Writes that the ‘golden age of autonomous’ is upon us.
intercst
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I’ll make the “not bull” case. By that I mean AV ride hailing could become a profit center, but not soon.
This is one of those areas where you don’t need to be a tech expert to evaluate the situation. As Uber and Lyft found out (especially Uber) you can’t just show up with a ride hailing app and start picking up customers. You need a permit. Ride hailing is regulated on the state and very often on the local level. Uber and Lyft spent lots of time in money tied up in court and lobbying in order get ride hailing permits, and it still isn’t universal.
So where is Tesla in the permit process? Texas does not require special permits for AV ride hailing, and Tesla already has a Texas ride hailing permit, so that’s one state out of the way. Beyond that, Tesla has not applied for an AV ride hailing permit in any jurisdiction that I’m aware of. And again, this is something that needs to be done on a city by city basis in many states. It took Uber years to get permits to operate in all the major markets.
This says to me Telsa hasn’t applied for any AV ride sharing permits because they aren’t ready to apply for them.
The other component to this is we know the Austin rollout will be geofenced with a remote (or possibly in car) safety operator. This means two things: One is that stock, privately owned Tesla can’t be used as a robotaxi. In short, there will not be millions of Tesla robotaxis on the road this year or next year.
The other thing is that Waymo was doing this four or five years ago. I’m sure Tesla’s tech is amazing, but it isn’t bleeding edge. If we were to mark the start of the golden age, it would be back then, not next month.
Since Tesla is going with the Waymo’s geofenced approach instead of Musk’s stated preference of a universal solution, it suggests Tesla itself is doubting the universal solution is possible in any reasonable timeframe.
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Ramping of production for Model 2 is 2 years away.
Dan Ives is betting on a 50% subscription rate for FSD software once it’s no longer “supervised”. Only about 2% of Tesla customers are paying for FSD today.
I wonder if Elon could get the NHTSA to declare FSD fit for use on the Interstate Highway System? Would that supersede any local regulations prohibiting its use? Obviously a state or municipality could still ban it for use on local streets and state highways.
intercst
Ives is talking about ride sharing in the existing fleet of Teslas on the road.
intercst
That might be part of it. But there are two other possible factors:
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Let’s cut to the chase: when talking about other states, we’re mainly talking about California, because that’s where most of the Teslas are. And the center of the tech industry. AV permitting in CA requires a lot of information to be disclosed, and Tesla might not want to open the kimono like that just yet. So even if they were ready to apply for a permit in CA, they might not want to rush into it until the were pretty close to actually starting their service in CA.
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Tesla might be pursuing an alternative strategy of trying to pre-empt state regulation of autonomy. He’s got a lot of juice in the Administration, and the Secretary of Transportation alluded to national standards the other day. I don’t see it being very likely, given Democratic attitudes about Tesla these days (I’m pretty sure DOT doesn’t have existing statutory authority to do this). But it’s another path they might be exploring.
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They should hope so, because the core Tesla business of supervised vehicles is weakening in sales, especially in Europe.
But, in fairness, we can all name enterprises standing on much less. At least Tesla has revenue and profit.
If we just look at recent history, we know both Tesla and Waymo (and others) have been going at this for a long time. There’s nothing about that trend that says anyone is at the cusp of some step change in innovation.
Always happy to be wrong, no one can predict these outcomes: not even the leaders in this technology and the leaders of these enterprises (as the record shows).