[ikhatri]

So with the disclaimer that these views don't reflect those of my employer, as someone who works in the industry I think this article is basically spot on. The only point I would add is that the top line cost for all these vehicles is quite high right now, so scaling up the service alone isn't really a solution to the profitability problem. I won't get into specifics, but I think this blog post from Cruise summarizes the point pretty well (https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/av-compute-deploying-to...). The term "edge supercomputer" really is the best way to describe AV hardware deployment. And that doesn't even cover the sensor suite which is quite costly as well.

So if I was a betting man, I'd say that you can expect Cruse, Waymo & others to scale a little bit now, just to show investors that they can but for them to really save the bulk of the scaling (to hit that targeted figure of 1B/yr of revenue) until after they've found a way to get the costs down. That's going to come in the form of more bespoke vehicles that are better vertically integrated with custom hardware and sensing solutions (like the Cruise Origin).