Waymo (the unmanned company of Google's parent company Alphabet) and Uber's battle, finally came to an end last week, and finally the two sides reached a settlement. Let's take a look at the related content with the car electronics editor.
Behind this dispute, Waymo's key technology of autonomous driving has become an important part of it. Waymo's leadership in multiple driverless technologies has brought tremendous value to the company. According to a report released by Morgan Stanley, Waymo's valuation will exceed that of traditional auto companies and Tesla, at least $70 billion (about 480 billion yuan).
Why is Waymo worth $70 billion? What is the development and layout behind the high valuation? Here is the reason for you to sort out and interpret:
A number of driverless technologies are leading the industryFrom the existing road test results, Waymo has obvious advantages in the field of autonomous driving technology.
In January last year, CEO John Krafcik launched a set of autopilot hardware developed by Waymo, including an upgraded vision system, a modified version of the radar and a lidar. According to Krafcik, Waymo is exploring the use of autonomous driving technology in a variety of applications, including shared platforms, private cars, transportation, trucking and logistics.
Up to now, related technologies have been further upgraded and broken. Earlier this year, according to a test report released by Waymo in California, the number of human interventions that drove a driverless car to 1000 miles fell to 0.18. Compared to data released by Uber in March 2017, manual intervention is required for every 1.3 km of an unmanned vehicle. Waymo's performance is enough to "snap" other competitors.
So far, the project's test fleet has traveled 4 million miles on the road, staying ahead of the actual number of miles travelled by driverless cars.
In addition, Waymo has made great achievements in the development of laser radar systems, which has reduced the cost of lidar sensors by 90%, and there is room for further compression in the future. Lidar has many advantages, can be applied to the principle of transmitting laser to receive reflection, depicting the 3D form of the surrounding space, with extremely high precision, and even able to detect the subtle movements of humans within 100 meters.
High-performance safety system designIn addition to the improvement of technical performance, Waymo does not hesitate to build hardware and software. Waymo financial analyst Shawn Bananzadeh has revealed that from the birth of the Project Chauffeur (unmanned car project) in 2009 to the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion to develop the software and hardware of driverless cars to build the safety of their driverless cars. Sex.
From the design of Waymo's security performance, there are four main advantages:
System function security. The first is to be able to consider the constraints of traffic rules and to predict relevant scenarios, and to discover possible problems through road tests, and to continuously adjust analytical models and simulation tools. In addition, the system can solve problems such as hardware failures. Waymo has set up backup system and backup equipment for the system. If there is a fault, the system will be connected to the standby computer, steering wheel, brake, power system, obstacle avoidance system and so on.
The crashworthiness of the vehicle. The vehicle's ability to protect passengers in the vehicle through various measures, from protecting the structural design of the personnel inside the vehicle to having seat restraint and airbag functions to reduce injury or prevent death.
Optimize the service experience. Waymo provides the system with an interaction between the vehicle and the passenger, providing a user interface with destination settings, parking guidance, etc., optimizing the passenger experience and setting hazard analysis, relevant safety standards, extensive testing and for different driving needs. Multi-domain practice.
The guarantee of first aid measures. Waymo sets up an emergency system for the consumer and automatically sends the location of the incident to law enforcement and first aid groups, as well as the official team operations center.
Cooperate with three partnersFrom a business strategy perspective, Waymo has focused on computing platforms, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), application scenarios, and publicity:
1. Work with Lyft to expand the application scenario
In May last year, Waymo entered into a cooperation agreement with the taxi service startup Lyft: Both parties will bring the driverless car technology to the mainstream market through trial projects and product development efforts. Under the agreement, the two companies plan to test the Chevrolet Bolt driverless car in the next few years using Lyft's taxi network.
Lyft is the second largest taxi service company in the United States and received a $500 million investment from General Motors in 2015. In 2017, using the Chevrolet Bolt provided by GM, Lyft launched an automated driving test program in California. Founder Zimmer has previously said that Lyft will provide a taxi service based on autonomous driving technology to the outside world in 2021.
In addition, Waymo partnered with car rental company Avis last year to provide driverless car rental services. In addition, Waymo has partnered with car dealer Auto NaTIon to provide maintenance and support services for driverless cars.
2. Work with Intel to enhance the capabilities of the computing platform
In September last year, Intel announced a partnership with Waymo to provide a computing platform for L4 and L5 autonomous vehicles. Intel said it offered Waymo a solution for Xeon processors, Arria SoCs (for machine vision) and Gigabit Ethernet to help Waymo unmanned vehicles process information in real time.
For example, Waymo's driverless Chrysler Pacifica van uses Intel-made technology for data processing from connection to sensor.
3. Pull up the nonprofit organization to increase the publicity effect
Last year, Waymo and five American non-profit organizations (anti-drunk driving mothers association, National Security Council, Senior Life Association, Blind Children's Association, Phoenix East Valley Association) to the US public science popular driving technology and its progress, promoting automatic driving will give The benefits of consumers and society.
Some analysts pointed out that this wave is aimed at the public, or the consumer group's propaganda is because Waymo launched an automatic driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, ahead of the road, and drunk driving, old age, blind people, community and other promotional keywords, can be said It is the most direct and profound point in the market demand for automatic driving stamps, and has achieved the effect of publicity. By now, the Waymo driverless car has officially been on the road in Phoenix, Arizona.
There is still a gap from the commercialization stageIt is worth noting that compared to car manufacturers and shared travel companies, Waymo's disadvantages are that the commercialization approach is uncertain and the user's measured data collection difficulties need to be strengthened.
In the past year, the improvement of the Waymo unmanned vehicle has stagnated. From the data submitted to California DMV, the most difficult to manage UF (Unexpected Failure) did not achieve the same improvement rate as SIF (System Identification Failure), which indicates that Waymo's car may be some distance away from commercialization time. Coupled with critics, it is concluded that no one will be ready for commercialization until 2020.
Overall, Waymo uses Google as a strong backing to continuously achieve technological advancement and multiple breakthroughs. In the face of the current strong competitor Uber, after the confrontation, who will be the status of the driverless leader in the future? We will wait and see.
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