[kjksf]

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.

Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.

Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.

And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

[dinobones]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.

[llboston]

According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.

[testing22321]

> and there won't be, for years, if ever.

That is a lot of confidence. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space?

What makes you so certain?

[small_model]

lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.

[throw-qqqqq]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo

Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures.

Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number.

Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two.

According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.

[small_model]

Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.

The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components.

Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?

[hnburnsy]

I hope they are both successful, find their own niche, and even more players enter the market.

[gcanyon]

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have.

> didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware

A little more extreme, but: Tesla has sold something like 8.5 million cars total. If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than $1.3 trillion.

[dmoy]

I'm not a fan of Tesla's approach to self driving, but

> If they simply dumped an extra $50K of material into every single one of those cars without raising the price a dime, that would be only $425 billion. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but still <checks notes> substantially less than [their market cap of] $1.3 trillion.

That is an apples to dishwasher comparison. Money is fungible only when it's the same kind of money on both sides. You can't compare market cap like that. (Even for a company whose market cap is seemingly divorced from reality like Tesla's)

[fooker]

They'd need one more thing, a time machine.

TSLA market cap was about 50B for the first several years of their FSD effort.

I think they'd choose lidar if they started now.

[testing22321]

If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T

[raw_anon_1111]

You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.

[golem14]

If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.

[nasreddin]

This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.

[digitalPhonix]

$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)

[bobsomers]

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.

[UltraSane]

Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.

[g947o]

> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.

[WarmWash]

Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.