Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) autonomous vehicle company Waymo is under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after reports that its vehicles potentially violated traffic safety laws. The US auto regulator is following up on over 20 reports involving the vehicles.

Yahoo Finance Pras Subramanian joins Catalysts to discuss the probe into Alphabet’s Waymo.

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

Google’s Autonomous Vehicle Company, Waymo is probed by us.

Authorities.

Yahoo finances pros to Romanian is here with more pros what’s going on?

Hey, yeah, you know, it’s not just Tesla and GM the crews are having problems with self driving here.

NTS are probing Google’s Waymo as well.

They’re studying 22 separate incidents where that involve collisions or instances where the cars may have violated traffic laws.

In some cases, they crash the objects in other cases, the the human driver was able to disengage the system to make sure it didn’t crash into someone or a thing.

Um The probe covers 444 vehicles that are out there that way most test right now.

So, you know, look companies like Tesla, like I said, G MS crews even Ford having problem solving self driving and autonomy.

Uh look it’s a hard problem to solve and the stakes are pretty high from a both a technology but also a human sort of safety point of view.

So a lot going on in that space and, and right now, Google struggling with that, right?

Do you think, I mean, does obviously will delay the timeline of this just in terms of mainstream adoption and exactly what that looks like, but just in terms of how much more investment research is maybe necessary at this point and how much of a Capex problem this could potentially be here for some of these companies who are trying to be larger players within this space.

Yeah, if you’re Tesla, you’re looking at from Musk’s point of view, we’re gonna invest heavily in A I and, and a machine learning and go with that route, go with the visual learning route and see how that that goes.

Uh Other companies like Ford, for instance, they used to have a big uh ARGO A I um A start up joint JV with VW.

They, they actually closed that down and wanted to focus more on assisted driving.

They think that’s sort of the, the near term goal, full self driving autonomy to them is seems unrealistic or is too expensive to solve.

But, but Cruz is trying to do it.

Uh Tesla’s trying to do it.

The question is, how long will that take?

Story continues

And I think that’s, that’s the problem right now.

Yes, certainly.

All right.

Great.

Thanks so much.