From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing):

Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.

Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.

Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.

I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).

In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.

Tesla has had a massive surge in cybercabs in Austin over the last few weeks. I would venture to say they have surpassed the number of Waymos over here. Don't have any numbers to back this up though. As for being profitable, it seems the cost of a cybercab should be much less than a Waymo.

It may be the other way around if the pace in Austin is repeated elsewhere. Cybercab rides per week has already surpassed, Waymo, allegedly.

https://x.com/KHerriage/status/2114902145627504719

Did you take a look at amount of money waymo is losing let alone profit?

Unsupervised robotaxi has lower (at fault) accidents than unsupervised waymo.

All notable cybercab accidents have been done by remote driving.

The only thing waymo have are - large fleet thus large miles/week - many cities

In last week or so, Tesla went from tiny to equal/more than waymo in Austin seemingly in just a few days.

They'll do that in other cities too in due time.

If a few things work out for Tesla they can do overshadow Waymo very quickly.

Waymo’s entire fleet is estimated at about 6000 cars. Tesla produces this many cars in a little over a day.

The cybercab is also likely to end up costing 1/10th of a Waymo car

It’s not that Tesla is winning here. But the economics of their solution can totally tilt the entire market in the future.

There always gonna be both Pepsi and Cola.

Waymo isn't profitable at all. It's a massive money loser. And in some cities Tesla is nearly at parity

Lack of lidar isn't the biggest problem. Nor will adding it make Tesla's cabs suddenly reliable and useful. They don't have Google's geospatial data, they don't have the remote intervention infrastructure, they haven't expanded it across multiple cities and built out the service infrastructure to clean and repair their fleet. They don't have the financial history to go to Pimco for term loans paid out of cash flow.

Speaking as someone who follows the NFL, people will forgive all kinds of horrendous behavior if the player's team is winning. It's easy to say things in the abstract like "won't buy a Tesla" because most people aren't really shopping for a car all that often. But if the cybertaxi works and is cheap, then I would guess a lot of people won't be sticking to their proclaimed values. That said, I have my doubts that cybercab will really work all that well.

> There are millions of Americans like me who will never step foot in one because of their association with Elon Musk.

You guys have to realize at some point that you're not a significant part of the market. There are a lot of people who don't particularly like musk but the amount that would never use a cybercab isn't a significant part of a 300m person market.

"Politics got involved" from the beginning. In the context of USA politics, being an EV company while your CEO talked about how important electrification was to stave off the effects of human caused climate change is 100% a politically coded act.

What happened wasn't "politics got involved", what happened was that CEO started talking other politics.

And to say that "politics got involved" is a ridiculously passive statement. Elon has full control over how he publicly acts. Politics "didn't get involved" from 2022 onwards, Elon's publicly articulated political views significantly shifted, AND THEN Elon personally led massive organizational changes in the federal government.

Regardless of if you support or oppose DOGE, it's completely dishonest to wall off his actions at DOGE into a separate category of acts that you can clearly separate from his business.

This is a business lesson that most competent CEOs are intuitively aware of.

Elon's cognitive decline from drug addiction affected both his business and political decision making. pre-ketamine Elon delivered the Falcon 9, Model 3/Y, and Starlink. post-ketamine Elon gave us Cybertruck, Starship (aka the SpaceX Cybertruck), and a bunch of fake products like the flying roadster, humanoid robots, and Cybercab.

Musk has been consistently vile the entire time, it's just that liberals always think they were always right, even when they had the opposite opinion five minutes ago and were advocating that people who have their current opinion be fired and arrested for treason. He must have changed they say.

Even now, they have no idea how to criticize him because they adore the blindingly wealthy, opinionated, and willing to use that wealth to force that opinion on others (it's upper-middle-class sainthood.) His biggest crime somehow is that he allowed you to say what you wanted on twitter. His second biggest is that he went after the "administrative state", which is this mysterious theory that the Executive Branch should have authority distinct from the President, and therefore not be subject to democracy at all, in any way. Just like they turned on Assange, it's always telling that their consistent enemy is democracy. Democracy is directly offensive to the credentials that they dedicated their lives and compromised their personal integrity to get from wealthy people and institutions.

They're offended by Musk because they wanted to show their Teslas off, and to talk about the projects that their company partnered with Tesla on at parties, and to be proud of their kids getting named Tesla scholars and getting Tesla genius grants. They can't be because he's obviously a slimeball in a way that they can't overlook and ignore and mock the victims of (in return for money and status.) That's it. They, however, are currently overlooking the crimes of their favored billionaires and employers, so have no language to articulate their resentment of him that doesn't also incriminate themselves. So it's just this insane inarticulate id-explosion.

Reminds me of people being embarrassed about working at Arthur Anderson or Lehman Brothers at parties. "I worked in accounting; I worked in insurance," they would say. Their mothers used to gush about them, and now they don't even mention the names of the companies, like a father who died in prison. All Musk's properties are like that now, as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.. Musk's properties still actually even come out better than other tech slop because they all ostensibly have some material purpose other than extracting rents from normal people through deceit and by doing the least work possible.

I used to have a name for people who can't see this dynamic: "emoluments libs." They were the libs during Trump's first term who kept saying "The Democrats aren't going after Trump for profiting from his office because they're too afraid." No, dude. They're not going after him because they have the same deals with the same people, and everything that they would go after him for implicates them too. After you avoid the obvious, you're left with impeaching a totally corrupt guy for not arming Ukraine hard enough to threaten Russia hard enough because they wouldn't cooperate in uncovering the blatant corruption of a prominent Democrat. If that's the best you've got, a thing that sabotages one of your own prominent politicians (who was destined to win the next presidency by a hair), and highlights an evil thing you're currently doing in Ukraine, the other alternatives must be really horrible i.e. would send you to jail with him. Their only bright spot is that they hoped it would take (a notoriously disobedient) Biden out so The Atlantic libs could push one of their soulless golems Harris or Buttigieg into the presidency.

I have to be honest. I'm part of the ancient left that is celebrating the imminent death of the middle class, because it's their weird psychology that is killing us. I encourage their replacement with AI wherever it is possible, my criticism of AI is that it is still not good enough to do it, and if the middle class have anything to say about it it will never be. They will ruin it by either coddling the owners of AI to total flaccid laziness or threatening the owners of AI to make them cripple it, but they will make sure that they will maintain a lawn by any means necessary. They will, however, never give a shit about the uninsured unless they get sick themselves.

Almost as if journalists were paid partisan hacks.