To make a similar comparison, Alphabet's Waymo has AV's that actually work. But they're not capturing 80% of Tesla's valuation.

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xp84 2 days ago | parent [-]

Don't those cost like $400,000 a piece to outfit, though? I mean this with tremendous respect because I think they're the only ones doing it "right," I feel like Waymo is kind of 'bruteforcing' autonomous driving using money. There's an inherent limit to the impact of a technology (and thus its long-term value) based on its cost, and even stipulating that Waymo has solved it in general, I think a valuation should be contingent on a roadmap which shows how it's going to scale out -- this seems like an as-yet unsolved problem until someone shows how to combine the reliability of the tech-heavy Waymo system with the price tag of a Tesla.

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jjmarr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Historically speaking there was an 80 year period in which transporting mined, natural, lake ice from the US Northeast/Norway around the world was economically competitive with ice machines depending on local market conditions.

Machine ice became competitive in India and Australia in the 1850s, but it took until the start of World War 1 (1914) for artificial ice production to surpass natural in America. And the industry only disappeared when every household could buy a refrigerator.

Self-driving doesn't have to scale globally to be economically viable as a technology. It could already be viable at $400k in HCOL areas with perfect weather (i.e. California, Austin, and other places they operate).

	▲	Zigurd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		One of the most interesting statistics about Waymo is how few of them there are. The only service area with what you could call a large number of vehicles is the Bay Area. The news reports I've seen about it say under 1000 there and fewer than 3000 nationally. Uber's CEO was quoted as saying that a Waymo completes more rides than 99% of Uber drivers. It's a pity he didn't make a comparison against the median Uber driver. But it's plausible that a Waymo could replace 10 Uber drivers or more. That ratio flows through to revenue.

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Zigurd 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's like asking if it's better to launch on Falcon 9, or wait until Starship actually hits $100 a kilogram to orbit.