Sci/Tech Alphabet’s Waymo cuts cost of crucial self-driving car technology by 90% by building in-house

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If self-driving cars are going to become the norm, they are going to have to get cheaper to produce. Waymo, the self-driving initiative recently spun out of Google, says it has already made a bunch of progress on that front.

The company has slashed the cost to produce Lidar sensors, the radar-like systems crucial to many driverless car efforts, by 90 percent over the last several years, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a presentation at the Automobili-D conference in Detroit on Sunday.

One key to bringing the cost down from an off-the-shelf price of about $75,000 in 2009: Building the technology in-house.

In addition to software, Waymo is also designing all of the hardware in its systems inside of Waymo. That includes two new types of Lidar sensors in addition to the mid-range ones its had from the start. They are short-range sensors, to detect objects in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle, and long-range ones to detect potential obstacles from afar.

Read more here. (Recode)
 
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