Hey what's up guys, ThioJoeJoe here
and you may have seen this week that Google actually made a big announcement in regards to their
self-driving car project.
They're actually spinning it off as it's own company.
Before, the whole self-driving car was under Google in their "Moonshot" program which is basically different
crazy technologies they try to create and see what happens, but now the self-driving car project I guess
was successful enough where they created their own company now called Waymo, which is going to be
taking over that whole project as its own company, but still under the whole Alphabet umbrella company that
that really is Google at this point. And obviously the whole Google self-driving car project has come a
long way, it started several years ago and I think with this move, making it its own company, they're
obviously thinking its a big change, they call it an inflection point, where they could be getting ready to
make it go mainstream. So before it was just kind of like test project to see if
they could do it but now you see as I
mentioned other videos all sorts of
other companies like Ford is trying to
make their own fully autonomous self
driving cars and actually it was last
year Google had a major milestone I
believe was in October they had their
first fully autonomous driving trip in
Austin, Texas where the car had no
steering wheel, no pedals or anything and
it made its first trip on public roads
and it was actually pretty interesting
because for this pilot test they had a
blind man in the ride so obviously he
couldn't control the car even if he
wanted to even if it had any controls so
it's just a good example about what
these cars would be capable of and how
useful they would be to people who might
normally not be able to drive whether
they're blind or handicapped or impaired
from a night of drinking or something
like that it would help out in so many
different situations and they have a new
Waymo website you can go on, they kind of
explain a little bit about what the
project is they have a little bit of a
history of the project they say that
they've gone 1 billion miles per year in
simulation miles so i'm not really sure
how that works they have like a simulation
where I guess they take sensor footage
from real driving situations and kind of
apply that and teach the computer how
human drives and then they also have two
million real-life self-driving car miles
where that information was actually
applied and they can kind of see how the
car behaves in real life when it might
not know exactly what to do and with a
human you know you can do that critical
thinking on the fly make a decision
whereas the car has to have a lot of
information because it only knows to do
exactly what you tell it to but if you
can manage to make it learn that's the
big deal and interestingly I was kind of
surprised by this actually is Waymo
said that they don't really intend to
make their own cars they said they're
not trying to build better cars but
rather they plan to license out all the
technology and the learning and software
that they've created and they want to
license that out to automakers and
trucking companies and that sort of
thing so instead of trying to have their
own cars
they'd rather help other companies built
theirs off of that and make the money
that way which kind of makes sense
because if you think about it there's a
lot less overhead if you don't have to
actually manufacture physical cars and
instead just focus on the software
because you can sell the software as
much as you want and pretty much charge
as much as you want without having any
overhead all whereas the car
manufacturers they probably know a lot
more about car manufacturing process
where Google doesn't so they can save
the money makes more sense for them to
instead of putting in all this software
research to come up with their own self
driving car algorithms they can just buy
from Google, who is better at that.
So like anything the companies are going
to be focusing on what they're good at
and just buying the software and the
licenses from other companies who are
good at other stuff and as I mentioned
in one of my previous videos where I
talked about what i think are going to be
the big trends, I do think self-driving
cars are going to see a big improvement
it's kind of like all the pieces are
falling into place we have Tesla
releasing their more affordable cars
with a lot of self-driving car
capabilities now
not necessarily just being self driving
in itself then Ford like I mentioned
several times they want to release a
fully self driving car i think within
five to six years and so a lot of
companies are moving forward very fast
whereas five years ago it would have
been insane to think that this was going
to happen so quickly and of course the
benefits of having a self-driving car
are too many to even consider most of
which would be the safety because if you
have all self-driving cars that can talk
to each other they're not really going
to get in a crash because they're
predictable whereas a human they might
do something unexpected and the other
people have to have that reaction time
humans are slow
whereas if it was a self-driving car
they instantly know what was about to
happen before a human would even know
what's going on so they can react to it
before anything even happened at all
and also if we get to the point where
it's basically all self-driving cars
transportation would be way faster
because you practically wouldn't even
need traffic lights you wouldn't really
need speed limits because the cars would
again know what every other cars doing
they can kind of synchronize going
through traffic intersections without
having to stop and if they do have to
stop and they all accelerated the same
time no-nonsense based on human delay
and because self-driving cars you would
hope at that point would be better at
driving than a human they could go
physically faster even because they can
handle the response times required in
going so fast I mean if you're going 100
miles an hour if you take one second to
respond to something you've already gone
really far still whereas a car it's
going to take milliseconds to respond so
it'd be a lot better. On the flip side
though they're going to face a lot of
challenges because the biggest of which
I can see is when self-driving cars are
just starting to come out
it's not all self-driving cars they're
in the minority then you know they're
gonna have to deal with a lot of stupid
people on the road it's not going to be
all self driving cars that are very
predictable so they'll probably have to
be even better than what they would need
to be later on but I think that's good
because then they learn from the best or
the worst i guess you could say so when
they get to that point where it's all
self-driving cars
it'll be a piece of cake you really
never have to worry about crashes
hopefully I also kind of wonder about
how they would handle truly unique
situations that are very difficult to
predict like a detour we have to go on a
dirt road or something then how would
the car even handle that you know if
they didn't program in dirt roads are
like a very specific type of road or
driveway or something like that where
the human might be able to negotiate
that but self-driving cars never seen
anything like it before I think they
would really have to have some sort of
manual control
I don't think we're almost ever going to
get rid of completely being able to
control cars in some way I think you're
always going to have pedals to override
at some point and maybe you know manual
cars will be a specialty item or
something like that so it will be
interesting to see how this whole way
Waymo company proceeds, I think this year
is going to be very exciting to watch
because of even last year they were able
to make a completely self driving car
trip then they've obviously progressed
since then and in one more year or
it's gonna be insane
so I guess that's really all there is to
talk about any further would be pure
speculation which you know is fun to
speculate but want to keep this
relatively informative just general
opinions based on what we actually have
so far if you guys do have any ideas
though I would be interested to hear
them would you ever get a self-driving
car would you have to wait till they're
like really safe before you even touch
that? I'd be kind of nervous going 70
miles an hour in a car that I can't
control at all,
that would be a bit nerve-racking. So we
can talk about that down in the comments
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