(Photo Credit Curbed)
The allure of self-driving vehicles is huge for most techies, with the initial focus on personal vehicles and then an expansion to commercial vehicles (like taxis and mac trucks). Waymo, one of the most well-known self-driving projects, can trace some of its origin story to Carnegie Mellon University. In the late 1980s, CMU was also known for developing the ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network), which looks like a self-driving ice cream truck. A few years later, Sebastian Thrun joined the CMU computer science department & did much of his early work on robotics there, before leaving for Stanford. Thrun then helped found Google X in 2009 with Anthony Levandowski, with the first major X project focusing on self-driving cars. X incubated this project for several years, then spun it out into Waymo in December 2016. In May 2020, Waymo received a $3B investment from venture capital and private equity investors, so they continue to find their “way forward in mobility.”
Another company which made a failed foray into self-driving cars was Uber. The Uber Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was based in Pittsburgh (right near CMU) and was Uber’s answer to helping make its ride-sharing unit profitable. There was another self-driving Uber Freight unit based in San Francisco, co-founded by Levandowski. That imploded in 2018 when Waymo sued & Uber settled, as Levandowski was later convicted of stealing Waymo’s technology & served 18 months in prison. [Fun fact: I visited the UF offices with a small group of students for a private tour & chat with the co-CEO Lior Ron in Dec 2017 shortly before the scandal broke. Very cool technology but huge oops!] ATG then shifted to focusing solely on developing passenger vehicles until December 2020, when they were sold to Aurora Innovation. Super curious to see how Uber charts its path to profitability now.
And there is also a wave of self-driving commercial cars in development. Cruise, a majority-owned subsidiary of GM, had announced in Jan 2020 the launch of a new electric autonomous shuttle car, to be used primarily within urban environments. Chinese WeRide received $200million in funding in Dec 2020 as part of the race to build autonomous vehicles in China. Right around that time, Amazon's Zoox acquisition launched its first vehicle, another similar autonomous robot taxi. And all of these definitely look like toasters on wheels. Some would say that the cute & innocuous design is to help a wider group of consumers to feel comfortable with trying this technology, whereas many early adopters love the sleek & futuristic look of cars like Tesla instead. The boxy style of many self-driving cars also facilitates functioning of the complex web of sensors these cars need to work properly. And speaking of, Tesla has included ‘auto steer’ features in some of its vehicles for a while, but just announced that Full Self Driving could be here for car owners as soon as April 2021.
The line between tech firms and car companies is continuing to blur, especially when you see the more traditional car company Hyundai outlaid around $1B in December 2020 to acquire robotics firm Boston Dynamics.
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How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA : these are such odd words to see strung together
