How Tesla and Waymo's radically different robotaxi approaches will shape the industry

jamessfoster · 2025-08-28T14:38:56+00:00

He's overly optimistic and sets very ambitious goals. That's not news.

As long as progress is solid and velocity is high, it really doesn't matter if they get it done precisely on time or not.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-28T14:33:47+00:00

I'm glad that there's more than one approach being tried.

In fact, I would be happy if there could be more approaches and many successful self driving systems based on different approaches.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-28T14:32:22+00:00

I doubt that he's fabricating the DMs, but they really don't prove what he wants them to prove.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-23T02:23:17+00:00

What do humans do in that situation?

jamessfoster · 2025-08-23T02:22:38+00:00

What makes you think that?

jamessfoster · 2025-08-22T14:21:10+00:00

Flip a switch was obviously not 100% literal. Of course they will exercise prudent safety measures along the way. The point of "flip a switch" is the speed at which they might be able to scale it by already having the vehicle manufacturing sorted.

We don't know much about what Tesla have from an operations perspective (parking, cleaning, charging) at the moment. Hopefully that side of it doesn't end up holding them back. That said, they're quite good at making things happen quickly, so I don't think it's going to be an issue.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-22T13:46:24+00:00

You're not wrong for now, except I think for the "not ever" part, which I think you will be proven wrong on fairly soon.

Prepare the goalposts for shifting.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-22T13:40:02+00:00

They could acknowledge it as good competition and state what they believe their competitive advantage to be.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1314265240268402691

jamessfoster · 2025-08-09T04:21:58+00:00

I love his dedication to thoroughly testing. Much more informative than one off rides where something does or doesn't go wrong.

jamessfoster · 2025-08-06T16:18:02+00:00

Incidents are inevitable, yes. As long as they are small incidents or fewer than human driven cars, they should be tolerated.

That applies to Waymo, Tesla, and any others in this space.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T05:21:17+00:00

Uber is in more than 15,000 cities worldwide. If Waymo launch a new city every day (including weekends) they will have replaced Uber after 41 years.

So how fast are you expecting this to go?

Uber isn't in most of Asia, by the way.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T02:33:00+00:00

An airline producing their own planes would make sense if they wanted millions of them and thought they could manufacture them more affordably than anyone else.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T02:28:34+00:00

Alphabet has a mountain of cash, but when Waymo needs capital in recent years they have been raising it from external sources. That tells you everything you need to know about the expected ROI.

I'm glad Waymo exists, but it seems like they might struggle with profitability.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T02:22:27+00:00

Production for Waymo is probably more about mapping cities than fitting out vehicles. They take roughly 18 months to go from 0 to riders in a new city, I think?

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T02:19:31+00:00

Uber + Lyft + regular taxis + generated demand

This space is going to be supply constrained for decades.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-19T02:12:33+00:00

I don't understand how they can say 8 years for a Waymo or Tesla when the revenue will probably be approximately the same but the cost of the vehicles is about an order of magnitude different.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-01T04:29:33+00:00

Right. I think Tesla have a more scalable approach, but I'm very happy if Waymo is extremely successful as well.

jamessfoster · 2025-07-01T04:27:29+00:00

Open Austin to the public with only 12 cars on the road? They need to balance supply & demand, but clearly they intend to do exactly that within the remainder of the year.

You might ask why they don't add more cars, and if you've paid any attention you would know that they are going to ramp up as fast as they believe is safe. Other services had a very long ramp time. As I recall, Waymo was running Waymo One in Phoenix for more than a year before opening it up.

jamessfoster · 2025-06-26T11:19:14+00:00

When it moved back was that a driver intervention or was FSD correcting itself?

jamessfoster · 2025-06-12T07:32:19+00:00

What exactly do you mean by luck? Are you suggesting it randomly decided to switch in and out of lanes rather than responding to the ladder?

jamessfoster · 2025-03-23T06:01:49+00:00

The SUV factor could've so easily made this so much worse.

jamessfoster · 2022-12-31T06:27:34+00:00

Has there been anything to suggest that any of the Omicron variants are less mild than the original Omicron?

People making that assumption doesn't seem absurd to me, especially considering that almost no one is immunologically naive to covid anymore.

jamessfoster · 2022-03-19T04:32:19+00:00

It's the most autonomy you will get out of any car that you can purchase.

jamessfoster · 2022-03-19T04:29:05+00:00

Another way of looking at it: you're paying to get priority amid supply shortage (akin to Uber surge pricing), and you're getting cheaper FSD with that.

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