The data coming out from an independent study of Waymo autonomous vehicles is, frankly, amazing. Swiss Re, one of the largest global insurance firms based out of Zürich, reports that 25.3 million fully autonomous miles drive by Waymo vehicles resulted in a 92% reduction in car crash injuries.
In plain English, Waymo self-driving tech is 12.5x safer than human drivers.
Let’s dig into what that means!
I work in vehicle testing, specifically on ADAS and autonomous driving features. One thing that gets overlooked with Waymo is the fact that that fucker has a 6-figure price tag on the sensing equipment on it. You’ll never see that on a production level vehicle
The real point of self driving cars is not to have to buy one. They should be ubiquitous fleets of taxis that never sleep, not personal possessions that sit in the driveway 90% of the time.
Even if it was a quarter million bucks, it would quickly pay itself off. Keeping a taxi car available and operating 24/7 is a big deal for operational costs. $25/hour on a $250k device is a recovered in just over a year. It’s all profit after that.
“Never” is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won’t end up on a production vehicle at some point.
In the auto industry pennies matter. Inevitably some higher-up will convince himself that they can accomplish the same thing with just a camera and some software. Margins tend to be more important than quality. I’m not saying that’s right, its just what tends to happen
Isn’t that already happening with Tesla?
Happened awhile ago. It was and is still a bad idea IMO
That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I’m going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.
You’re the engineer, I’m just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I’m assuming that I’ve just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.
The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they’re now low six figures. I anticipate they’ll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.
Next week at your local big box for the price of a DJI drone