I see this path:
- Develop AV (L4, march of 9s to safety)
- Scale and improve AV in company fleet via taxi business.
- Sell autonomy in consumer-owned (and maintained/managed) vehicles/fleet.
Both Waymo and Tesla are on this path.
Step 2 has a dependency on 1.
Step 3 has a dependency on 1. and 2.
Step 3 at L4 (sleep while your own car drives, the promise) is years away.
Maybe you can argue Tesla will go 1. to 3. without 2., but they haven’t completed 1. yet and they are doing/trying/claiming 2., so hard to argue they are going to 3. without at least some 2.
Waymo is at step 2.
Bulls often argue that Tesla has a manufacturing advantage.
I would argue that solving autonomy is the harder problem versus manufacturing vehicles. The world is full of vehicle manufacturers but not so full of AVs with demonstrated human-level autonomy.
We can go back and forth, but what has happened and is happening supports the above.
What evidence do you have that Waymo will have a hard time pruning their sensor suite?
Again, let’s check the available data.
Looks to me like they have already done it with their next gen (6th) sensor suite:
Karp told Business Insider that Waymo aims to launch Ojai for public riders by 2026. The company has been testing the vehicle in several cities, including San Francisco.
…
The sixth-generation Waymo Driver will have 13 cameras, four lidars, six radars, and audio receivers.
…
5th gen has 29 cameras, six radars, and five lidars.
They cut the cameras more than in half and dropped one lidar.
As far as affordable for consumer-owned L4?
Who knows? That’s not happening this year or next year at any scale. We do know hardware prices go down over time and with scale.