I am looking forward to self driving cars, and keep hoping they will get here before my parents lose their ability to safely drive themselves.
Back in the mid 70's there was a 'personal rapid transport' or PRT system proposed which was individual 'cars' on a rail system that were smart enough to stop at a station. The idea was that the rail line had switches where a PRT unit (4 or 8 passenger) could go into a station when called with an elevator like button. You would get in, and then it would head out on the track and not stop again until your destination station.
The idea was that it eliminated the two biggest issues with 'public transportation' which were pickup and drop off schedules that forced waits when you transferred from one line to another, and the fact that the train/bus would make all stops forcing it to be slower than a point to point bus/train.
I believe you could implement that system safely on a dedicated 'self driving car' road. And such roads would be less expensive to build than a rail infrastructure.
I graduated from wvu and apart from “#1 party school” tag, its claim to fame was/is the PRT. fun to ride, not fun when your cabin gets stuck in middle of the track with nobody to call.
Last time we checked, there's still a plaque in the office warning about "Rotten Ralph" (his nickname). Many family stories. My sis and bro would ride unattended, monitored from the control room. They loved helping reboot the system by manually entering the hexidecimal codes.
I remain disappointed we don't have PRTs every where.
I remember reading a sci fi novel with that idea too. The scene had a guy packing up his luggage in a self-driving car, watching the car get in line with a long-distance "train" of self-driving cars, and then falling asleep so he can make it to the next city.
My daughter is on the autism spectrum. I think she is capable of driving herself, but at least right now, she shows no interest in it. Instead, I'm teaching her how to get around herself on a bicycle. And while I am still intent on helping her develop self-reliance, the future she will be working as an adult will likely involve self-driving cars.
I think it is very likely that the cost of self-driving cars will be higher. Middle class is already getting squeezed, and if having on-demand transportation is more affordable, it is more accessible for people. When self-driving cars have lower insurance premiums, then manually-driven cars would be left in the domain of the hobbyists and the wealthy -- driving it for fun, rather than because you need to make a living.
At the same time, I can see bicycles and electric bicycles becoming even more popular.
There was a kickstarter campaign a couple years ago documenting how roads were originally made for bikes, with the first paved roads being lobbied by bicycle groups rather than auto groups. We also have some interesting things: (1) in the early days of the auto industry, the auto industry pushed forward legislation for traffic safety, shifting the idea is that if a pedestrian is on the road, it is the pedestrian's fault, and that "roads are made for cars" (2) buying out trolly companies so people would buy more cars and (3) this idea of "roads are made for cars" has become so ingrained in our mindset that it influenced city and urban design for almost a hundred years.
I'm glad to see this is starting to swing back the other way.
Arguably you can get most of those benefits now by chartering Uber, Lyft, Waymo, etc. to run private bus lines. They could run bigger and smaller vehicles as needed and let you schedule your pickups and dropoffs from their apps.
Plenty of countries around the world let people start up their own bus lines to meet demand.
Completely agree! That's what I think the future of self-driving cars will be -- not so much "automatic Uber" but instead little busses that can automatically optimize their routes to get people where they need to go. This would mitigate a key issue that is often raised in regard to ridesharing --
that it has the potential to clog streets.
Speaking of PRT in the 70s, for quite some time the Morgantown PRT in West Virginia was the only functioning example of one. (I believe nowadays there are a couple others):
A highly used system would be able to do it all, cars to take you to a bus, to take you to a train, bus at the other end, and then more cars, all scheduled JIT.
Throw in a standardised luggage system and lockable storage boxes at stations etc, to keep all the stuff you have around in your car, and you're getting somewhere.
Charge someone who wants to travel alone by car 10x as much as those who share and move between modes of transport
Then they charge you for all luggage like the air planes. While plastering you with targeted ads. I dont know what the future is going to look like more...idiocracy or black mirror.
Right now you can get in your car turn off your phone and radio and go where you want in peace. I bet they build a tier systems with autonomous cars. Pay this much it will go this fast. Pay more it will go faster. There will be like 3 major companies and like the internet providers you will have to pick the lesser of all evil.
Do I think they are cool, yes. Do I like the technology, yes. Do I like where the businesses will go with this technology, no.
Super easy to move between modes of transport if you don't have kids.
Moving the car seat alone makes car sharing a huge pain. And it's true now more than ever since now there's a social/safety expectation to have children in a full seat or booster seat until they're at least 10-12 years old.
Of course, if you have children, you're not using the car alone.
Many states do not require a carseat in a taxi. California is not currently one of them, but I can see this changing when more vehicles on the road are automated.
What do you guys think of a solution where the driverless leg of the trip is also passengerless. In v1 of the system the passenger is required to have a license and will follow route guidance from the car to navigate to their destination. After arrival the car will return to autonomous mode and take much safer precautions to the next customer.
As they loaded Kayleigh Hutschins, age 36, onto the stretcher, it waited. Rick was a new EMT. He just got his certs about 3 weeks ago. He was told of the 'shadows' in classes. But seeing one was still a bit un-nerving. Daniel, the more veteran EMT was marking the time, but knew there was no rush to get to the hospital.
'Yeah, they freaked me out at first too' Daniel said into the ambulance's sterile white lights, he looked back at the freshie.
'They go all the way to the hospital, right behind us, yeah?' Rick wondered if the stories were true.
'Yeah, as long as her credit card still works, it'll be right on our ass'
'What happens then? When we get to the back door?'
'Follow us right in, thank God John Muir's not a blind road and has an exit. UCSF just has a loading dock, damn things block us in all the time and we have to call SFPD to get em moved out of the way.'
'How long do they stay for?'
'In the parking lot? They'll stay until her card is cancelled or the family does something. Homelanders like y'all can't pinch two nickels, so the family'll likely never contact the card company cus they'll hound them for years about her debts.' Rick looked at her glowing green fingernails, perfectly manicured.
'After 30 days John Muir or the other hospitals just calls the car company and gets them to move. All at once. It's a laugh riot.'
As they loaded her into the bay, the shadow inched forward the exact same amount.
Aiden was bouncing around with Peppa Pig singing songs. The grass was green and he was in the iPad too! So much fun Aiden and Peppa! Wee!
But then Aiden was awake.
The softness under the nylon of his car seat smelled good, like rain on Daddy's driveway. All Aiden could see was darkness and the blue and orange glow of the car. It was night now. They weren't at Daddy's anymore, but he wasn't at Mommy's house yet either.
There were noises outside, a man's voice, deep. Not Daddy's. Aiden was confused. Aiden was scared
The front door opened. The man got in, well, he more fell in. Aiden was very scared. Where is Mommy? Where is anyone?
The man smelled strange too, like Uncle Greg. That bread-like smell when Uncle Greg drank Parent's Soda.
Aiden was so scared. He just wanted to be back with his iPad dancing with Peppa! Aiden started to scream and cry! Mommy! Peppa!
'Aw fuck, therhss a kidh n thsss fuckher!' The man tried to say, but his mouth sounded like it was full of drool or sand. He smelled really bad now.
Aiden kept screaming for Mommy. Hot tears and snot.
The man turned around, his eyes were red and poofy. His hair was stringy and he was sweating a lot. He looked at Aiden but his eyes kept drifting and he kept tilting his head.
'Ssssshhhhhhh. sssalll right kiddao. Weell get ya basck hhhome. S'll call the Pawlice nn get sha basck to yer Mawmy' The man slurred a lot and got back out of the car.
The man slumped down on the side of the car and took out his phone, Aiden could see over the side of his carseat. He was so scared. Where was Mommy? Who is this man?
After a long time of crying for Mommy flashing lights came by the car. The blue and red colors were so bright. The man stood up and went over to the lights, but fell down a lot. A police lady came to the car and opened it after talking to the man.
'You ok, sugar? How are you feeling.' Aiden looked at her, this wasn't Mommy.
'It's ok now sugar, your Mommy is coming real quick, OK? Were you on the way from your Daddy's to Mommy's?' Aiden nodded and gripped the belts of his carseat tighter.
Is the cautious mode going to obstruct traffic or something? Or are you saying that exposing other people to risk is okay and exposing users of the service is not?
If the autonomous system can't operate in a way that passengers would be comfortable with I don't see why it should be allowed on the roads at all.
I don't think that would work. First, nobody wants to drive a taxi. Unless it was really cheap most people would just get a lyft and not worry about following guidance from their taxi. Second, most of the people at risk of dying from a malfunctioning self driving car will be people outside the car. Third, how are you going to convince regulators your car is safe if you're making concessions like that? The government is a slow beuracracy and won't take kindly to halfway solutions that will force them to do things over once things are actually ready.
And as pessimistic as I'm being, I don't think its that bad of an idea. I just wouldn't put my money on it.
I am picturing your conversation with the insurance company:
“So in autonomous mode, the car takes many precautions, so it is really safe”
“Sounds good. So why do you want to let the customer drive?”
“Because they will be less cautious”
“I am raising your premiums”
Do you think self-driving cars will have different shapes in future, or is the existing typical look of cars the optimum shape?
TBH, I can see lots of problems even in existing cars for people - too many blind spots, too uncomfortable to get in and get out, more dangerous for those sitting on the driving side.
I wonder if all these problems will go away with self-driving cars, or are they necessary consequences of an optimum design to meet safety regulations.
I think the "uncomfortable to get in and out" needs to be addressed. Without the steering wheel, perhaps the seat can swivel, or perhaps passengers can exit from the front or back.
I doubt, at typical car speeds, aerodynamics is a big factor. It's not like a jet.
That touches some on one of the big potential advantages of having a "cloud" of cheap self-driving cars available.
Right now, people need their own car and can mostly only afford one, so they only buy cars that are at least pretty good at everything. And that's like 90% of the market, economies of scale are so strong that car companies don't really make anything but that.
Cars that drive on the freeway get a decent advantage from being aerodynamic. And right now, basically nobody wants to buy a car that can't run on the freeway efficiently.
If the self-driving car world moves car ownership from individuals to large taxi fleets, then markets open up for all sorts of specialized vehicles. Now we can make something that's super easy to enter and exit but has poor aerodynamics and high-speed handling. They might be awful on the highway, but the self-driving car taxi company will still buy some as long as they have enough non-highway ride requests and interest in the vehicle type.
An interesting idea that Mercedes showed in their self-driving prototypes (which only ran on a hardcoded loop for that test) was having all seats face the middle, so the passengers could look at one another.
That's a lot more comfortable, and already common for the rear two rows in larger cars.
Most trains I've ridden on have seats like this and it seems to work out OK. If you're one of the people who gets motion sickness if not facing forward, just grab one of the forward-facing seats.
Get rid of the need for windows and steering wheel you have a lot of options. In a self-driving taxi you could even have multiple self contained 'cubicles' so you could share rides and not have to interact with anybody else.
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.
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.
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.
This article is actually just about them buying the cars. But currently their service operates in a small area in Arizona... A state chosen because they decided not to require Waymo to disclose safety statistics that other states like California require of self-driving cars.
They mentioned "25 cities" in the article though. I wonder when they'll release the complete list.
> Takeaway number two: You may come in contact with these cars sooner than you think, especially if you live in one of the 25 cities where Waymo is currently testing the tech.
If someone is familiar with the US, are these cities all mainly wide freeway, low traffic? Or do they include cities with difficult, narrow, busy streets and also country lanes?
Last I heard the only place they are currently truly driverless is Chandler, AZ. A suburb of Phoenix. It has wide quiet roads and large freeways (I don't think they autonomously drive on there, always have seen a driver). Also very clean road lines and almost no weather.
That's correct, they are testing in those cities, but AFAIK, only specially trained Waymo contractors are involved in those locations who can intervene during a failure. (Some parts of) Phoenix is the only place they're currently allowing passengers, where they conveniently, do not need to disclose any information about their safety record.
also chosen because chandler az has essentially ideal driving conditions. they have been for years now operating in ca which does require them to disclose safety statistics
But again: Any operation in California has been with trained test drivers. So the likelihood of accidents is significantly lower than without them, as in the program launched in Arizona. They had to disclose disengagement statistics, but drivers definitely could (and did) disengage the system to prevent accidents.
That said, Waymo did test the fireflies (the little bubble cars) pretty extensively in the MTV area, and I believe those had no driver at all, either safety or remote. But they also weren't classified as (basically) golf carts and not motor vehicles.
And yeah, it's very clear that waymo is interested in moving towards full autonomy faster than the California legislature is, and so it's making advances in areas where such things are allowed.
Elsewhere you said the move to AZ was because of the difference in reporting required. While I guess technically true, I think that the real answer is broader. What waymo wants to do isn't legal at all in CA. The looser reporting required is just gravy on the ability to actually test the cars.
AFAIK, Google lobbied for that lack of reporting requirements, so removing vital safety protections was a big part of this. Similarly, it isn't "testing" cars to put passengers in them, that's putting people's lives in the hands of beta hardware.
The fact that a significant amount of California politicians have been bought and paid for by Google and are still resistant to adopting Google's preferred legislation on self-driving cars shows some level of how reckless Google has been here.
> The fact that a significant amount of California politicians have been bought and paid for by Google and are still resistant to adopting Google's preferred legislation on self-driving cars shows some level of how reckless Google has been here.
Alternatively, the fact that they are unwilling to adopt Google's preferred legislation disproves your premise that they are bought and paid for by Google, collapsing your entire argument.
What vital safety protections do you believe are missing?
>The fact that a significant amount of California politicians have been bought and paid for by Google and are still resistant to adopting Google's preferred legislation on self-driving cars shows some level of how reckless Google has been here.
Erm, there are about 30 conjectures in this statement. I don't know how I can have a good faith conversation with you when you say stuff like this that I can best describe as made up nonsense. Its tautological and impossible to even imagine a counterargument. Just to be clear, here's what you're assuming:
- Google's vehicles are unsafe (if they weren't what they are doing wouldn't be reckless, by definition)
- Google has significant control of the CA legislature
- Google is resistant to this regulation for safety reasons, and not some other reason (for example: competative advantage)
- California's regulations don't harm Google's advances in areas unrelated to safety
Just as a simple counterexample: Waymo wants to beta test the infrastructure for scaling out its fleet without safety drivers. There have been 0 disengagements in the last N,000 miles (where, say, N is suitably large), and the cars appear able to drive themselves in all circumstances they encounter in Phoenix. In such a case, continuing to require safety drivers (as in CA) would be harmful to their goals, and wouldn't actually have an impact on safety.
To summarize: your entire argument that Google is being reckless is predicated on their vehicles being unsafe. If they arne't unsafe, nothing else follows. You don't trust Google. But I don't understand where "don't trust" becomes "actively assume malice at every point". That seems, strange.
> The details are a bit sketchy. Ask "how many thousands," and you're told, ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Off-topic: I was surprised to see that journalists are doing Unicode art in articles now, and I don’t think that’s wise. Wouldn’t this confuse a blind reader who is listening to a transcribed version?
I was impressed to discover that on macOS, asking it to speak '¯\_(ツ)_/¯' results in it saying "shrug". The exact form from the article without the backslash for the left arm, though, results in it saying "comma" for some (very) strange reason. For example:
Is this a joke? I just ran it and got something like "macron colo-con letter to underscore macron" And that's... The best I can interpret, it's very muddled.
edit: Ah, I see your response to someone else. I'm going to try Allison.
edit: Ha! It is Allison! "Shrug". What a time to be alive!
Strange, I'm on 10.13.3... have you tried running the say commands at the command-line? My speech settings are set to "Allison", so perhaps it's a feature of the advanced voices?
> have you tried running the say commands at the command-line
I don't know how else to run it :)
But you guessed it. I have 4 voices, Samantha/Victoria/Alex/Fred. I was using Alex. Samantha behaves as you say, all others behave as I say. (Strangely enough, now it says "Samantha (downloading)", so maybe after download it will be 'fixed'?)
It's fun to try stuff like this. In iOS for example you can go to Settings - General - Accessibility - VoiceOver to try the screen reader experience.
For the shruggie I get "macron backslash underscore japanese in a different voice slash macron," which sucks. Too bad - I was hoping it would be recognized as a word.
Wouldn't the same thing happen with ":-)", which is likely to appear (and be relevant) in quotations if nothing else?
I'd expect a screen reader to handle ":-)", and given that Slack has had /shrug for years, I am curious if screen readers also know how to pronounce the shrug yet.
Looks at the source, in this instance, the emoji is not accessible. It's text in the paragraph, just like the actually words. The author is relying on tools like Jaws/NVDA correctly translating a graphic into spoken word.
There are ways to add emojis in an accessible fashion. You'd have to treat them like images and add alt text or some aria attributes to ensure the screen-reader interprets it correctly. Or, use predefined Unicode verisons.
Neither was done here and Wired should be ashamed of themselves for not even making an effort.
Their article format is Markdown, and if you enter the full shrug as Markdown then the back slash escapes the underscore to prevent it becoming markup, but it is removed in the process.
I was trying to make a joke about the journalist not caring about screen readers. Also, the correct way to shrug in markdown is ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ (verified in github and gitlab).
That's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that the proposed solution would be nothing more than doing the same thing again, but as a transcription service. Unicode updates with new emojis too.
Being more adaptive than that requires offloading the responsibility of readability to the writers. If I write a blog post featuring a unique ascii emoji I made up, I can't expect a third party to handle that for blind patrons, regardless if it's a transcription service or unicode.
Yes, my point is that a transcription service or screen reader will be well served by having a database containing symbol sequences like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯".
And transcription services should certainly recognize "¯_(ツ)_/¯" as a failed attempt at "¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Screen readers probably should too.
If they are sticking to whatever Unicode blesses they aren't serving their users well.
Also, I read provost as talking about the art in general, including a correct shrug, so I replied in that context instead of spending time on the missing \.
I think the point is that there are still people to punish, but it will be harder for people to make that connection. Humans wrote the algorithms which “drive” the car; there’s nothing de novo here.
When I drive a car, I am liable for all accidents made with me behind the wheel. An acceptable risk.
When I write self-driving software, am I suddenly liable for all accidents made by all of those cars when my software is driving? Because the stakes there are quite a bit higher. Personally I wouldn't take the risk.
How to handle liability with a computer behind the wheel without strangling innovation isn't a solved problem as far as I know.
Justice is generally enforced by a human with a proven track record of being reasonable, a judge. I don’t think a judge will go after a CS intern because she forgot a semi-colon in her pull-request. A judge might very well go after a company that has a pattern of emails arguing that dodging around requirements on brakes saves money by not having to replace them as often.
In the case of manual driving, there is an understanding that humans might kill other humans when operating a motor vehicle and the enforcement focuses on a subset of precautions (alcohol, speed, lanes and, for professionals, continuous hours of work). For lane assistance and robot cars, there are no explicit list of guidelines yet, but there should soon be enough cases around: clearly communicating to drivers what is their responsibility; taking necessary steps (which might need professional bodies to define) when releasing something new, possibly a dedicated bureau. Cases will be more complicated because, presumably, only large corporations can handle those. The responsibility will most likely be focusing on testing practices and enforcement, not individual coders.
I suspect the closest structure will be pharmaceuticals & medical devices: it is currently acceptable to sell complex products made by large corporations that can statistically be related to thousands of people dying -- because they come with scientifically sound studies on samples, proving that they save more given a certain diagnostic. A public body defines how to prove that those help and private initiatives try to match those criteria, asking for experimental exceptions to medical practice.
Google has a habit of testing A/B on half of the world’s online population, so they might push against not trying more widely than small tests at clinical scale. There could be an interest in building a realistic simulator and testing code in there; building tracks able to replicate edge cases with mannequin -- things that actually already exist for the auto industry.
The prize is so large and the brand impact of being seen as unsafe too large for stakeholders to not find a reasonable solution.
It isn’t a solved problem, and no one engineer writes something this complex. The question of how groups of people, governments, corporations and so on can be liable in wrongful death is however. Rarely applied, but settled.
Yeah because businesses and the wealthy always disregard financial liability and the potential PR disasters of robots killing people on public streets /s
Business themselves don't cause them. They can try to have good processes, verification, etc, etc, ... but even then something can happen by simple human error.
Waymo says there are 1.25 million deaths worldwide per year due to car accidents. 94% of them have at least some human error component.
Honestly, we have to get over this "someone must pay" mentality. If the rate of deaths falls from 1.25 million to 125,000 that will be a 90% drop in deaths. We should not be looking to punish Google or other companies for their contribution in reducing deaths because the status quo isn't good.
What happens when a sober driver, following the rules, runs over someone? I suppose the same will happen here. If negligence will be found on the part of the engineers, that could get tougher though.
"Waymo" was invented so that the press would stop calling them Google cars, because in case things go awry, Google as a whole would be under fire. This way "Waymo" (effectively a department of Google) can be thrown under the bus effortlessly with no PR damage to Google.
They don't want people thinking of Google when their cars are holding up traffic, turn out to be assholes when merging or changing lanes, or cause a fatal accident. Thus, Waymo.
In general I think separating brands is a good idea. And I think, at least from technical perspective (not legal perspective) you shouldn't blame Google in case something goes bad, and rather Waymo. After all, the set of people running Google search or Android are very different from those managing the self-driving car project.
In some sense, a single entity Google is an illusion so best to avoid it.
There are other reasons to have separate entities beyond just legal issues. You can find some guesses out there as to who was responsible for Alpha or why Alphabet was created. But having other 'bets' provides some niceties around: earnings reporting, and spinning-off/selling entities if needed.
I'm also guessing it helps lure in potential leaders like John Krafcik (CEO of Waymo), because these execs can come onboard with the title of CEO rather than some VP within Google. (though, Krafcik joined Google 1 year before Waymo was founded).
That's right. It definitely helps hiring. In the executive level by fancier titles (rather be one of thousand VPs or CFO of Waymo, it's not even a comparison), but also at more junior levels. The usual marketing spiel there is we are like a "startup" but with the resources of a giant company.
While they are different people, they are still the same money, and so Google's top managers still should be shamed for not investing enough in car safety.
I'm not sure the motivation was as ill-intentioned as you indicate. Yes they spun it off the but I don't think Google was re-structured into Alphabet (and subsidiaries) for this reason. Waymo is a self driving car business, Google is a search engine that provides online services. I don't think the two overlap in a way that makes sense to club their businesses together into one quarterly report.
And it worked. I must have missed the news when Waymo was spun off, because I didn't realize they were former Google folks until like... last week. I kept wondering where the hell these guys came from and how they suddenly had the money to come up with this super-advanced tech by themselves.
I'm not actually all that interested in self-driving cars at this point in their development (one can only be excited about a finite number of non-existent things at once), so I haven't been scouring articles, merely skimming (if even that). I've noticed the articles mention Google but figured they're mentioning it because Google also has a self-driving car they're working on.
TBH most of the articles I've read that mention Waymo are in relation to their lawsuit with Uber, and many of them say "Alphabet" and not "Google", and Alphabet still doesn't register as Google in my mind.
I think Google implemented one of the recommendations from Innovator’s dilemma. Where you want new ventures to be as independent from the parent company as possible. E.g. earnings of 1mm for parent company might be insignificant, but very desirable for a new product.
Google had to split into Alphabet divisions. Executive focus doesn't scale. Arguably, they did it too late, which is why they shit the bed so bad with Google Cloud, a technically superior offering that for years had poor support, no focus, and further fell behind AWS.
The printing press that is advertising there steals all the focus.
I'm convinced that if Waymo was a division of Google, they wouldn't be close to monetizing.
I think they just wanted something for investors to know by name outside of "other bets". Easier to say you're losing money investing in Waymo than their other more conventional money losing ideas.
It's probably for the best, same with the decision to change Google the megacorporation into Alphabet, with the Google brand focusing on search and internet.
All this reorganization happened after Ruth Porat took over as Google's new CFO. Prior to that, activities of the bread and butter money-making parts and more speculative parts of Google were not separated. This made investors nervous because while they viewed Google as a money factory, they also viewed it as run by crazy geniuses who might be wasting untold amounts of money on their fun research projects.
It seems Porat felt that Google would be in a better position by separating all that out so that things are more transparent to investors. If the stock price is any indication of how investors felt about that, she was right.
This doesn't mean that the Google brand couldn't still be applied to Waymo's activities, as is the case with Google Fiber, which kept the name. But it is not just Waymo that lost the Google brand in the process: Google X became just X, and Google Life Sciences became Verily.
Hard to tell why initially you were downvoted so much. It's actually a very interesting comment for me, and a very clever strategy because if Waymo fails, while the press will say it's Google owned, it will still be felt as a separated entity. If it succeeds there will be a stronger link between the two brands in people's mind, and such link can be made stronger via marketing.
I downvoted because it's a pretty strong and cynical-seeming accusation with little evidence. If it was suggested as a theory for the spinoff (or the entire Alphabet re-org?) or as one of the likely motivating factors, I think it would add to the discussion, but as-is, it's stated as fact that the sole reason for Waymo becoming its own company was to shield Google PR.
There are many Alphabet companies: Calico, CapitalG, Chronicle, DeepMind, Jigsaw, Nest Labs, Sidewalk Labs, Verily, Waymo. Is the idea that all of these were created under the same PR-driven motivation? I think it's much more reasonable that it was a legitimate re-org of a massive company, and that organizational units want their own identity and autonomy.
Are you sure? What about Google+? Guess they spent at least a billion for that.
Google's search and ad network is paying (directly or indirectly) for everything. All other projects are just to keep people using their search and seeing ads on their platform.
I don't have numbers but I was thinking to spectacular failures like Google Wave or similar software projects. For sure they were also built by large teams and costed a non trivial amount of money, but this kind of research on autonomous vehicles, it's spawning a much larger amount of time and requires non common experts, there are tons of legal issues related, and you don't stop because people are not using it... it is a technological problem so you spend more and more resources trying to crack it. So I've the feeling that it's significantly more costly than other attempts that Google did in the past, but I've no numbers. I guess the Waymo numbers are simpler to get, because now it's a spin-off (but we should add all the money spent before the spin-off), but the cost of things like Wave are near impossible to obtain, I can imagine.
Since the restructuring, it is Alphabet that is publicly traded. As a result Waymo is part of the publicly traded entity equally to Google. You can already invest in Waymo by investing in Alphabet.
That is true but what usually then would happen is successful businesses are then spun out and they do their own IPO.
Alphabet would retain controlling interesting. This is pretty common but not the only way. Sometimes parent company shareholders are given shares in the new company directly. So say every share of GOOG might be given a share of Waymo Inc for example. It is not always the case that the parent company keeps control.
It can also happen the other way where a sub is public and the parent does an IPO.
The structure of Alphabet is what gives the flexibility to do this.
Back in the mid 70's there was a 'personal rapid transport' or PRT system proposed which was individual 'cars' on a rail system that were smart enough to stop at a station. The idea was that the rail line had switches where a PRT unit (4 or 8 passenger) could go into a station when called with an elevator like button. You would get in, and then it would head out on the track and not stop again until your destination station.
The idea was that it eliminated the two biggest issues with 'public transportation' which were pickup and drop off schedules that forced waits when you transferred from one line to another, and the fact that the train/bus would make all stops forcing it to be slower than a point to point bus/train.
I believe you could implement that system safely on a dedicated 'self driving car' road. And such roads would be less expensive to build than a rail infrastructure.