Of course, Waymo faces some likely competition from Tesla, which announced its self-driving Cybercab robotaxi at its We, Robot event. Tesla already offers a ride-hailing service for its Bay Area employees, but the company relies on safety drivers for now.
I might be wrong, but my impression is that Tesla is years behind Waymo as of now.
Tesla and Waymo are trying to solve the same problem but two different ways.
Waymo chose the more expensive but easier option, but it also limits their scalability.
Tesla chose the cheaper option, but it’s much harder to solve, if they can even solve it with todays technology.
Ignoring that, even if Tesla had a viable solution, they would still be years behind Waymo as even in a best case scenario there’s going to be a lot of hoops to jump through before they can be operating like Waymo is today.
The difference is that IF Tesla can solve the problem they are trying to solve, they’ll be able to operate anywhere in North America and it’ll happen at the flip of a switch for either all their cars with HW3/HW4, only cars with HW4, or in the next few years, only cars with HW5, but all future cars from that point forward would have the capability.
Tesla also makes their own cars so can do this at cost, while Waymo has to purchase them from a partner which means there’s a markup, and their sensor suite is very expensive.
Someone on another thread mentioned how they wish their car has radar since it can detect everything, to which I replied, it can’t detect stationary objects at high speed. If he ever replies, I imagine he’s going to say, thats what Lidar is for, except Lidar doesn’t work well in Rain, Fog, Snow, Dust. That leaves vision.
Waymo’s current tech/fleet won’t ever be able to operate as a L5 vehicle (everywhere all the time) unless they solve vision the same way Tesla has to solve vision, or we have some breakthroughs in radar/lidar tech to bypass their weaknesses.
Waymo can operate as a L4 though today due to all these extra sensors.
Tesla may never solve the problem, but they are supposedly the furthest ahead in the vision game which is crucial.
Most folks would like that 45 billion to be invested into functional public transit. Fuck Waymo.
Don’t worry. It’s fake money anyway.
Perhaps, until IPO. There is VC money that should have went to taxation that isn’t fake money. They’ve dumped an obscene amount of money into the business so far.
That’s fine, make a big fuckin speed train with that funny money
If they can continue to roll this service out, they are going to do very well.
