From a tech and safety prospective, Waymo seems to be combining lidar, cameras, and radar to potentially exceed what a human driver can do. Why all this talk about the future when Waymo can do this today?
@kelseyhightower Because Tesla will be able to produce a car costing 20k to build that drives itself, and brings in multiples of that 20k in revenue over the lifetime of the car. We're talking profit margin per car in hundreds of percent. Waymos cost 200k to outfit. See the problem?
@kelseyhightower It's just another project Google may cancel at any moment.
@kelseyhightower Waymo: - 0.01% USA coverage - Has fewer robots than 5 years ago - Robot needs more human support than it'd take to drive manually - Spending $3 Billion doing 1 Million trips, annually - fails ~2 orders of magnitude more frequently than human drivers - often drives illegally
@kelseyhightower If I had to guess it's because they don't manufacture chips, automobiles, or batteries. The self-driving stack is going to be much cheaper to *replicate* than the wheeled platform it commands.
@kelseyhightower Assuming they’re operating at a loss with each unit, perhaps the unit economics just isn’t there yet. When it becomes cheaper with scale and technology gains, maybe then?