At $1.1 Billion Invested, Google's Self-Driving Car Moonshot Looks Like A Bargain

From Forbes:

The high-profile legal fight between Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and Uber over the theft of autonomous vehicle tech secrets appears to have revealed yet another interesting nugget: Google’s R&D budget for its moonshot effort to perfect self-driving technology. And it looks like a bargain.

Over a six-year period Google’s spending for its “Project Chauffeur” totaled $1.1 billion, according to tech site IEEE Spectrum, which found the figure in a close review of a court filing. The information was disclosed in the transcribed deposition of Shawn Bananzadeh, senior financial analyst for Waymo, the report said. Neither Waymo, which was created last year to commercialize Google’s many years of R&D, nor Google has publicly shared that figure previously.

A Waymo spokesperson declined to comment on the report or confirm the amount. Waymo’s budget has been wrapped into Google’s capital expenditures on new initiatives categorized as “Other Bets.” In 2016, Other Bets got $1.385 billion, a jump from $850 million a year earlier.

Bananzadeh’s deposition is heavily redacted, though at one point he describes the $1.1 billion figure as “a cost that captures the entire program spend from inception to the period of time where it stops,” IEEE Spectrum reports. He clarifies that the time period referred to runs from 2009, when the Google program was created under Sebastian Thrun, to the end of 2015.

The company was an early and aggressive advocate of self-driving vehicles, so much so that it eventually pushed global automakers and numerous tech companies to pour vast resources into their own software, artificial intelligence, computing systems and sensors for autonomous cars and trucks. Uber was particularly motivated to catch up under former CEO Travis Kalanick.

Along with Thrun, Google’s original team was packed with university engineering stars that came out of the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Challenges, competitions sponsored by the Defense Department unit to create robotic vehicles capable of driving themselves in both off-road and urban courses....MORE

In early 2016 we posted "2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year" (now mit umlauts and not just in the Hästkött). It went on for ten pages, so long I had to throw in little distractions (a discourse on umlauts) and the best guitar player in the world, a 17 year old girl in Paris.

Fortunately, thanks to ZeroPointNow at iBankCoin we now have this handy schematic for the highlights: