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Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promis

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's? Disclaimer - I am an Alphabet & Tesla shareholder

greenthrow 2y ago
1) Waymo has not "solved" robotaxis as a business. They are not profitable and the vehicles are not truly autonomous (the humans monitoring the vehicles are merely remote. We don't know how many humans are needed per vehicle.) 2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe Tesla is close to true robotaxis.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has zero experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major version numbers that have different sets of flaws.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  You are correct, Waymo has not solved the economics of robotaxis yet. However Waymo does have a huge head start on the solution. Waymo has been able to manage their scale growth to manage the cost of finding these solutions. It seems like a competitor that hasn't had that will have to pay a lot more to catch up.
zooq_ai 2y ago
as a Alphabet and Tesla shareholder, this is what is important. The rate of innovation at Tesla > Waymo The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD Tesla has economies of scale. Waymo has all the details figured out. Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years) Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that. Larry, Sergei are extremely poor capital allocators. Musk is brilliant (despite him being a narcisstic a*hole). Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness. Waymo is successful enough to not kill it, but also not a cash-flow positive to scale it up Edit : Tch, Tch expected HN anti-Musk hate showing up in downvotes.
- jonny_eh 2y ago
  > Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness. Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck
  - zooq_ai 2y ago
    They wish they had
    - ddalex 2y ago
      Who wishes to have created the car that gets stuck when it rains?
      - zooq_ai 2y ago
        The kind of founders who knows the risk of launching products? The kind of founders who knows shipping > waiting-for-perfection?
        ddalex 2y ago
        lmao auto founders that never heard of recalls :) move fast and break things may be ok for social networks, but never ok for endangering the safety of others to launch a 6th model of a marque, so well established, theoretically knowing a lot about cars, a model that dies when it gets wet, it's just embarrassing
        zooq_ai 2y ago
        https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Tesla/model-3-4-door-sedan/2022 https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Tesla/model-3-4-door-se...
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Tesla doesn't even have a single autonomous vehicle yet... They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number of times I had to grab the wheel'.
notyourwork 2y ago
Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort. Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.
  - thegrim33 2y ago
    FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152 incidents with or without injuries, per million miles driven [1]. So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries. Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, but from those initial numbers it seems your perception of reality of Waymo "screwing up" less is not accurate. [0] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million/#:~:text=When%20considering%20all%20locations%20together,2.78%20for%20the%20human%20benchmark https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...) [1] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data-2024q1/#:~:text=The%20previous%20highest%20result%20was,miles%20driven%20per%20accident%20registered https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data....
    - ra7 2y ago
      This is a ridiculous, apples-to-oranges comparison. You’re comparing fully driverless miles to driver assist miles with humans actively preventing accidents without controlling for any variables.
bangaladore 2y ago
The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see. Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic signs, and much more. HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities. Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. It remains to be seen if Tesla can generalize FSD enough to reach the same level as HD Mapping everywhere. Still, they have shown that the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
- kajecounterhack 2y ago
  > Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it. > the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point. That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big part of driving. Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog. Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within 100ms. LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of the world's shape. Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are believers at the company that maybe you could make "good enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change in strategy they just have no way to regression test their software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no human supervision.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way. Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're aiming for, and I hope it works out.
- jessriedel 2y ago
  > They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.
slibhb 2y ago
Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better position than anyone else to simply update their software and deliver self driving cars. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
whiplash451 2y ago
Waymo is in a better position because: 1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most people dislike their experience with uber, while most people think that they are a better-than-average driver) 2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains) is a golden asset in self-driving.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Tbh I love my experience with Uber. I know people who don't own a car because they think it's cheaper to use Uber. But you're right - I am an above-average driver.
- choppaface 2y ago
  The main factor though is that California appears poised to hand them a monopoly.
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    Cruise did not help themselves. The market is open.
    - choppaface 2y ago
      Waymo/Google benefitted massively from regulation (and lack of regulation) early on when they hacked up the car’s code for a demo and caused an accident with injuries https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-self-driving-car-crash-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s... Waymo would not exist as it is today if that crash had any fair scrutiny.
jrflowers 2y ago
This is a good question. Will the robot taxi company beat the company that hasn’t made a single autonomous vehicle in the robot taxi business? It is hard to say
LZ_Khan 2y ago
I really don't think robotaxi's are viable with just consumer grade cameras. Lidar's are what make them truly safe. Aka: tesla's training data is garbage.
itsoktocry 2y ago
There was an episode of The All In podcast a month or two ago. Friedberg brought up driverless Waymo being available in San Fran. Chamath hadn't even heard of it. He looked it up live and it blew his mind. These guys are all about tech and couldn't believe there were companies ahead of Tesla, what do you think the normies know?
- yangikan 2y ago
  Could you point me to this episode, please?
diebeforei485 2y ago
> is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's? Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win. Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised. Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
  - diebeforei485 2y ago
    Tesla is rather good at mass producing their own vehicles so they are not reliant on existing Tesla owners providing their vehicles for the fleet. If the rumor mill is to be believed, they will also be making a dedicated robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel so there isn't a wasted empty driver seat. > Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission. Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
    - FireBeyond 2y ago
      > Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods. The entry bar for renting a vehicle on Turo is quite a bit more substantial than hailing an Uber. I looked at making my cars available. You can restrict the age of the driver (anything vaguely high end I see required you to be 30+), require substantial deposits ($750), proof of your own insurance, mileage and location limitations, and more. Versus "Downloaded the Robotaxi app and put in a credit card number".

greenthrow 2y ago

1) Waymo has not "solved" robotaxis as a business. They are not profitable and the vehicles are not truly autonomous (the humans monitoring the vehicles are merely remote. We don't know how many humans are needed per vehicle.) 2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe Tesla is close to true robotaxis.

jeffbee 2y ago
Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has zero experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major version numbers that have different sets of flaws.
shkkmo 2y ago
You are correct, Waymo has not solved the economics of robotaxis yet. However Waymo does have a huge head start on the solution. Waymo has been able to manage their scale growth to manage the cost of finding these solutions. It seems like a competitor that hasn't had that will have to pay a lot more to catch up.

zooq_ai 2y ago

as a Alphabet and Tesla shareholder, this is what is important. The rate of innovation at Tesla > Waymo The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD Tesla has economies of scale. Waymo has all the details figured out. Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years) Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that. Larry, Sergei are extremely poor capital allocators. Musk is brilliant (despite him being a narcisstic a*hole). Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness. Waymo is successful enough to not kill it, but also not a cash-flow positive to scale it up Edit : Tch, Tch expected HN anti-Musk hate showing up in downvotes.

jonny_eh 2y ago
> Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness. Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  They wish they had
  - ddalex 2y ago
    Who wishes to have created the car that gets stuck when it rains?
    - zooq_ai 2y ago
      The kind of founders who knows the risk of launching products? The kind of founders who knows shipping > waiting-for-perfection?
      - ddalex 2y ago
        lmao auto founders that never heard of recalls :) move fast and break things may be ok for social networks, but never ok for endangering the safety of others to launch a 6th model of a marque, so well established, theoretically knowing a lot about cars, a model that dies when it gets wet, it's just embarrassing
        zooq_ai 2y ago
        https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Tesla/model-3-4-door-sedan/2022 https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Tesla/model-3-4-door-se...
Workaccount2 2y ago
Tesla doesn't even have a single autonomous vehicle yet... They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number of times I had to grab the wheel'.

notyourwork 2y ago

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

TulliusCicero 2y ago
Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort. Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.
- thegrim33 2y ago
  FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152 incidents with or without injuries, per million miles driven [1]. So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries. Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, but from those initial numbers it seems your perception of reality of Waymo "screwing up" less is not accurate. [0] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperforms-comparable-human-benchmarks-over-7-million/#:~:text=When%20considering%20all%20locations%20together,2.78%20for%20the%20human%20benchmark https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...) [1] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data-2024q1/#:~:text=The%20previous%20highest%20result%20was,miles%20driven%20per%20accident%20registered https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data....
  - ra7 2y ago
    This is a ridiculous, apples-to-oranges comparison. You’re comparing fully driverless miles to driver assist miles with humans actively preventing accidents without controlling for any variables.

bangaladore 2y ago

The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see. Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic signs, and much more. HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities. Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. It remains to be seen if Tesla can generalize FSD enough to reach the same level as HD Mapping everywhere. Still, they have shown that the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.

kajecounterhack 2y ago
> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it. > the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point. That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big part of driving. Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog. Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within 100ms. LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of the world's shape. Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are believers at the company that maybe you could make "good enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change in strategy they just have no way to regression test their software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no human supervision.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way. Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.

dyauspitr 2y ago
I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're aiming for, and I hope it works out.
jessriedel 2y ago
> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.

slibhb 2y ago

Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better position than anyone else to simply update their software and deliver self driving cars. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

whiplash451 2y ago

Waymo is in a better position because: 1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most people dislike their experience with uber, while most people think that they are a better-than-average driver) 2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains) is a golden asset in self-driving.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Tbh I love my experience with Uber. I know people who don't own a car because they think it's cheaper to use Uber. But you're right - I am an above-average driver.
choppaface 2y ago
The main factor though is that California appears poised to hand them a monopoly.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  Cruise did not help themselves. The market is open.
  - choppaface 2y ago
    Waymo/Google benefitted massively from regulation (and lack of regulation) early on when they hacked up the car’s code for a demo and caused an accident with injuries https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-self-driving-car-crash-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s... Waymo would not exist as it is today if that crash had any fair scrutiny.

jrflowers 2y ago

This is a good question. Will the robot taxi company beat the company that hasn’t made a single autonomous vehicle in the robot taxi business? It is hard to say

LZ_Khan 2y ago

I really don't think robotaxi's are viable with just consumer grade cameras. Lidar's are what make them truly safe. Aka: tesla's training data is garbage.

itsoktocry 2y ago

There was an episode of The All In podcast a month or two ago. Friedberg brought up driverless Waymo being available in San Fran. Chamath hadn't even heard of it. He looked it up live and it blew his mind. These guys are all about tech and couldn't believe there were companies ahead of Tesla, what do you think the normies know?

yangikan 2y ago
Could you point me to this episode, please?

diebeforei485 2y ago

> is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's? Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win. Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.

FireBeyond 2y ago
Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised. Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
- diebeforei485 2y ago
  Tesla is rather good at mass producing their own vehicles so they are not reliant on existing Tesla owners providing their vehicles for the fleet. If the rumor mill is to be believed, they will also be making a dedicated robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel so there isn't a wasted empty driver seat. > Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission. Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    > Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods. The entry bar for renting a vehicle on Turo is quite a bit more substantial than hailing an Uber. I looked at making my cars available. You can restrict the age of the driver (anything vaguely high end I see required you to be 30+), require substantial deposits ($750), proof of your own insurance, mileage and location limitations, and more. Versus "Downloaded the Robotaxi app and put in a credit card number".