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.
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://electrek.co/2024/02/15/gm-nearly-doubles-map-super-c...