These are some rough thoughts I’m having on the current autonomy landscape, having watched the industry develop over the last few years. It’s by no means sourced, definitive, or necessarily always accurate, and represents only my opinion. Nevertheless, as an active researcher in robotics in general and applied machine perception in particular, I enjoy a degree of living in the future that might make my viewpoint interesting to you.
Passenger Autonomy
Passenger Autonomy is the big sexy topic getting most of the media attention, positive and negative. The recent Uber crash has raised questions regarding the safety of autonomy testing programs, while Waymo continues its PR offensive ahead of what will probably be some form of public launch in late 2018 or early 2019. Passenger autonomy is also receiving the majority of regulatory scrutiny, with legislators in various states either licensing passenger autonomy testing on public roads, or else giving autonomy companies free reign.
Cruise, Waymo, Uber and others have been saying a public launch of an autonomous taxi service is “imminent” for quite some time now, and Cruise seems to be closest to delivering at time of writing. Once one company launches, the rest will follow in short order. This is a market with untested business models and huge up-front R&D costs that will need to be recouped. Additionally, there are the untested behavioral factors - will the general public trust autonomous taxis? Will they treat them with care, or trash them because no one is watching? Will other road users interfere with them on purpose?
Technically speaking, many of the problems remaining to be solved are unknown-unknowns which autonomy teams will only encounter with on-road testing in real traffic conditions. Despite Waymo’s marketing materials, very little real testing has gone on so far. Additionally, I don’t believe any company has the clear best autonomy team. Though the consensus is that Waymo is furthest ahead technology-wise, many of the original core members have left to found most of the current crop of autonomy companies, and it’s unclear how much difference having a better technology will have pre-launch.
The Launch
The truth is the launch of robotaxis is going to be underwhelming, and might be the reason we have’t quite seen a first mover yet - the first one in is going to receive much of the PR backlash when the service just kinda sucks. At launch, robotaxi services will be very limited; limited to a geofenced geography, limited to weather and other operational conditions, they will be slow, and if I had to ballpark it, roughly 10% of the time they won’t do what the user wants in some way (rough/scary ride, unexpected stop, weird road user interaction, other technical fault).
The novelty and hype surrounding the launch will get people excited for a few months initially, but ultimately even heavily subsidized (I fully expect the services to be either completely free initially, or with some nominal price so that the user feels they’re getting something of value) they’re not going to be competitive with rideshare services. Companies like Uber have the advantage here in that they can probably just keep their own drivers out of the autonomy geofenced areas, but that invites competitors in.
Who’s going to be first? Either Uber or Cruise. It’s still not clear to me whether Waymo intends to run their own service except in isolated markets as a demo - the actual robotaxi service doesn’t appear to be their core business. Since GM has Cruise, I’m guessing they’ll partner with someone like Ford or a European vehicle OEM to run their robotaxi service under license.
The Hangover
What happens in the landscape after the launch depends on what kind of company you are.
If you’ve got a big external entity funding you (Waymo, Cruise), you settle in for the grind, or else your parent panics and cuts you off. You slowly expand your geofence and your operating conditions, you minimize the PR damage from various big events like fatalities or major crashes or bizarre behaviors (someone is going to have sex in these things, someone is going to get killed by another person in one, someone is going to hack into one, the cops will want to pull one over), and you try to keep people interested enough so that an upstart competitor doesn’t eat your lunch. It will be ~5-10 years before this is a real business.
If you don’t have a big external entity paying your bills, but you’re going for the fully vertically integrated scenario like Zoox, this is the moment where you absolutely need to raise a gigantic amount of money to fund your warchest for the 5-10 years it’s going to take for your service to turn into a real business.Whether or not you can raise that money depends mainly on external market conditions, and at this point you need to bring in really big institutional investors. You probably have the highest risk out of all the passenger autonomy models, and it’s not clear that you’ll be rewarded with an outsize return in the face of e.g. GM Cruise.