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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

If I were Google, I would be concerned that competitors are getting much more data much more cheaply than they are and that recent advances in image recognition/processing make the tech that much easier for Ford, etc to build in-house without having to license it from Google.

Though I guess Google/Uber are probably getting significantly higher resolution data than Tesla/MobileEye/etc since you can't stream all sensor data back to HQ over LTE.

I think a lot of these articles are driven by the fact that Google has been working on this for so long and yet we have upstarts that are getting cars on the road in a fraction of the time.

It's very possible that Google overestimated the problems with Level 3 Autonomy and the public backlash associated with it and building L3 tech as an on-ramp towards L4 may turn out to be the correct path to market and funding further development effort.

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Google had come out saying they don't believe that an incremental approach will lead to fully driverless cars; at some point the leap has to be made. Sooner rather than later in Google's case.

Given that Google doesn't make cars, I don't really see how they would go about commercializing L3, even though it's well within their capacity from an innovation standpoint.

I really don't think they expected the auto industry to respond so aggressively with their own proprietary autonomous driving OSs, determined to shut Google out.

At this stage their only option is to get to six sigma level 4 in a way that leaves everyone else scratching their heads wondering how Google did that. It's going to take a lot longer than Google anticipated.

Now Google could probably release level 4 quite soon in a limited capacity that's more an amusement park ride than a relable, profitable transportation service, but it's probably smarter for them to keep their eye on the prize and keep plugging away at it. They're in too deep to throw in the towel.

The fact that they've said it doesn't mean they're right. But I think most of their statements have actually about how L3 is unsafe, rather than the fact that incremental progress is impossible.

Plenty of the startups in this space aren't making cars, but buying cars and installing aftermarket kits. Otto is a great example. Or they could have done what MobileEye did and sell L3 tech to car companies to fund further development.

I don't find the auto response particularly aggressive; they've waited 7 years to even start anything. The barrier to entry in that time has gotten so much lower due to deep learning that geohot can build a car that has some level of autonomy in his garage, and I think those advances were what really caught google flatfooted.

Can Google keep funding a pie in the sky research project for another 20 years, which is roughly the timeline they've said about L4 autonomy.

Can Google keep funding a pie in the sky research project for another 20 years,

Yes

They could just buy Fiat Chrysler. It's like $11 billion. Google's got 64 billion in just short-term cash investments: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG&fstype=ii&ei=...

Most Tesla cars are connected to wifi when parked at home, so that's when data can be uploaded to Tesla's servers.

Ah, that makes sense. Still, I sort of expect raw sensor data to be very high volume, so Tesla engineers can probably deploy "queries" to the fleet for which data to upload, but not get the whole thing.

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