In Waymo’s defense the hope is that cost will come down over time (it’s already working with Honda?). It makes sense to figure out what it takes to do the job first then do cost-reductions later than not knowing what it will take to achieve it. But I suppose when Waymo knows what it would take to do it, Tesla and the rest of the industry will know too as it’s hard to keep this stuff a secret for long (I think).
So in the end China’s EV companies will be the winner. They know how to bring costs down better than anyone else, and they will know how to do self-driving too. Just a matter of time. Kinda like nuclear weapons. Eventually it will spread to many countries, Iran included.
I have Tesla shares too (more than 100 ), so I hope Tesla will eventually figure this out, not too slowly.
Oh it just hit me. Yes this is the ultimate solution. We will have Optimus robots remotely driving robotaxis through Starlink internet connections. That’s it folks. Finally we can put this debate to rest.
Waymo does 250K rides a week, and aims to more than 2X its fleet in a year. It is not perfect so I am sure you can find footages of it doing silly things. But at least Waymo is truly autonomous as in you don’t need a guy sitting in front with thumb hovering over the kill switch.
Tesla is supposed to be the one scaling faster, but in reality it’s the one scaling much slower. The big event this week is actually not the tiny Tesla robotaxi rollout but the Xiaomi YU7 launch. The YU7 standard package includes lidars and radars for free that Elon claims is too expensive. Plus Nvidia chips and the self driving software and still manages to undercut Model Y in price. 200K orders in 3 minutes flat. Tesla’s China sales is going to crater even more now.
Fast or not we shall see. You’ve already lost the bet in Tesla by not going in on the cheap back in 2019. Doubling down on the negativity isn’t necessarily going to yield better results in the future. In fact, it might lead to even more bewilderment if and when Tesla managed to scale exponentially again. Be warned.
Another point is Waymo isn’t level 5 either. Its cars has remote control capability so when a car is in a situation it cannot get out of by itself, a remote operator will take over and “unstuck” the car until it can drive itself again. Tesla cars don’t have this feature, so they need a real person sitting in the same car. This obviously is a costly solution, but you have to start somewhere.
Waymo’s tech is advanced enough that this probably doesn’t happen very often, so their remote operator team doesn’t need to be huge. For 250k rides a week, assuming 25 rides per car per day, it corresponds to roughly 1500 cars roaming around at any given time. It’s a decent size fleet even after doubling, but nowhere near Tesla’s potential.
On my farm my neighbor threatened to shoot down my friend’s drone. It’s only a matter of time before someone shoots at an empty Waymo or Robotaxi. They are already torching and disabling Waymos in LA. The rage against machines is real.
Outside the tech world there is visceral hatred against these things.
), so I hope Tesla will eventually figure this out, not too slowly.
This time millennials?
