Here in the product/research sense, which is the hardest bar to cross. Making it cheaper takes time but generally we have reduced cost of everything by orders of magnitude when manufacturing ramps up, and I don't think self driving hardware(sensors etc) would be any different.
It’s not even here in the product/research sense. First, as the author points out, it’s better characterized as operator-assisted semi-autonomous driving in limited locations. That’s great but far from autonomous driving.
Secondly, if we throw a dart on a map: 1) what are the chances Waymo can deploy there, 2) how much money would they have to invest to deploy, and 3) how long would it take?
Waymo is nowhere near a turn-key system where they can setup in any city without investing in the infrastructure underlying Waymo’s system. See [1] which details the amount of manual work and coordination with local officials that Waymo has to do per city.
And that’s just to deploy an operator-assisted semi-autonomous vehicle in the US. EU, China, and India aren’t even on the roadmap yet. These locations will take many more billions worth of investment.
Not to mention Waymo hasn’t even addressed long-haul trucking, an industry ripe for automation that makes cold, calculated, rational business decisions based on economics. Waymo had a brief foray in the industry and then gave up. Because they haven’t solved autonomous driving yet and it’s not even on the horizon.
Whereas we can drop most humans in any of these locations and they’ll mostly figure it out within the week.
Far more than lowering the cost, there are fundamental technological problems that remain unsolved.
