Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rvz 1115 days ago
> Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up.

Is that it? SF only? After billions invested? There is a laundry list of those that tried and failed especially with burning an insurmountable amount of VC money even with billions of their own money.

Lyft: Scrapped and sold their self-driving project. [0]

Uber: Scrapped their robot-taxi project and sold it off. [1]

Zoox: Once valued at $3BN, acquired by Amazon for $1BN after nearly going bankrupt and is still using specialised cars for self driving only in SF. [2]

Cruise: Acquired by GM and still using specialised cars for self driving in SF [3]

Drive.ai: Ran out of money and almost bankrupt and acquired by Apple. [4] No where to be found on the roads.

Waymo: Same situation as Cruise, but Google keeping them alive.

Comma has lasted longer than these over-valued companies and is already in lots of consumer grade vehicles beyond SF today and not in specialised cars and taxis unlike Cruise and Waymo who are still stuck in SF [5].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/26/business/stock-marke...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944337751/uber-sells-its-auto...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/26/amazon-buys-self-driving-tec...

[3] https://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-s...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/25/self-driving-startup-drive...

[5] https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/18/cruise-waymo-near-approval...

2 comments

Anyone can call a Waymo robo-taxi right now in Phoenix and it works really well. It's a modified electric Jaguar. That's a pretty big difference from the others.
Good thing everyone lives in Phoenix and SF XD
If it works in Phoenix there's no reason it wouldn't work in a large part of the US, they just haven't rolled it out yet. Proving that it works is the hard part.
How so?

Different roads, geography, etc?

Sure Phoenix is an easy case with dry weather and car-based infrastructure but there are huge areas of the US that are fundamentally the same. If they can solve the problem of driving safely and conveniently in Arizona they can set it up elsewhere too.
Comma's hypothesis could be correct and its licensing is also very flexible, if they do succeed in making an android equivalent of SDC(self driving), they will be used by all these car manufacturers eventually.