Autonomous Car Race: Who is Tesla’s Biggest Rival?

Self-driving technology has made impressive progress, from science fiction, to “now commercially available” road-bound reality, attracting a lot of big players. The ride-sharing company Uber was spending $20mn a month on developing autonomous technology. Tesla wanted to upgrade the company’s electric cars with Autopilot, software that enables autonomous driving. Alphabet’s Waymo started its first commercial self-driving taxi service late 2018.

The competition intensified recently as Waymo got the first license to send its car onto some California roads without drivers. Waymo is said to have cleared the way to beat the other rivals by at least a year in driverless cars race.

Waymo Has Made Significant Strides In Ten Years

Waymo originated as a Google’s project before it became a stand-alone subsidiary in 2016. Waymo now runs fully autonomous taxi service called “Waymo One” in Phoenix, Arizona. The company said it wanted to expand the use of Waymo One into other states and license the technology for not an only taxi but also personal use cars and public transport solutions.

In 10 years, the project has made a significant advancement. Waymo has completed 10 million miles on public roads, fully autonomous, while training its virtual system for 7 billion miles, racking up 10 million miles a day.

Tesla, however, rolled out the first version of Autopilot software in 2014, developing in partnership with Mobileye. At that time, Autopilot included semi-autonomous drive and parking capabilities. As an upgrade version, the company’s stated intent is to offer full self-driving for its customers in 2020.

Unlike Waymo, Tesla does not publicly announce the total number of Autopilot miles, but one report claims it had completed over 1.2 billion semi-autonomous miles (June 2018).

Waymo's Breakthrough Over Tesla

Late 2018, Waymo got a license from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to operate fully autonomous cars within limits, making it the first to receive this license. There are estimated 59 companies including Tesla in the game to legally run a vehicle without any human in the driver’s seat. The milestone grants Google’s subsidiary permission to test over 35 cars in 7 cities including Palo Alto and Mountain View.

Meanwhile, Tesla needs to finish 6 billion miles before it can pass regulators. However, with a large fleet of vehicles - around 425,000 – Autopilot has its own advantages in training data to improve the neural networks needed for self-driving cars.

Tesla’s CEO Criticized Waymo’s Technology

Unlike many other manufacturers, Tesla’ Autopilot uses image recognition neural nets and cameras to train the system instead of LIDAR, which Elon Musk criticized as being useless with cameras. Tesla’s CEO claimed that even the most advanced simulations couldn't capture everything in the real world. Meanwhile, Waymo is big on simulation. Musk also criticized the practice of using high-definition maps, which help guild autonomous cars through an environment. It is, however, the first step of Waymo to build a detailed picture of an area and categorize “interesting features” before deploying any vehicles in a city.

It is still a long way before the self-driving car can be allowed in public. Nevertheless, with Tesla (and Ford and GM) in the mix, Google will be forced to move faster and behave better, creating a very fair game for all.