In 2015, Tesla released a video demonstrating a prototype âsnake chargerâ that (presumably autonomously) connects and charges a car. Itâs amazing and honestly not as creepy as I might have imagined.
I missed this prototype at the time and apparently not much has happened with it in the interim, but recently Elon Musk confirmed on Twitter that the charger is still in the works.
This charger would make a lot of sense were Teslas able to drive autonomously, as Musk hints they will be able to do soon (note that a lot of people are skeptical on that point). Autonomous charging would really untether the vehicle from the need for human intervention.
At this point neither the snake charger nor Full Self-Driving mode are ready. But itâs a pretty awesome video.
Waymo has begun offering (âsellingâ) driverless rides to members of the general public in the Phoenix area. This is super-exciting, both because of the technological achievement and also because of what this advancement will make possible. And that relates to economics.
With paying customers in the vehicle, each ride covers (or at least subsidizes) its own cost. This means that, over time, Waymo can afford to drive many more miles than it could if it had to cover the cost of each ride for testing purposes.
Letâs do some math to see how that works out.
Waymo is currently logging about 1 million self-driving miles per month. Letâs assume all of these miles are part of the Waymo One service in Arizonaâââjust for the purpose of this exercise.
Waymoâs blog post this week shared that â5â10% of our rides in 2020 were fully driverless.â To keep the numbers easy, letâs multiply 1 million by 10%, which yields 100,000 driverless miles per month.
How much money does Waymo save by going fully driverless?
Presumably the driverless vehicles are operating in low-speed environments, at least to start. That means lots of intersections and stopping. Letâs assume the driverless vehicles average 10 miles per hour. That means that, in order to log 100,000 driverless miles in a month, Waymo would have to drive for 10,000 hours.
Iâm honestly uncertain of the policies and economics at Waymo One, but letâs imagine that a vehicle normally has a single operator that costs Waymo $30 per hour (wage plus taxes and benefits). That implies an operator cost of $300,000 per month (10,000 hours times $30 per hour), or $4 million per year, to log driverless miles.
That is a lot of money to me, but it doesnât actually feel like that much money for Waymo. But now imagine scaling up.
On average, for human-driven vehicles (not Waymo), an automotive fatality occurs once every 100 million miles. Imagine that we want Waymo to drive an order of magnitude more than that, every month, in order to validate the safety of its vehicles. Thatâs 1 billion miles per month. Now the driver cost becomes 1 billion miles, divided by 10 miles per hour, times $30 per hour, equals $3 billion per month. Thatâs prohibitive, even for Waymo.
But if the vehicle becomes driverless, those costs go away.
For me, thatâs one of the really exciting aspects of Waymo opening to the general public. If riders will pay enough to cover the marginal cost of the ride without a driver, then it becomes possible to massively scale testing and validation.
I suppose it would be a little much to claim that Waymo was paying attention to my tweets, but lo and behold, today they announced that I can take a fully driverless ride, if I can get to Phoenix đ
âBeginning today, October 8, weâre excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.â
Youâve been asking, and now itâs here: Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Metro Phoenix. To our valued riders, take a ride and share your experience by tagging #WaymoOne! More here: https://t.co/0066gAbLegpic.twitter.com/xDTrn6FPjW
âWaymo and Cruise allow their staffing vendors, Transdev North America and Aerotek, respectively, to make decisions regarding when it is safe to test and how to respond to driver concerns. But drivers say those companies can be slow to act, communications are often contradictory, and they feel pressured to keep working despite unsafe conditions.â
Self-driving car operators, particularly at larger organizations like Waymo and Cruise, tend not to be employees, but rather are often contract workers, often employed by an outside staffing agency. This state of affairs is hardly limited to self-driving carsâââcontract workers employed by staffing agencies are so common in the Bay Area, for engineering, program management, sanitation, and more.
Even companies whose hourly workers are employees, for example firms with large retail or operations centers, face this COVID challenge. Salaried headquarters staff who can work productively from home, while the hourly employees have to be physically present. The division is really about whether you work with ideas or with the physical world. Doctors and dentists have to go to the office for the same reason.
The Verge reports that Waymo is paying its contractors to stay home, although the story only mentions this in passing, and then proceeds to relay other reports that Waymo contractors are pressured to come to work. So itâs hard to know what to make of that.
I confess the best response to this situation eludes me. It feels right to say that companies should pay their workers to stay home and not risk their health, but it is only a short-term solution for a private company to pay people to not work. In the long-term, those companies will struggle to fund those costs.
There is a public health case to be made for some sort of tax or penalty on firms whose employees catch COVID. That doesnât solve the wildfire problem that also comes up in the piece, though.
Perhaps the best solution is meticulous record-keeping, so that employers can verify that their teams are in fact staying safe while working.
Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron broke the self-driving car Internet recently (I just, but only a little), by predicting, â I feel very confident that in the next 12-to-24 months, youâre going to see self-driving vehicles, with no person in the vehicle, moving people on a daily basis.â
And I think heâs right about this! It might already be true, in fact.
Waymo is supposedly moving people in fully driverless vehicles in the Phoenix area and has been for quite some time. The riders are pre-selected and under NDA, so the reporting has been quite limited. But it might already be happening daily.
In very constrained, geofenced operational domains, I suspect weâll see more companies launch driverless vehicle servicesâââparticularly Chinese companies, which donât get a lot of coverage in the US, but are progressing rapidly.
In the meantime, if you want to see driverless vehicles in action, follow Oliverâs Twitter feed.
Itâs a surreal feeling to see a car with no one driving it.
Regardless of the doubters, this technology will transform how we all move, reducing needless death and giving independence back to those who donât have it.
The US Army spent about a month this summer testing self-driving combat vehicles, and is pretty bullish on the results. Major Cory Wallace, one of the test leaders, concluded:
âThereâs no reason why we are using humans to breach complex obstacles while under fire. We have the technology to be better. The technology on our cars is often better than what we have on some of the combat platforms today. I am very excited to see that paradigm shift.â
The write-ups Iâve seen on this testing focus on the harm-reduction aspects of the technology, as does Major Wallace. Nonetheless, I would imagine there are potential performance enhancements the military might gain by automating fighting vehicles.
The analogy that jumps out at me is agriculture, where the real benefit of autonomous tractors and other farm equipment comes from precision, which leads to increased crop yields. The benefit from labor reduction is less important in that context.
In the short-run, I can certainly see why the military might use robots instead of humans for tasks like bomb disposal or scouting, even if the performance is inferior. Better to risk an automated tank that a platoon.
But in the long run I would imagine these vehicles will outperform manual drivers and gunners. That increased performance could cut two ways simultaneously: on the one hand, precision would hopefully mean less collateral damage and fewer civilian casualties; on the other hand, the Terminator 2 scenario comes to mind.
Update
My former colleague Art Gillespie, who is was a US Army soldier and is now an autonomous vehicle engineer, provides insightful commentary:
My take on this is that effective autonomy on the battlefield wonât be 1:1 analogous with current platformsâ form factors. Do you even need tanks if you can swarm a target with hundreds or even thousands of disposable smaller robots with similar payloads?
My latest Forbes.com article explores the many facets and possibilities of the recently-announced partnership between Waymo and Volvo.
âVolvo and Waymo each announced that, âWaymo is the exclusive L4 partner for Volvo Car Group.â Waymo did not offer up any comparable exclusivity to Volvo. Indeed, Waymo has varying levels of partnership with Fiat-Chrysler, Jaguar, and Renault Nissan, which it mentions in the same blog post announcing the Volvo partnership.â
Thereâs a sensor angle, a ridehailing angle, an Uber angle, and even a China angle. Lots going on there. Check it out!
A few weeks ago, Volkswagen closed a multi-billion dollar investment in Argo AI. The investment was originally announced last summer, so this was hardly a shock. Nonetheless, the deal results in a really interesting ownership structure for Argo, that is shared by Cruise, and is pretty uncommon among startups.
When GM purchased a 40-person startup called Cruise Automation in 2016 for a reported $1 billion, a self-driving acquisition race began.
About a year later, Ford announced that it âwouldâ invest $1 billion over four years in a little-known Pittsburgh-based startup called Argo AI. Confusingly (at least to me) for $1 billion Ford was not âacquiringâ Argoâââit was becoming a shareholder. It wasnât even clear whether Ford would be a majority shareholder.
There is a certain logic to this structure, but itâs really unusual. The logic is that Argo, as an independent company, would be able to grow rapidly, like a startup, unencumbered by Fordâs constraints and brand. It would just have a lot of Fordâs cash.
On the other hand, Ford made a tremendous bet on what was then a very small team. If Argo hit a home run, Ford wouldnât necessarily reap most of the reward. And if Argo took all that money and drained it, Ford had limited power to prevent that.
In the time since the Argo investment, Cruise has essentially spun out of GM into a similar structure. Itâs taken major investments from both Softbank and Honda, to the point that Cruise is once again an independent company with corporate investors who have poured in billions of dollars but have a lot less control than you might imagine.
Volkswagenâs investment in Argo seems to be a vindication of this unorthodox approach. Unlike Ford, Volkswagen is investing in a real companyâââstill a startup, but one with hundreds of employees and solid technical progress. Volkswagenâs investment shows they think this may be the path forward.
So often when you see a corporate investor try to become a venture capitalist, things go poorly for both the big company and the startup. In this case, things seem to be going quite well.
This week I had the pleasure of interviewingAutoX COO Jewel Li for Forbes.com. We discussed what itâs like to run a company spread across the US and China. Diversity brings challenges:
âCulture is hard to explain,â says Li, who immigrated from China to the United States in 2011 to pursue her PhD at the University of Delaware. âItâs in every single detail. Are you writing all of your documents and messages in English, so that everyone can understand? If the company caters for employees, is it a diverse selection of food?â
But there are unexpected advantages:
âA lot of AV companies havenât been testing and are data hungry. We were very lucky that there were always fleets to test in China. It never slowed us down,â says Li.
The second quarter of 2020 has been pretty great for Phantom.ai. The Silicon Valley-based ADAS startup closed a $22 million Series A financing in April, led in part by Ford Motor Company. Today, they announced a partnership with Renesas, a Japanese Tier 1 automotive supplier, to develop âfull stack Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems.â
This makes Phantom.ai one of the very few startups targeting what would seem to be a lucrative and promising market.
An oddity of the self-driving car revolution is that startups have so far had much more success tackling Level 4 full autonomy, compared to Level 2 advanced driver assistance.
Level 2 means that a driver still needs to be in control of the vehicle, which leaves startups with one of two difficult paths:
Become a manufacturer and build vehicles for consumers.
Faced with that challenge, and perhaps also for safety concerns, most startups have opted to instead work on Level 4 autonomy. This is a much harder challenge, but carries the potential of deploying robotaxis directly and probably (maybe?) avoiding the existing automotive supply chain.
The only company that has cracked this nut, Mobileye, cracked it in a huge way, exiting to Intel in 2017 for $15 billion. On the one hand, I would have thought more entrants wouldâve been attracted to this space. On the other hand, it took Mobileye 18 years to achieve this success, highlighting how long the automotive supplier road can be.
That leaves Phantom.ai, which has survived on a mere $5 million seed funding round since 2016, and overcame a cringe-inducing 2018 rear-end collision with a press crew on-board. Kudos to them as the leading startup in the space.
Even Phantomâs own employees seem a little dumbstruck by this state of affairs. One anonymous employee wrote in a 2019 Glassdoor review:
â If they exist, we donât know who our competitors are, other than MobilEye. Is another company going to come in and steal our thunder? Itâs my biggest worry. [Our competitors, by the way, are not Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, etc⌠their product is for a different market.]â
The main competitor I can think of is Comma.ai. I own their EON DevKit and have installed it in several different vehicles. The performance of the OpenPilot software it runs is impressive. I wish it would get to market in a bigger way than it has so far.
But cracking the automotive supply chain is tough.
David Silver 