Exactly. I've worked on autonomous vehicles by myself to the point of acquiring a vehicle for development. But the vehicle's conditions were less than ideal and it became too expensive to repair. I am using parts from it to mock up some prototypes. Acquiring a reliable vehicle for development is too expensive. Mind you, I'm an individual working on this as a hobby project. A startup will have a harder time due to overhead costs.
If anyone wants to talk autonomous vehicles feel free to email me. I enjoy it. :)
Did you try using simulations? I built a rigid body car driving simulation in college using OpenGL. Now I get a lot of inbound interest from the self driving car geeks.
Yes, I did data simulations and analysis. My main interest is in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) real time communications. Those things were simulated with a series of Python scripts, but there is nothing like real world testing. I am in the process of acquiring an SDR like HackRF to mock up some tests. But that also gets expensive when you have multiple SDRs transmitting or receiving data. Hopefully it will happen by the end of this year.
Anybody have some spare SDRs or some Lidars while we are at it?
If anyone wants to talk autonomous vehicles feel free to email me. I enjoy it. :)