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josecyc

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Uber's drivers represent 40% of the cost per ride to Uber.

A more efficient service (algorithmic operation) which costs 40% less seems to be a no brainer.

A lot of the Tesla robotaxi fleet would be people that still own the cars but just deploy it to the fleet to make money for them.

Tesla has Full Self Driving as a clear objective and feature though, autopilot is just their way of releasing the useful features they acquire along the way to FSD. Tesla's difference in its approach (which I think most people tend to miss) is that it aims to be a robust general solution to L5, not a "hard coded", expensive, brittle, geofenced solution, which are basically what all the other L4 startups are aiming for. As famously Levandovski (the guy behind Waymo, Uber and Otto) and others have accepted that Lidar and HD maps are the wrong approach. https://medium.com/pronto-ai/pronto-means-ready-e885bc8ec9e9 It just is not a sufficiently general and economic solution to be scalable across time and space. It doesn't matter if Waymo's only focus has been FSD (which it completely hasn't) if they have a wrong approach they won't achieve it.

Not really, Uber has accumulated around 3 million drivers, Tesla has around 1 million cars with FSD capabilities and growing much faster than Uber. Tesla has the advantage that their fleet would be composed with their owned cars plus customer cars, my prediction would be that they would quickly becoming bigger than Uber's fleet of drivers once they have FSD and with a click of a button you could send your car to make money for you.