The technological race for autonomous vehicles

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Alphabet, Google parent company, initially was the only investor of Waymo, but recently it opened to investments and quickly gathered over $2 billion. In the latest round, the company gathered over $2.5 billion, which in total gave $5 billion Capital.

Source: Waymo.com


Waymo has been operating for 12 years, the company specialises in autonomous vehicles. It is one of the oldest and best co-financed companies in this industry, and their great advantage is full access to unlimited Google resources.


Company’s cars are tested on the roads of 25 cities, Waymo One, which is a service that allows a ride to a stand-alone car, traveled thousands of kilometres, what is more company signed partnerships with numerous transport companies.


Recently, Waymo entered cooperation with Daimler – the owner of Mercedes-Benz, to work on autonomous trucks. After that, many other automakers have started a similar cooperation with Waymo.

Despite numerous successes and continuous development, the company also faced many problems that leaked to the public. This year, from the company, the vast majority of CxO level employees left, which was probably associated with videos that appeared soon after. The movies showed as autonomous vehicles get out from control during road tests. In recent years, numerous accidents were caused by autonomous vehicles and media was vocal about every case.

The autonomous vehicle market is dynamically developing and interest is increasing among tech giants such as Microsoft or Amazon. The first one invested $2 billion in Lyft, and the second one bought a company called Zoox. Companies from the automotive market are also increasingly interested in this technology, Daimler took over many companies specialised in autonomous tech, Ford and Volkswagen invested gigantic capital in Argo Ai, Toyota started working on the first autonomous car, and Bridgestone bought the majority of Kodiak Robotics, all these activities look like a technological race.

Despite this, the old player on the market, Waymo claims that “They love a challenge.”

Sources:

https://waymo.com

https://aibusiness.com/document.asp?doc_id=770295&

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