Is Tesla Truly Gearing Up for a Robotaxi Rollout?
This VC says Waymos could replace transit in SF, May mobility expands to a second US city, and what you’ll learn from following a Waymo around for a full day.
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Top Stories of the Week
Tesla appears to be building a teleoperations team for its robotaxi service (link).
Tesla has been testing & driving the Cybercab around Giga Texas the past couple of weeks (link).
If Tesla ever launches a true driverless ridehail network, heads will explode. Until then, we are left with a lot of speculation and anecdotes. I don’t know enough about Tesla’s technology to have a clue when it will be ready for prime time. But I do know from my own personal experience with FSD, there’s no way in hell I would put anyone I love (or even like) in the back of a Tesla cybercab right now.
But no one has ever gotten rich betting against Elon. And tele-operations are a key component towards launching an autonomous ridehail network since AVs need a fail-safe if/when things go awry. From here, Tesla just needs an insurance partner and a regulator willing to allow them to do driverless rides on public roads. Wonder how hard the latter will be..
May Mobility expands autonomous driver-out vehicle operations to second US city (link). Despite a confusing press release, I’m assuming that ‘driver-out’ means there’s no driver in the vehicle and these things are operating on public roads. Regular readers know that that’s really the only benchmark that matters when it comes to autonomous. Next stop, paid AV rides.
Cool Rides
Little robotaxi in the big city (link).
AVs or Humans behaving badly
Self-driving in LA is not easy (link). It’s not clear who was at fault in this accident but my money is on the human since these types of Waymo videos have been rare. During Cruise’s hey-day, I feel like I was seeing an incident/accident/issue on a weekly basis. So it was not a shock when something negative happened. At Waymo’s current scale (just 150k rides per week), tracking social media and actually taking rides can be an effective way to understand the product.
Other Stuff
Blake really waded into it with this tweet and a lot of smart folks chimed in on why this would never work (I agree!). Here are a few of my favorite responses:
Muni does around 500k trips per day so it’s not totally unreasonable that a Waymo could handle 33 trips per day (little high), but if luxurious, point to point trips were completely free, this would induce a ton of additional demand. Not to mention the physical restraints on space in downtown SF. So there’s no way this idea would ever work. But I do find it ironic that all of the transit enthusiasts who jumped on this idea, also like to say that Waymo and Uber are major competitors to transit. Well which one is it guys??
I also disagree that it’s a tech-bro culture war against public transit. A lot of regular citizens see a broken public transit system (insert any US city..) and want a better solution. Replacing SF buses with 15,000 free Waymos is a dumb solution but I think the sentiment is fair. Let’s use technology to improve and strengthen our transportation options.
Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future (link). Cool to see The Rideshare Guy contributor Gabe Ets-Hokin driving a team of WIRED staff around all day in SF, chasing Waymos. They discovered a few things:
Waymos drove very cautiously and carefully, following all the rules of the road and some of the unwritten driving rules like not running into the intersection as soon as the light turned green - Well, except for one of the Waymos that ran a yellow light :)
The Waymos were able to take many of Gabe's favorite shortcuts and driving maneuvers, showing they could navigate the city streets effectively.
They observed the Waymo vehicles constantly moving empty between staging lots, which raises questions about the efficiency and environmental impact of having so many empty self-driving cars on the roads.
Until next week, sayonara!
-Harry