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Thursday, January 12, 2017

Waymo Manufacturing Partner?

Answers and poses the big questions:

Who would be the manufacturing partner? STM does a lot of automotive work. 

Magna Electronics as well, and they know Microvision. 


They're also talking about selling it to other companies.
Bloomberg


Forbes -- more at the source


Waymo this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit revealed that the latest generation of its hardware and software is being used on Chrysler Pacifica minivans that begin road tests this month. A total of 100 of the vans are getting radar, sensors, cameras and laser Lidar units for 360-degree, high-definition images of a vehicle's surroundings, all made by Waymo.

Having the company’s hardware engineers and software developers work together on the entire system has brought “design-driven” component cost reduction, Krafcik said. Further savings will come from high-volume production.

“We’ve scaled now so that we’re moving from units of tens to units of hundreds,” he said. “Think about the radars – we have six in the cars. We’re building 100 Pacificas now, so that’s 600 individual radar units. That’s quite a bit.”

“As you increase in an order of magnitude from tens to hundreds you’ll find cost reduction, but now we’re getting ready to scale to thousands and tens of thousands and we’re going to find there additional manufacturing cost down efficiencies,” he said. “We’ll also probably find it makes sense to work with a partner to help us manufacture these things.”

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