It is unable to scale. Waymo is too expensive and manual. The tech is overly complex and overloaded gadgetry.
Choosing the start up for Tesla … and interpreting that in the most prejudicial way possible, to boot … makes for a very strong contrast … although no different than the contrast would have been for some time in the past. What this fails to recognize is that Tesla has started something which could dramatic alter these comparison in a year or two … if it works.
And yet they are scaling. Whether they can keep scaling is another story, but so far they’ve been growing their service at an exponential rate.
Tesla has simpler equipment, but has yet to demonstrate that it even functions as a Level 4 system. The current open beta test in Austin still has humans inside the car that are performing real-time driving functions, so it’s not yet even a Level 4 system; and of course the CA program is just an ordinary Uber-like system using Teslas.
It may be that neither company can scale to a national program economically. But Waymo is certainly scaling its Level 4 system, while Tesla has yet to even launch one. Sometimes simpler and cheaper tech doesn’t mean an advantage - it might just mean that their system doesn’t have the right tech to actually work.
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AV ride hailing has been core part of Tesla’s business strategy since at least 2016 and reiterated many times since then. Tesla first applied for an AV testing permit in 2012. It shouldn’t be in dispute that Tesla has been working on this problem for a very long time. I don’t think it is reasonable to dismiss these efforts by saying Tesla is in start up mode.
But I did address that issue in the very first paragraph in my post you responded to (see below). You again are comparing Tesla’s future tech with Waymo’s current tech. If you allow that Tesla’s tech will improve in the future, you must also allow that Waymo’s tech can also improve.
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I don’t see any relevance to the issue. Are Airbus engineers smarter than Boeing’s? Is that what why the 737 Max crashed?
Is this an either or issue? Maybe Tesla management has a different agenda.
Even if true, irrelevant to future cash flows. My post was an effort to get you to look into the future but you remain anchored to a present without a future. That’s not investing.
The Captain
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I find that to be extremely implausible, given the sheer number of times Elon has publicly emphasized AV ride hailing over the past decade.
But assuming you’re correct thatTesla management is not focused on this issue, then AV tech is not a good reason to invest with them.
Oh, but I did mention the future:
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Waymo has 1500 cars in 16 years.
Shareholders will demand that it be spun off or shut down like Google glasses.
Chatgpt, Grok, Claude, Meta are gunning after their search business.
Not that it’s important to the thread, but yes, that’s why the 737Max crashed. Boeing engineers allowed a single point failure to bring down the aircraft, and they did it not once, but twice.
Boeing airframes have historically had at least two AOA (Angle Of Attack) sensors for redundancy; those tell the pilot if he is exceeding proper conditions for the wind angle over the wing, a sort of useful metric if you’re putting a few hundred thousand pounds of aluminum and humans into the air and depending on “lift.”
Airbus has a minimum of 3 on its aircraft, sometimes four. Boeing thought they could get away with just one on the 737Max, and in case it didn’t work right, well, they wrote some swell software (MCAS) to take over from the pilot, even if the pilot didn’t want it to.
And it did. There were several incidents which happened prior to the two crashes, so Boeing had plenty of notice, but, um, didn’t. Even after the two crashes they kept saying everything was fine, and “pilot error” and stuff, until every other country on the planet banned the aircraft from landing there, and finally US regulators gave up and grounded the planes too.
So yes, Airbus engineers are smarter than Boeing. Incidentally, it was Airbus engineers who designed the A320neo which almost overnight began stealing Boeing customers thanks to its larger capacity but better fuel economy. Now desperately behind the 8-ball, since Boeing was buying back shares instead of designing new airplanes, they chose not to make a “new” plane, but to (again) pump up the tired 737 frame - with the results we all read about later.
For the record, Boeing even noticed the poor flight characteristics during its own testing, which is why they had the software guys (likely in India) write the MCAS “corrections.” Interestingly, even though there are redundant flight computers on the planes, the MCAS only ran on one of them, so in case of a computer failure (which happens, that’s why there are two) the MCAS wouldn’t operate at all.
So to answer the question: yes, Airbus engineers are smarter than Boeing’s. And it appears Airbus management is much smarter than Boeing’s too.
I hope this sidelight has helped inform and answer your question.
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This is an absurd statement.
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I’m certain this was a management failure, not an engineering problem. I doubt the engineers thought a single point of failure was a good idea.
Remember the infamous meeting at Thiokol prior to the Challenger disaster “Take your engineer hat off and put on your management hat on.”
Which brings us to this insight by the Captain, which I hadn’t considered before:
I had previously assumed that Tesla’s management was committed to AV ride hailing. But if Tesla management’s agenda excludes AV ride hailing, this neatly explains why Tesla doesn’t offer AV ride hailing. The Captains insight also explains why Tesla isn’t applying for AV ride hailing permits: Not on their agenda.
I don’t fully buy it, but his theory explains quite a bit.
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I have similar thoughts (as do many others) about decisions at Tesla.
Regarding the camera-only decision I wrote below in another thread. This has “bad management idea” written all over it (although I could be wrong).
By the way, AVs need redundancy in hardware (compute and sensors) - hmmmm?
Because Airbus engineers are smarter?
The Captain
I’m sure it was both.
No engineer worth his salt would design a car without brakes, no matter what the managers said. Designing a product knowingly destined to fail should put a crimp on the career of any engineer forever.
Yet they did it. Yes, both engineers and management were at fault.
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And Tesla has zero autonomous cars in 12 years also.
It’s pretty clear that both companies started their autonomous efforts many years before there were sufficient advances in the underlying tech to make such a product commercially feasible. It just wasn’t possible to make an AV in the 2010’s.
While Waymo “only” has 1500 autonomous cars, Tesla has yet to deploy a single vehicle that operates without a human in the car performing critical driving functions.
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Tesla went IPO 15 years ago. It is now a $T market company with ~$90B+ in TTM revenue. It created a global supercharger network, EVs with best selling car in the world, a large Energy business, own batteries and even lithium refinery and a diner.
And yes, it developed FSD with vertical integration in autonomy with DOJO, Training infrastructure, automated data annotation and even their own Inference chips.
Waymo had one job. In 16 years with all the free capital from daddy Google, they have 1500 cars on the road and that too in geofenced area. They run large losses, tech is expensive, manual and overly complex. It will slowly die.
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Not relevant. Tesla also failed to develop the solar roof as a viable product, failed to meet their projected 50% annual growth, failed to bring the Semi timely to production volume, and failed to bring the Cybertruck to market at the specs and price necessary for sales volume. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. So far, they have not succeeded in developing a car that has been deployed autonomously. Waymo has.
Despite all the free capital from the automotive division, the autonomy division has yet to deliver a deployable product. Like Waymo, they’ve been trying for a decade - unlike Waymo, they don’t yet have a system that has been (or perhaps can be) deployed for autonomous driving.
Tesla’s past successes in developing EV’ and charging stations don’t mean they’ll be successful in developing autonomy. Anymore than Google’s massive success in search means that they’ll succeed.
It’s been many years since Tesla last brought to market a majorly successful product. Their subsequent efforts have either come to nought (solar roof, Roadster 2.0, Semi) or only very modest adoption (Cybertruck). While they are trying to implement an AV using only inexpensive hardware and leaning heavily on software, they very well might fail altogether - or do it much more slowly than they need to to be successful.
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Waymo will be shut down, just like Cruise was. Bloated expensive tech that doesn’t work.
This is a highly questionable way to phrase your observation. Both Tesla and Waymo cars are imperfect at the task of driving everywhere. Waymo makes few enough mistakes in cities to seem like a possible AV taxi, but is not really significantly tested in the country and on high speed highways. Tesla is tested all over the world, but seems to still have an error rate that is a little too high. Gives quite a different impression.
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They are imperfect in very different ways. Waymo is an imperfect Level 4 system - it can’t operate autonomously everywhere, but where it does it can function with no human in the car doing any of the driving functions. Tesla is an imperfect Level 2 driving system - it can’t operate anywhere without having a human I. The car doing some of the driving functions.
Waymo’s deployed more than a thousand autonomous cars, and Tesla hasn’t deployed a single one. Waymo might be open to the criticism that its tech is bloated, expensive, and doesn’t work - but so too is Tesla. Their bloat and expense is on the software side, not hardware - but they’ve also spent a ton of money on their tech, and it still hasn’t been deployed as an AV anywhere.
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You’re conflating L2 and L4 driving. Tesla has certainly tested L4 driving, but we don’t know how well it works because it hasn’t released the data or applied for AV permits. So the comparison to Waymo’s L4 driving is a little awkward.
A reasonable person would conclude Waymo’s L4 is better, simply because it is operational and Tesla’s isn’t.
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