I'd argue Tesla has the lead. Perhaps their approach has technical limitations that make full self-driving impossible so it's moot but they have the lead.
They are not even close to being able to do what Waymo does.
The question is not, who has the first taxi on any public road anywhere, but who first can launch 10000 of autonomous taxis and make money.
Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area.
Self driving is mostly a software problem, and to solve general driving, a gigantic learning problem. How is gone solve that first and scale it, is open.
I would put my money on Tesla, and I wouldn't invest in Waymo if I could.
Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead.
So, can Tesla do this right now?
Also, why should Waymo not use HD mapping when they clearly have the ability to do it? Seems like a weird criteria.
And its highly questionable that their mapping can actually deal with all the incredibly complexity of the real world.
I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.
Funny, I have the same the opinion of Tesla’s camera-only approach.
> I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.
A “demo” with 20 million autonomous miles clocked vs 12.2 miles. The “process” that has so far yielded very little in terms of actual autonomous driving if you ignore the FSD marketing speak.
Probably Waymo
> Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area.
and Alphabet / Google is a money printing machine, if they get to self driving first it’s pretty much over for their competition.
> many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all
So self driving technology isn’t a solid business model? Why are so many companies trying to do this?
What’s stopping Waymo from patenting this after they get to an acceptable threshold and selling it to their competitors?
Waymo has spend 10+ years and they can now barley driven in possibly the easiest location in the world, a location where they have logged millions of miles. Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first. The technology on their car is incredibly expensive both now and to scale it to 10k, 100k, 1M vehicles is a huge challenge, both capital and manufacturing.
They are like a rocket company who says, we have this amazing air-frame, launch pad, software we only need to figure out the engine, then we are gone make money.
I place my bets on the company that has million of cars on the road, seeing every corner case possible in every location, because that is the real challenge to overcome if you actually want to have many 1000s of cars in every city. Plus the sensor suit and compute power in a Tesla maybe cost a few 1000$, scalable to 10s of millions of vehicles.
I don't think either of them is really close to self driving, but at least Tesla is focusing on the right problem with a scalable solution.
> What’s stopping Waymo from patenting this after they get to an acceptable threshold and selling it to their competitors?
If their technology actually works they would want to dominate the self driving taxi market and not sell it to the competition.
Their competitors would then have to install this whole Waymo hardware suit, making it not very practical for OEMs and normal cars. Uber or Lyft might be costumers, but why would you sell it to them if you could just replace them.
Waymo has burned money for 10+ years, signing a few licensing deal for a slightly better Mobile Eye will not give the return they are hoping for.
They are still in a learning phase -- they charge enough so as not to distort rider behavior, but they expect to lose money on each ride.
Apart from that, why build cars when you can sell the system to everyone?
Not having lidar has directly caused a bunch of autopilot crashes, so I expect they'll add it.
Hilarious to hear this come from someone rooting for the guys who took an off the shelf LKA + ACC system that couldn't handle stationary objects, turned it on full-time, and called it "Autopilot".
Of course the decision to essentially misuse that sensor suite killed a few people but that's neither here nor there right.
I don't think you can disparage Waymo and cheerlead Tesla on the basis that you think Waymo a money fire whilst ignoring that Tesla is massively in debt and has yet to post a positive annual net income. Tesla has burnt money for 17 years and it's recent profitable quarters are only the beginning of a turnaround that is not yet anywhere near sufficient to recoup it's losses.
In the meantime legacy car manufacturers are catching up with Tesla's offering and providing ever stronger competition. The coronavirus has disrupted production & made sales numbers confusing, but Tesla has lost its top spot in markets it led until recently. Tesla has been great PR for EVs and an important early market innovator, but it is by no means guaranteed long term success in either self-driving or car production.
The difference is that Tesla had a clear buissness plan to profit that they executed step by step. And the only reason they lost money is because they were expanding production capacity.
The analysis of the cars clearly showed that they had great margin on the cars, by far the best in the industry for BEV.
The same can not be said for Waymo. Its basically burning money and not even a clear plan on how this can eventually be recaptured. Tesla already makes money with teams that work on this stuff.
> In the meantime legacy car manufacturers are catching up with Tesla's offering
Wait, are you somebody from 2014? Because we have been hearing that since then and its still not true. And even if it were, it would not be a thread for Tesla, its a thread for ICE vehicles.
> but Tesla has lost its top spot in markets it led until recently.
Tell that to the 18% global market share in terms of EV sales. Its more if we are talking BEV. And its even more if we are talking revenue. And its even higher in terms of profit.
The facts actually say that Tesla has been expanding its global market share. But of course if you only read media articles that say 'in August Tesla fell to second spot in Lithuania' and BS like that, then you end up being misinformed.
Tesla also a has 3 gigantic new factories coming online next year, plus they easily have the best strategy for battery scale.
I'll bet you $1000 Tesla won't be the first to develop self-driving that is at least as good as humans (wrt. accident rate) in all weather and terrain conditions. Hell, I don't even think they'll be the third.
Disclosure: I work at a self driving company that is neither Tesla nor Waymo.
The fact remains they are out there, and you can buy them, and they can do some sort of self-driving. Waymo is an impressive tech demo at this point.
Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill?
Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually leapfrog them.
Waymo can just license the tech and sensor suite to manufacturers and make money off that. They don't need to actually build and sell a million Waymo vehicles.
The beauty of the Tesla model is that they've already made tonnes of the cars that should eventually be able to do this. Furthermore, instead of each vehicles being a cost for them, the vehicles are a source of revenue.
I acknowledge that it does all hinge upon Tesla reaching a point with their autonomy where it can be unsupervised. Some people say they will never get there, but I think that's pretty shortsighted. The data collected by their existing fleet is a massive advantage. Let's not forget that it's been more than 11 years since the first video of what became Waymo, and they can pretty much only drive a small area in Phoenix, with high likelihood of needing to train extensively for every new location as they're now doing in California. Tesla are doing most of the world in (more or less) one go.
The problem with Tesla is that while they've sold cars with that as marketing claim, there is very little reason to believe that its true.
And cars don't have an infinite shelf life; sure, they've sold lots of vehicles with that claim, but even if it were true, a whole bunch of those are already 1/4 of the way through an average US vehicle lifespan, and Tesla may end up with lower lifespan given its rock-bottom initial quality.
But where did you get a million cars from? To equal Tesla's existing fleet?
Uber has 3 million active drivers globally. If you assume that they're working in 8 hour shifts, 1 million Waymo cars is a rollout sized to replace Uber.
Coming at the math from another direction, Uber does 1.6 billion rides a quarter. A million cars would mean 18 rides per car per day. Totally doable.
But Waymo would surely focus on countries with high wages - US, Canada, UK, Australia, most of Western Europe. Replacing Uber in only those countries would only need perhaps 500,000 cars.
Of course they're going to ramp up towards those numbers, but once the tech works and it's just a matter of cash, it's going to happen very quickly.
If Waymo can get a 60% gross margin instead of a 20% gross margin, their profits could be an order of magnitude higher.
This is a trillion dollar opportunity, and its the first thing Alphabet is seriously pursuing that can rival search.
Aftermarket conversion kits are a rounding error and there's no long term moat. And that's before you start to get in to issues like improper installation and use, aftermarket modification, accidents causing bad PR when the gear isn't even running etc.
Remember that AEB demo a decade back where the car just slammed in to the object it was meant to stop for and it turned out they hadn't turned it on? Nightmare.
Yes, they definitely have the lead in outsourcing costs.
> Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road.
Actual deployment, not counting developing the technology, maybe, what, $100 billion or so at the outside, given a generous guess at the unit cost of the cars and a generous multiplier to cover other deployment capital costs.
> How many zeros are there on that number?
8
> Who is going to be paying that bill?
Well, I mean, if they couldn't convince outside investors, Alphabet could do it with cash on hand and still have money left over, but if they can demonstrate the technology, investors will be falling all over themselves to jump on board.
*: I don't know the actual number.