I agree completely with everything you've said, but it's worth keeping in mind that if legal/compliance requirements were to be loosened, a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record. And someone close to the incoming presidential administration would be in a position to influence what those requirements are.
Self driving cars don't have to be on par with human drivers, they have to be WAY WAY safer else public backlash is likely to ban them.
It's not like Waymo couldn't be rolling out faster, but it's obvious they're doing everything they can to maintain the public's trust in them because once that's lost it'll be incredibly hard to get it back again.
And ultimately the law is one thing, but if people legitimately see Cybercabs as dangerous to them personally they'll take things into their own hands. Someone assassinated a CEO in New York a few days ago, you think pissed off people won't molotov a cybertaxi?
Even supposing slanted regulatory rule making, Tesla’s autonomous capabilities are vastly inferior to Waymo. The rules can’t be that complicated, either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not.
FWIW I’m a Tesla owner who rides Waymos whenever they are available for a cab ride, and won’t turn on FSD despite a number of free trials
>either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not
This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.
Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)
My impression is that we’re regulations to soften, Waymo would quickly expand to freeways - the lack of their ability to do so now constrains their usefulness
Tesla has data from 5 million vehicles in real world conditions.
What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.
Waymo (and every other AV company) mostly use simulated data. The real world stuff is very repetitive and not that important; they also don't collect nearly as much as you think they do.
And it doesn't help with the main issue, which is Tesla uses cameras and cameras don't work reliably at night, in glare, when they're dirty, etc.
> a company could expand their offerings with a less robust safety record
But would people take it?
I mean, if one service is 25% cheaper but there are a bunch of horror stories of their vehicles crashing into highway barriers (like this past October), I'm not sure people are going to get in.
Driving is 100% cheaper, and there are a bunch of horror stories of people crashing their vehicles into highway barriers. We’re not starting at zero here.
Is driving really 100% cheaper? Owning a car has pretty high fixed costs.
Also, it's different when you crash a car yourself vs a robot doing it. If you are driving, there is clearer accountability than a robot, so the bar must be much higher for the robot.
