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.
The technical sophistication of Google’s program, operating today as Waymo, is considerable. So auto and tech competitors have been on a buying and investment spree the last two years to compete.
General Motors purchased autonomous tech startup Cruise Automation in 2016 in a deal worth at least $580 million (and possibly more than $1 billion, based on some reports). Ford in February committed $1 billion to create Argo AI as its in-house autonomous car software unit.
Intel, seeking to be a key supplier of a range of autonomous vehicle components and technology, bought Mobileye, a leading maker of sensing systems for automated cars for more than $15 billion in March. Apple reportedly has had its own vast self-driving car initiative, hiring numerous auto engineers, though appears to have scaled that effort back, at least for now.
No company has been as concerned with catching Google as Uber. It spent an estimated $680 million in 2016 to buy Otto, the startup co-founded by Anthony Levandowski, ostensibly to develop technology to automate heavy-duty trucks. Levandowski was both a DARPA Challenge star and a key member of Google’s self-driving car team. His actions -- downloading more than 14,000 technical documents from an internal Google server weeks before he resigned from the company -- are at the center of Waymo's lawsuit against Uber, which fired him in May.
Uber also opened a well-funded Advanced Technologies Group R&D center in Pittsburgh in 2015 to lead the development of on-demand autonomous vehicles the company will one day add to its platform.
Autonomous cars aren’t here yet, but they keep getting closer. They offer the promise of less stressful commuting, low-cost rideshare services, mobility for those who can’t drive because of advanced age or disabilities and, most importantly, a means of dramatically reducing traffic deaths.
If they deliver all that Google's $1.1 billion backing will look like an absolute steal.
