Ok, I appreciate that timelines in this space are long. But the opening phrase:
"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development..."
reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
5 years...? I bought mine with FSD in 2018, and that was years after it was "right around the corner." Worst Kickstarter of all time... Though I do like the car itself.
This is at the other extreme end though. They could do nothing and call the agreement to explore satisfied. Would rather they wait till they've removed at least three of the hedging words.
It’s too early to be of much interest to outsiders, but impressing people likely isn’t the intention. By announcing that they’re talking, they don’t need to keep its existence secret anymore or worry about it getting into the news at some random time as a “secret project.”
Here in Ireland we often see news announcements in the construction sector that goes something like "We received the go ahead to submit an application for planning permission to commission an impact study to determine whether it's viable to survey the land for construction suitability."
Yeah, that's pretty amazing corporate speak. And the development time lines are long. I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Even if it is just a Toyota vehicle with Waymo brains, there is a Taxi/Van in Japan called the Alphard and it's pretty nice! Toyota also has the e-pallete, which is a self driving bus for their new Woven City project. It would be great to see a new vehicle platform co-developed for those purposes because the Toyota "electrical" architecture is about 10 years behind (all CanBus). If I was them I would sort that out before building new EVs. If you look at a bz4x and pop the hood, it looks like an IC vehicle! There is no frunk, just legacy junk. It was never designed as an EV, they just put an electric motor and a battery in a Rav4 type platform and called it a day.
What kind of development? LiDAR on every Toyota? Would be very interesting.
If every car on the road was self driving we would not need a giant chunk of code to work around human behavior
"We've agreed to let the engineering staff from both companies directly exchange information in a place and form that we would not normally allow to occur. Hopefully they work out a way to glue our two stacks together."
>"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies. "
Took me a minute to find it, but the title seems accurate to me based on the second paragraph in the blog post from Waymo.
"In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)."
Toyota has been way, way behind on electrification. I suspect they’ve been Innovator’s Dilemma’d are are in a death spiral that they haven’t even noticed yet
Actually, we should also realize that they've been super wildly successful at getting people to move towards clean energy vehicles.
Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree.
It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars. It becomes obvious when we look at the total emissions generated by that pool of 100k cars.
If there's anyone to blame, I'd look at the luxury division - Mercedes, Audi and BMW (and also Genesis/Acura) - all late to the party, and still haven't been successful at meaningfully replacing the vehicles they would sell to their customers yet.
Up until recently (~2022/23) Toyota had cumulatively sold more hybrids than all EVs sold by all manufacturers combined, globally. They arguably have the best hybrid drivetrain on the market, and it's gotten to the point where even the Camry (2025 onwards) are exclusively offered as hybrids now.
Hybrids are a dead end. There’s already EV’s doing 1MW charging. That’s practically gas pump speeds while also being able to charge at home, and the underlying technology keeps improving.
8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.
>It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars.
It seems like hybrid sales are pretty comparable to EV sales in the U.S., at least according to this source anyway.
Not noticed, because they're printing money with their hybrids that all have year-long waitlists in the US. Gas stations are alive and well, and until the housing crisis is fixed (not happening in our lifetime), people will be reliant on gas vehicles because you can't charge at most apartment complexes.
Isn't that Japan in general, and for national security reasons? AFAIK they're wholly dependent on China for crucial mineral components in EVs, and 'burning the boats' by abandoning internal combustion manufacturing would effectively turn them into China's vassal.
They have some of the best hybrids on the market and EVs in general are not ready for prime time yet. Their plug-in hybrids are in the current sweet spot and are very popular. They have plenty of time to catch up once infrastructure and power density are there for EVs. This is with a US context.
Aren't now the european manufacturers pulling back from full electrification and into hybridization? Hopefully we'll get hydrogen powered cars at some point.
I went to a Subaru dealer here in Calgary and asked about the Solterra with a friend present.
The salesman bluntly told me to get a Tesla and half heartedly tried to get me to look at a hybrid. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there with a friend.
In retrospect, I am happier with my used Model 3 than an electric car from a company with no intent on winning the market.
Anyone have a source for how many pounds of batteries each car manufacturer has shipped over the years? It would be nice to see how BYD is doing compared to Toyota, Tesla, VW, and General Motors, etc.
I suspect you don't actually own an ev. Otherwise you might mention a specific here. I own an ev and they're marvelous. The ability to leave with a full tank of gas every morning and never have to worry about filling up is fantastic. No maintenance other than tire rotations ever 10k miles, and electricity is way cheaper than gas. And EVs are just fun to drive. The instant torque is fantastic and everyone I show it off to loves it.
The future of (public) transportation absolutely is driverless cars.
Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.
Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.
This “if cars were synced all would be well” fantasy assumes that the limited gains from scrunching won’t be a rounding error compared to the nearly unlimited additional trips that robots with infinite patience could start making.
Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”
If you want to get rid of the space taken up by 5 lane highways you need to convert roads into walkways for pedestrians, bike lanes, and bus lanes.
There can still exist space for cars but they need to be last in priority rather than the first, second, and third consideration cars have today when it comes to infrastructure.
I challenge anyone who seriously proposes this to first spend a month in a wheelchair. You quickly discover that your sense of scale and freedom of movement is largely a function of your physical capability and financial comfort.
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
The future of public transportation is buses and trains. Any other solution that involves wrapping individual humans in a steel bubble 10x the size is woefully inefficient and wasteful. No matter how well they self drive.
I love AVs, but It would do jack shit for traffic and the horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains. You still gotta have spaces for pedestrians, and cars still make cities ugly and unpleasant. Even electric autonomous ones. Tire friction still makes noise and pollutes the air with microplastics.
They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
> They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.
> horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains
This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.
I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.
Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...
But I think the real challenge isn't just the tech: it's the messy middle. Human drivers aren't going away anytime soon, and mixed traffic (humans + AVs) is where a lot of that theoretical efficiency gets lost
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.
We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.
(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)
If the car ahead of you is sharing visibility and braking data, you can drive on their bumper and stop when they stop.
If the car next to you is receiving route data, they can open a spot for you to get to your exit.
The benefit is large and NOT REQUIRED for normal operation. It's the easiest coordination problem in the world, because it's all upside and practically atomic.
> It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
That's what I want to, but I don't think it's really a fair complaint given that this has been reasonably well defined. What we both want is 'L5' (level five) autonomy, where the vehicle doesn't even need the ability to be manually driven necessarily.
(L4 iirc is hands-off but someone in the driver's seat (which must therefore exist) in a fit state to take over if necessary - no sleeping on the way in, no drinking on the way home.)
Let me use my phone or watch videos on the highway. I’m okay with taking over with a small amount of warning. I’m also okay doing all non-highway driving.
I just want something that can keep me in my lane and avoid ramming the vehicle in front of me. If I need to drive at the start and end of my trip, that’s okay.
This is what I want too, driving 15 min manually in the city doesn't bother me or tire me out at all, I just want to watch TV when driving straight on the interstate for 300 miles.
Want I’d want to see is a focus on level 5 autonomous driving from day 1. (Edit: Even if the system is level 4 to start with.) Yes the current coverage area is limited, but if you live in one of those cities the coverage area is easily large enough to be useful.
Oddly enough I think this is one of the few times when a subscription model makes sense. The current approach has a fallback call center which can give the cars driving directions in unexpectedly situations, which could be supported by either a monthly subscription or low hourly fee. Similarly move out of the coverage area and stop paying etc.
As someone who's blind I've made this argument in the passed. I don't need 100% success as long as the failure mode won't injure me. Seven years ago I would have loved a car that would have driven me to and from work 95% of the time, and refused to take the other 5% if the weather forecast was bad enough that the self driving wouldn't work correctly. I'd also be fine with the car pulling over to the side of the road if it got confused and waiting for someone remote to take control and drive until it was out of the situation where autonomous driving wouldn't work. Given the fact that I now work remote and am married to someone who drives if you told me I could by a car with autonomous driving for $50000 now I don't think I'd do it. I'm interested to see just how good autonomous driving gets and if it drives down the prices of taxi services. At this point I'd rather see an autonomous taxi service offering lower rates then Uber instead of buying my own car with autonomous driving.
I think you may mean Level 4. The difference between 4 and 5 is that 5 doesn't have any territory/environmental constraints, but you said you don't mind those.
If they require high speed cellular service then the system can’t scale to level 5 driving. Add a Starlink dish on top and the hardware could eventually scale to the entire continental US etc.
And I actually agree about the subscription model too. It's one of the rare cases where it feels practical: pay while you're in the coverage zone, pause when you're not
"Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)."
This feels like a pretty natural pairing. Waymo brings the software + autonomy stack, and Toyota has the scale and track record for building reliable, safe vehicles. If this actually leads to autonomous tech in personally owned cars (not just robotaxi fleets), that would be a major shift from the current trajectory
Readit News
"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development..."
reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.
As an 11 years Toyota driver I agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorandum_of_understanding
Concepts of a plan
Does the Waymo brain need all the Waymo hardware?
>With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance...
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...
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The current HN title seems too definite.
(Submitted title was "Waymo partners with Toyota to bring autonomous driving to personal vehicles")
"In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)."
“Enhance next-generation POVs” could be accomplished by bringing Toyota’s autonomous driving to the same level as Tesla’s, give where they are today.
And they’re not definitively “bringing” it. They’re just exploring bringing it.
Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree.
It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars. It becomes obvious when we look at the total emissions generated by that pool of 100k cars.
If there's anyone to blame, I'd look at the luxury division - Mercedes, Audi and BMW (and also Genesis/Acura) - all late to the party, and still haven't been successful at meaningfully replacing the vehicles they would sell to their customers yet.
8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.
It seems like hybrid sales are pretty comparable to EV sales in the U.S., at least according to this source anyway.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63904
I disagree. They backed hydrogen / fuel cells for most of the years others were developing bevs.
For most of America, EV'S and the associated infrastructure aren't QUITE there yet.
Not noticed, because they're printing money with their hybrids that all have year-long waitlists in the US. Gas stations are alive and well, and until the housing crisis is fixed (not happening in our lifetime), people will be reliant on gas vehicles because you can't charge at most apartment complexes.
They’re Toyota. They can buy their way onto the winner’s table later.
Hopefully this won't happen.
Wow, you’re more right than I thought. Ford is way higher than I would have thought too.
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I do wish they’d make a plug in hybrid Sienna…
The salesman bluntly told me to get a Tesla and half heartedly tried to get me to look at a hybrid. I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't there with a friend.
In retrospect, I am happier with my used Model 3 than an electric car from a company with no intent on winning the market.
Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.
Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.
If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.
So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.
Currently it’s got to be worth sitting at the wheel or paying a delivery driver… but if my robot says “6 hours to drive 10 miles”, I’ll think, “wow traffic is bad, whatever, it’ll get there when it gets there, beep, off you go! siri, text mom that the paint chip is on its way”, oh hmm actually maybe teal is better… “hey siri, get me another toyotaymo”
This is also easily managed with congestion pricing.
There can still exist space for cars but they need to be last in priority rather than the first, second, and third consideration cars have today when it comes to infrastructure.
So like a train?
You might not value that, but lots of other people do.
For every bus you can take ~50 cars off the road.
Doing things the right way requires civic-minded effort. The average American is just way too individualistic to make a dent in this problem.
They gotta supplement mass transit for dense cities, not replace it.
Full agreement here. AVs are great for last-mile transit.
> horrible use of space until they become autonomous buses on dedicated bus lanes, or trains
This is where we disagree. The whole point of AV TaaS is that they can go where bus lanes and trains can't. Last mile transportation.
I also wouldn't say they do "jack shit" for traffic in the sense that they reduce the need for parking, and reduce accidents which are the source of a lot of unpredictable congestion.
Surely there are tradeoffs. They indirectly incentivize sprawl and taking more taxi rides overall. And I get the tire residue argument (especially since AV fleets are mostly electric with high torque generating more tire wear). But is tire noise really a fair complaint? They're just going where cars already go and tires are engineered pretty well to minimize noise...
That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.
We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.
(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)
If the car ahead of you is sharing visibility and braking data, you can drive on their bumper and stop when they stop.
If the car next to you is receiving route data, they can open a spot for you to get to your exit.
The benefit is large and NOT REQUIRED for normal operation. It's the easiest coordination problem in the world, because it's all upside and practically atomic.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
(L4 iirc is hands-off but someone in the driver's seat (which must therefore exist) in a fit state to take over if necessary - no sleeping on the way in, no drinking on the way home.)
Level 2 and 3 are the mostly-automated version, and they differ in how much notice they're supposed to provide and how much attention they require.
Let me use my phone or watch videos on the highway. I’m okay with taking over with a small amount of warning. I’m also okay doing all non-highway driving.
I just want something that can keep me in my lane and avoid ramming the vehicle in front of me. If I need to drive at the start and end of my trip, that’s okay.
Oddly enough I think this is one of the few times when a subscription model makes sense. The current approach has a fallback call center which can give the cars driving directions in unexpectedly situations, which could be supported by either a monthly subscription or low hourly fee. Similarly move out of the coverage area and stop paying etc.
If they require high speed cellular service then the system can’t scale to level 5 driving. Add a Starlink dish on top and the hardware could eventually scale to the entire continental US etc.
"Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)."