The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dolgov: Waymo will continue using LiDAR, radar, and cameras together
“So yeah, I think the trend, you know, for us that we'll, you know, using all three modalities just, you know, makes a lot of sense.”
Dolgov: End-to-end AI models alone cannot achieve full autonomous driving
“You can take, you know, an end-to-end model, go from sensor to, you know, trajectories or actuation. You know, typically you don't build them in one stage, you build them in stages, but, you know, you can do, like, backprop through the whole thing, so, you kno…”
Panigrahi: Multi-sensor suites outperform camera-only autonomous driving systems
“Does the combination of these sensors position you better than individual. The answer is yes. We can show you that there are situations in which camera will be insufficient.”
Kalanick: Uber's autonomous driving program was second only to Waymo in 2017
“Our timing program was like second to Waymo, but catching up at the time.”
Yudis: Tesla and Waymo autonomous vehicle approaches will technically converge
“And so the next kind of 10 years is, and I think what you'll ultimately see is, like, somewhat of a very technical convergence, because the Tesla system is a very sensor light system. It's basically just a camera system. And the Waymo system is very sensor hea…”
Waymo logged zero injury collisions across its first million fully autonomous miles
“In that, we published our full crash text. And there was not a single collision with injury. Not a single one. And only two of them would, you know, meet the standards of a reportability called CISS.”
Waymo re-simulations successfully avoided every fatal crash in Phoenix's East Valley
“We took every fatal crash that had occurred and re-simulated and showed that Wemo could avoid that.”
Autonomous vehicles require full-stack hardware and software to maintain iteration speed
“And the technology, and it really required the full stack, right? We build the hardware, we build the software, because if you built just the software and waited for somebody else to deliver the hardware, the speed of learning, the speed of iteration that was …”
Google's early machine learning infrastructure investments created Waymo's competitive moat
“Really the breakthrough engineering that you sometimes need in AI is just having the raw infrastructure to intake all this data. The amount of data you have to learn to handle to build a really, you know, well-learned algorithm is pretty hard, and that's where…”
Panigrahi: Waymo dramatically reduced LiDAR hardware costs over two years
“The amount we have been able to cost down these LiDARs in the last two years is incredible.”
Younis: Foreign governments will protect domestic automakers from Waymo dominance
“The German government won't just let Waymo come take over Germany and let Daimler and BMW go under business, and the same thing is true for Hyundai in Korea, Honda and Toyota in Japan, and the Chinese companies, because there's a recognition that if all of the…”
Dixon: Soaring Google salaries have hurt the startup acqui-hire market
“But now you look at the salaries of companies like Google, some of this came out in like the court documents of what they were paying, like the Waymo engineers, and it's like, you know, it's like the price of an annual price of a startup acquisition or somethi…”
Younis: Cruise was outpacing Waymo before operations were halted
“I actually think crews, you know, they were certainly moving at a much faster pace than Waymo. They started way behind, and you're talking about neck and neck when, you know, ultimately the plug was pulled.”
Dolgov: Distilling huge AI models beats training small models directly
“Where you're much better off training a huge model and then distilling it into a smaller model than just training small models.”
Dolgov: Swiss Re study showed zero bodily injury claims for Waymo
“We published a joint study with a Swiss RE. Which is, I think, the largest global reinsurer in the world, and the way they look at it is, you know, who contributed to an event, and there we saw, ah, like the same theme, but the numbers were, ah, very strong, t…”
Dolgov: Waymo driverless cars cut injury crashes by 3.5x
“And I think 3.5 acts as the reduction in injury. And that's about two X reduction in the police reportable kind of lower severity incidents.”
Panigrahi: Waymo operates fully autonomous rides and airport pickups in Phoenix
“And in Phoenix, we'll take you to down to Scottsdale, and when you land at the airport, we will pick you up at the airport. That's where we are in the journey. We're fully autonomous where we need to be.”
Waymo CPO claims company has achieved full autonomy where needed
“We're fully autonomous where we need to be.”
Panigrahi: Waymo was first to cross one million fully driverless miles
“We were the first company ever to cross one million fully autonomous miles.”
Departing founders practically bear the burden of proof in IP disputes
“And the challenge with these cases is you're kind of proving the negative, right? So in that case, you know, ah, you know, Anthony Lewandowski, who was the person, he had to prove that, you know, he didn't take anything, right? As opposed to them proving that …”
Yudis: Waymo autonomous vehicles average tens of thousands of miles between disengagements
“Whereas the Waymo doesn't, generally speaking, has tens of thousands of miles between disengagements.”
George: Waymo autonomous vehicles are 7-10x safer than human drivers
“Well it turns out it's like, Seven to 10 times safer than a human driver.”
Dolgov: Waymo Driver will expand into deliveries, trucking, and personal vehicles
“We envision a future where our, the Waymo driver will deploy, be deployed in other commercial applications, right? There's deliveries, there's trucking, there's personally owned vehicles.”
Waymo operates 24/7 across San Francisco, Phoenix, LA, and Austin
“In terms of where we are today, you know, we are up, you know, driving in all kinds of conditions. We're driving, you know 24 seven in San Francisco, in Phoenix, you know, a little bit those are the most mature markets, but also in L.A. And in Austin, and, you…”
Waymo has completed over 15 million fully autonomous rider-only miles
“I mean, we've driven, you know, tens of millions of miles in the physical world, and at this point we've driven more than fifteen million miles in full autonomy, what we call, you know, writer-only mode but we've driven, you know, tens of billions of miles of …”
Dolgov: Autonomous vehicle AI scaling requires rare-case data over raw mileage
“It has to be, you know, the right kind of data that, you know, teaches the models or trains the models to be, you know, good at the rare cases that, that you care about.”
Dolgov: Waymo is combining autonomous driving AI with vision-language models
“So that, that's what we've been very focused on that Waymo most recently is taking kind of the AI backbone and all of the AI, the Waymo AI that is over the years we've built up that is really proficient at this task of autonomous driving and combining it with …”
Dolgov: Waymo builds its own custom imaging radar in-house
“So if you build an imaging radar, which we do ourselves you know, it allows us to, you know, give you an additional redundancy layer, and it has benefits also in active sensor.”
Saswat Panigrahi: Waymo uses hybrid specialized deep models, not one single algorithm
“It's definitely many, many deep models. Some very general, extremely deep learning models, and some specialized models to make them really good at some very hard tasks.”
Panigrahi: Waymo rides require no front-seat human driver or takeover
“Fully autonomous as you can see, nobody in the front seat, no expectation of a human to take over.”
Panigrahi: Waymo suspends autonomous operations in heavy snow
“So, we are in that level four with a certain scope, So right now, if we were to begin heavily snowing in SF, which it has, believe it or not last season, there was a little bit of snow we wouldn't operate it.”
Panigrahi: Waymo AVs drive defensively without assuming drivers obey lights
“It thinks about many small details. Where is it positioning itself? How much gap is it leaving? What's its velocity so that it has the greatest optionality if somebody were to behave recklessly. So when we are crossing that sign, we're not assuming that everyb…”
Solving San Francisco and Phoenix traffic allows autonomous driving to generalize globally
“Pretty much every good weather city is like a linear combination of those two things, right? So in Los Angeles, Exactly. So you go to West Hollywood, you're much more like a SF style driving. Lots of pedestrians, cyclists, and so on. You go to the LA's you kno…”
Waymo could detect pedestrians in 2019, but struggled with over-conservatism
“And if you're always conservative, which was, you know, say four years ago, it was not like we couldn't detect the pedestrians, we could totally detect them. It was this nuance of, are we being over conservative, assuming they may jump in, hence let's not move…”
Radar sensors allow Waymo autonomous vehicles to see around corners
“The radars can almost see around corners. Even when the laser and the camera or our human eyes can't.”
Waymo has driven millions of autonomous miles and billions in simulation
“And by the way, the two million thing that you mentioned, that's just the fully autonomous miles. We have billions in simulation.”
Panigrahi: Off-the-shelf LiDAR and radar were unsuited for autonomous driving
“What we found is that the absolute best LiDAR out there, absolute best radar out there was not optimized for the task of autonomous driving. And hence you know we had to build it.”
Panigrahi: Autonomous drop-offs require contextual rules over static logic
“It depends on the context. If you're on a busy street like that, and somebody's going to a business, they would like to be dropped very likely in front of the business they're going to. Whereas if they are getting out of home, going to work, and it's a narrow …”
Panigrahi: Waymo vehicles programmatically exercise heightened caution around children
“And it's more cautious, because it understands that kids can jump out more erratically than others can.”
Waymo has logged over 20 million real-world testing miles
“By having driven twenty million plus miles in testing, by having done billions of miles of simulation, we become aware of problem spaces that others may not have discovered yet.”
Waymo Partners with AutoNation to Service Autonomous Vehicle Fleets
“AutoNation has an agreement with Waymo to service their self-driving cars at a bunch of the AutoNation locations around the country.”
Panigrahi: Waymo vehicles can see 360 degrees up to three football fields away
“This car with those appendages, as you mentioned, can see three football fields away, 360 degree, and it's getting a snapshot multiple times a second.”
Waymo vehicles detect cyclist handlebar orientation to predict their movement intent
“Because we can see that their handles are turning leftward, so we can understand that they're likely going to go that way.”
Panigrahi: Waymo designed its next-gen autonomous vehicle platform with Geely
“Our next generation vehicle that we did design with C, VT, and Geely is a pretty powerful platform taught with the rider in mind.”
Granular passenger screen displays cause riders to fixate on technical details
“So we tried to experiment with how much detail we put in here, and there are folks who, when in the early days we had a version here that would show a lot more detail, and they would engage like this, right? In fact, they would look more inside than outside th…”
Panigrahi: Waymo tested vehicles in 20 diverse environments including Death Valley and Tahoe
“We have tested, for example, in Miami as well for the heavy rain. We have tested in Death Valley for extreme temperatures. We have, ah, tested in Tahoe for snow. So there was a testing phase in which we went to 20 cities just to make sure with enough of a dive…”
Panigrahi: Waymo warns passengers about approaching cyclists to prevent dooring
“And the reason, by the way, ah, we're switching a little bit from safety to user experience design, the reason it told you cyclists approaching is what we know is even when the car is stopped, what happens is people open the door, and the cyclist was like, I m…”