Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment
Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development...
reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.
Tesla would love to offer the reassurance to buyers but there’s a reason they haven’t done so: they’d lose money on it.
Has no one watched Fight Club and heard the anecdote about how a company will only recall a car if the cost of the recall is lower than the cost of settling all the lawsuits? All this guarantee tells us is that Mercedes did a similar calculation. Taking legal liability is not proof the car is safe. It is proof that they think the value of customers thinking the car is safe is more valuable than the cost of paying out settlements. Tesla not making the guarantee does not prove their cars are unsafe. It is evidence that if they did the same calculation, that got a different result. Maybe that is because the car is more dangerous, but it could also just be a different marketing philosophy and Tesla notably does not approach marketing like most other car companies.
The conclusion that you reached in which the Mercedes is safer than the Tesla is valuable to Mercedes and that opinion was indirectly purchased by Mercedes paying out legal settlements.
Think about it like this: company A says “our government product is military-grade. We have a 1 year warranty.” while company B also says their product is tough but offers a 5 year warranty. Which one do you think has better data supporting the durability of their product?
The precedents set in that case mean that the liabilities arising out of legal action based on 'strict liability' are likely to be extremely punitive (these days, well upwards of the $147M awarded against Ford in 1980, and into the billions). Any company that did not factor such a payment in their calculation in addition to the indirect costs of reputational damage, deserves everything they get. I doubt this is the case with Mercedes.
One question I do have that perhaps someone here will know - is the Mercedes guarantee limited to certain locales? e.g. Germany only as the roads there are in good condition and well marked? (I'm assuming here).
Tesla will not - it will blame the human driver for not paying attention. That's the difference.
It’s for traffic jams, and only usable in them. There’s not a big legal liability when the biggest risk is probably a fender bender.
The bigger difference is that Mercedes’ system only works on highways, under 40 mph, and you need a car in front of you that it essentially follows.
And geofenced to specific highways, only during the day and during good weather.
It's still cool (to me at least). But it's bizarre seeing people dismiss FSD as being the same as adaptive cruise control while touting Mercede's Drive Pilot. Drive Pilot is a lot closer to adaptive cruise control than FSD.
It's unfortunate that there's so much misinformation that gets thrown around whenever this topic comes up.
DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone. Please refer to the Operator’s Manual for a full list of conditions required for DRIVE PILOT.
Only on select freeways and only under 40 mph (and only during daytime with good weather conditions) sounds like it wouldn't be particularly useful.
Still, the tech is cool, and moving in the right direction. It's just always hard to really tell the state of things without doing some digging, because there's a ton of misinformation that gets thrown about whenever this topic comes up.
If it's full self driving, then I assume that Tesla is paying for your insurance and taking all responsibility for any crashes it causes in your car?
How impressive it is depends on where you live.
Did it also drive itself back to your home empty?
As such, it's been roughly 12 years just around the corner for Tesla and Musk enthusiasts.
To be more specific: Musk explicitly said in that marketing event that buying anything other the Tesla wouldn't make economic sense, as they'll earn their own price back as self driving Taxis within the following two years.
Still blows my mind that people believed him anything as these kinds of unrealistic promises were at the heart of every event since the start.
Believing someone with promises like that is - from my perspective - begging to get scammed.
From that point of view, people should be glad the delivered cars were decent. Most purchases with outlandish promises end with merchandise that is borderline unusable.
Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.
As an 11 years Toyota driver I agree.
Even if it is just a Toyota vehicle with Waymo brains
Does the Waymo brain need all the Waymo hardware?
With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance...
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...
But they probably could use less if they had better software and networking in the car. I think automotive systems tend to be built like: add 1 ecu and 1 sensor for 1 function. So they can do all the functional safety analysis for that one system in isolation. I expect they can't just keep adding all these single purpose functions and features without a central computer indefinitely but they don't have one right now. A brain like waymo (probably has?) could possibly fix that.
We've agreed to let the engineering staff from both companies directly exchange information in a place and form that we would not normally allow to occur. Hopefully they work out a way to glue our two stacks together.
They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
Concepts of a plan
Maybe because it is true?
It reeks of manual fitting. Tesla surveys an area and makes manual adjustments that keep the system from misbehaving for a while until something changes and then it’s back to shit.
And in the 12 months I've had the car, it has gotten noticeably better maybe 2 times. Once last year, and then once in February. After the iteration last year, it drove fairly well, but I still had to intervene once or twice per trip. Now I make it through half of my trips without intervening, and when I do intervene it tends to be to avoid embarrassment vs safety (not committing, wrong lane for an upcoming turn, etc).
Given how ai is advancing, I am pretty confident they will get this working fully autonomously with just vision, it's just a question of when.
Knowing how prone to exaggeration Elon is, my bar was low. But it blew me away honestly. After nearly 30 years working in software and with some background in machine learning and computer vision and generally just trying to make software that works reliably, it's a pretty jaw dropping experience.
Would I take a nap in the back seat and let it drive? No. But does it allow me to sit there focused on a technical podcast or an audiobook so I feel like I'm getting back an hour or two a day instead of worrying about driving? Absolutely.
That said, I still don't "trust" FSD to the point where I could comfortably be in the backseat taking a nap just yet. 99% is not "good enough" for something as critical as driving.
But when the usual outcome is death, i suppose a coma is an improvement.
If there simply isn’t enough visual information, vision-only will fail.
And in a safety-critical system, the distinction is not mere pedantry.
It’s actually the one case where Google’s customer service beats the competition’s. Waymo customer service is still somewhat trash. But you need it so infrequently compared with Uber, and Uber and Lyft somehow manage to make Google look like a people company, that I find myself almost exclusively taking Waymo when I’m in a city where it is an option. (Via the Waymo app.)
There is a reason even taxi companies are now partnering with Uber in places like DC.
I travel a lot between business (not as much now) and personally. I know I can land in any airport domestically and most airports internationally and can get a ride on Uber and with surge pricing someone will usually pick me up.
It isn’t financially viable to have enough Waymo cars on the road that will be able to handle peak demand and just sit there during low demand.
Uber is buying time, Waymo is buying velocity
Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.
Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.
Can you say more about this?
Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.
It was probably because cops stopped enforcing traffic laws during COVID and never started again:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...
Granted, plenty of douchebags will have made their money and scrammed, but founders would prefer to emulate the biggest winners which is what matters.
Nobody is out here emulating the business practices of John Studebaker though I'm sure he died plenty rich.
My sense is that plug-in hybrids really are the sweet spot for a lot of people in North America. The shorter full EV range is still well within most people's needs for a typical day's worth of driving, but you can still travel to and through rural areas without so much stress about whether you'll get stuck killing time for an hour or two at a slow charge station.
It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips.
A few years ago this was true, but now that Tesla has opened up their network of chargers, your destination probably has to be >100 miles away from most interstate highways before road trip charging becomes much of an issue.
I can fill my tank and be back on the road in <5 minutes in most cases, and I only have to do that once every 350 miles.
With an EV, I would be stopping anywhere from 10-30minutes (depending on the kinds of chargers available) (assuming I don’t have to wait for one to open up), and I’d be doing it twice as often.
It adds a very meaningful amount of time to long car trips.
But charging for regular use is dramatically better. Anytime you're not on a road trip, you spend essentially no time fueling. Just plug in at night like you do with other electronics.
So I'll take saving 15 mins every week avoiding the gas station, in exchange for the couple times a year I have to wait an extra 15 mins charging.
On long road trips you get the fast re-energizing of a gas car.
For regular use if your plug in every night there is a good chance you can do most of your driving in EV mode. Current plug-in hybrids often have EV mode ranges of 40+ miles.
This is what someone I know with a RAV4 Prime reports. They plug in at night and it seems to mostly use the battery. It does sometime use the ICE but it is infrequently enough that they have only had to put more gas in every few months.
286 miles at 70 MPH
249 miles at 75 MPH
232 miles at 75 MPH with 2kW of heating
...that model seems to take about 45 minutes to charge from 10-80%:
https://evkx.net/models/ford/mustang_mach-e/mustang_mach-e_l...
Also when I do road trips, I'll tend to do multiple shorter stops which according to that link means I'm closer to the "optimum charging area" than going 10%-80% in one sitting, so that might have caused me to overshoot that estimate a little.
So beyond that slight amendment of switching that one ~30 minute charging stop to two ~15 minute stops, the answer to ketzo's question is "yes, really", but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
I don't think I have ever plugged into a supercharger more than 10/15 minutes.
That’s not nothing!
The battery pack is much smaller. A Prius PHEV is almost 500 lbs lighter than a Model 3 and only 100 lbs heavier than a normal hybrid Prius, which also has a battery pack. The MSRP is lower by almost $10k, which can cover a lot of maintenance before you resell it with less depreciation.
but the downside is maintenance of ICE engine and transmission and all consumables
Hydrogen fuel cell is more about diversification, and it is fully backed by the Japan gov so ROI would be through the roof even if it doesn't "win".
Also many countries aren't producing enough electricity (cough Japan and Germanycough) so EVs getting popular _at scale_ isn't going to happen tomorrow either.
Right now there's a plant that is stopped by the gov from getting back into production for safety issues, with the elec company trying to appeal for the nth time, and it sure doesn't help the overall image.
"This time it will be fine" is kinda hard to stomach for the impacted public to be honest.
For Japan to be that good at nuclear, there first needs to be a way to gracefully fail and retry, instead of making whole regions unhabitable for a century. We're clearly not there yet.
Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree.
It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars. It becomes obvious when we look at the total emissions generated by that pool of 100k cars.
If there's anyone to blame, I'd look at the luxury division - Mercedes, Audi and BMW (and also Genesis/Acura) - all late to the party, and still haven't been successful at meaningfully replacing the vehicles they would sell to their customers yet.
8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.
Sure, numerous EV startups will bite the dust, but the actual tech of putting a battery on wheels and spinning the wheels with motors isn't going anywhere.
They also sold 4k RAV4 EVs
Toyota has sold over 33,000 BZ4Xs in the U.S..
https://electrek.co/2025/01/03/toyota-bz4x-sales-finally-pic...
https://insideevs.com/news/755382/bz4x-solterra-sales-increa...
The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.
Combined mileage from many hybrid power trains is only ~10% better, and the technology inherently adds significant costs/complexity.
But there’s ~45 MPG all gas cars that have been built. Currently the best option is 39MPG combined, but that car’s aerodynamics aren’t great because hybrids can push that a little further for people who really want maximum MPG.
It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars.
It seems like hybrid sales are pretty comparable to EV sales in the U.S., at least according to this source anyway.
have been clear
I disagree. They backed hydrogen / fuel cells for most of the years others were developing bevs.
death spiral that they haven’t even noticed yet
Not noticed, because they're printing money with their hybrids that all have year-long waitlists in the US. Gas stations are alive and well, and until the housing crisis is fixed (not happening in our lifetime), people will be reliant on gas vehicles because you can't charge at most apartment complexes.
Toyota has been way, way behind on electrification
They’re Toyota. They can buy their way onto the winner’s table later.
The salesman bluntly told me to get a Tesla and half heartedly tried to get me to look at a hybrid. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there with a friend.
In retrospect, I am happier with my used Model 3 than an electric car from a company with no intent on winning the market.
For most of America, EV'S and the associated infrastructure aren't QUITE there yet.
I do wish they’d make a plug in hybrid Sienna…
Wow, you’re more right than I thought. Ford is way higher than I would have thought too.
Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.
Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
So like a train?
You might not value that, but lots of other people do.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.
We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.
(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)
It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
If the car ahead of you is sharing visibility and braking data, you can drive on their bumper and stop when they stop.
If the car next to you is receiving route data, they can open a spot for you to get to your exit.
The benefit is large and NOT REQUIRED for normal operation. It's the easiest coordination problem in the world, because it's all upside and practically atomic.
There can still exist space for cars but they need to be last in priority rather than the first, second, and third consideration cars have today when it comes to infrastructure.
The town I live in has many streets without sidewalks, and even the ones with sidewalks, many of those are entirely unsuitable for wheelchairs. Designing the streets to have pedestrian needs prioritized over cars would make the streets more handicap accessible not less.
Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”
For every bus you can take ~50 cars off the road.
Doing things the right way requires civic-minded effort. The average American is just way too individualistic to make a dent in this problem.
Majority said that USA will be better if more people started working in factories, but a minority said USA will be better if /they/ worked in factories.
It's the whole "I got mine" mentality, where people are not willing to compromise on their own comfort for the greater good, yet they expect others to do so.
I don't think this is unique to the US, I think it's just very egregious there at the moment.
They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.
horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains
This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.
I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.
Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...
Here's another vision of the future - gradually everyone's cars become self-driving, and now cars are more accessible to a wider range of people. 30% of the population currently can't drive due to age or disability, but if cars drive themselves the elderly, disabled, and even children can now own and operate vehicles. And now you have 30% more cars on an already congested road system. That should be enough to make traffic jams the norm everywhere.
But in case that wasn't bad enough, consider this - now people can do other things while they travel, because they don't have to be driving. So, in turn, they can live further and further away from their workplaces in cheaper, larger houses and do more of their work on the go. And while they do this they're spending more time on the roads, and - you guessed it - causing more congestion.
And because parking will always be expensive and hard to find in busy city centers, people will set their cars to loiter while they visit, rather than parking. Just going round and round while their owners shop. Causing - you guessed it - even more congestion.
TL;DR - the most likely result of autonomous vehicles is out of control congestion.
In what way would self driving cars incentivize not owning your own car?
Taxis/uber etc. are all built as "regular cards". It requires at least 2 people in there. How often is actually more than 1 person in a car? Wasn't that like 2/3 of all drives?
Now let's assume we have specialized cars for just a single person - that saves a lot of material, fuel, and also (parking) space.
But that only works if you don't OWN the car, because if you own it, you might sometimes have to have passengers right? So you always get a big car that is not needed in 2/3 or so of the drives.
That aside, having another driver is annoying for various reasons (e.g. privacy).
A driverless car can very easily do things and make money while I'm waiting for it.
In some scenarios, people rent out their owned cars during the day to avoid this massive opportunity cost, but I doubt that will be the most efficient model.
In what other asset class ever has it made sense for the capital owners to be an extremely long tail of people, rather than a large corporate owner? Especially something as high velocity and fungible as cars.
I'd sell my cars in a heartbeat if "Uber minus the driver" existed and was cheaper than owning a car.
We're at least a decade away from that.
"sleep while it drives me to work"
People work all over the planet during all seasons, don't they?
(L4 iirc is hands-off but someone in the driver's seat (which must therefore exist) in a fit state to take over if necessary - no sleeping on the way in, no drinking on the way home.)
Level 2 and 3 are the mostly-automated version, and they differ in how much notice they're supposed to provide and how much attention they require.
Let me use my phone or watch videos on the highway. I’m okay with taking over with a small amount of warning. I’m also okay doing all non-highway driving.
I just want something that can keep me in my lane and avoid ramming the vehicle in front of me. If I need to drive at the start and end of my trip, that’s okay.
Oddly enough I think this is one of the few times when a subscription model makes sense. The current approach has a fallback call center which can give the cars driving directions in unexpectedly situations, which could be supported by either a monthly subscription or low hourly fee. Similarly move out of the coverage area and stop paying etc.
Toyota and hybrid vehicles - very weak entry into the market
Toyota and hydrogen powered vehicles - dead on arrival
Toyota’s failure to electrify fleet
Now they want autonomous vehicles? Wonder who backs out first? Waymo or Toyota once they realize what a joke Toyota is.
Well at least they are not collaborating with Nissan.
Toyota and hybrid vehicles - very weak entry into the market
This statement doesn't seem to track with reality. The Prius was one of the first major hyrbids and it sold like hotcakes. You see them everywhere. Their current offerings include more hybrids than ever, in fact it seems a majority of their vehicles have a hyrbid option today, including the Tacoma and Tundra.
"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies. "
The current HN title seems too definite.
In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs).
“Enhance next-generation POVs” could be accomplished by bringing Toyota’s autonomous driving to the same level as Tesla’s, give where they are today.
And they’re not definitively “bringing” it. They’re just exploring bringing it.
(Submitted title was "Waymo partners with Toyota to bring autonomous driving to personal vehicles")
I wonder if this time it'll be different now it looks like Tesla might finally get self driving to the mass market.
This is why Tesla's "actuals" are delivered so many years after the dates of the initial pronouncements (for those few things that have so far been delivered at all).
I legitimately don't know who's ahead of who and where the state-of-the-art currently sits, but I do know that I hear far more about Tesla's vision roadmap than Waymo's or Uber's or anyone else's.
I wonder if this time it'll be different now it looks like Tesla might finally get self driving to the mass market.
Source? Not just another Elon "next year" promise though right?
little to show for it
Wonder if there's any breakup clauses when the manufacturers want to do autonomy with other companies outside of Waymo and this is Alphabet casting a conflict-of-influence net across the industry, almost like a desperate man calling every divorce lawyer in the tristate area to deny his wife proper justice.
now it looks like Tesla might finally get self driving to the mass market.
What year is it?!
I can't think of another pipeline technology that is both this proven and this impactful.
Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs).
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-prioritize-r...