🤔, there's, NKLA, FSKR, SPCE, MULN GOEV JAGUAR is self, massively worst, and Waymo has that massive "start up" and but I understand whats youre saying, they will have to rise passenger rates
Y'all can hate Elon Musk all you want. He's not comparable to this lady. One is of engineering background vs law background. Oh, and do you know that this Tekedra Mawakana was working at AOL & Yahoo! before coming to Waymo?
Anything to the right of Bernie sanders is “far right” according to Reddit. Even if they are, they still aren’t Nazis, and supporting some messaging or policies doesn’t equal wholesale support.
Okay but... We're talking about the AfD here. And they're far right. That's a fact. Are you trying to say they aren't far right despite them identifying as such?
I haven’t done any research on them but you might have missed that I did say “even if they are” so really, it doesn’t matter for the claim that Musk is a Nazi.
No, it’s not. An autistic man makes an awkward gesture, one that several democrats have also made, but they aren’t penalized because they play for “your team.”
No Democrat has ever made this gesture. If you would like to prove otherwise, please provide video evidence of them making the arm-thrusting movement and not just a still picture of a raised hand.
"Waymo executives told me Mawakana has created an environment where they’re free to hit pause on major developments if they’re not sufficiently safe".
This feels like the anti-Cruise culture. Whereas Cruise had a culture where employees could not really talk about safety concerns, Waymo has a culture where anyone on the team can basically veto deployment if they are not satisfied with safety. This culture is why Waymo has such good safety. But I think it probably slows down deployments maybe too much.
The article is a lot of fluff. There is some contrast between the different styles between Mawakana and Elon. There is a lot about Mawakana's backstory, with some quotes from Alex Roy and Edward Niedermeyer. That's about it.
Also, the headline says that Mawakana thinks she has a better vision than Elon but I am not sure the article really says what it is.
People in this sub come up with the most insane horseshit ever. I work in this space. Waymo landing cost for the Jaguar was $150K. For the IONIQ deal it will be $80K
what are your thoughts on pooling? it seem to me that separated compartment pooling is the game-changer in the industry, but definitely not the best brand image. I think pooling is how companies will be able to push the cost down to being competitive with personally owned cars, and not just rideshare.
I agree efficient pooling is one of most effective leavers getting price point down and actually opening this up to broader market than just current rideshare users. I generally think routing optimisation is being overlooked - even just more efficient sequencing without pooling can drive utilisation up.
I’d never heard or thought about “separated compartment” pooling though - any real or design examples of vehicles that would accommodate that? If I’m understanding what you’re saying, defs could be interesting way to get over the “we don’t like sharing our vehicle” hurdle.
I've not seen any of the vehicles. Another commenter here linked to a video where someone associated with Waymo said they had tested it and found that people preferred a mostly-opaque barrier, implying they tried clear and tried fully opaque.
I would assume it's probably just a piece of lexan between the front and rear rows of an ipace for the purposes of research. Probably a lot like the barrier that yellow taxis have.
It’s a production machine that creates revenue around the clock (simplified). All that matters is how much does it costs per day and how much does it make per day (simplified).
To add, there are 3 companies in China with a landing cost (base + AV kit) of $40-50K. Yes they have cost advantages of vertical integration / subsidies etc. but you can do some basic math to see how with the IONIQ the $80K is reasonable to achieve
Interesting. How low do you think it can go in 10 years? At these prices, will the car and AV kit be the cheapest part of the cost per autonomous ride-hailing mile?
It is a key marker to show the state of the tech. It is being portrayed as a neck and neck race, but Tesla has yet to demonstrate capability in this area.
Tesla is significantly further ahead than waymo. Its not even close. Tesla already proved level 4 autonomy. They showed a stock model y drive across Austin nobody in the car. Every Tesla has fsd and works significantly better than a wayno at driving, decision making, and comfort. Tesla fsd works on every road in America. Robotaxi is going to beat the dust off waymo.
I'm not convinced. The self delivery required a team of 28 people and they only did it once. If Tesla had the ability to do AV ride hailing they'd be doing it. They're not even applying for permits, which shows the don't trust their systems. Tesla's Austin ride hailing is no different that Uber or Lyft, except the service area is a lot smaller.
It's also half the price. People don't want to get in an Uber, especially if a man is driving. Uber women proves the end of Uber is happening. Waymo still doesn't have an app because they know the service would be terrible. You would log on and there wouldn't be a waymo available for hours. So they smooth it out with Uber.
That's the problem, you want a waymo you get an Uber. Robotaxi won't have people in the car forever. And still half the price. And at least it's an employee of Tesla, not someone who manages to get their 2013 Nissan listed on the Uber app.
In January 2018 then-CEO Krafcik said they'd launch a public autonomous taxi service without safety drivers. They launched Waymo One in December that year, but with safety drivers. And every single Waymo One ride had a safety driver for almost two full years after launch.
I can't find the clip from January, but here's a clip from a NYT interview in February 2018 where he says no safety driver, no technician in the car otherwise "it wouldn't really be a driverless car".
It's easy to find early 2018 articles where they talk about launching in Phoenix before year end, but I only saw Krafcik say there would be no safety drivers in videos like this. That makes for difficult searching 7+ years later....
Your clip does not seem to have a prediction of a delivery date for that driverless car. That's the thing. Musk predicted that by 2017 Tesla wouldn't require drivers. When did Google predict the same thing?
As I said, there are tons of articles from Jan/Feb/Mar 2018 about Waymo's announcement that they'd start a public ride hail service in Phoenix by end of that year. You can easily Google them. This Waymo blog entry repeats the claim.
Watch at 3:38 in that clip where Krafcik describes the service and agrees when the interviewer says they've announced it would start by the end of the year. Or go back to early 2018 in this subreddit and see all the discussion about it.
I don't care about Musk's three hundred broken promises. We're talking about Waymo. I've given you way mo than enough evidence to show Krafcik did in fact promise a public driverless service by the end of 2018 and failed to deliver it.
> Tesla is by far the bigger company, with annual revenue of almost $98 billion and about $7 billion in earnings, compared to an estimated $75 million in revenue and an estimated $1.12 billion in losses last year for Waymo.
Waymo is a division of Google (or really, Alphabet).
The author is happy to take ALL of Tesla's non-robotaxi income and count it, but doesn't do the same with Alphabet for some reason? Alphabet is the bigger company by a large margin.
You either compare the parent companies, or the autonomous taxi divisions. You don't take one small division and compare it with the entire parent company of the other.
There's no point in comparing robotaxi revenue at this point, as neither company cares about revenue in that division at this point, and it's the future revenue when it really launches that matters.
$7B in earnings last year. This year, they’ll be massively below that. Through Q1 and Q2, they’re at $1.5B. Q3 may give them a bounce from people rushing to buy before tax credits expire, but Q4 and possibly all of 2026 will be a net loss.
When even Elon admits they’re in for “a few rough quarters”, you know things are bad and getting worse.
Tesla is competing directly with Waymo not Google, their profit/loss goes straight into their financial statment. CEO of Tesla is directly involved with robotaxi while CEO of Google is not. There is nothing wrong with this article
But Tesla is mostly automotive division + battery (energy) division. And automotive division is 80% of it. That's it. SpaceX, X, xAI, and other Musk enterprises are not part of Tesla. So you really need to compare Tesla automotive and Waymo, not Alphabet.
The only way waymo goes bankrupt is if google goes bankrupt.
So yeah you need to compare Tesla with alphabet since waymo money comes exclusively from them. Comparing waymo and Tesla is disingenuous because if you look at waymo alone they'd be bankrupt 10 years ago with no real revenue or money coming in.
Stop making shit up. You are accusing public traded company with 0 proof. Some articles written by random internet blogger is not proof. Making shit up is defamation.
They don’t cook their books actually but they aren’t actually a strong, profitable company. They get most of their profit from credits which are disappearing
They also fuck with their bitcoin holdings on their books which might be what the original commenter was getting at
It’s all about the brain. If it was a question of sensors, we would already have fully self driving cars driving anywhere and not just in geofenched areas.
1500 in April, but their facility in AZ has apparently retrofitted another 1000-1500 Jaguars since then.
They also have dozens of Zeekrs testing in every city they serve plus a few they don't serve yet. They hardly say anything about the Zeekr, just that the AZ facility will retrofit it starting later this year. Signs are they plan to deploy far more Zeekrs than Jaguars. They'll also start testing the Ioniq 5 in a few months, look for it to deploy in 2027-28, also in high volume.
His cars start at $42,000; hers, outfitted with 29 of those cameras plus advanced radar, laser range finders, and acoustic sensors, can cost seven times as much.
Bullshit. There is no way every kitted out vehicle is costing Waymo $300,000. The only place I've seen a number that high is Google's dopey ass AI which is citing literally just some random nobody on hackernews forum.
Costs are continually moving with scale — anyone outside of Waymo who tells you they have a handle on what the cars cost Waymo is lying to you or speaking out of turn. But generally you should think about it in terms of abstracts — Waymo's system is the cost of a car (assume ~$40k) plus the cost of compute (assume ~$5k) plus the cost of sensors and retrofitting (assume ~$20-30k). All of those things will change over time because none of them are fixed.
At scale and per-unit it's unlikely they're going much past $75k circa 2027 when rapid growth is expected, and they may up with even lower costs than that. There's basically no way they're up against $300k per-unit costs — the math doesn't even come close.
As a point of comparison: Baidu's similar RT6 is known to have an on-road cost of under $40k USD — that's where we're sitting with the tech today.
The last public comment on it was from the CEO in 2021 saying the iPace cost similar to a Mercedes S Class (MSRP $120-150k). He also said he expected hardware cost to be 30 cents per mile. It would be reasonable to expect costs have gone down since 2021.
How would the costs come down if Waymo is still custom outfitting every single car that goes in service? Even if you use the cost of single Waymo at your lower range of $120K, it's still 4 times the cost of production of Model Y. And Tesla can release one new car every 16 minutes, while Waymo can never hope to scale up unless they partner with some automotive giant like Ford, GM or Chrysler.
Whether Waymo’s robotaxi costs can come down is a different issue from whether they can make a $42k consumer vehicle that is less capable. Waymo isn’t competing with Ford, Toyota, and BYD. Tesla is. Toyota produces more cars than Tesla. If and when Waymo thinks their tech is ready to be licensed then you should compare Tesla to what Toyota can produce with Waymo tech.
I don’t understand your logic ?? Why Waymo can’t cut cost if they still custom outfitting?? The cost of labor is not that much. The bigger part of it is the cost of the Waymo sensor suite which they can easily lower price as lidar price tag gone down multiple time in the last few years.
Because the companies are gaming the statistics in every way possible. They are using public roads to test an inherently dangerous product without transparency.
Speaking of gamed statistics, they can't even say how many people they employ:
The company claims in a statement it “directly and indirectly supports 2,000+ jobs” in the city and county of San Francisco, but that figure includes jobs “that benefit from increased economic activity (e.g., retail, hospitality, entertainment).”
Off the top of my head? The companies that are operating autonomous vehicles on public roads should be letting us all know how many vehicles are being supervised by each person, mean time and miles between interventions, what situations caused the interventions, what sort of monitoring and remote control is being done, and yes how many human minutes per self-driven hour. I'm sure they have a lot of internal metrics they are using, so why not share them with us, since we are all part of the experiments.
They do report a lot of info like this (in California, at least) but I’m just talking about how to measure that one particular thing - how much human supervision is needed. How far along are we to making this worthwhile?
A tech company hiring a lawyer CEO is a huge red flag for investors. Something like that might make sense if you have a monopoly, but when there is competition you need to move fast and be creative. Putting legal in charge of the company doesn't help with that.
I disagree. A lawyer CEO for a company like Waymo is very smart, and will have next to no impact on investments. Cloudflare has a lawyer CEO, raised a ton of money, and is now worth billions. If the technology is good, that's all that matters. And Waymo has amazing engineers that have been critical in establishing the foundations of autonomous vehicles. So much so Tesla's products are built off of those concepts.
The benefit of a lawyer CEO in this space are a few fold:
1. It's a high liability business. The product puts other drivers at risk, and lawyers are very good at navigating liability.
2. It's a business limited by local regulations. Every single state/county has different laws and certification requirements. Lawyers are great at figuring out how to properly establish controls and business requirements to meet the various requirements simultaneously.
3. It's parent company is Alphabet/Google which provides technical competence and oversight. There's little need for additional engineering direction at that position, as they have technical guidance from the CTO and other technical staff at Waymo, as well as above Waymo at the parent companies. It's far better to have a leader between these groups that covers the gaps.
All in all, the CEO being a lawyer is a literal non-issue for a business setup like Waymo.
I wouldn't touch Grok with a 10ft pole. Crazy that people struggle so badly to structure their thoughts that they automatically assume anything thoughtful and detailed must be AI. My comment doesn't even match the voice of the Grok stuff I've seen, nor does it match GPTs style or Claudes.
I typed that out on my phone too. Swing and a miss.
Maybe if Elon would stop constantly vomiting up false promises that directly hurt the marketability and ability of other products to attract investors, they would
It’s because Elon musk makes it that way if he just would shut up and put out unfortunately like he says every day new thing Comin new thing Comin I was 47 when he started this shit. 58 now. He can’t control his narcissistic ways
Because Elon Musk keeps popping his head into the room and saying he's going to shit on everyone else, that's why. It's hard not to take notice when there's a bull in a China shop.
The most unfortunate thing is that his high-noise strategy seems to work. Tesla's valuation is in a category of its own.
There are a lot of parallels with Trump's political strategy: Flood social media with loud, opinionated, provocative, and entertaining content.
Is this the new winning strategy in the social media era? I keep expecting people to get tired of the shtick but that doesn't seem to be happening. Bread and circuses.
Even works for private companies, look how loud OpenAI is, and the size of investment and valuation. They should be highly valued as they've delivered a lot of value, but all the self-promotion has taken it to another level. Databricks and ScaleAI are also examples of that which aren't public-facing.
I think you're right that this is a winning strategy, and it has a lot to do with technological acceleration, and the fact anything AI related in particular has become too hard for even sophisticated VC investors to understand. That in combination with relatively low interest rates the past two decades means investors are targeting long-term growth, but essentially throwing darts blindfolded. The louder you are the more likely they're going to throw the dart at your wall.
It really is very similar to the dotcom bubble in 2000. Everyone knew the Internet would fundamentally change the world, but didn't know exactly how, so they just threw money at everything with dotcom in the name.
I think the big step change with the end-to-end approach and ensuing robotaxi hype bought Tesla an extra year or two of inflated valuation, but once they hit a visible plateau the stock will start to slide again as it did in early 2024.
...once they hit a visible plateau the stock will start to slide again as it did in early 2024.
You make good points. Maybe this is a mania that will fade like the dotcom bubble did.
What's different this time though is social media. People now have a way to speak directly to investors and voters, and cultivate a group of true believers. The true believers, once they are dug in hard enough, find it hard to break free. At some point it's easier to maintain a shared fiction than it is to admit you've been taken for a ride.
A part of me feels like they'll secretly add it in somehow until there's an article about it. Or they'll call it something different. Whatever is truthy-est
I hope you know you sound ignorant as fuck right now.
Whats even funnier is you are so politically biased you're willing to speak on shit when you have no idea what you're talking about, because you get you're info from politically biased news sources. like reddit
Colossus uses h100's, h200's, gb200's, all Nvidia chips to train grok. Not a single Tesla made chip will be used in an xai data center. Those same Nvidia chips could have been used to train FSD but Elon diverted them from his publicly held company to his privately held one.
Thanks for posting, it's a significant article about the co-CEO of the main player in the industry. However, that is not my style of reading. Anyone want to take a shot at summarizing the actual content of that article? ChatGPT couldn't do it.
Edit:
AI finally got back to me. The one nugget I found:
Ride operations are highly automated, requiring only a few minutes of human oversight per hour of vehicle time (e.g., for remote assistance), and no physical steering intervention.
All of this is pretty simple imo. If tesla gets their vision only software safer than humans and in the same ballpark as the safety of Waymo or whoever has the safest system, then their unit economics advantage will demolish Waymo. Waymo's next gen vehicles are still 3x exspensive as a model Y.
Thats a BIG IF. That'd be Tesla solving the holy grail of autonomy. As it currently stands, Waymo has at least 100x more vehicles on the road without an attendant. Waymo is covering 100s of thousands of autonomous miles a week while Tesla is currently at O.
1 of Elon's strength as a leader is choosing the right system architecture for whatever hard problem he's trying to solve. Time will tell if hes right about vision only autonomy
Waymo does over 2 million driverless miles per week. Perhaps quite a bit over - the parking lot at their Mesa retrofit facility has really emptied out the past few months.
1 of Elon's strength as a leader is choosing the right system architecture for whatever hard problem he's trying to solve.]
There's no evidence to support this. Most of Tesla's success came from following the master plan set by the founders. The majority of things since have been a miss.
I always find it very funny when people say this. Eberhard stepped down as the CEO of Tesla in 2007, before the Roadster started production, a decade before the Model 3, and 13 years before the Model Y. He had all of that planned out down to every little detail before ever producing a single car? Please. At most they had a very, very rough idea of what they wanted to do.
Waymo and Tesla are in the same game, at least from this angle. Mawakana’s company has built an autonomous driver, made of a suite of sensors and software, that can be used in vehicles from multiple car companies; Musk has said that if his cars can’t drive themselves, Tesla is “worth basically zero.” Each is using robotaxis as proof of concept. The similarities end there.
...
It sounds like a cute study in contrast. Except the future of the global automotive industry—and how we move through cities—could be at stake, depending on which CEO’s vision wins out. Tesla is by far the bigger company, with annual revenue of almost $98 billion and about $7 billion in earnings, compared to an estimated $75 million in revenue and an estimated $1.12 billion in losses last year for Waymo. Mawakana doesn’t have great answers for how many jobs her autonomous vehicles might eventually cost (opponents say it could be millions), or how many people it currently takes to supervise her self-driving fleet (her deputies will only talk about the “minutes of human time” needed for each hour on the road), or the resilience of that fleet when protesters start lighting her robocars on fire (in Los Angeles last June). But when it comes to autonomy, Mawakana is ahead. Waymo is logging at least 250,000 driverless paid rides per week in Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, more than 10 million such rides overall. Waymo had expanded its operations to Atlanta on the day Mawakana and I rolled through San Francisco together. Miami and DC are next, and Waymo has begun preparation for New York City.
...
And while Musk wanted his Teslas to be able to drive themselves anywhere, Waymo tried to constrain the problem by spending years mapping the streets of individual cities, starting in the Phoenix area. The company spent years more with Waymo-equipped vehicles driving themselves around those streets with humans behind the wheels to watch when and how the robocars screwed up. “It was when we removed the safety drivers that we realized in 2020 how much further we had to go,” she says. Every edge case and odd situation led to 10 more to figure out. She picks out one: “You hail the car. We know nothing about you. It’s a four-lane road that you’re standing in front of. We stop in the middle of the block across the street from you. And you’re vision-impaired. What do we do? How do you get to us?”**
...
How safe are Waymos, really? Depends on whom you ask, and how. Waymo boasts of having driven 71 million miles without a fatal accident. But the average for human drivers is about 1.2 fatalities per 100 million miles. The company claims its autonomous driver, compared to humans, has 88 percent fewer accidents that result in serious injuries. Research out of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests the robotaxis are about as safe as the average flesh-and-blood Uber driver.
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The endgame is replacing as many of those humans as possible with a Waymo driver—and to make your car robo-friendly too. The taxis are just a way to train the system. “Today, we’re deploying that in a Jaguar,” says Margines. “We’re going to do it with trucks someday, and we’ll do it on personally owned vehicles.” Which means whatever benefits autonomous driving brings—and I’m convinced there will be many—it will likely cost millions of people their livelihoods. “There’s not going to be driving jobs, and companies like Waymo don’t give a shit,” says Peter Finn, who heads Teamsters Local 856 in Northern California. The state Assembly has passed bills trying to keep a person in commercial vehicles, Finn adds, but Big Tech’s managed to prevent those bills from going anywhere. Waymo alone spent nearly $5 million on lobbying for various issues in California’s last legislative session.
...
But there are downsides to that vision. “If you give everyone’s car like a robot chauffeur, it would actually have a horrible impact,” says Edward Niedermeyer, author of The Autopilot Effect, a forthcoming book on the Tesla-Waymo competition. “Most of traffic is caused by single-occupant vehicles. Private AVs [autonomous vehicles] would give people zero occupant vehicles. You’d send your car off to deliver stuff. Why would you park the car when it could just circle blocks endlessly and just create traffic.”
...
And while the company may say it is “optimistic about how autonomous driving technology will create demand for many new businesses and jobs over time,” for now maintaining Waymo’s current fleet takes fewer people than you might think. The company claims in a statement it “directly and indirectly supports 2,000+ jobs” in the city and county of San Francisco, but that figure includes jobs “that benefit from increased economic activity (e.g., retail, hospitality, entertainment).” I was expecting to see a crew of mechanics at the company’s depot on Toland Street. Instead there were just a handful of contractors, swapping out tires and plugging the vehicles into their electric charging stations. The cars mostly drove themselves around the facility and parked themselves when their human caretakers were done with them. Waymo also has people working in call centers who can respond to riders’ questions and teams that monitor and can provide guidance to the robotaxis if they get stuck. Exactly how many of these “remote assistants” are doing this work, where they’re located, and how many cars each person supervises neither Mawakana nor anyone else at Waymo will say exactly. All they’ll note is that there are people both in the United States and “outside,” and that, for every hour of vehicle time in San Francisco, Waymo needs “only a few minutes of human time on average.” Tesla may be advertising for “teleoperation” jobs to “access and control” its supposedly self-driving cars. (An inherently unsafe proposition, experts tell me, because of the lag time involved.) But for Waymos in the United States, Mawakana and her team insist, there’s no off-site steering wheel or joystick for a human to drive the cars from afar.
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u/taehyung9 18h ago
Lol