So if you were a betting man what would you go with. A bunch of software folks that don't really understand robotics. Or a bunch of robotics folks that learn some ML.
I think the ML is the easy part. The real engineering in making these things truly production ready is the hard part. Only few places in the world have that kind of production expertise. Toyota being one such place.
You keep assuming a self driving car strongly resembles a traditional industrial robotics at all.
The actual actuating part of a self-driving car is fairly easy (just turn the wheel, apply the breaks), it is the control system and sensing that is key to success, the former being software, and the latter (LIDAR) that Google is heavily invested in while Toyota is very late to that game.
Right now, if I was a betting man, Google will beat Toyota. Of course, Toyota could always flip the table and take some risks, but that isn't what Toyota is known for. If it happens great! But I don't think any smart money sees Toyota having a clear advantage ATM.
I think you're downplaying the actual engineering required. Robotics is more than just actuators. Robotics folks have been doing sensor fusion, control, and learning for much longer than software ML folks have been doing those same things.
I'm saying a software company is not gonna crack the market. Software companies neither have the expertise nor the engineering discipline. Boston Robotics and Google have been famously not getting along and their self-driving division seems to have been horribly mismanaged for a long time and we are now seeing the fallout in the form of lawsuits.
Industrial robots, and humanoid robots for entertainment purposes. Whereas Google has many of the founders of ML, not to mention its experts. Is Toyota, who already seriously undervalue software, willing to pay top dollar for those people when their average SDE makes < $60K/year (not just a problem with Toyota, but Japan in general)?
You also seriously misunderstanding the amount of engineering discipline needed to build modern software systems.
Misunderstanding? Given that my day job is to literally build tools and infrastructure for "modern software systems" I don't think I'm misunderstanding things at all.
But whatever I can say on "modern software" has already been said much better by Alan Kay so I'm going to defer to him for the rest of this conversation.
I'll buy Toyota stock. You buy Google stock. We'll compare notes in a decade and see who managed to make self-driving cars commercially viable.
I guess you'll find Toyota stock to be incredibly undervalued with a P/E of just 9.5 vs. GOOG's 30.26. The market isn't treating Toyota like a tech company. The market has already spoken, they've placed their bet on Google, which means that boat has already sailed. If you believe TM will make a tremendous comeback, then you could make bank, but that is a risky bet vs. a safe one (given today's information).
I think the ML is the easy part. The real engineering in making these things truly production ready is the hard part. Only few places in the world have that kind of production expertise. Toyota being one such place.