Tesla has been operating supervised ridehailing of robotaxi for Tesla employees in California for the past year. Tesla also has large numbers of employees in Texas. It would be trivial for Tesla to start a supervised ridehailing for robotaxi for Tesla employees in Texas.
Tesla has 20,000 employees in Fremont, California. Tesla has over 20,000 employees in Texas and is in the process of ramping to 60,000 employees.
Waymo has 150,000 rides per week. If half of Tesla employees (10,000) in California were given rides to and from work every day then this would be 100,000 rides per week. Tesla employees often work overtime and on weekends.
Tesla just offering the service to employees can put its supervised ridehailing at Waymo scale already. Tesla in California and Texas just for employees will be bigger than Waymo. Tesla will be able expand an unsupervised service in California and Texas at a far larger scale than Waymo by the middle of 2025.
Ark Invest believesTesla should enjoy a price umbrella at its robotaxi launch, thanks to the high level of current ride-hail prices, as shown below, while leveraging a lower cost per mile than the average vehicle on the road. Why? The operating costs associated with electric vehicles are roughly one-third those of their gas-powered counterparts.4 Without safety drivers, Tesla has suggested that, at scale, its robotaxi rides will cost consumers only $0.30-0.40 cents per mile,5 slightly higher than ARK’s estimate of ~$0.25 per mile but well below current ride-hail costs of ~$2 per mile and personal car ownership costs of ~$0.70 per mile.6 Lower price points could unlock ~$11 trillion in revenue potential, ~80 times larger than the addressable market that Uber and Lyft target today, as shown below.
Tasha Baidu Apollo Go Largest Robotaxi Company Now Developing Tesla Approach
Ark Invest Tasha Keaney says Apollo Go is the largest robotaxi company in China and the largest in the world by volume of rides.
Apollo Go is now trying to use the Tesla end to end approach.
The challenge that Baidu and others have it that Tesla needed to train with millions of cars. Baidu only has few thousand cars.
The largest EV company in China is BYD. If BYD wanted to copy Tesla they would need to get Tesla Hardware 4 equivalent into all fo their cars. It would take BYD at least 3-4 years to follow Tesla to version 13 FSD.
This is why I believe all of the Chinese companies will license Tesla FSD.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Reading this brought me to the thought what happened to ZipCar ?
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5553910/driven-how-zipcars-founders-built-and-lost-a-car-sharing-empire
Not even the Tesla board believes in FSD and the grand new growth phase; as per yesterday’s news (October 30th 2024), Tesla board members, including Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, are preparing to sell around $300 million in stocks.
le sigh
What proportion of their total stock holdings and future options potential does this represent? We all like to buy a new boat now and then
If you look closer into the details you’ll find they have stock options nearing expiration. If they want to exercise them before losing them they need cash both to buy the TSLA stock at the strike price and pay the taxes on the difference with the market price. The SEC requires insiders to follow a protocol of publicly announcing these sales well in advance so market timing by insider knowledge isn’t a factor.
Is would happen even if they had certain insider knowledge TSLA would go up after their sales. It doesn’t in any way imply they don’t believe in “FSD and the grand new growth phase”.
“This is why I believe all of the Chinese companies will license Tesla FSD.”
That won’t age well.
I think they will do what they always do, steal ip, then have their own network, and not give Tesla a penny.
FSD isn’t as easy to steal as it might seem. Neural networks aren’t especially subject to reverse engineering. Even the people who train them aren’t that sure exactly how they work.
Chinese OEMs are very competitive with each other and very oriented to manufacturing not software and robotics and R&D. Tesla is quite willing to license them it’s tech roughly at cost and give them support to implement it. Tesla wants to own the platform and make money on Robotaxi software and services not selling hardware or licensing OEMs.
China OEMs that take the deal will have a huge competitive advantage over their peers and there is no IP their peers are capable of stealing and applying that would equalize it.