Is the waymo approach as economically in feasible as people claim?
IIUC, FSD costs are mostly captured by the running service, and the lidar equipment. The lidar equpiment is < 20,000/car for sure, and I can't imagine it costing 15,000/car to service it using waymo's ride hailing platform at scale.
Does anyone have any actual statistics/calculations on this sort of thing?
...Meanwhile, the ADAS in many new consumer cars can pretty much drive itself already.
Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.
Yeah, not really. "Pretty much" drives itself isn't a thing. It either drives itself or it doesn't. Which ADAS system allows me to sit in the back seat while it drives itself fully?
> Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.
Considering every self driving car company except Tesla (maybe MobileEye but even they have backup LIDAR systems) uses the exact same approach as Waymo, this is way off the mark.
Just look at EVs and the drop in battery cost over the years. Lidar being cheap at scale is just a matter of when, not if.