point where a car can safely drive itself with
no driver, while everyone else (Tesla, Uber, etc.) is happy to rush to market
with options that still require an attentive person behind the wheel. These
are different focuses that have different outcomes and time scales, as the
last part of the article says.

~~~
mcphilip
Agreed.

My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from
testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved
problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon
as competitors claim.

For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central
Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge
out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge.

How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual
intervention?

~~~
daveFNbuck
My question would be how can a human handle that scenario without computer
assistance? You can always add a visual sensor near the front bumper of a
self-driving car to safely let it peak around the corner without having to
pull forward far enough to get hit.

~~~
stcredzero
peek

~~~
therealdrag0
Reminds me of:
[https://twitter.com/stealthmountain](https://twitter.com/stealthmountain)

------
Animats
Google/Alphabet's corporate problem is that they have no clue about how to
sell anything except ads. Even when Google sells something in a B2B context,
Google expects to control the terms and offer the customer little recourse.[1]

Automotive doesn't work like that. GM, for example, insists that if a
supplier's part causes a recall, the supplier is responsible for the costs of
the recall.[2] Auto manufacturers demand the right to send their inspectors
into a supplier's plant. If supplier quality slips, the oversight becomes
tougher. It has to be that way; a car has thousands of suppliers, many of whom
can make the final product defective.

The new head of Google's self-driving project is a car guy from Hyundai. He
understands this. Google now has a center in Novi, MI where 100 self-driving
mini-vans are being built in a joint venture with Fiat Chrysler. That's step
1.

This is more of a management ego problem than a technical problem. Selling
self-driving technology as an auto parts supplier doesn't fit with the "change
the world" mentality. The automaker gets all the credit. Few people know the
names of the major Tier I automotive suppliers. Microsoft ran into this once.
Microsoft wanted the Microsoft logo to appear when the dashboard display
booted up. They were insistent about this. The automaker involved went with
QNX instead.

[1]
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla](https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla)
[2] [http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-
ne...](http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-new-
purchasing-contract/)

~~~
karpodiem
Precisely. Manufacturing is hard/messy - the cavalier attitude that
Apple/Google have with quality doesn't fly here.

I'll believe that Tesla is a real player if they're able to scale to
500K/units a year.

~~~
FabHK
To be fair, Apple has been doing hardware since, well, the Apple I in 1976.

~~~
vacri
"You're driving it wrong" will cut it even less well with cars than it did
with phones.

~~~
Bromlife
Hopefully the sentence would be: "You're driving it, wrong."

------
PinguTS
> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other
> companies seriously considered the technology.

Always wondering who writes up that shit. Car makers are way long before in
autonomous driving. It is a huge difference in "just doing things and not
talking about as long as technology is not ready" vs. "talking about
technology and presenting even unfinished products." Especially Tesla is very
big in the later once.

Car makers are in self driving since technology went into cars. Without that
research we would not had any driving assistants these days. I remember mid
1990s when I was an intern at then DASA (Daimler Benz Aerospace) and they
worked with a self-driving S-class powered by a new chipset developed by then
TEMIC (now Continental) based on Radar technology. Today we have this
technology in any decent new car as part of the adaptive cruise control. Back
then the test drives where made on a airport runway.

~~~
csours
1956 GM Motorama:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak)

It looks kind of (extremely) ridiculous now, but think about all the things
that changed between then and now. The iPhone is ubiquitous now, but it only
came out in 2007, and we really only got modern cellular internet after that.

I think that the Smartphone revolution had a huge impact on the way most
people think, to the point where it is hard to remember what life was like
before them.

The autonomous, decentralized nature of smartphones, along with the cloud for
updates and backup is beyond game changing, and software designed before this
REALLY shows its age.

DISCLAIMER: I work for GM, any opinions are solely my own, etc.

~~~
PinguTS
I didn't know that. It shows for how long that is a vision and how long it
took. Still, the vision is far away from happening. (But may be not an
additional 60 years.)

~~~
csours
This may blow your mind: in the 1930s GM owned some aircraft manufacturing and
investigated flying cars. Spoiler Alert: that never worked out, as you wind up
with a crappy car AND a crappy airplane.

------
CPLX
> Uber Technologies Inc., founded in 2009, will soon let users of its popular
> ride-sharing app hail autonomous Volvo SUVs in Pittsburgh.

I have a feeling that piece of news requires extraordinarily loose
interpretations of the words "autonomous" or "soon".

~~~
svantana
Actually it will begin any day now [1], however they failed to mention that
there will be a driver behind the wheel -- i.e. doing what google has been
doing for years already, but also picking up passengers. Seems to me it's
mainly a PR move...

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-
bring...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring-it-on-
how-pittsburgh-became-ubers-testing-ground.html)

~~~
CPLX
Nothing says progress like a driverless car that requires a driver in the
drivers seat.

~~~
surfmike
Even if you had a good-enough car, the law would still require that at the
moment.

~~~
CPLX
Perhaps. Also relevant is the fact that they don't have a good-enough car.

------
skywhopper
Not sure how you can be losing at this point. Self-driving cars are far from a
reality. The claim that they need a "sales force" now when they don't yet have
a product is disturbing. The Uber experiment in Pittsburgh has made for some
outstanding PR, but let's see how it actually goes before we praise them for
solving the problem. You can bet they are minimizing as many variables as they
can (only operating in perfect weather, and only along routes with no
construction and very well painted lines that has been laser-mapped to the
centimeter).

Fact is, it's extremely unlikely we'll see self-driving cars outside the most
constricted of environments for decades yet. This should be obvious to anyone
who (1) has driven and (2) works with computers. It's scary to me that
everyone is eating up the hype and pretending they're imminent.

~~~
m3koval
As someone who lives in Pittsburgh - and likes the city quite a bit - I can
attest to the fact that: (1) the weather is rarely perfect, (2) the entire
city is under perpetual construction, and (3) the lines have not been painted
in years. It took me quite some time to comfortably drive in the city because
to the narrow streets, poor road maintenance, and bizarre traffic patterns
induced by the many bridges and tunnels.

It will indeed be interesting to see how the well the Uber deployment goes in
practice. They certainly did not choose an easy place to start.

------
vorthrwy
Google is so perplexing. I hoped their green-field research divisions would
become drivers of innovation in the mold of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, etc. They
had the resources and prestige to acquire the world's top talent. All we've
got are the world's dorkiest glasses. Where did things go wrong?

Thiel argues that monopoly is a necessary condition of innovation, and Google
can qualify as a monopoly under any reasonable measure. But it's starting to
feel like PARC and Bell Labs were an accident of history; both were perfectly
positioned at the cusp of the digital computer revolution. If we're
approaching a similar technical revolution, it's not clear at all. Machine
learning, chat bots, drones, ride-hailing apps, etc., are great, but we're in
the midst of evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- progress. That's fine. It's
the normal state of affairs, progress marching slowly on.

Whether Google wants to do long-term green-field research or it wants to
incubate new businesses, it's not clear. From the outside, it looks like a bit
of an identity crisis.

~~~
lijason
If you look at PARC and Bell Labs, the innovations from those teams didn't
necessarily become ubiquitous while within those companies. They started
there, but left before they found their market and adoption success. I get the
feeling we may see that with Google's green field projects as well. Google R&D
may identify important areas of the future but be unable to monetize and grow
them in ways that make sense in the current business.

Otto (and Uber's acquisition of it) might end up being an example of that in
the self-driving car side. Google incubates that vision, unable or unwilling
to release it as the founders of Otto wanted; they leave and eventually find
commercial success elsewhere.

------
Fricken
Classic Google troll.

Get everyone salivating for glorious, apocolyptic disruption, scare the crap
out of the traditional auto industry, incite a mad scramble that mobilizes
billions of dollars and thousands of men, and then turn around and say 'well,
actually... this is really hard, guys.'

~~~
josefresco
Can you name another Google instance of "well, actually... this is really
hard, guys.".

The only thing that jumps to my mind is Google Glass?

~~~
akerro
Modular phone project abandoned a few days ago. I really hoped it would bring
to the end stupid era of endless consumption where you have to replace your
whole phone just to get better camera or remove micro-jack.

~~~
Zigurd
I called that shot the first time I read about it. There are zero successful
modular consumer electronics products. The near-trivial analog connectivity
between stereo components is as close as modularity has ever come in that
business, and that's really an example of how, at best, modularity attracts
customers that resemble audiophiles (and wannabes), which may not be an ideal
target market.

~~~
mhermher
Desktop computers are still pretty popular. Especially among PC gamers. That
is the only example I can think of to refute your comment.

Edit: but it only works because of the space in a PC tower. It doesn't work
for laptops, and I was sort of in the same boat as you. I couldn't imagine it
would work for phones. Specifically that they are so space constrained.

~~~
Zigurd
Yes, they are modular. But the reason laptops took over the mainstream PC
market is that modularity had an incremental cost, and was VERY seldom used,
and when it was used, it caused problems that are relatively expensive
compared to the cost of the PC. It was easier to make a range of non-modular
products to cover any variability in needs.

Now modularity in PCs is the domain of gaming PCs, plus a few speciality
niches. Gamers as a market could be seen as analogous to audiophiles: a bit
cranky and hard to please.

------
knodi123
My wife and I now refer to this phenomenon as "getting oculused". When you
come up with an amazing moonshot project, make a ton of amazing progress, and
then, from an apparent outside perspective, _completely stop making progress_
, at which point your competitors start from scratch, surpass you, and get to
market first with something that has more features.

Are there other big examples in history of this phenomenon? When a company
announces a lot of genuinely pioneering progress at something, and then is
immediately beaten to market by a competitor who was paying close attention
and moving more nimbly?

~~~
BurningFrog
This sounds a lot like "Second Mover Advantage".

------
gourou
> Uber logs as many miles in 24 minutes as Google’s autonomous cars have
> logged in their existence

They completely left out that Google has a lot of Waze data (50 million users)

~~~
JBReefer
But not Waze data with a camera or sensors outside of GPS

~~~
gberger
The same can be said for Uber.

~~~
a13n
But not for Tesla

------
vblord
Am I the only one that it kinda bothers that this is a race to be the first
one to market? In something like this, I'd rather wait a little bit and wait
to see who has the best product rather than the first product.

~~~
ajmurmann
I think it's more differentiated than that. There were big efforts to have
convoys of trucks drive themselves on freeways many years ago. Freeway driving
seems pretty solved and save at this point and probably more reliable than
human drives. So not realising that does no good. Driving on icy country roads
with pedestrians walking on the side is a totally different story. So I think
we need to look at this by functionality. We will only learn sooner by
releasing mature functionality sooner and can fund research toward more
automation. I don't think this is fundamentally different than releasing a web
site with all the features you could want on day one. Granted it's like a
website handling incredibly important operations that you don't want to go
wrong. But that's similar to banking websites, health care applications etc.
We didn't insist surgery robots to be a full surgery replacement day one.

------
georgeecollins
From a strategy perspective it always seems like you develop better with a
clear incremental goal, even when the increments are huge. In that sense,
Tesla has a clear goal to incrementally improve its cars. Uber has a clear
goal to augment its service. Next steps for Google? Apple? I'm not surprised
they are drifting.

------
trapperkeeper79
I'm going to say something that will going to downvote me into oblivion ...
but I think self-driving tech needs to be given away for free. This is not
unprecedented. Volvo gave away the seat belt. Edward Jenner gave away the
smallpox vaccine. More recently, Toyota is "giving away" their patents with
respect to hydrogen fuel cells and Tesla is doing this for batteries.

How many people die of traffic fatalities? We are so close to a world where
such deaths are the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. If only we
had truly bold individuals at the helm.

------
ChuckMcM
This is not something I expect to read in a Google story:

 _" Tesla, with thousands of internet-connected cars on the road, has a
similar data advantage, one former member of the Google car project said."_

But it is absolutely the case that data here trumps brilliance. Its really too
bad that Google isn't still partnering with Uber rather than trying to compete
with them.

------
frogpelt
I have so many questions about the Uber program in Pittsburgh.

Does it take instructions? Can the rider change his mind?

What happens if a fight breaks out in the car?

Will there be a hotline you can call if your car goes rogue? Or just parks and
won't move?

I guess these questions are why they are doing a pilot program.

~~~
hammock
Ignoring the fact that there will be a driver in the car, these are all
previously solved problems for autonomous rail transit.

~~~
frogpelt
Yes rails make things a lot simpler.

------
sharemywin
I think this just show that these tech companies hoarding 100s of Billions
dollars so they can defeat the next threat is just a complete waste and would
be much better in the hands of investors as dividends.

------
danielmorozoff
This is like claiming Amazon is building rockets better than spacex. Ones
rockets go up and down , the others actually put things in orbit. Not the
same, though they both use rockets.

Comparing apples to oranges.

------
ilaksh
If they wanted to Google could probably pick a few very low risk streets or
neighborhoods, distribute an app that makes you waive liability, and provide a
self driving taxi service with no driver during good weather. The technology
is much safer and more advanced than competitors.

I think it boils down to actually getting rid of the driver entirely means it
had to handle 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 situations. It also means there is no
person to blame in the event of an accidents, which are impossible to avoid
100% regardless of how good the system is, due to the laws of physics. None of
that would be a problem if we had a tech-savvy and tech-friendly, carefully
considering public. But we don't have that really. When it comes down to it,
many people depend on cars for a living and almost everyone has accepted them
as a daily part of life. Google knows that any collisions could result in a
massive angry mob out to get them.

I actually hope articles like this one can gode them into letting us use their
system and if it does the occassional Google-had-a-collision mobs turn out to
be short lived and relatively tame.

~~~
aphextron
> waive liability

Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. Those papers
you sign are nothing more than a placebo deterrence. Companies can be, and
are, sued regardless every day.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US.

That's technically true (you disclaim liability or waive the right to recover
for particular torts), but substantively false.

> Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day.

There are limits on what liability can be signed away, and certainly many go
beyond that, and certainly there are disputes over whether the requirements
for others to be effect are met which results in lawsuits where that is a
threshold issue.

But it is not the case that signing away the right to collect on certain
claims generally has no legal effect in the US, even though it might not
always have the full effect it would seem from the text viewed in isolation.

------
calebm
Google likes data... I wonder if they're considering giving Chauffeur away to
automakers, contingent on building in the ability to gather data from it.

------
camillomiller
There's a curious amount of FUD going on lately about every non-automotive
company's efforts in the field of car automation.

------
throwaway7767
So google's falling behind in self-driving car development because other
companies have scaled back their expectations and are now focusing on vehicles
that can't actually drive themselves?

We seriously need new words to seperate "self-driving car" from "vehicle with
driving assist systems". Something the marketers can't fuck up by diluting it.
I suggest "Fully autonomous vehicle".

This is like saying ITER has been overtaken in fusion power development
because Dubai just installed a large solar collector plant that generates
quite a lot of power. It's a ridiculous comparison and shifting of the
goalposts.

~~~
rtkwe
There is a scale that's been defined but getting news and articles to use them
appropriately is an uphill battle. It'll help when it becomes a more common
thing so more people get used to the difference.

[http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Departm...](http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Department+of+Transportation+Releases+Policy+on+Automated+Vehicle+Development)

------
gthtjtkt
> it could be 20 to 25 years before most trips in cities will be provided by
> autonomous vehicles, he added.

Ouch, I had no idea it was that far away.

Hard to believe that when Uber is already testing with passengers in cities,
though.

~~~
ghaff
I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I fully expect it will be decades before I
could order a self-driving car with no driver aboard in Manhattan or Boston.
It's certainly possible that fully autonomous driving systems under some
subset of conditions like limited access highways will be available sooner--
_maybe_ much sooner--but, of course, that doesn't enable the use cases that
excites people who don't want to own cars etc.

~~~
kilroy123
I agree with you. However, I do think it _is_ possible to have it sooner.
However, not without a massive investment and effort from many different
players working together. Government involvement, etc.

~~~
ghaff
That's probably fair. One the one hand, nine women, one baby etc. On the other
hand, _if_ there were widespread adoption of standards, infrastructure were
modified to smooth over some of the hard bits (e.g. transponders in
construction zones), possibly remote operators setup for if cars get stuck,
etc. adoption could be accelerated at least somewhat. I still think the
generalized door-to-door driverless experience is a lot harder than many are
giving it credit for though.

The government involvement in a positive direction will probably be somewhat
tough. It's not hard to frame this as a job-destroying technology initially
primarily for the benefit of the better off.

------
jonnat
Google has no intention to beat its competitors in the self-driving cars
space, and I suspect it has never actually wanted to produce such cars for
mass use.

What it does want is to make self-driving cars widely used, because that would
mean that the time currently wasted in commuting by car could turn into
increased internet usage, which drives Google's revenue. That's why Google was
an early investor in Uber. Its efforts in building self-driving technology are
intended as a catalyst for the industry, in which case it seem to have been a
success.

~~~
visarga
If Google wanted to increase internet usage, instead of self driving cars it
would invest more in decent remote working technology. Not needing to drive
beats laptoping in your car.

But I think Google imagines itself as an "AI company", and self driving cars
are just one of the goalposts of AI. I have to admit, I am frustrated by the
secrecy of their development process, years passed and nothing of essence was
announced about their progress.

~~~
fixermark
I think Google's got chips in both games.

[https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/](https://apps.google.com/products/hangouts/)

------
yalogin
I understand Tesla's rush to market as it wants to sell cars to make money to
feed its research/work. So it needs the marketing gimmick/advantage to sell
more cars.

But I don't get what Uber is getting by using partial autonomous vehicles.
Their only goal is to replace its fleet with fully autonomous cars. To that
end, outside of getting data I don't see anything else. By that logic I would
be really surprised if they expanded their partial autonomous offering beyond
what they have today.

~~~
linkregister
It makes sense for Uber because it has unique legal issues. Every PR win and
deal with a municipality decreases its headwinds for the next deal it makes
with a city. Also it gives Uber an opportunity to debug the experience before
actually releasing a fully autonomous vehicle.

This service is different from the Tesla autopilot feature since it is
aspirationally an autonomous vehicle. In Uber's case, it is expected the
driver will have to actually take over in some corner case situations.

------
devy

        The two main ways for Google to commercialize the technology are by including Chauffeur, 
        the name for its self-driving software, in cars made in high volume by existing auto manufacturers ...
    

Is Chauffeur a generic name for driving log software or it's just so
incidental that it happens to be same name Comma.ai picked for their own
driving log app? [1]

[1]: [http://comma.ai/](http://comma.ai/)

~~~
seren
Chauffeur comes from French and means "hired driver".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur)

It would be like calling a generic domestic robot 'Butler'. So it makes sense
for an autonomous driving solution.

------
samfisher83
A big issue with Autonomous tech is liability. I mean with a human you have a
person you can blame. With a computer how will liability be handled? Is the
companies fault. Is it owner of the car.

~~~
FryHigh
Yes. This is also the problem with all Automation tech from the early days of
AI.

------
empath75
It seems like the ideal endgame for something like this for google is patent
licensing, in which case they don't actually _need_ to produce a product
themselves.

------
pilooch
Google wants car-bots to roam the streets and crawl the real world, much as
they did in the digital space. They just need a flow of automated cars to
blend into.

------
uxcn
I would be genuinely curious what the development methodologies for Chauffeur
look like, if anyone can point me in the right direction.

------
muzster
We all know how technology in Formula One cars improves road cars - why don't
they (Google, Tesla, Apple etc ) compete on the race track ? - They could take
baby steps first and compete in the time trials.

It might even bring a whole new audience to the sport.

Just a thought.

Source: [http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-
technol...](http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technology-
improves-your-road-car_sto4975756/story.shtml)

~~~
escoz
I love F1, but driving on a closed track (or highways, for what matters) is
many orders of magnitude easier than dealing with traffic, people, bikes,
other drivers, etc. BMW created this many years ago, and the car was better
than most drivers already. Advancing track days doesn't really help much on
bringing cars to cities.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBwhz33CkA)

------
cesis
I would love some simple self driving - pick me up in the front of the
supermarket, automatically find a parking spot etc.

~~~
rtkwe
There's not a lot of space between that and full self driving on highways and
surface streets really. You get rid of a few sign reading needs but your car
still has to have the full suite of sensors and compute power to monitor its
surroundings.

------
nkoren
Bloody hell... when are journalists going to learn the difference between a
car that doesn't always require a driver's hands on its steering wheel, and a
car that _doesn 't require a driver_. It's as fundamental as the difference
between a carriage that has a extra-cool harness for the horse, and a carriage
that _doesn 't have a horse_.

~~~
IMcD23
A carriage with no horse would be a car with no engine. I think you mean a
carriage with no harness needed.

~~~
jm_l
perhaps a horse-drawn carriage in which the horses require only broad
instruction

------
Jabbles
Is there any (non-PR) advantage of driving around with a passenger as well as
a backup-driver?

~~~
Zigurd
If you look around the internet at objections to self-driving cars, many of
those objections are based on fear. So finding out if self driving cars
actually scare people is probably a good thing. Even if they don't outright
scare people, the behavior of a self-driving car will be different, and maybe
some of those differences are unpleasant for riders.

~~~
kmonsen
Once there are uber rides for half price if self driving, it is going to
change a lot of opinions.

------
simonsarris
It seems like both Google and Apple are having big troubles with their car
programs. For either of them, why _not_ attempt to acquire Tesla?

Wouldn't that launch point give them a huge leg up against the other?

~~~
rhino369
Telsa is still a niche car company, and despite their PR their autonomous tech
isn't really better than other luxury car companies. In fact it might be worse
and Tesla is more willing to just beta test in production.

But I doubt either company wants to actually deal with automotive
manufacturing and sales. They'd be better off just being a supplier to car
companies. You'd go buy a Ford Fusion with the Google Self Driving package, or
something similar.

There were rumors Apple would actually build cars, but I think they were
either wrong or Apple gave up. It's not that profitable of an industry.

------
intrasight
They should just buy Uber

