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What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business. - Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much

by dkobia 1y ago

What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business. - Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins. - Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only. - Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.

oldjim798 1y ago
Why do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world? Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed. Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
  - oldjim798 1y ago
    Autonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
    - willahmad 1y ago
      you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic. there is a huge economic impact
      - oldjim798 1y ago
        Oh good, even more hours of the day my boss can take from me to wring even more labour out of me
        warkdarrior 1y ago
        Or you could use that time for your own purposes, no reason to allow for your boss to control your commute.
    - hibikir 1y ago
      They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school
      - earthnail 1y ago
        You no longer need inner city parking, and people will be more willing to jump on public transport to skip traffic because you are not bound by the location of your own car anyway.
        gtowey 1y ago
        Are all those cars going to keep circling the block at night when nobody is driving?
        smelendez 1y ago
        They’ll do what taxis have always done when not in use — go to a lot or garage in a cheap part of town.
        gtowey 1y ago
        You think taxi companies are paying for enough parking spaces to store most of their fleet at once? A lot of those cars are stored on the street in front of the house of the driver. Also, the problem of storing something like 10k taxis pales in comparison to storing 100k+ cars. Some large cities have millions of cars. When was the last time you drove to a stadium concert or ball game? It takes hours to get something like 30k cars in and out of those parking lots when everyone is trying to use the same roads at the same time. It's absolute gridlock. So to implement anything like what you're talking about you'd need a network of garages and lots in the periphery of a large city, and the road infrastructure that can handle 100k cars driving from outside the city to your home all in time to whisk you away on your morning commute. For that kind of civic planning & engineering complexity you could just build public transportation based on trains, light rail and busses.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic. Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
  - McAlpine5892 1y ago
    We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation. Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust. Addendum The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
    - jjice 1y ago
      For long distance trains: While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them. > We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get. Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it. Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.
      - rangestransform 1y ago
        There are already places in the US that can financially justify Japan-tier high speed rail (specifically the northeast corridor), but Connecticut simultaneously wants high speed rail through the coastal towns and opposes the land acquisition required to get adequately straight tracks. If American politics is unable to get out of the way in such a slam-dunk case for rail, what hope is there to bring public transit and urbanism to all of the car-dependent suburbia in the rest of the country?
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    Probably not ideal if one company controls the whole shebang though.
    - Fricken 1y ago
      Currently it's looking like Waymo's most viable competitors are in China, namely Pony.ai and Baidu's Apollo. Even without competition it will be a long time before Waymo is operating in most American cities.
      - grues-dinner 1y ago
        Assuming Chinese competitors get cut off as a "threat to national security", I'm sure Waymo would behave responsibility as a monopoly and won't be driving for a system that "accidentally" end with private car ownership being eroded along with public transport options in favour of their product. It would be crazy if a self driving car company would undertake projects that undermine public transport, for example. Proposing mad things like vacuum pod trains to head off conventional HSR for example. Imagine!
        astrange 1y ago
        Americans are incapable of constructing HSR all on their own. It doesn't matter if anyone tries to distract them, they'll be tied up in 200 years of lawsuits over whether the fake environment reports are long enough anyway.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.
  - oldjim798 1y ago
    The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'. This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      >hedge funds would be worth nothing. People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.
  - elzbardico 1y ago
    Do we still believe this propaganda? Really?
  - groggo 1y ago
    And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.
  - asdff 1y ago
    The customer is often merely a product to be farmed like livestock for as much of their disposable income as can possibly done. The people who are provided value are usually the shareholders not the people who are using the product or service.
jedilord 1y ago
[dead]
hibikir 1y ago
If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.
UltraSane 1y ago
Tesla isn't really in the game. Their robotaxi's only purpose is to inflate the share price. Tesla hasn't driven a single mile without a safety driver in the car.

by dkobia 1y ago

oldjim798 1y ago

Why do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world? Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed. Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.

bpodgursky 1y ago
Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
- oldjim798 1y ago
  Autonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
  - willahmad 1y ago
    you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic. there is a huge economic impact
    - oldjim798 1y ago
      Oh good, even more hours of the day my boss can take from me to wring even more labour out of me
      - warkdarrior 1y ago
        Or you could use that time for your own purposes, no reason to allow for your boss to control your commute.
  - hibikir 1y ago
    They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school
    - earthnail 1y ago
      You no longer need inner city parking, and people will be more willing to jump on public transport to skip traffic because you are not bound by the location of your own car anyway.
      - gtowey 1y ago
        Are all those cars going to keep circling the block at night when nobody is driving?
        smelendez 1y ago
        They’ll do what taxis have always done when not in use — go to a lot or garage in a cheap part of town.
        gtowey 1y ago
        You think taxi companies are paying for enough parking spaces to store most of their fleet at once? A lot of those cars are stored on the street in front of the house of the driver. Also, the problem of storing something like 10k taxis pales in comparison to storing 100k+ cars. Some large cities have millions of cars. When was the last time you drove to a stadium concert or ball game? It takes hours to get something like 30k cars in and out of those parking lots when everyone is trying to use the same roads at the same time. It's absolute gridlock. So to implement anything like what you're talking about you'd need a network of garages and lots in the periphery of a large city, and the road infrastructure that can handle 100k cars driving from outside the city to your home all in time to whisk you away on your morning commute. For that kind of civic planning & engineering complexity you could just build public transportation based on trains, light rail and busses.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic. Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
- McAlpine5892 1y ago
  We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation. Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust. Addendum The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
  - jjice 1y ago
    For long distance trains: While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them. > We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get. Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it. Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.
    - rangestransform 1y ago
      There are already places in the US that can financially justify Japan-tier high speed rail (specifically the northeast corridor), but Connecticut simultaneously wants high speed rail through the coastal towns and opposes the land acquisition required to get adequately straight tracks. If American politics is unable to get out of the way in such a slam-dunk case for rail, what hope is there to bring public transit and urbanism to all of the car-dependent suburbia in the rest of the country?
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Probably not ideal if one company controls the whole shebang though.
  - Fricken 1y ago
    Currently it's looking like Waymo's most viable competitors are in China, namely Pony.ai and Baidu's Apollo. Even without competition it will be a long time before Waymo is operating in most American cities.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      Assuming Chinese competitors get cut off as a "threat to national security", I'm sure Waymo would behave responsibility as a monopoly and won't be driving for a system that "accidentally" end with private car ownership being eroded along with public transport options in favour of their product. It would be crazy if a self driving car company would undertake projects that undermine public transport, for example. Proposing mad things like vacuum pod trains to head off conventional HSR for example. Imagine!
      - astrange 1y ago
        Americans are incapable of constructing HSR all on their own. It doesn't matter if anyone tries to distract them, they'll be tied up in 200 years of lawsuits over whether the fake environment reports are long enough anyway.
charcircuit 1y ago
The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.
- oldjim798 1y ago
  The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'. This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >hedge funds would be worth nothing. People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  Do we still believe this propaganda? Really?
- groggo 1y ago
  And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.
- asdff 1y ago
  The customer is often merely a product to be farmed like livestock for as much of their disposable income as can possibly done. The people who are provided value are usually the shareholders not the people who are using the product or service.

jedilord 1y ago

[dead]

hibikir 1y ago

If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.

UltraSane 1y ago

Tesla isn't really in the game. Their robotaxi's only purpose is to inflate the share price. Tesla hasn't driven a single mile without a safety driver in the car.