by anonym29 | 2025-09-04 18:25:20+00:00
18 hours ago is "last few days"? It's open to the public right now. Members of the public are riding in Tesla Robotaxis right now. You cannot simply assume that no members of the public are able to do this just because your account is still on the waitlist.

There's a difference between disingenuity and information advantage. You're welcome for the early tip-off.

I'm completely unimpressed with Waymo's economics.

Waymo is locking itself into economically non-viable LiDAR setups. The 5th-gen Jag iPace cars were $70k + another ~$80k in hardware, making them $150k each just to get into the same ballpark as Tesla's sub-$40k cybercabs. While the zeekr-based / gen 6 Waymos are considerably cheaper, with a base vehicle costing only $33k and equipment costs way down, they're making progress, but they're still reportedly $80k+ per vehicle, and the LiDAR is simply unnecessary.

The safest human driver on the planet only has 2 eyes and 2 ears. The existing camera + mic setup on a Tesla vastly exceeds that, and thus the upper threshold on Tesla's camera-only safety approach vastly exceeds the safest human driver on the planet even without LiDAR.

As time has shown, the enormous trove of real-world data that Tesla has continues to improve the FSD stack in the real world (not just the theoretical upper limit) over time. You don't have to like Elon Musk, or Tesla, but the fact of the matter is that FSD (despite being only level 3 autonomy at the moment) is already far safer than human drivers are, just like Waymo.

Waymo (who has only a couple thousands of cars total, and only plans to produce tens of thousands per year) will never have as much real-world data as Tesla (who has millions of cars on the road collecting training data, and continues to produce over a million per year), and thus will never breach Tesla's data moat.

In order for environmentally-friendly EV mass transit via a robotaxi network to be a viable future for the nation's transportation needs, the unit economics and resulting per-mile costs have to be attractive not just to the ivy tower millionaire tech and finance workers along the west coast and New England, but to the ordinary, working class people that coastal HN elitists love to denigrate.

The big picture goal here is not to have the best robotaxi service at any price point in 2025, it's to make convenient, safer-than-human-driver individualized mass transit (the US transportation network, for better or worse, is ultimately built for individual automobiles first and foremost, rather than trains, busses, etc) economically and environmentally sustainable for all people, not just for those on six-figure incomes.

Waymo's a cool idea on paper, and their approach to safety may be laudable, but they do not have an economic trajectory to replace personally owned automobiles. Tesla does, and that matters more to the big picture than Waymo's 2025 snapshot-in-time safety advantage over Tesla, which has and will continue to shrink as Tesla's data moat expands at an exponential rate over Waymo's.

I'm happy about this. Helping all people (including low income people) access affordable, convenient, and environmentally sustainable transportation is a laudable goal. It's disappointing that the politically left-of-center has lost track of cheer-leading this important goal to play a game of partisan tribalism that seeks to attack the entity that is doing more to advance towards this goal than any other entity.