As the title says. Will the autonomous driving industry has huge layoffs in the near future?
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No one knows. Even if one is coming soon, you'll never know till it actually happens. Just like the recession.
Probably not for the near future as there is still a lot of capital flowing into all of these AV startups. Problem is, there hasn't been a major breakthrough in this space in years, and the current pace of incremental capability increase is far too slow given investor expectations. The edge/outlier cases have proven far more difficult to solve than anticipated. So without a major AV technology sea change event I think investors will eventually lose confidence/patience and you'll see a lot of the independent shops fold up. AV houses that are capitalized via the massive free cash flows of their parent company (e.g. Waymo) will probably be okay for a while.
But uber atg and lyft level 5 might be dead becasue uber and lyft are not doing so well.
Neither will be dead in the near future though. Even at their current burn rates they have years of cash left. ATG also has its own independent capital channels (see post-IPO investments from Toyota, Denso, etc.)
I interviewed at level 5 and the people there are really bright. I don't know where they are going to keep getting the money though. They are expanding and want to have like 500 engineers (they pay , so maybe average like 300k TC), so that's 150 million per year in pay, and probably at least an extra 5 million for the building/vehicles, etc. Some of them are paid a lot more, so mabye 180 million per year. So, they think it will make it in 5-10 years, so maybe 1-2 billion total. Maybe possible for a 10 billion dollar company, but I don't know how plausible.
Check your math 300k * 500 is 150m not 15
Haha, that's what I get for doing it in my head while falling asleep. Corrected, thanks!
Not likely in any of the eng positions at least at ATG. Hopefully they nix the entirety of the SCALE team. Literally the biggest waste of money at ATG.
I mean, at this point, we could go either way.