00:00 Josh
Well, Waymo has emerged as a leader in autonomous vehicle technology and robotaxi services. The roots are of course with Google, because the self -driving car project and Waymo have taken a long way. Our Senior Autos reporter, PRAS Subramanian, now comes to us to talk about its success as a leader in this sector, PRAS.
00:22 PRAS SUBRAMANIAN
Hey Josh, yes, you said, yes, so it started as a fence of Google, UH, Google X in the X -Division problem in those days what they used to name autonomous nine, and after some testing and trying to get permits off the ground in 2016, the Waymo project became. Uh, started testing his Pacifica hybrids and left from there. 2018, Waymo, UH, worked with Jaguar, linked to them to get their i-Pace EVs for testing. You can now see this on the street in LA and such places. Uh, you know, Waymo uses a combination of vision, radar, Lidar, what they call multimodal. They claim that this is the safest solution. Now they have driven the most robotaxi miles. They carry out around 250,000 trips a week, right? So other rivals such as GM's cruise and AV technical companies such as Argo AI are gone. Only a few competitors such as Weride and Pony.ai and Zoox leave in the room. Now, challenges, they have to scale up. They have around 700 to 1000 vehicles in large markets and can produce in their factory around 1500 a year. An expert tells me that this could be a bottleneck for them in the future, while Tesla, right, Tesla with their big test arrives on the regret that their start of their test is unofficial in 12th place, if their hardware is sufficient, I will have millions of vehicles on the road and if you can easily see it with their robotaxi software. That's a big like. Tesla service has just begun, years behind Waymo, and as Musk's big bet on a single-vision system combined with the neural network that Tesla has built, can assume and possibly exceed Waymo, there is still a lot to see if that can actually happen.
3:02 AM Josh
Now pras, have you taken a waymo? And if so, what did you think of the experience? I ask because I didn't do that.
3:13 AM PRAS SUBRAMANIAN
I did that, about a month ago, I was in LA and I took a waymo, uh, in the western part of the city to the place of a friend and II was actually deeply impressed. I thought it was very slippery. I used the app to order the waymo. It comes to you. It has you, it has your initials at the top and a small screen, so you know it is yours. You open the door with the app. You close the door, step inside and you and then you start the ride when you are in the car, press the button on the app. Suddenly it combines your phone, it says that you can stream music, it can change the temperature to your wishes. It is very pleasant. The car is actually beaten. I think at a quite pace, not something slow in my opinion. Uh, I am with me, brought me where I have to be and in a competitive rate for Uber.
