00:00 Josh
Well, Waymo has become a leader in autonomous vehicle technology and robotics services. Of course, its roots are with Google, and as its self-driving car project, Waymo has come a long way. Our senior automotive journalist PRAS Subramanian is now talking with us about its success in PRAS, the leader in the field.
00:22 Pras Subramanian
Hey Josh, yes, you mentioned, yes, so it's a fork of Google, uh, google X, when the X department issued the X department, which they used to call Automous Nine, and after some testing and trying to get a license in 2016, the project became Waymo. Well, start testing its Pacifica hybrid and take off from there. In 2018, Waymo, UH teamed up with Jaguar to pair with them to get the I-Pace Evs tested. You see these now in the streets of Los Angeles and in similar places. Uh, you know, Waymo uses vision, radar, lidar, what they call multimodal. They claim this is the safest solution. Now, they have the most robot miles. They do about 250,000 trips a week, right? As a result, other competitors like GM's Cruise and AV tech companies like Argo AI have all disappeared. In the space, there are only a few competitors left, such as weride and pony.ai and Zoox. Now, challenged, they need to scale up. They have about 700 to 1,000 cars in the main market and can produce about 1,500 cars per year in the factory. An expert told me that this may be their bottleneck in the future, and Tesla, on, the big test of Tesla is going on, I'm sorry, they did the test informally on the 12th, if they have enough hardware, I already have millions of vehicles already on the road, and when you already have millions of vehicles facing your robot software, you can get along with them. If that's big. Tesla services are just beginning, and in the years after Waymo, if Musk's big bet on the only visual system built by Tesla would pair with a neural network, it might be better than Waymo, uh, there's still a lot worth seeing to prove whether this can actually happen.
03:02 Josh
Now, PRAS, did you get a Waymo? If so, how do you view this experience? I asked because I didn't.
03:13 Pras Subramanian
I did get in Los Angeles about a month ago, and I took a Waymo in the west of the city and got to a friend’s place, and II was actually very impressed by it. I thought it was very smooth. I used the app to order Waymo. It comes to you. It has your acronym on the top and on the small screen, so you know it's yours. You open the door with the app. You close the door, enter the room, and then start riding as the car starts, clicking the button on the app. Suddenly it pairs the phones together, it says you can stream music and you can change the temperature to your preference. Very pleasant. The car is actually whipping. I think at a decent pace, I don't think it's a slow thing. Well, go find me and take me where I need to go, the competition speed of Uber.
