In a lengthy interview with Bloomberg News, republished by Autoblog, George Hotz, the serial entrepreneur who founded self-driving startup Comma.ai, has this to say about autonomous cars: “It’s a scam. These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018, analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion.
The definitive book on the effort to bring autonomous cars to market is Autonomy, written by Lawrence Burns, who headed the early efforts by Google to develop the technology. It’s a fascinating tale, filled with multiple twists and turns as the team struggled to find the answer to cars that drive themselves.
But despite all the money thrown at the problem by Google, Uber, Tesla, Zoox, Cruise, and countless others, autonomous cars are no closer to reality today than they were 5 years ago, and many of those companies are running for the exits, looking to cut their losses if they can.
Anthony Levandowski was part of the team at Google headed by Lawrence Burns. For a decade, he was one of the brightest stars in the field of autonomous driving before he disgraced himself by suddenly quitting his job at Waymo and jumping to Uber. What followed was a giant lawsuit between Waymo and Uber and several convictions for stealing trade secrets for Levandowski. Ultimately, he was pardoned by Donald Trump at the urging of Peter…
