The new toolkit is the result of a long running, if quiet, push by the Alphabet subsidiary to invent its own hardware. When Waymo started life in 2009 as Google’s Project Chauffeur, it stuck off-the-shelf sensors on Toyota Priuses purchased at a local dealership. That included a roughly $80,000 rooftop lidar from Velodyne, which dominated the early laser scanner market. Soon, the Googlers developed their own lidar, which debuted around 2012 on their self-driving Lexus SUVs. When they moved on to the Firefly—the koala-like prototype without a steering wheel or pedals—they made much more of the hardware in-house, including the work of designing the cutesy two-seater.
Waymo (as it was christened in 2016) soon gave up building its own vehicles, but kept making the bits that replace the human driver, chiefly the sensors and the computer systems. The software may do the thinking, but it’s no good if it can’t rely on good sensing data, or reliable connections between the sensors and computers. The best way to ensure that everything going into the car meets Waymo’s standards, Jeyachandran says, is to do it themselves. “We realized that off-the-shelf doesn’t meet the requirements needed for self-driving.” With the financial backing of Alphabet and a head start in the field, Waymo could make the equipment it needed to see and navigate the world. In a statement, Velodyne says that it “continue[s] to develop sensor solutions.”
The effort—including paying hundreds of engineers for years of work—is not cheap. Nor is the output. Numbers are scarce here: In 2012, the company said its vehicles required about $150,000 worth of specialized equipment. In 2017, Waymo reported it had dropped the price of its lidar by more than 90 percent from the prior year. So the drive to reduce costs—especially for vehicles meant for the not-necessarily-lucrative taxi and delivery business—is easy to understand. This week, Waymo announced its first external investment, a $2.25 billion round led by Silver Lake, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and the Mubadala Investment Company. Until this round, Waymo was funded by its parent company, Alphabet.
Waymo’s hardly alone here. The big players all run hardware programs. That’s largely because the self-driving industry is young and small enough that the supply base isn’t really there. A few years ago, there was no demand for a lidar that could spot a pedestrian wearing black, in the rain, at 250 meters. Especially not one that could handle life on the road, including the abuse of extreme temperatures, potholes, and being pelted with gravel and salt. So, many self-driving companies have moved to make their own goods wherever necessary, and possible.
“They’re all trying to build their own hardware,” says Kevin Peterson, CEO of the sidewalk delivery robotics company Marble, who worked on the Darpa Grand Challenges with many of the industry’s current leaders. “They’ve got the money, and they’ve got these needs that self-driving cars have and nobody else does.”
