Jason Calcanis of the All in Pod predicted
Tesla will land 40% of the future robotaxi market,
Uber 40%,
Waymo 15%, and everyone else splits the remaining 5%.
I go through the actual supply chain, unit economics, and hardware numbers and show why we think that split is way off — and why Tesla likely ends up capturing 99-100% of the market instead.
A whiteboard walkthrough of each of companies and the whole industry. Waymo’s lidar supply chain bottleneck (they’re converting under 10 vehicles/day), Uber’s dependence on lidar-based partners for its robotaxi hedge, Tesla’s 6 million Hardware 4 vehicles already deployed and robotaxi-ready, and why a single FSD software update changes everything overnight.
In this video:
0:00 Why I think Jason’s 40/40/15 split is wrong
0:39 Waymo’s fleet: ~4,000 vehicles and the factory bottleneck
1:51 The robotaxi-grade lidar shortage is critical
9:15 Global lidar supply tally: ~10,000 vehicles worldwide
11:07 Uber’s real margins: why only $5 of your $25 ride goes to Uber
12:37 Uber’s $10B bet across 20 AV partners — and why it’s still lidar-dependent
14:50 Uber’s Plan B: buying Cybercabs directly from Tesla
16:14 Tesla’s fleet: 6M Hardware 4 cars ready for a software flip
19:29 FSD v15 rollout timeline and the TAM math 22:38 Why we think it’s 99-100% Tesla, not a three-way split
23:52 The charging network Tesla still needs to build to support scale
26:02 Uber and Waymo’s unit economics problem at scale
We’re not saying Jason’s completely off base — Waymo, Uber, and the Chinese AV companies are real businesses with real deployments. Where we disagree is the scale math, timing, ramping, business models, the factories, the lidar supply chain, and the unit economics all point toward Tesla pulling away, not a three-way split.
What’s your read — does Waymo’s lidar bottleneck actually cap them the way we think, or is there a scaling path we’re missing?
Supply chain cap 25000-50000 Lidar robotaxi cars in ~2030.
AFTER FSD 15.X update – 6+ Million Tesla unsupervised. Today there are over 1.5 million supervised 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.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
2026 ileoy is still far off guys, eoy stock market is always better than the worst month of the year, September.
“I go through the actual supply chain, unit economics, and hardware numbers and show why we think that split is way off — and why Tesla likely ends up capturing 99-100% of the market instead. ”
This prediction is almost certain false.
With development of AI other companies will be able to train specialized AI for full self driving and will put their own products on market. It is very unlikely 99 – 100% scenario will materialize. Tesla has invested a lot in self driving, but other will be able to catch up. AI is changing the landscape.
The bitter truth is that AI advancement is about data and scaling. Everybody else can provide alternative AI to scale but nobody else has the data. That came from Tesla’s bet years ago to build collecting it into every vehicle they sold. The reason it’s already baked in, is that Tesla is ready now to occupy much of the market as soon as unsupervised FSD is gets approved. For AVs it also comes from already mastering mass production. Those things would take any competitor years all uphill with massive cash burn while Tesla is very profitable. Competitors have no real prospect of ever making enough profit to compensate for the losses. The one exception for AVs as for Space launch is China. China has deep enough pockets to subsidize any losses in the interest of national competitiveness.
This scenario is what it looked like years ago and nothing changed. Only the machine vision neural network version will win. Nobody else is even close to manufacturing scaling. The illusion has always been there are lots of competitors when it’s always been Tesla and a lot of Lidar Self driving companies burning cash. From a stock market pov it’s hard to time even if the ultimate endpoint is clear. Tesla is as dominant in terrestrial transport as SpaceX is in transport off the earth. 99% of the TAM. At this point it might still be years until it’s obvious to the market but it’s pretty much already baked in. There is no room for anyone else to acquire the training data or scale manufacturing. Tesla will have an unassailable advantage on cost and quality. Even as critics came to say it’s all just broken Musk promises – all that happened was what seemed likely 5 years ago became a near certainty today. When FSD unsupervised gets switched on and Tesla Network Robotaxi services are scaling rapidly all over along with CyberCab production – the licensing of FSD will have a Ford NACS moment. Some OEM will license followed by a cascade of most of the rest. Every vehicle on the road will be either Tesla or “Tesla Inside”.
So 600 $ per share was a bad prediction? Now it is 354 $.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/09/tesla-unleashing-thousands-of-cybercabs-will-send-shares-to-600-by-end-of-2026.html
The real question is, what is the bottleneck for growth (short term/long term). If it is scaling production than you are right. If it is regulation (which seems to be the case short term at least especially for Tesla) then Jason is right.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-stock-falls-as-cybercab-launch-lands-with-a-thud-1108376b