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by princess-aslaug 3061 days ago
I wonder if the FCA plan to be the platform for Google's self driving AI, instead of trying to develop their own AI like other car vendors are doing, make sense. In some way it seems very hard and costly to build your own AI, even Tesla appears to be lagging behind Waymo. On the other hand I'm not sure how much replaceable the position of FCA is. Currently trivially replaceable, but maybe in the future as they develop more and more skills about building the platform for autonomous driving vehicles (minus software), it could be a good position to be in.
2 comments
kyrra 3061 days ago
Waymo is also working on courting other manufacturers, but nothing else has been announced outside of Honda[0] (which hasn't gone anywhere).

Car manufacturers today can be seen as integrators of various technologies. Most all of the driver assist tech out there today comes from companies like MobileEye and Bosch. It tends to make sense from an expense perspective to let that type of tech be developed outside of car manufacturers so the development costs can be more easily be recouped.

[0] https://www.recode.net/2016/12/21/14046496/waymo-alphabet-ho...

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princess-aslaug 3061 days ago
Thanks. The question will be if owning the best or first autonomous driving logic, good enough that can be mass deployed, will be such a big advantage to make the fact you can make a good car almost irrelevant compared to that.
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icebraining 3061 days ago
even Tesla appears to be lagging behind Waymo

That's not surprising. Waymo's team goes all the way back from the 2005 DARPA challenge[1] - they've been working on it for a long time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_(vehicle)

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