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Comment by loser777 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of this deal are the fact that the order seems to be on the scale where things appear to be ready off-the-shelf. Does an order of 62,000 imply that Waymo is close to having hardware that can be quickly adapted to multiple cars (e.g., the Jaguar and now the Chrysler) that can be produced at scale? Or have they managed to convince manufacturers to heavily customize their existing vehicles (seems unlikely)?

That's something I'm not sure is even on the horizon for any self-driving car effort other than Tesla.

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Unless I have missed something they are getting the cars over several years. A modified car (presumably during the manufacturing process), over several years, is very much reasonable. Radar and camera is part of the production of the modified car, LiDAR and compute system snaps into modified body. Waymo keeps control on their most important hardware. Seems very doable over several years.

The Jaguar I-PACE deal envisioned designing a custom version of the I-PACE so that the sensors and computing hardware could be installed at the factory. I haven't seen specifics on the Pacifica deal but it seems likely they'd take the same approach.

On that particular aspect, I'd bet money on Cruise, having been bought by GM, who has more expertise in manufacturing automobiles, far beyond what Tesla has accomplished to date, simply by virtue of being an incumbent car maker.

I imagine it might be easier than you are thinking. I think it’s mostly a matter of mounting all the sensors (camera, lidar, laser), securing the main computer(s) somewhere, routing between everything. For the electronics I think most(all) modern cars are electronically steered so inserting your computer into the steering is probably straightforward. To get and control most of the other auxillary features it might be enough to insert yourself on the CAN bus?

I’m sure there are a lot of details in the above, and a lot of stuff I’m missing, but I’m not convinced it’s something a group of good engineers couldn’t do in a few months or a year. Certainly not something that is not even on the horizon for most companies.

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