With the massive layoffs of Google, Waymo has also suffered.
4-year veteran, executives from Daimler, Carnegie Mellon masters... None of them are immune.
The bad news came too suddenly, a few days ago it was safe and sound, and now it was suddenly opened:
Science and technology practitioners have had a hard time these days, and they can't find a sense of security anywhere.
According to internal employees, Waymo layoffs accounted for about 4% of the total number, about 80 people, which is also the first public layoff since Google started the research and development of unmanned vehicles.
Some netizens even think that this is not much, and a new round of layoffs is waiting behind.
△ Netizens associate "Waymo" with "way more"
According to incomplete statistics, 10 Waymo employees have posted on the LinkedIn expressing regret that they have been fired.
Positions involved perception and motion control engineers, fleet and vehicle technicians, and even HR in charge of hiring was fired.
Unexpectedly, the prophecy of netizens in early December last year has now become a saying:
Waymo hasn't laid off jobs yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did, early 2023.
Waymo lays off workers
Exactly how many employees have been laid off is not yet known.
Waymo officials described it as "limited to the number of layoffs."
Public information shows that among the group of people who were laid off, the shortest was 1 year and the longest was 4 and a half years.
From the job position, it involves truck maintenance supervisor, software engineer, vehicle integration specialist, technical recruiter.
△Graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering
According to netizens, a large part of the layoffs came from the unmanned truck department Waymo Via, internally codenamed Husky.
It is reasonable to speculate that Waymo may have to shut down or shrink the business.
In this regard, Waymo officially denied the shutdown, but the spokesperson immediately said that they have reduced the deployment of some unmanned trucks, and will continue to increase the research and development of driverless technology, which will be able to apply to both Robotaxi and truck businesses.
The reason for the layoffs can be mainly speculated from two aspects.
The first is that the economy is unable to make ends meet.
Waymo, a Alphabet company, had about 2,500 employees before the layoffs.
However, under such a huge company, in addition to paying huge salaries to employees, it also needs to bear all aspects of research and development expenses, such as developing lidar, training machine learning models, and cloud computing business used to analyze data...
Current revenue mainly comes from the Robotaxi business, deployed in California and Arizona; Partners in Waymo's trucking business include C.H. Robinson, J.B. Hunt and Uber, but it's likely not generating any revenue right now.
Alphabet's financial report can also corroborate: net income in the third quarter of 2022 was $13.91 billion, down 27% year-on-year; "Other bets" operating loss was $1.6 billion, up 24% from $1.29 billion in the same period in 2021.
Waymo is covered by "other bets."
Secondly, the commercialization has not progressed smoothly.
In May 2022, a Waymo self-driving truck was hit by another truck.
The lidar was smashed, and the security officer behind the steering wheel was injured and taken to the hospital.
A Waymo spokesperson responded at the time: "The accident occurred without technology, as this collision was mainly blamed on another truck driver who crossed the lane line and crashed into our truck".
Although Waymo is not at fault, an accident can easily lead to distrust. After all, Waymo has been testing driverless trucks since 2017, trucks began transporting goods in 2018, and Waymo's transportation business was named Waymo Via in 2020.
So this can also explain why netizens speculate that Waymo is shutting down the unmanned truck project.
Level 4 autonomous driving company winters
The current reality is that all Level 4 autonomous driving companies are more or less caught up in this cold current.
For example, Aurora, Argo AI, Nuro, Motional, Tucson Future...
The first is Aurora, known as "Robotaxi the world's first stock", once vowed to be three points with Google Waymo and GM Cruise at the time of its IPO, but did not expect to finally fall to the point of layoffs, freezing recruitment, cutting business, and even considering selling Apple and Microsoft.
In order to save money, the company's CEO Urmson said that he gave up his equity dividends, thereby saving 2.4 million US dollars (equivalent to about 16.28 million yuan).
At the same time, Aurora also abandoned the lunch service for employees, which could save 21 million US dollars (about 142 million yuan) and canceled the corporate donation program.
Secondly, backed by Ford and Volkswagen's Argo AI, the famous L4 autonomous driving star unicorn company was directly declared bankrupt.
Argo AI used to be glamorous - originating from the entrepreneurial project of Google's self-driving car team, which was founded in 2016 and was acquired by Ford a year later for a sky-high price of $1 billion, becoming the beginning of a wave of self-driving nuggets.
Subsequently, Ford invested a total of 1 billion US dollars, and in 2019 it was re-dismantled - the introduction of Volkswagen investment, making ArgoAI an autonomous driving company backed by Ford and Volkswagen, with a valuation of as high as $7 billion, a cumulative absorption of $2.6 billion, equivalent to 17.6 billion yuan, and a team size of up to 2,000 people.
Then there was the unmanned vehicle delivery brother Nuro, who drastically laid off 300 employees, frankly saying that there was "no other way" but to lay off employees.
Nuro is an unmanned vehicle company under Fudan high-quality students and Waymo veteran Zhu Jiajun, and is also the pioneer and pioneer of the low-speed unmanned delivery track, which has been invested and bet by SoftBank, Google, Toyota, etc., and even placed on the hope of "the first stock of unmanned logistics".
However, it was also difficult to escape the winter, saying in an email that "rapid recruitment was a mistake", cutting about 20% of employees and affecting about 300 employees.
Level 4 autonomous driving company Motional also survived, laying off dozens of employees because "the company needed to divert resources to other areas."
Motional's origin is not simple - aiming for the development of L4 level robotaxi, the source is from MIT and Carnegie Mellon, two well-known universities, not only backed by Hyundai Motor, but also backed by Aptiv under the auto parts company Delphi.
It is precisely because of this background that it has been favored by many taxi giants from the beginning, including but not limited to Uber, Lyft, and Via.
In addition, Tucson has restructured the company in the future to focus on investing in research and development of self-driving truck technology, cutting about 25% of its workforce, affecting about 350 employees.
In this big cold current, Waymo responded relatively late, but finally returned.
What's more, even the landlord Google's family has no surplus food.