Tesla Full Self Driving, Autopilot and the Driver Assist Market

For years, Alphabet’s Waymo, Tesla and others leaders have promised autonomous vehicles will be here soon. However, we are currently short of the promised robotaxi capabilities. Here is a summary of the current situation.

Tesla Full self-driving beta for city streets to roughly 400,000 customers in North America. FSD is bought by about 10% of buyers in North America. Tesla also has some FSD sales in other parts of the world. Autopilot is sold to about 20-40% of Tesla buyers globally. Tesla has made $5-10 billion on Autopilot and FSD. Autopilot, advanced driver assist, sells for about $3000-6000.

All of the revenue for Autopilot and Autopilot plus is recognized as those systems are sold as completed systems. FSD is sold as partially complete for a fixed price (currently about $15000) or for monthly fees of about $199 per month.

There are various market reports on the Global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market size. One of the reoprts valuesvalued at approximately USD 18.2 Billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 24.5 billion in 2023.

Other companies in the driver assist are:

Denso, Aptiv, Robert Bosch GmbH, Continental AG, Magna International, Veoneer, Hyundai Mobis, ZF Friedrichshafen, Valeo, NVIDIA, Intel, Microsemi Corporation, Mobileye, Nidec Corporation, Hella, Texas Instruments, Infineon Technologies AG, Hitachi Automotive, Renesas Electronics Corporation, and others.

Other Autonomous driving companies are:
Waymo, Cruise, Pony.ai, Zoox, Apollo (Baidu), Aurora Innovation etc…

Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service, provided around 660K rides in the first quarter of 2023, up 236% year over year and 18% quarter over quarter. Apollo Go operates in more than 10 cities across China and carried out more than 474,000 rides in 2022. In June 2023, Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis got permission to operate across an area of 188 square kilometers in Shenzhen from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. In 2021, Baidu -Apollo announced plans to expand its self-driving mobility service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. The Apollo RT6 fleet is to be scaled to 10,000 to 100,000 vehicles at a steady rate, Baidu said, without disclosing when it will reach that size. 10,000 RT6 would cost about $400 million and 100,000 would cost about $4 billion. The Lidar and sensor supply chain will need to be scaled to achieve this goal.

Baidu plans to deploy 1,000 Apollo Moon robotaxis over the next several years in China. They currently have a few hundred vehicles. Apollo has more miles and vehicles than Waymo and Cruise.

California-based Pony.ai provides autonomous driving solutions and has launched robotaxi pilots in the US and China.

Baidu and Pony.ai started charging fares November, 2021 in Beijing for their robotaxi services, which have a safety driver monitoring the ride. Pony.ai started a paid taxi service May, 2022 featuring 100 AVs as traditional taxis within the Nansha district of Guangzhou. Both also have been testing AVs and robotaxis in the U.S., although Pony.ai’s driverless tests were suspended in California after a vehicle hit a lane divider and street sign in Fremont. Baidu and Pony.ai have a robotaxi license for service in Beijing as of March 2023.

GM laid out a vision of self driving cars in 2017 and this has not been fulfilled. GM has said they would have a million EVs. GM said they would get self driving car rides below $1 per mile.

Waymo talked about adding 62000 cars.

In Feb, 2023, Waymo announced the first million miles of without a safety driver. They had a million miles with riders only.

In May, 2023, Waymo had 2 million no driver miles.

Baidu (Apollo) introduced robotaxi called the RT6 – capable of Level 4 autonomous driving, complete with a detachable steering wheel. Baidu is trying to get a robotaxi of that tier of autonomy certified in China. The Apollo Go service surpassed one million autonomous rides in the summer of 2022 and eclipsed two million rides in late January 2023.

In early 2023, Apollo Go was providing an average of over 20 rides per EV, per day in a particular zone. Its initial footprint for driverless robotaxi services is 60 square kilometers, but says it will eventually expand to 500 square kilometers in China’s capital.

Waymo operates in parts of Arizona, San Francisco and will soon operate in LA.

Tesla FSD beta program passed 150 million miles in April, 2023.

Ford and VW talked about Argo AI and put in billions before Argo AI went bankrupt.
Ford driver assist system is called co-pilot 360.