Autonomous Autos – Stark contrast

The leaders should survive while rest look to be in great peril.

• While Waymo pushes ahead with its “driverless” taxi service, Uber is mired in difficulty clearly indicating that the gap between the leaders and the laggards is widening.
• Waymo has announced that its “driverless” taxi service trial in Arizona will now be made available to the general public in the Phoenix area which I think is a big step forward.
• General availability is a milestone because it means that Waymo is now comfortable that its product is safe enough to be made available to anyone that wants it.
• Although, this is being touted as a service for the entire Phoenix area, I suspect that it will remain rigidly geofenced in the parts of Phoenix which are relatively simple to drive.
• I have driven around Phoenix on numerous occasions and it is one of the easiest cities to drive anywhere in the USA and has the some of the most consistent weather conditions.
• Needless to say, I think Cairo, Mumbai and Beirut will be some of the last cities in the world to adopt autonomous driving.
• Waymo also adds (see here) that once it has installed partitions between the front and the back, it will return safety drivers to the vehicles to enable wider geographic coverage.
• I think this move highlights just how well the initial trial has gone but also highlights just how fundamentally limited autonomous driving remains.
• The reason why I put driverless in quotation marks is because the drivers are still there it is just that they are not in the vehicle.
• The vehicles are being monitored remotely and a safety driver can take over at anytime should a glitch be encountered.
• When this started it was one remote driver per vehicle with the intent that over time one could have multiple vehicles being monitored by a single safety driver and eventually none at all.
• It is not clear how far down this path Waymo has been able to go but general availability is a good sign.
• However, one could also argue that the pandemic has reduced demand for ride hailing by 75% (Uber Q2 2020) and so making the service general availability with one remote safety driver per vehicle is now much less of a challenge.
• I still think that Yandex is somewhat ahead in this area as it has been ready for some time to launch a fully autonomous service in parts of Russia with no safety drivers and no remote monitoring beyond a remote engineer stepping in when the vehicle gets into difficulty.
• To be completely fair, the locations where Yandex is launching this are in the middle of nowhere and Google Maps reveals what must be one of the simplest and quietest driving environments available anywhere in the world (see here).
• This combined with the latest data that is available from the DMV (see here) shows that the field is tightening with a group at the top who are all pretty close in terms of performance and the rest whose are so far adrift that they are unlikely to survive.
• In this list I put Baidu, Waymo, Cruise, Pony.ai, AutoX, Nuro, Yandex, Mobileye and Amazon (Zoox).
• Almost everyone else is struggling for relevance and I think that we are going to see the long-tail continue to shorten as these companies run out of money.
• Right at the bottom of the list are Apple who I don’t think is taking this very seriously (why would it?) and Uber upon which the future of the company rests (see here).
• Uber has to get this right and it if it wants to maintain any kind of long-term advantage, it must be with an in-house solution.
• This is why it should throw away what it has developed so far and start again.
• Not out-bidding Amazon for Zoox was probably a big mistake.