u/FrankScaramucci

Zdroj: The two Europes

• Waymo's system is end-to-end. (Source 1)
• The system supports a camera-only mode and they know how much performance degrades compared to using all sensors. (Source 2, Source 3)
• The system is robust to errors in the map or to map being temporarily removed. (Source 2)
• The cost of creating and maintaining HD maps per mile driven is negligible and their architecture probably supports switching to LD maps without a major rewrite. (This is just my deduction.)
• The huge sensors on the outside is a temporary phase. Personally owned vehicles with Waymo's system will have integrated sensors. (Source 4, I've also read rumors that this is coming in this subreddit)
• Waymo scaling is not a new thing, it's been somewhat consistent since officially launching to public 5.6 years ago, in fact, it has slowed down a bit in the last year. The annualized growth of weekly paid rides has been 4.5x per year. (Source 5)
• Waymo did ten challenging 100-mile routes without human intervention 16 years ago. Each route was tried repeatedly but still, it's notable that being able to drive for 2 hours without intervention is something that Waymo could do such a long time ago. (Source 6)

* Some of these are not 100% certain but rather probably approximately correct.

Edit: Many of these claims are about the Waymo Foundation Model. It's not clear to me whether it is actually deployed in production. One sign that it isn't deployed yet is that the Hyundai vehicles are supposed to use a next generation of their software.