I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment:
Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way.
Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.
> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.
Well you can definitely bet it will be faster not slower than the first two, especially given the basic (i.e. shared/city-agnostic) engineering required and the policy component, which will get easier and easier with each city as risk aversion turns to FOMO.
My argument is based on theory. We know that a lot of the learning is facing unusual situations (trucks delivering traffic lights, etc) that can happen in many places. And we have some idea of how long the mapping takes.
As a potential customer, Waymo's careful approach seems much more appealing to me. I don't want to ride in a move fast and break things robotaxi when it's snowing in Chicago.
Same, though playing Devil's Advocate some more, I can certainly see why "everywhere all at once" sounds more appealing to many people than "incremental rollout to major metros". While I'm guessing that eventually Waymo will cover pretty much any paved public road, that's not actually certain, let alone when it would happen.
I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.
Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way.
Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.