In 2009, 13 years ago, Waymo's predecessor, Google's self-driving division, was established. Many people see it as a sign that autonomous driving is starting to develop in the United States.
In 2015, Uber CEO Travis Kalanic founded the autonomous driving division, threatening to replace human drivers with autonomous driving in the near future.
In 2016, Uber rival Lyft didn't let go of the track either. Lyft CEO John Zimmer predicted that in 2021, most of Lyft's mobility services will be picked up by autonomous driving. In 2025, private cars will be a thing of the past. Everyone will rely on autonomous driving to get out of the house.
Also in 2015-2016, Silicon Valley's self-driving startups - Nuro, Zoox, Argo AI, many companies that later became the backbone of the industry mushroomed, and the self-driving roundtable discussions everywhere made people believe that autonomous driving ushered in a big explosion, and 10 years later, young people no longer need to learn the skill of driving.
But these rhetoric ultimately do not meet the reality - 13 years later, autonomous driving has not quickly entered people's daily lives as these companies predicted; but it is not without achievements, the entire industry has undergone a reshuffle in the past 2 years, and has a new look.
It is worth noting that the self-driving that these companies are pursuing is not the same thing as the "autopilot" that exaggerates performance and misleads in Tesla advertising. Whether it's Waymo or Cruise or other companies, they're all pursuing fully autonomous driving on Level 5 that doesn't require any human attention or intervention. Tesla's current level of assisted driving is only Level2, that is, partial autopilot. This article will also only discuss the development of fully autonomous driving companies.
Waymo: First mover, last?
Joel Johnson sat nervously and amused in the back seat of the car. Last year, as a passenger, he experienced Waymo's self-driving taxis operating in suburban Phoenix.
What made him laugh was that the whole car had been stuck for a full 14 minutes and didn't move. What stuck the car was an inconspicuous tapered barricade. What made him nervous was that there was no driver in the cab, and he couldn't do anything sitting in the back seat.
It doesn't take a second for this human driver to react to the roadblocks that go around, eventually causing the entire street to be congested for a long time. 14 minutes later, Waymo's technicians arrived, and the car started unexpectedly, startling Joel. He posted the video on YouTube and instantly attracted 400,000 people's attention.
This isn't Waymo's only awkward moment in recent years. For the company, the most inexplicable thing may be the mass resignation of the executive team. Last year alone, CEO John Krafcik, Chief Safety Officer (CSO) Deborah Hersman, TimWillis, CFO Ger Dwyer, who oversees the company's factories and international supply chain and serves as the company's general manager, and Adam Frost, head of its autonomous driving partner, left.
Dwyer's departure shocked the outside world because he had already joined Google in 2006 and joined Waymo in 2016, a few months after Waymo declared independence.
It can be said that no matter how Waymo pretends that everything is fine, the collective departure of executives still makes the outside world feel quite worried about its future. And this worry has gradually spread to this field of autonomous driving — 13 years later, there seems to be a lot of progress, but the shouts that once replaced human drivers with autonomous driving seem to have become a blank cheque.
So far, billions of dollars have been invested in autonomous driving. Tim Papandreou, a former Waymo employee, said people now realize that there is a long way to go for self-driving. The industry has been in a state of only blossoming and not bearing fruit for the past 10 years.
Startups: Reshuffle
This "no result" has directly led to the gradual decline of the entire industry in the past two years. Some small players directly went out of business, and some surviving players chose to bundle with large enterprises and form alliances to report to the group for warmth. After 2020, the entire industry has completed a frequent reshuffle again and again, and finally become the situation that is more than enough today. One of the biggest changes in alliances is that technology giants and traditional car companies have entered the game and found the most suitable self-driving startups in the autopilot jianghu to form an alliance – this alliance is not only to invest in money, but more importantly, they try to combine autonomous driving technology with their own products and businesses to seek commercialization possibilities.
After 2020, after many years of high valuation and high investment bubble, autonomous driving seems to have gone downhill for the entire industry. In just over a year from March 2020 to April 2021, self-driving truck company Starsky Robotics declared bankruptcy and shut down all operations. The company, founded in 2015, raised more than $21 million, including $16.5 million in its Series A funding round in late spring 2018 alone. The investors behind it include a number of well-known investment banks, including YC and Shasta Ventures.
In 2020, self-driving company Zoox was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. The self-driving company, also founded in 2014-2015, already had a high valuation of $3.2 billion in financing in 2019. It was also the largest acquisition in Amazon's history at the time. This isn't the first time giant Amazon has shown its interest in autonomous driving — back in 2019, Amazon participated in Aurora's Series B funding round, injecting more than $500 million.
Although the number of self-driving companies is limited, there are not many plagiarism and intellectual property lawsuits in this circle. In 2019, Tesla sued Zoox for stealing trade secrets through its former employees. In the end, the court ordered Zoox to pay Tesla a large amount of damages. Because, when Amazon's acquisition was blown out, Musk unabashedly mocked on Twitter.
At the end of 2020, a major event in the field of autonomous driving was that Uber officially sold its self-driving unit ATG to Aurora. Meanwhile, as part of the deal, Uber injected $400 million into the latter. FOR Uber, ATG was a hot potato that didn't make money and burned money — the year before the shutdown, ATG only brought Uber $42 million in revenue, but it caused about $500 million in burned money losses. For the dream of self-driving that is far away and cannot see results, Uber can't afford to burn money. According to Uber's pre-IPO prospectus, the ATG division is valued at approximately $7.2 billion. At the time, Uber had already invested more than $3 billion in the business.
Just as Uber's joining the industry in 2015 was a sign of the first year of autonomous driving, this year, Uber's exit from the industry was also considered by many people in the industry to be an important sign of the industry's downward spiral.
Since then, industry acquisitions have become more numerous. At the end of 2020, for example, Nuro acquired Ike, then a self-driving truck company. In the spring of 2021, Cruise acquired another startup, Voyage.
In April 2021, Uber's rival Lyft, who did not realize his 2015 rhetoric, finally could not bear the pressure and sold the self-driving business that had been cultivated for 6 years to Toyota's Woven Planet. At the time, the transaction price was about $550 million.
In March 2022, GM spent $2.1 billion to acquire SoftBank's stake in Cruise, while replacing SoftBank with an additional $1.35 billion in investment in Cruise. At present, GM holds more than 80% of Cruise and has an absolute right to speak.
Car companies: enter the game with the ability to pay money
As mentioned above, after a major reshuffle brought about by industry consolidation in the past two years, traditional car companies and technology giants have entered the game and become the most important players in the entire autonomous driving jianghu through acquisitions and strategic cooperation. These list of car companies include Tesla, BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, Volvo and Hyundai.
We have made a simple sorting out of the alliance after the shuffle.
First, the first big group of players is Waymo and Chrysler. The two companies signed an exclusive cooperation agreement in July 2020. Chrysler, whose full name is Fiat Chrysler, is the product of the merger of Fiat Automobile and Chrysler. Under the agreement, Waymo will incorporate its own self-driving system into Fiat's Pro Master van. In addition, Chrysler opened up his self-driving business for his future car Level4 to Waymo.
The second important player combination is General Motors and Cruise. And the way they formed the alliance was the acquisition mentioned above.
The third big player is the Aurora we mentioned that acquired Uber and toyota, which it is working closely with, to acquire Lyft's self-driving car. Maybe Uber and Lyft have been competing in the field of autonomous driving for so many years, and they will not expect this result in the end.
The fourth player that cannot be ignored is Amazon, which chose to complete the alliance by acquiring Zoox. In addition to the acquisition of Zoox, Amazon also has a number of layouts in self-driving long-distance transportation, such as last summer, they signed a $150 million order for self-driving systems with self-driving truck company PlusAI. Meanwhile, Amazon bought 20 percent of the company's option stocks.
The fifth is Ford, Volkswagen and their combined self-driving company ArgoAI.
In this way, autonomous driving in the United States has entered a period of integration. The alliance between these companies is definitely not just an investment relationship of money. More importantly, they hope that by working together, they can accelerate the opportunity to find commercial applications.
Taxi + Delivery: Try it out from around the corner
For most self-driving companies, one of the mainstream application directions is the self-driving taxi business (Robotaxi) that carries passengers. While the same taxi business is the same, the progress of companies is different – some no longer need a driver's seat driver, some can walk in busy metropolises, and some are considering taking on challenges in areas with bad weather.
Waymo is already providing driverless services to passengers in Phoenix, San Francisco and other places. In real business, there are no drivers sitting in the driver's seat. Although there are still "14 minutes of awkward moments of being motionless", overall, Waymo is a company at the forefront of this regard and has the most experience.
The city of choice for GM and Cruise's rental businesses is also San Francisco. Mary Barra, CEO of GM, said publicly: "This is an important step towards our commercial plan to pay for taxis. In 10 years, our business will bring in about $50 billion in revenue. In their tests in San Francisco, similarly no human drivers appeared in the driver's seat.
Toyota and Aurora work together to test driverless cars in Texas, USA. The test model was toyota's Sienna with the Auroradriver kit.
Amazon and Zoox's self-driving tests were in Seattle. So far, though, their tests haven't involved an open passenger-carrying business. They chose Seattle because they wanted to challenge Seattle's rainy, snowy weather to see if these external factors affected the sensor's identification. In addition, the company is slightly different for the body design of self-driving taxis. Their car is designed as a two-way electric unmanned vehicle, two-way driving, four-wheel steering, pure electric, no throttle, no steering wheel, no driver seat, only four face-to-face passenger seats, which can be said to completely subvert people's cognition of the appearance of the car. Although this layout is very suitable for renting out pick-ups, at present, the business is still not started, and it is a relatively backward "player" in the perspective of Robotaxi.
Finally, let's talk about another application direction of the top players in the field of autonomous driving technology - last-mile delivery.
At present, in addition to cooperating with Ford Motor and Volkswagen to carry out Robotaxi business in Miami and Austin, Argo AI and Ford Motor are also trying to apply in the field of short-distance delivery.
Argo AI has completed an alliance with Walmart to conduct pilot cooperation to provide driverless delivery services for online shopping customers. Since last September, Walmart has been putting the business in places like Austin and Miami. In the introductory video, after the Ford car equipped with ArgoAI stopped in front of Walmart, the Walmart purchaser put the goods in the back seat, and finally the "last mile" was transported by the autonomous vehicle. After parking, users only need to pick up their own goods from the back seat.
However, in addition to expensive self-driving car solutions, some companies are trying to complete tasks directly with lower-cost self-driving robots. Doordash announced in November that it intends to develop its own delivery robot. Similarly, Uber is planning to shift its efforts on self-driving cars to self-driving delivery. UberEats is working with self-driving company Motional and self-driving delivery robotics company Service Robotics to enable self-driving delivery in Los Angeles. However, it is unclear whether UberEats will rely on car self-driving or robot delivery. Serve Robotics, once part of Uber, came out on its own and founded a new company.
While these applications are still in their very early stages and show no signs of profitability, at least the commercial logic of autonomous driving has become clearer with the addition of some large companies.
Technical and mass production issues
In addition to the short-term difficulty in making a profit, self-driving companies also face some technical problems and difficulty in mass production. Even Waymo, a technology leader, can't escape this.
In 2017, when Waymo announced the start of its self-driving business at Phoenix (there were drivers in the driver's seat at the time), an employee of the company was told by the company that they would expand to nine cities over the next 18 months.
"Waymo's internal employees at the time often said that we had solved the problem of 99% driverless cars. We're ready. We just had to get the car started. A former Waymo employee said in an interview with Bloomberg.
But the end result, at least for now, is that the last 1 percent is a problem. Five years have passed since 2017, and Waymo's 18-month plan for that year is still hopeless.
For the industry as a whole, small distractions such as street builders, cyclists, and pedestrians are still difficult problems for technology companies to solve 100%. In addition, each city has proposed various new regulations for autonomous driving. Bad weather — rain, sleet or snow — is also a problem that self-driving cars can't handle. Until these seemingly small, but vital to passengers and road safety issues are addressed, widespread commercialization of fully autonomous driving has become almost impossible.
In terms of car production, Waymo has also encountered difficulties. In 2018, Waymo signed a contract saying it would produce 20,000 Jaguar SUVs for self-driving cars. A few months later, Waymo said it would work with Chrysler to produce more than 60,000 self-driving minivans.
"Not a lot is assembled." Later, Krafcik confessed to the outside world. In fact, according to Bloomberg, there is a lot of demolition work to be done. Due to the precision of the components, many engineers have to manually disassemble some parts, check for problems and then install them back. Even a misplaced wire can cause engineers to spend days looking for problems. These difficulties make it difficult for Waymo to complete mass production. According to some parts manufacturers, Waymo has cut orders for Parts from Crysler, while delivering fewer Jaguar cars than was released earlier.
Of course, in recent years, Silicon Valley has become less and less "bragging" about autonomous driving, which is also related to the industry's increasingly cautious and cautious attitude. Especially after the car accident in Uber in 2018, those big words became less and less.
These companies are trying to recalibrate expectations, whether it's about what autonomous driving can do or when it will become widespread.
Many former Waymo employees have mentioned that parent company Alphabet has been extremely sensitive and cautious over the past many years. In 2018, Krafcik intended to showcase the company's technical capabilities in several cities in the United States through a marketing campaign, but was opposed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They decided not to over-advertise the product before it was ready.
In addition to reducing its campaign, Waymo also officially announced the deprecation of the word Self-driving in favor of Autonomic Driving. The difference is that the former refers to fully autonomous driving, while the latter includes assisted driving. For example, Waymo's public campaign, which has been going on for three years: Let's talk self-driving, was changed to Let's talk autonoumousdriving. The Autonomous Oumous Vehicle Industry Association, which includes Ford, ArgoAI, Aurora, Cruise, Nuro and other self-driving companies, has also officially deprecated the self-driving description.
Overall, although the autonomous driving industry has not changed the lives of ordinary people in 10 years as people expected 13 years ago, and is experiencing some lows, its application direction is becoming more and more clear. Importantly, the industry still has a lot of hot money from traditional car companies and technology giants, and it also brings together a large number of technical experts. As Joel said after the video went viral, it looks like autonomous driving has completed 99% of its development. For that last 1 percent, the industry still has a long way to go.
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