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Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Waymo revealed their "secret" tools for advancing this crucial technology implies that either:

1) They believe no one can quite catch up before they can launch the technology. Since they know several competitors have huge resources and brilliant people, it means they are quite close to launch.

2) These tools have become open secret within the industry, so no harm is done to their competitive position by revealing it to the public, only good PR to be gained perhaps to attract more bright engineers.

I suspect 2) is more likely since several key players have moved around so much in the past couple of years. Relatively high-level knowledge about how autonomous vehicles are being developed at Waymo might have become well-known within the industry by now.

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No doubt it's number 2, I've seen quite a few articles about other self driving efforts and the general sentiment I've seen on HN is "Cruise looks like they're far ahead" and "What about Waymo? Did they fall behind?" This seems like Waymo PR is showing off some secrets to re-assert their technical strength.

The strategy of combining simulation with real world data isn't particularly original, nor is the idea of using test tracks. The challenging part is how you do it. This article barely touched on that.

The article is some good colour commentary on what's going on inside Waymo, there's some fresh information here regarding the scale of their operation, but nothing about the fundamentals are any kind of a reveal. The principles of Waymo's development strategy have been well scrutinized throughout the industry. The other thing is that everything that Waymo has publicly revealed has been at least a year old.

There was nothing secret in that article. Everyone is doing it. E.g. BMW won an industry innovation award for their simulation work years ago. Yes, right around the time when Google were still just driving around in a parking lot.

The rate at which high level engineers move around leads me to believe that quite a few companies will arrive at approximately the same level of autonomy at the same time. Thus the marketshare for autonomy providers is probably going to be based on other factors than the actual technical superiority. Waymo will presumably need buyers, many of whom are the type that like IBM Watson style marketing.

I'd also say it's 2 and the piece is about bringing the cool factor up so recruiting is easier.

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