Learning from the president of the USA, Elon? As the latest data shows, Tesla FSD is still far from unsupervised self-driving in customer vehicles, which was promised, but it has improved significantly in the last few months. The combination of the improvement and the fact that Musk can’t take many more losses with missed FSD timelines has pushed Tesla to find a solution: Waymo.
Musk has pooh-poohed Waymo’s approach to self-driving for years. He claimed its geo-fenced, mapped, teleoperation-supported approach wouldn’t scale.
Yet, that’s almost exactly what Tesla is about to launch in Austin this year.
I can almost guarantee what will happen: Tesla will launch this project and claim to have achieved “unsupervised self-driving.”
Elon and his Tesla influencer simps will pump this up while blurring the line between this product and FSD in customer vehicles to give the impression that Tesla is still a leader in self-driving.
When, in fact, Tesla will only have achieved what Waymo delivered years ago.
What was presented as a strategy shift was also a profound admission of failure. For years, Barra—like many executives in the tech and auto industries—spun a fantastical vision of the future in which fleets of so-called robotaxis would imminently replace normal cars. The technology was already developed, according to GM’s boss; the only thing left to do was scale it up. “We’re here. It’s happening now,” she boasted at the 2023 South by Southwest Conference in Austin. She routinely claimed that GM, which had revenue of roughly $50 billion in its most recent quarter, would make an additional $50 billion per year from robotaxis by 2030.
This sounds remarkably like the rantings of another “self driving car” proponent, doesn’t it?
These predictions turned out to be outlandishly optimistic, relying on questionable data and technical kludges that made the company’s software look more sophisticated than it actually was. Perhaps more unsettling, amid a boom in artificial intelligence technologies that has companies large and small contemplating replacing large numbers of human workers with modified chatbots, Cruise was hardly alone in overpromising. The company’s failure not only offers a cautionary tale for others attempting to sell robotaxis, especially [Elon Musk]’s Tesla Inc. and Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., but it also suggests that the wild promises of operators of AI chatbots (and the companies that depend on these chatbots to justify their sky-high valuations) should be met with caution, if not outright skepticism. After all, autonomous driving was supposed to be the [easy part] of AI.
Despite its failure, Cruise got as close as almost any company has to operating a viable commercial driverless car service. The problem was, it wasn’t very close at all.
I post this story not only for its inherent interest, but also as a cautionary tale for those who have decided that autonomous robots are just around the corner, and that all that remains to be done is, you know, tweak a few things and learn how to train them.
The failure to successfully train computers to get anywhere close to the capabilities of any Uber driver (after 15 years of sending cars loaded with sensors onto millions of miles of road) should give pause to some of the same companies as they attempt to use a similar technology to supplant humans in performing more complicated tasks. Driving—unlike, say, writing news stories or doing customer service for a bank—is fairly straightforward, an activity governed by clearly defined rules that are more or less the same no matter where you are.
Conclusion:
And like robotaxis, the chatbots cost more to run than anyone is willing to pay, causing some, such as Jim Covello, head of equity research at Goldman Sachs, to suggest that the AI boom is actually a speculative bubble. With an implied valuation of almost $160 billion, OpenAI is the richest startup of all time, but it’s losing billions of dollars a year.
Having lived through the dot-com bubble, the real estate bubble, and even having been alive during the Nifty-50 bubble (although unaware of it at the time), I’m thinking a realistic evaluation of this stuff might conclude that AI is real, there will be some winners, but at this point it is entirely unclear what those might be and which investments are likely to be the superstars of the new field.
While I agree that FSD is neither F nor S right now, this statement still won’t be correct. That’s because Tesla is planning on delivering it in a standard production $30-40k vehicle, while Waymo delivered it in a heavily customized $100k+ vehicle. If they were two businesses on equal footing, with equal service offering, would you invest in the one that has $35k cost per vehicle or the one that has $100k+ cost per vehicle?
No, this demonstrates what appears to be a leap-frogging of Waymo/Cruise/etc. 's approach.
If what Franz said on Jay Leno’s show is being interpreted correctly, then Tesla is skipping over the safety driver on board phase. This is a big deal.
This is what Tesla bulls have been saying for years - that Tesla’s approach of using FSD in owner vehicles will enable them to move faster at the more important later stages of autonomous development. If Tesla remote operators can handle more vehicles than Waymo, then especially without the need for HD maps it can scale to more regions/cities faster than Waymo has.
And while it is yet another potential wolf cry, Elon just tweeted anticipation of the faster roll-out:
I’d invest in the project that was carrying paying passengers. We still don’t know what it will cost to make the $35,000 vehicle functional.
I’d be fine with an interstate highway only, geofenced FSD, if I could recline the driver’s seat and sleep for a couple of hours while cruising down the highway.
Of course, but the premise (that I replied to) was that they launch an equivalent service. That’s the whole criticism … that Tesla will launch a similar [remotely supervised] driving system rather than what they promised, a totally autonomous driving system.
So each one remotely supervised. Each one with paying passengers. Each with similarly comfortable cars. Each one with a similar app to hail the cars. Etc. Which do you invest into, the one with $100k+ vehicles or the one with $35k+ vehicles?
It’s quite possible that that will come first. It all depends on regulations and testing. I’ve seen testing of semi trucks using full automated driving, and it was mentioned a few times that they would only do that on highways for now because surface road driving has too many variables to deal with. I’d also take that service. Even now, using FSD feels so “luxurious”, almost like having a chauffeur drive me around. But to have the car do everything for long highway drives, while I read, use my phone, play a game, take a nap, etc would be even more luxurious.
Maybe neither. The cost of the car may be trivial to the cost of paying someone to remotely supervise it.
Even in the case of Waymo - the cost of the car might be a trivial portion of the overall expense of the program.
I am reminded of the fact that tax drivers in NY often paid $140,000+ for a medallion to drive - probably 5 or 6 times the value of the car - so their profitability had very little to do with the expense of the vehicle.
Well, right now the $35k vehicles don’t exist. They’ve been promised for a few years, but we still haven’t seen even a concept art, let alone something close to functional. The $100k vehicles exist and have been in use for a year or more.
Further, the smart guy with ADHD at the head of the company promising the $35k vehicle is now splitting his time 4 ways instead of three, with his newest venture seeming to attract the largest portion of his time. That just doesn’t seem like a recipe for success as an investor, even before considering the current price of that investment, which appears to have a lot of future success already baked in to the price.
Frankly, I’m going to take a pass on investing in either. Neither the company with barely functioning, highly geofenced, human supervised “self” driving, nor the company continually promising and promoting vaporware along side their aging existing product lines seem to be good investments at the moment.
The CyberCabs were shown functioning driveessly at the Robotaxi event Tesla put on in October.
This is a bit of a Tortise - Hare race. Waymo, Cruise, Uber, Argo jumped out to what some perceived as an early lead. But, of those only Waymo is still around doing autonomy. Tesla’s use of owner driven cars for gathering data and iterating on the system will, I believe, result is a superior system, especially in terms of cost and expandability.