A few months ago I made it off the waitlist for Waymo One, and a few weeks ago I ventured up to San Francisco, solely for the purpose of taking my first driverless Waymo rides.

Years ago I had ridden around Mountain View in a driver-in Waymo Chrysler Pacifica minivan. This time, though, I used the app to hail my own Waymo Jaguar iPace rides.

A few thoughts:

• The vehicle feels very smooth at 35 mph, on wider, faster streets. My memory is that when I was at Cruise, several years ago now, we were limiting ourselves to 25 mph.
• Pickup took a while. I started at the edge of the city, took a ride to downtown, and then hailed a different ride back. On each end, pick-up took 15-20 minutes. This was late on a pretty quiet night, so presumably not much contention for vehicles.
• The “hard” in-vehicle experience is great, especially sitting in the front passenger seat.
• The “soft” in-vehicle experience is fine. Nothing bad, but nothing special, either. If you connect the Waymo One app on your phone to the vehicle, I think you can select some radio playlists.
• The rooftop dome, which has a Waymo ‘W’ icon in the photo above, is used to communicate with the public. It has some symbols for pick-up and drop-off.
• It felt a little expensive. Maybe $25 each way, when I might have guessed $10-$15. I guess Uber and Lyft have gotten more expensive, too.

Overall, it felt super normal and simultaneously a marvel of engineering. Not a particularly tough route or time of day. But just like a person.

TechCrunch recently reported that Motional secured a bridge loan to keep operating while it lines up its next financing. The company had been, or maybe still is, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, the Tier 1 automotive supplier. However, Aptiv announced in January that robotaxis are proving too expensive, and stopped financing Motional.

Details on the bridge loan are scant. Motional simply put out a press release that the short-term financing will give “shareholders” time to discuss longer-term financing and “solidify alignment” on Motional’s strategic direction. Motional does say it is “in negotiations to finalize” its next round of funding.

I suppose the issue here may be that Hyundai, or whoever is leading the next financing round, wants to make sure they own enough of Motional that they aren’t just funding the company for Aptiv’s benefit. Perhaps the next round of financing involves selling Aptiv’s ownership stake, in addition to securing new cash. Just speculation, of course.

I saw this tweet yesterday, from Gokul Rajaram, who is a board member at several prominent tech companies.

The tweet seems correct, as far as it goes, but it’s worth noting that startups have to compensate employees somehow. It’s interesting to pair the attitude in this tweet with the common refrain that hiring great tech talent is incredibly hard.

Surely to some extent the answer is to compensate employees with equity, although startup equity has some complications:

• It’s usually illiquid
• Stock options require employees to eventually put forward cash to exercise; if the employees are working largely for equity, raising the cash to exercise becomes hard
• Equity compensation turns employees into investors in the company; this has a lot of benefits but also turns the stereotypical employer-employee relationship on its head – employees are now in a position to ask the same hard questions of executive leadership that investors ask

The liquidity issue is typically the largest – you can’t pay the rent or the mortgage or the groceries or the childcare provider with stock.

So we get back to cash compensation.

Of course, the tweet frames its recommendations in terms of extraneous spend. Is a nice office or a bonus extraneous?

I think you could argue about a plush office, although note that a luxurious work environment has value to employees. Maybe just taking that money and giving it to employees as cash would be better, but I guess a nice office is possibly more psychologically and tax advantageous than cash.

And I guess a bonus could be extraneous if it were totally unexpected. But a lot of companies build bonuses into their published compensation structure and employees factor this as a core part of their compensation.

I have other thoughts about bonuses as a part of compensation. There are some significant plus and minuses, from all points of view – deciding whether to take part of cash compensation and put it into a bonus form is non-trivial.

But in the context of the tweet – sure, companies should avoid extraneous spend. They should probably avoid extraneous spend even after they become cash-flow positive! Extraneous spend is wasteful, by definition.

But companies also need to compensate employees in order to attract and retain them. Employee compensation is not extraneous! Let’s not be penny-wise pound-foolish here.

Applied Intuition just raised a $250 million Series E funding round, valuing the simulation company at $6 billion. Many people have observed that in a gold rush, the most valuable business is selling picks and shovels. Applied Intuition fits that bill – they tout that 18 of the top 20 automakers in the world world work with them.

Most autonomous vehicle companies that I have seen have several different types of simulations:

• Video-game like simulations that look realistic but more expensive to run
• Playback of logged data from the real-world
• Hypothetical “synthetic” situations
• High-fidelity physics simulation

Often there are other types of simulation, as well.

An advantage of working with Applied, as Kodiak does, is the commonality between these scenarios. Since a single company is developing all of these engines, with a product team to coordinate, the simulation products overlap closely. As an engineering customer, this is a big benefit.

Yesterday, while driving to work, I listened to a recent Autonocast episode, “EV Rental Blues.” Basically, they talk about Hertz selling off most of its big recent investment in EV rental cars.

The Autonocast panelists, who are all EV enthusiasts, mostly speculate about the difficulties ordinary, non-EV rental customers encounter when renting their first EV. I suspect the panelists are correct. I helped out my parents once after they unwittingly rented and I half-suspect that my parents – who are not dummies – would’ve just run out of charge and had the tow the car had they not had assistance from me.

But I think it’s also worth pointing out that I also have come to view renting an EV as a bad proposition – and I am not an EV neophyte. I own and drive an EV daily!

The problem with renting an EV is pretty similar to the problem with owning an EV if you don’t have at least moderate speed charging at home or at work. If you can’t charge the EV while you’re hanging out somewhere, doing something else that you would be doing anyway, then you have to take 30-60 minutes out of your life every few days specifically to charge the vehicle.

EVs are terrific when paired with home or office charging, because you don’t have to allocate any extra time to fueling up, not even pulling into a gas station.

But without home or office charging, which is almost always the case for car rental customers (including me), the charging time (and sometimes the lack of charging infrastructure) becomes a major pain. Better to just rent a gas vehicle.

Udacity announced yesterday that it is selling itself to Accenture.

Although I left Udacity three years ago, it looms large in my career. In 2016, Sebastian Thrun recruited me to join his start-up and build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, which wound up teaching tens of thousands of students to work on autonomous vehicles. I led the Nanodegree, and the team the built it, which was the highlight of my career.

2017, in particular, was Udacity’s biggest year. Several other Nanodegrees followed fast on the heels of the self-driving car program, leading the company to rocket ship growth.

The subsequent years had ups and downs, but Udacity always had the best instructional model of any educational enterprise I’ve ever tried.

And that pedagogical success really stemmed from Sebastian. He is the best teacher I’ve ever known – charismatic, but humble enough to realize that students don’t learn from listening to him. Students learn by doing, which was part of Udacity from Day 1. Hands-on quizzes, exercises, and projects, and then feedback on those projects from trained reviewers, are the core of what made Udacity so great at teaching.

I texted Sebastian yesterday to congratulate him on this milestone in Udacity’s journey, and to thank him for recruiting me there, all those years ago.

He texted back and reminded me that my Nanodegree is still out there, along with all the other courses and programs I taught at Udacity, and that people are still learning from me. I hope they keep on learning 🙂

If you follow the CEO’s Twitter account, every once in a while you get an early peek into what the company is about to disclose publicly.

Today Don Burnette posted:

In particular:

2024 is looking to be the biggest year yet for @KodiakRobotics as we gear up for driverless!

I mean, I guess all self-driving companies are always working toward going fully driverless. But I don’t think you have to read too hard between the lines of Don’s tweet to figure out our big focus for 2024 😉

Very cool!

The ankles seem a little stiff, but the demonstration of picking up and egg is very impressive. It’s always hard to know how staged these demo videos are. But I’ve heard previously that the dexterity to grip something fragile without breaking it is pretty hard for robots.

I hope this translates to real breakthroughs for users of prosthetic limbs, among others.

The dance party at the end is a little hokey, but I guess I appreciate the whimsy.