Waymo needs competition. Who else is even close to being able to provide it? I'd hate to think Tesla is next in line because they haven't even started a commercial pilot program yet.
It may not be a perfect driving solution (probably 1:1 teleoperator to car in the beginning), but their go to market speed is undeniably better than Waymo et al. Waymo, Cruise, etc have to map out an entire region and have long rollout timelines. In theory Tesla could say they will deploy in X city, talk with the local government to get necessary approvals, and get it going after a few test drives. Thats the tail, anyway. With that kind of go to market speed you can start acquiring customers pretty easily and start scaling up the business. Its basically the typical SaaS setup - cut some corners for market share and become the defacto player in it after some time.
I wouldn't write them out purely out of spite. Their solution is the most conducive to scaling laws, on the ML, operations, and business side.
My understanding was that in many states, it's mostly just paper requirements and not any strict testing, etc.
The report comes days after Trump named the automaker's CEO, Elon Musk, as a co-head of the incoming administration's government efficiency department. Trump's team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as "incredibly painful", weeks after unveiling a two-seat "Cybercab" robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.
That's a good thing, we shouldn't be lowering the bar for AVs.
There's a straightforward solution to this that doesn't compromise public safety:
Employ paid training drivers who monitor the AV while it is collecting training data in environments where it does not yet meet the safety bar. These drivers are paid to be observant and intervene to avoid accidents. Furthermore, in their interventions, these training drivers provide critical training data used to improve the system.
This is what Waymo does also.
Perhaps Uber should have been more careful whom they hire, or put stronger controls on what they are allowed to do in the car.
Nobody wants to let a minimum viable driver chauffeur them around every day. Accepting the reduced quality of performance and increased risk a short duration cab ride is another story.
If you simply search for things like "tesla direct sunlight", "tesla camera condensation", "tesla camera bad weather", you can see thousands of instances of vehicle cameras not working.
Meanwhile Waymo bets on jamming the car full of sensors to ensure it has superhuman 360 perception in all conditions with multiple sensor redundancy. Waymo takes safety insanely seriously. Tesla doesn’t care if 100s die in their car while on FSD. Waymo doesn’t want to make cars or manage fleets. They want to purely focus on automating the driver end to end.
Unless Tesla has a magical perception algorithm breakthrough, Waymo may expand all US states that allow it, while Tesla won’t even get an operational robotaxi with 100+ rides per year.
Elon has tremendous success in SpaceX with falcon & starlink, that’s a fact. But Tesla FSD is so much hype compared to substance.
Not exactly reliable sources of information.
a) Early technology adopters are more forgiving of minor problems and are your free word-of-mouth marketers. The company benefits from lowered GTM costs.
b) Fast, reliable service depends on density; there needs to be enough cars on the road that there's always one available within a few minutes when you open the app; users will develop a habit of choosing whichever provider is reliably faster and that habit will become ingrained, making market entry for later movers more costly. First movers also have the advantage of their early adopters helping pay for their fleet as it's built up; later movers have to flood new markets with subsidized capacity to get to equivalent density. That works (Uber did it for rideshare) but it's expensive. So again: lower GTM costs.
Regarding whether this will be a viable market - Lyft/Uber have already demonstrated there's tons of demand for on-demand transportation services, and Waymo in SF is already very popular. One can back-of-the-envelope whether the economics work but generally speaking any time you replace labor with automation in a large market, it does.
In the long run though you're right that there isn't a moat that can't be solved with massive capital investment. But you could say the same about many markets; turns out one can have a successful company within a competitive market the old fashioned way.. by just being really good. It's harder, but it works.
Baidu/Apollo, maybe. There are deployed robo-taxis in China. Reviews of driving quality indicate "meh", they are sometimes directly teleoperated to get out of problems, and difficult intersections have fixed cameras the cars can see through.
Of course, if they're actually a more general kind of sensor but called a camera then it's fine.
I've been very puzzled at people treating FSD as non-existent when it's very reliably good.
We're still not even close to anything remotely capable of being autonomous, even on sunny straight californian roads... Bring these to switzerland snowy mountain passes or serbian dirt roads lmao
> a bleeding edge industry.
The only thing that this industry is bleeding is money so far
Most taxi/rideshare rides occur in cities, not the snowy mountains of Switzerland. Maybe they never make it to those snowy mountains. Who cares?
And again that's exactly what waymo's ceo said, it won't work everywhere / in all conditions, and as it turns out: outside of deserts and the west coasts these conditions are far from edge cases, they're the norm in most of the world
Without even talking about edge cases like mountains, put one of these in Paris or Rome and I give it 15 minutes before it gets stuck/crashes, people underestimate how hard the last 20% will be. 100 000 cars go through that place every single day: https://youtu.be/JgWhagB4d_g?t=79
It's very similar to legacy space and internet, the existing players saw SpaceX coming years out, did nothing and got crushed.
And Waymo has that whole time to bring down their costs of construction, learn how to solve problems of scale, and so on.
I agree that a CyberCab would have structural advantages if the service were at parity w/ Waymo, but that is a very big hypothetical!
I know which one I'd back.
Yeah, I could be wrong and they're just looking for the lowest risk profile. But, riders seem to be pleased and accident rate has been impressively low.
Is it easier to ramp to 1M vehicles a year and cut BOM costs by 80%, OR, install more GPUs and collect more data?
It's not a hardware problem for Tesla. They are a trillion dollar vertically integrated manufacturing powerhouse.
Thus it's a hardware problem.
If Tesla can solve FSD with only cameras, then yes, their ability to scale is much better than Waymo’s.
But that is a stupendously large “if”!
I’ve seen the Karpathy quote before, and I think it’s kind of hilarious to compare one company which does X0,000 robotaxi rides per day, to another company which has a robotaxi maybe entering production in two years, and say, “well look, they both have problems!”
Bit of a misleading simplification, no? Tesla boosters assume they will crack FSD, it’s just a matter of time. That seems like a big leap to me.
Andrejs point is that software problems are easier to scale your way out of. I think we can both agree there's plenty of precedent for this line of thinking.
A company cannot as easily scale their way out of lowering material costs by an order of magnitude or go from 1000 cars a year to 1M cars a year.
I’ve read The Bitter Lesson, I understand the argument “the human eyes are just cameras, and we do just fine”; I’m not totally unsympathetic to the idea that Tesla is better-positioned than some people think.
But I still think it’s a big leap to suggest Tesla will definitely solve FSD by scaling / software, and Waymo is fundamentally screwed and has no way to innovate out of its own scale problems.
Companies lower material costs by an order of magnitude all the time! Look at battery/solar over the last 15 years — in many areas we see two OOMs of cost reduction. It’s a challenge; but one that seems on par with creating software to replicate the optical capabilities of the human brain.
We're surrounded by AI miracles, this website is full of examples, yet people can't conceive of Tesla reaching this finish line. It's pretty odd.
I've clocked 20k miles on FSD. In the brief period I've used it I've seen step improvements. I guess in my mind it's a foregone conclusion with no breakthroughs required. All I need to believe is on the Tesla earning reports, which is Tesla data center build progress (training) and vehicles sold (data)
If they do pull that off, or are able pivot to a fused sensor architecture then I do think their hardware potential will make them a good competitor.
https://electrek.co/2024/02/15/gm-nearly-doubles-map-super-c...
But would people take it?
I mean, if one service is 25% cheaper but there are a bunch of horror stories of their vehicles crashing into highway barriers (like this past October), I'm not sure people are going to get in.
Also, it's different when you crash a car yourself vs a robot doing it. If you are driving, there is clearer accountability than a robot, so the bar must be much higher for the robot.
Even supposing slanted regulatory rule making, Tesla’s autonomous capabilities are vastly inferior to Waymo. The rules can’t be that complicated, either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not.
FWIW I’m a Tesla owner who rides Waymos whenever they are available for a cab ride, and won’t turn on FSD despite a number of free trials
This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.
Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)
What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.
And it doesn't help with the main issue, which is Tesla uses cameras and cameras don't work reliably at night, in glare, when they're dirty, etc.
It's not like Waymo couldn't be rolling out faster, but it's obvious they're doing everything they can to maintain the public's trust in them because once that's lost it'll be incredibly hard to get it back again.
And ultimately the law is one thing, but if people legitimately see Cybercabs as dangerous to them personally they'll take things into their own hands. Someone assassinated a CEO in New York a few days ago, you think pissed off people won't molotov a cybertaxi?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
edit: removed talk of downvotes, just providing the tweet.
Beyond, idk, saving my relatives the task of driving me to the airport, I don't see my family using an autonomous taxi at all. I think I'm like many Americans in that I like my personal vehicle because it's mine. I'm comfy in it, it's filled with only my stank, and I have tailored it to my liking.