Waymo will begin fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver —an important step in bringing our technology to more riders in more cities. This latest system serves as the primary engine…
Waymo will begin fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver —an important step in bringing our technology to more riders in more cities. This latest system serves as the primary engine for our next era of expansion, with a streamlined configuration that drives down costs while maintaining our uncompromising safety standards. Designed for long-term growth across multiple vehicle platforms, this system’s expanded capabilities allow us to safely broaden our footprint into more diverse environments, including those with extreme winter weather, at an even greater scale.
The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
By leveraging breakthroughs in AI and validating the system through our rigorous safety framework, we can now accelerate our journey to the road with unprecedented velocity and confidence. Today, we're lifting the lid on our 6th-generation Waymo Driver's sophisticated sensing technology delivering expanded capabilities at a lower cost.
Vision System
The Waymo Driver’s vision system goes far beyond the capabilities of human sight or standard automotive cameras. While it interprets the same semantic details we do, such as traffic light colors and road signs, it operates with a level of awareness no person can match. Our vision system can see everywhere at once and possesses a dynamic range that allows it to pull critical details out of deep shadows while being hit with the direct glare of high-beams or emergency vehicle lights.
Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
At the core of this system is our next-gen 17 megapixel imager, a breakthrough in automotive vision technology. This high-resolution sensor captures millions of data points for incredibly sharp images while offering exceptional thermal stability across automotive conditions. These imagers allow the Waymo Driver to see around the vehicle with fewer cameras than if we used 5 or 8-megapixel sensors. The result is a system a generation ahead of other automotive cameras in terms of resolution, dynamic range, and low-light sensitivity.
A vision system that is reliable in inclement weather needs to keep itself clear. While cameras on conventional cars can struggle with raindrops, road grime, and ice, our system features integrated cleaning systems to maintain visibility. In conditions where a camera’s view may be limited, our lidar and radar provide the necessary redundancy to maintain the Waymo Driver’s perception.
This focus on high-performance sensing extends throughout our hardware system. We've pushed more processing complexity into Waymo’s custom silicon chips rather than relying on multiple hardware components. This approach delivers superior results with remarkable efficiency—our new cameras outperform the highly capable system on our 5th-generation vehicles, even as we continue to reduce costs by using less than half the number of cameras.
Lidar
Unlike cameras that rely on light reflected from the environment to see, lidar lights up its own way by using laser beams to paint a 3D picture, also known as a point cloud image, of the world around it. If you drive in the rain or snow on dark freeways, you know how hard it is to see with vision alone.
Waymo’s lidar sees the world in exceptional detail, distinguishing smaller objects like pedestrians near larger ones like vehicles, day and night.
Our 6th-generation lidar leverages the significant cost reductions the industry has seen over the last five years, especially as affordable lidar increasingly appears in consumer vehicles. By harnessing these market efficiencies alongside our custom-designed chips and optical designs—with core components designed and built in California—we have developed a system that sees at greater distances with better fidelity and higher robustness, all at a cost profile optimized for expansion.
Strategically placed short-range lidars provide redundant coverage to our cameras, enabling the Waymo Driver to associate accurate distance measurements with camera imagery. This is critical when navigating alongside vulnerable road users, opening car doors, and other urban situations where centimeter-scale range accuracy matters. Beyond physical placement, we have reengineered how our lidar illuminates a scene and processes data internally. These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases.
Radar
Waymo’s imaging radar creates dense, temporal maps that instantly track the distance, velocity, and size of objects in all lighting and weather conditions. By leveraging radar chipsets that have become more sensitive and affordable, we benefit from industry-wide cost reductions while continuing to expand our own capabilities.
Waymo’s imaging radar can operate in a range of severe weather conditions, providing our system more time to discern an object and inform our next move.
Our next-generation radar builds on the foundation of the 5th-generation Waymo Driver, using new in-house algorithms to deliver improved performance in rain or snow. This 6th-generation system maximizes the benefit of sensor fusion by leveraging lightweight, powerful machine-learned models to extract maximum information from each sensor and dynamically optimize the performance of every sensing component.
External Audio Receivers (EARs)
To complement our visual sensors, the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs, that help the Driver detect important sounds on the road, such as approaching emergency vehicles and railroad crossings, and respond accordingly. The Driver’s EARs are strategically placed around the central perception dome to optimize its ability to hear sirens and localize where the sounds are coming from while reducing the amount of wind noise it is susceptible to, especially at high speeds. Thanks to its EARs, the Waymo Driver can often hear and identify which direction a siren is traveling before it can even see it.
One driver, different vehicle platforms
The Waymo Driver can be applied to different platforms and use cases.
Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency. This 6th-generation system marks a major shift at our autonomous vehicle factory in Metro Phoenix, where we are beginning to meaningfully scale toward a capacity of tens of thousands of units per year. By collaborating with OEM partners to ensure base vehicles are Waymo Driver ready, we have engineered a system built for high-volume production, allowing us to unlock greater economies of scale as we bring our technology to more people.
As we transition to fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo Driver on the Ojai, we'll continue providing our employees and their guests trips as we refine the rider experience. We can’t wait to open our doors to the public soon.
We’re looking for innovators and visionaries to join us to build the next generation of sensing technology and custom compute. From the silicon up, we’re designing the hardware that allows the Waymo Driver to see, think, and scale globally.
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Comments
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
By rbbydotdev 2026-02-1310:1610 reply I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
By seanhunter 2026-02-1315:142 reply I don't understand the sarcasm. Driverless trains for mass transit are in operation in lots of places around the world and have been for some time (eg the Docklands light railway in London) https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dlr/
Driverless personal transportation is the unsolved problem.
Weirdly, DLR trains still have an attendant onboard. A better example of a fully centrally operated train would be something like the SkyTrain lines in Vancouver.
By seanhunter 2026-02-1317:401 reply The attendant is a legacy of a union settlement as I understand it. It's not actually required for the ooperation of the system.
By mikepurvis 2026-02-1319:02 The book The Box discusses similar compromises that were made with the longshoremen unions during the transition from conventional hull-packing to containers. There's a certain fairness to it at least for a time, but the technology existing to make the role truly unnecessary does prime things for the next round of discussions when it can be fully eliminated or moved to an off-board overseer remotely monitoring multiple trains at once.
By tim333 2026-02-1319:39 Not all DLR trains. They do things like keep an eye on people and check tickets - there aren't any ticket barriers.
By estimator7292 2026-02-1318:11 The point is that we don't have mass transit in most places in the US. Trains and light rail are indisputably better for everyone but we're betting the entire country on yet more cars.
By boredpudding 2026-02-1310:25 Maybe even have multiple people in each pod, and on the set track, have common stops where people are likely to get on/off.
By dyauspitr 2026-02-1314:59 Then have the track go to each persons doorstep. Also make sure the pod shows up within 5 minutes at your doorstep when you hail it from your phone. Each pod should be private and airconditioned. Each pod should also lay its own track when driving to remote locations.
By tim333 2026-02-1320:33 They actually invented something like that called a train around 1804 and very soon when they've developed it a bit more it will solve all our traffic problems.
By nilamo 2026-02-1313:27 It's a tongue-in-cheek description of how buses and trams work. ie: It's not a new idea, we just tacked "driverless" onto it.
I think the idea is that they could go full speed in sync, then afterwards they could still take you to your doorstep.
By circuit10 2026-02-1314:42 The commenter was being sarcastic about trains I think, but while we should be using public transport where possible there is sometimes a need for door-to-door transport so I don't see why we can't explore new ideas that may combine some of the advantages of both for certain use cases
By MisterTea 2026-02-1319:14 Power could be delivered by overhead catenary wire. Battery and/or ultra caps could handle if it has to go off wire.
By mlsu 2026-02-1323:37 I agree. The only wrinkle is that it's impractical to build a train line from my house to the train station.
Anything that isn’t point to point transit, or requires interacting with the public, is a non-starter for most people in the developed world.
Even in Japan, half of commutes are by car and that number has been growing.
By CyberDildonics 2026-02-144:10 Not sure where you are getting this information. Where there are trains, people take the trains far more.
In Tokyo, the vast majority of passengers rely on the extensive and efficient train system, which is often considered the best in the world. Cars are less commonly used due to high parking costs, traffic congestion, and the convenience of public transportation options like trains and subways.
Transportation Options in Tokyo Train Passengers
Car UsageRail Network: Tokyo has the most extensive urban railway network in the world, with 40 million passengers daily. Frequency: Trains run every two to three minutes during rush hours, ensuring minimal wait times. Accessibility: Major stations are equipped with elevators and clear signage in multiple languages, making it easy for tourists to navigate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Greater_TokyoDriving Conditions: Driving in Tokyo can be challenging due to narrow roads, heavy traffic, and limited parking availability. Parking Costs: Finding parking can be difficult and expensive, with many areas lacking sufficient parking lots. Rental Considerations: Renting a car may incur additional costs such as tolls and drop-off fees, especially if returning the car to a different location.*
By FuriouslyAdrift 2026-02-1316:09 You just re-invented trollies
By 05 2026-02-1314:45 If automation fails on a track, there are many people dead and toxic chemicals spilled everywhere - just look at US freight accidents. With orders of magnitude more mass, 3x less friction than tire/asphalt and no way to steer, many avoidable accidents are now also fatal. Now you need grade separation so this whole thing isn't compatible with pedestrians and bikes. But sure, keep posting this tired joke.
By AlotOfReading 2026-02-1223:04 Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.
Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....
By bonsai_spool 2026-02-132:435 reply In the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.
By LoganDark 2026-02-136:22 I use an electric scooter to get around areas where a car would be inappropriate or undesired. I keep it in the back of my car always (along with my helmet, gloves and goggles) so that I can pull it out when needed.
Pretty convenient when I unexpectedly find myself needing to use a parking garage and such. The scooter can take me out of the parking garage and into the building with no issue. And then I can keep it with me in the building until it's time to get back to the car.
It's also probably cheaper than a golf cart - mine was just about $3,600 brand new. Though used carts are probably cheaper still, and there are also much cheaper scooters.
I actually used to use only an electric scooter for transit, but then I got hit by a pickup truck who didn't check the bike lane before turning. So I did driver's ed, got my license and leased a BEV.
By KellyCriterion 2026-02-137:391 reply Cool! I thought this is more a thing of elderly care centers. I like the drivingfeeling of golf carts, so I would clearly do this as well if it would be allowed on public streets. Though on most streets with all these SUV around, it will feel unsafe for me.
By cucumber3732842 2026-02-1311:57 The state reduced regulation around vehicle registration so farmers can drive their SxSs and ATVs on the street (with some restrictions, obviously they don't go on the interstate) and then people in town registering their golf carts or whatever as second cars for around town stuff.
By ziml77 2026-02-1322:17 Oh golf carts were awesome in small lake communities in PA. Was much better than driving cars down those narrow roads and made much more sense for shorter distances. Plus kids got more freedom since we were allowed to drive the carts well before we could get drivers licenses (Might not be good to be as lax in a larger city though)
That's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?
By jasonwatkinspdx 2026-02-136:573 reply Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
By kldg 2026-02-1313:42 yeah, I can say that except for elder areas (not necessarily dedicated facilities, but there are things like "RV parks" which cater mostly to older folks but also families; they usually have 10mph speed limits), I've never seen someone driving a golf cart around town while I've lived in MI, OH, or PA.
I do see people driving horse-drawn carriages, ATVs (probably illegally), snowmobiles (legally in some parts of MI during Winter or condition-dependent), and riding mowers (probably illegally) in and around towns, though. Very rarely, I see someone driving an e-bike; this rareness is mostly because they aren't allowed on the sidewalks here and there's no bike lane, so you need to drive and signal like a car, which is pretty awkward given how many e-bikes don't even come with real brake lights (though many falsely advertise red rear running lights as a brake light, which'd be illegal to drive unless you hand-signal whenever you brake).
By bonsai_spool 2026-02-1315:051 reply > Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
Well, I guess you are not as well traveled in the Midwest as you think.
By bonsai_spool 2026-02-141:32 There are even laws about this: https://www.cityofdelafieldwi.gov/678/Golf-Cart-Permit
I've seen it in North Dakota fwiw, summer only obviously. Loads of them in Palm Springs also.
By badc0ffee 2026-02-1317:26 Where in ND? (On a golf course?)
Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia
By schmidtleonard 2026-02-1314:30 Is there anything in Georgia not named Peachtree?
By disillusioned 2026-02-137:051 reply Coronado Island, near San Diego, California, for one.
Sun City, Arizona, though these are golf communities/mega-master-planned communities. Coronado is a better example of a mixed vehicle environment with golf carts bopping around all the time on the same streets.
By hvb2 2026-02-137:36 Coronado isn't a good example. Or at least not one that scales, that's a VERY affluent neighborhood.
The golf cart isn't a replacement for a car, it's one you have on the side. I would argue that its partially because they're easier to park in a very touristy environment
By badc0ffee 2026-02-1317:25 Seems like more of a sunbelt thing.
By MarkusQ 2026-02-1316:00 Interesting that this seems like a slam-dunk argument for why reusable rockets and other improvements are practically impossible (e.g. "we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility"), and wouldn't matter in any case for structural reasons (e.g. "market inelasticity (cutting launch cost in half wouldn't make much of a difference)", yet in the fifteen years since it was written launch costs have fallen to a third of what they were, continue to fall, and the number of payloads to orbit has gone up by an order of magnitude or more (so much for "market inelasticity").
Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.
What you envision might happen in 2100+
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-130:48 Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching”
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap...
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
And the HN discussion
By fragmede 2026-02-1223:58 Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.
Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
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.
> 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.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver?
https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...
It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?).
However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.
By senordevnyc 2026-02-132:10 So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated.
Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.
By small_model 2026-02-1311:162 reply Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.
By small_model 2026-02-1315:471 reply Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te...
It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future...
If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.
By small_model 2026-02-1319:06 Reddit is extremely anti Musk and Tesla, that sub reddit being the typical example. Let's just wait and see where we are in 6 months.
By senordevnyc 2026-02-1313:32 This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices.
Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.
By testing22321 2026-02-135:381 reply > 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?
Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.
By red75prime 2026-02-138:091 reply Try to find a single ablation study of a sensor suite. Waymo is in a good position to do such a study and the corporation would have benefited from showing that vision-only systems aren't viable (by demonstrating the corporation's good will to maintain public safety and by making it harder for vision-only competitors), but no such study from them.
I guess they understand that computer vision is a fast-moving target and their paper might become obsolete the next day.
FSD and Robotaxi are plenty of evidence vision only aren't viable.
By red75prime 2026-02-1318:471 reply Read Electrek articles with a mouthful of salt. Fred Lambert’s “robotaxi is 10x worse than a human” estimate is based on his personal statistical reasoning, which somehow arrived at 200,000 miles per accident for humans. Minor accidents that Tesla reports for robotaxis (such as low-speed collisions with stationary objects) do not make it into publicly available statistics, so his estimate might be significantly off.
Not a single waymo requires a "safety driver" and the self driving never disengages the way it does on Teslas.
By red75prime 2026-02-149:491 reply Waymo routinely uses safety drivers, sorry, "autonomous specialists" when expanding to new cities[1][2]. Waymo cars occasionally contact the remote support. If support is not available, the cars just stay where they stopped[3].
Tesla has rolled out a small number of cars with no safety driver[4].
In short, you are either grossly misinformed or intentionally lying. Is it a political echochamber you are stuck in?
[1] https://waymo.com/faq/ "Our vehicles are primarily driving autonomously, but you’ll sometimes notice that our cars have autonomous specialists riding in the driver’s seat. These specialists are there to monitor our autonomous driving technology and share important feedback to help us improve the Waymo experience."
[2] https://waymo.com/waymo-in-uk/ "Our autonomous specialists who are present in the vehicle during testing are highly trained professionals."
You are grossly misinformed. Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times. In novel situations humans will provide instructions on what path to take but this is relatively infrequent. Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control when the car does something stupid. The small number of robotaxis without safety drives are limited to a tiny area and not open to the public.
Waymo works while robotaxi doesn't.
By red75prime 2026-02-1510:551 reply > Waymo self driving never disengages the way Tesla FSD does. It is active at all times
Consumer version of FSD can park a car if a driver doesn't take contol[1]. Waymo seems to require a remote command to initiate parking instead of just standing there with hazard lights on[2].
> Tesla Robotaxis are so bad they need a safety driver in every single car at all times ready to take control
Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel. So a driver can't be ready to take control. Stop lying. I no longer believe that you are misinformed.
[1] https://youtu.be/VU3i1Pgk4M0?t=1460
[2] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-r... "We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately"
By UltraSane 2026-02-1720:45 "Every single robotaxi in Austin doesn't have a driver behind the wheel."
Almost ALL of them do. And NO waymo's need them.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...
Robotaxis is checkers compared to Waymo Chesss
By testing22321 2026-02-1314:301 reply Technology is moving fast.
When do you think it will be reliable enough?
Not for a very long time. Just think about how big of an advantage lidar and radar are at night or radar is in snow and rain?
If Tesla had been smart they would have used regular cameras and event based cameras where the pixels send a signal whenever their brightness changes enough. These can have microsecond latency. And multi spectral cameras. Combined this data would provide very rich data for neural networks.
By testing22321 2026-02-1319:021 reply Sounds like you’re an expert. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space? In what capacity?
By UltraSane 2026-02-1322:41 I'm not an expert, just someone who understand how these technologies work. Sensor fusion is a fascinating thing.
By small_model 2026-02-1311:142 reply 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.
By youarentrightjr 2026-02-1316:401 reply > 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.
A year? They'll be gone in two weeks!
Seriously, what portion of your financial and emotional net worth is tied up in TSLA?
By small_model 2026-02-1316:481 reply None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
By youarentrightjr 2026-02-1317:261 reply > None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.
That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile".
With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the point now where an internet enabled phone is basically disposable, costing people ~ a few hours of wages.
History has shown that technology costs decrease over time, and rapidly if it's a critically important technology. If you don't agree, share a counter example.
By small_model 2026-02-1319:101 reply Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.
By youarentrightjr 2026-02-1421:30 > Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k
https://www.walmart.com/ip/ST-MOTOROLA-XT2413V-CDMA-LTE-BLUE...
Try to avoid cherry picking if you want to have a discussion where you or the other person learns something. All the Elon stans on this site that I've encountered are highly disingenuous, starting to think that's not a coincidence.
By senordevnyc 2026-02-1313:32 Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…
By throw-qqqqq 2026-02-1313:522 reply > 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.
By small_model 2026-02-1315:562 reply 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?
By jerlam 2026-02-1323:53 > Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?
The consumer does not care about which car picks them up or what hardware integration it has. The consumer cares about which car is available in their service area, how quickly it will arrive, how much it will cost, how quickly it can get to their destination, and that it will do so safely.
By throw-qqqqq 2026-02-1317:47 > 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.
I am only refuting the claim that Tesla has reached parity with Waymo in Austin. They are nowhere near.
Because Tesla has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, I will want to see Tesla scale up the robotaxi business to the level of Waymo (which is currently far ahead) before I proclaim them the winner.
You are not really backing your claims with facts or numbers, just opinion and future predictions which may or may not come true.
I hope they are both successful, find their own niche, and even more players enter the market.
By throw-qqqqq 2026-02-1317:58 Agree, competition is healthy.
> 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.
By dmoy 2026-02-130:27 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)
By fooker 2026-02-133:02 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.
By testing22321 2026-02-130:39 If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-130:462 reply You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
You can. It’s called a secondary offering. The SEC has a whole process.
By raw_anon_1111 2026-02-1312:35 You can sell more stock to raise money regardless of market cap.
By kiba 2026-02-132:58 They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
By golem14 2026-02-133:17 If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.
By nasreddin 2026-02-133:32 This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.
By digitalPhonix 2026-02-136:253 reply $50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)
By AlotOfReading 2026-02-136:471 reply You're years out of date on that number. I doubt it's been true this decade. Reasonable current estimates are under a few tens of thousand at most.
By digitalPhonix 2026-02-137:041 reply No, I know how much each honeycomb costs (BOM cost, that is); pretty confident on the radars; and I can guess at the cameras and compute.
By AlotOfReading 2026-02-137:211 reply Then they're way behind others in the industry, and I'm not sure I believe that given the people I know there.
By digitalPhonix 2026-02-1317:50 Then you should be asking them instead of arguing with random internet people
By ddalex 2026-02-1312:17 It's between 7k (chinese) and 17k (european) now.
You are either intentionally lying or very confident about facts you don't know. Could you please source your numbers?
By digitalPhonix 2026-02-1317:51 You are confident that I am wrong - why don't you share your source?
I'm giving ballpark numbers because I am in this space and don't want to dox myself.
By bobsomers 2026-02-134:21 > 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.
By UltraSane 2026-02-135:55 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.
By g947o 2026-02-1223:56 > 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.
By WarmWash 2026-02-131:56 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.
By standardUser 2026-02-1223:31 It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
By farresito 2026-02-1312:13 > In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
By zacmps 2026-02-139:46 I think what you're looking for is a bike.
By jsemrau 2026-02-136:18 I was thinking in the same direction when I wrote my 5000 word analysis on the current state of VLAMs. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-model...
By thefounder 2026-02-138:491 reply Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.
The failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1]
Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
By brulx126 2026-02-1310:32 Your link does not prove your point. It's about ADAS and even shows that it is not universally safer than human driving.
> However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively.
By thefounder 2026-02-1314:55 >> The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
Maybe a part of the fault is also the self driving systems themselves that keep crashing and killing people. I don’t have data to say with certainty whether self driving cars are safer or less safe than humans(I think they are less safe especially if taken out of their “trial” zones/sampling) but I can tell you that is less acceptable for self driving cars to kill people than it is for humans for “obvious” reasons especially when the self driving cars do this due stupid mistakes that a human driver would not (I.e goes straight into another car in plain day).
By lorenzo1860 2026-02-1413:25 Do you have some insight we don't have?
I mean yes, there are really good systems, but the heavy, long tail is still not solved.
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
By Petersipoi 2026-02-1316:31 Sure. But they can be way better than human drivers with only cameras. Visibility is rarely the cause of car crashes. Reaction time. Decision making. Follow distance. Speed. All these things are way more important to get right than "seeing through fog"
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
By guywithahat 2026-02-1318:54 When Tesla engineers/Elon talk about it it's usually pitched as a safety thing, by standardizing on one sensor they reduce "sensor contention". Famously Karpathy once described radar as a source of noise that held their vision sensors back.
I don't know who will end up being right in the long term, however I don't think this was a form choice, I think they believe a pure camera system will be more functional.
By Hikikomori 2026-02-1319:19 Funny.
the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
By Petersipoi 2026-02-1316:32 So you hope the people keeping you safe continue to put themselves in danger for you. Got it.
By nielsbot 2026-02-135:15 Yup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.
By atonse 2026-02-1311:21 Musk has been talking about this (generalizing the self driving model for their Optimus bot) for a while now.
Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time.
And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)
The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-1315:311 reply This is about the opposite of reality. Tesla is way behind in actually deploying autonomous vehicles, and other robotaxi makers with real deployments besides Waymo also use lidar.
Yeah millions of miles per day in autonomous driving for Tesla. Yes it's still supervised (somewhat, you don't have to pay much attention anymore) but the technology is absolutely there and just being refined at this point.
Waymos are geofenced, restricted to certain roads, and have remote humans in the loop at lot more than most people assume.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-1317:271 reply Not actually autonomous until it can be more or less trusted to handle itself, without constant human supervision. Until then, it's just prototype or testing miles.
Tesla's current robotaxi deployment is also geofenced and monitored by humans -- moreso than Waymo, even -- but of course Tesla superfans always conveniently leave that out of the narrative.
I don't think you understand that the level of autonomy that anyone with FSD currently has. It drives itself for hours with 0 interventions. Someone did a coast-to-coast drive with no interventions. Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
They will turn of the supervision requirements soon, and suddenly there will be hundreds of thousands of teslas that can drive themselves.
The skepticism is hard to get.
By TulliusCicero 2026-02-1323:591 reply > Yet yeah somehow I'm just a confused fan and you're not biased by politics?
Yes, because you're confusing "can generally make the decisions necessary to drive by itself" with "can be trusted to drive by itself with a non-attentive human occupant".
> They will turn of the supervision requirements soon
Oh, totally; this year, right?
The complete lack of self awareness is absolutely astounding.
By Rover222 2026-02-1514:27 Yeah it’ll happen this year. Please mark my words.
Waymos get stuck in weird situations every day. They need intervention, even on their guardrails. FSD is of course not perfect, but yes they have obviously cracked the code (it’s obvious if you use it or get beyond the groupthink here), and are being cautious with turning off supervision requirements. As they should.
By super_flanker 2026-02-1315:291 reply This must be a sarcasm, right?
By Rover222 2026-02-1317:22 ya'll are so biased because of politics
By MetaWhirledPeas 2026-02-1223:212 reply > Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
You might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.
By ddalex 2026-02-1312:18 Dude, $26k Chinese cars come with lidar in the base configuration
By standardUser 2026-02-1223:332 reply Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.
Most cars don't have a paid driver. Uber, taxis, and trucking is a tiny minority of drivers.
By standardUser 2026-02-1318:26 I guess your time isn't vlauable.
By ghaff 2026-02-1312:58 It's been a while since I looked it up but I understand the human is about 50% of taxi operating costs. That's not trivial of course but it's also not dwarfing vehicle costs.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-133:552 reply > Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
This yes.
> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.
This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.
We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
By close04 2026-02-138:44 > The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment.
And regulatory capture by the incumbent. Reach the top then push for regulation behind you. Thats’s one big additional obstacle to overcome for a new player.
OpenAI was so willing to support regulating AI just as soon as they thought they’ve gained enough of an advantage over the competition and they can burn the bridge behind them.
By SecretDreams 2026-02-1315:37 I think this post just got brigaded, wow.
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible.
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
It seems tough culturally.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
By Alive-in-2025 2026-02-1223:052 reply Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.
At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.
Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.
There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.
What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.
Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).
This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
By Alive-in-2025 2026-02-146:18 Of course a new genre defining company can do what existing companies did and vastly increase the market if they make it better, more efficient, easier whatever. All taxi companies are not all transportation needs, not even on the road. Busses, planes, etc. There will be really new market niches, how about if your RV lets you sleep comfortably and drives all night, you never need to pay or stop (if you can sleep in a moving vehicle), gas or charge itself up.
I was thinking it won't be just one company with this tech, so they'll compete and reduce the value of driverless cars down, by attacking the profit of each other. That would be healthier than having pseudo monopoly power because there are only 2 of them - like say ios and android are basically the world of cell phones, with a few very tiny other companies.
By gruez 2026-02-131:02 >The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
Were there even reliable metrics for this? They only seem small like car dealerships seem small - not of consolidation.
By refulgentis 2026-02-136:251 reply Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.
By FarmerPotato 2026-02-138:18 Anecdote: living in an area where Waymo is becoming mainstream, but we've been seeing their mapping cars drive around streets for five years prior.
Waymo has been attracting outside capital just fine.
I think the bigger issue is that Cruise was not succeeding at building the driver.
Cruise was shutdown after a safety incident, same as Uber.
By mkozlows 2026-02-1319:26 I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.
This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.
Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
By jessriedel 2026-02-1218:171 reply Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.
Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
By jessriedel 2026-02-1516:05 If that were really the risk they would spin them out.
By helge9210 2026-02-1218:29 I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
By garbawarb 2026-02-134:10 Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
(Also former Cruise employee)
Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary.
(Another former employee)
By AlotOfReading 2026-02-1221:50 I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways.
(Another former).
By RivieraKid 2026-02-1219:493 reply This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
By ForHackernews 2026-02-1222:082 reply What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero.
That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
By RivieraKid 2026-02-1316:34 But Waymo or their competitors are not in the "shuttling people around" business. They're developing a driver. Robotaxi is one of the applications.
The winner-takes-all aspect comes from economies of scale for example. If Waymo is several years ahead and has better economics, how can Cruise catch up? They will have lower cost of capital. Top people will want to work at Waymo rather than Cruise. It will be hard to close the R&D gap. When Cruise is where Waymo is today, Waymo will already have a lightweight package that will be used by Ford, VW or Toyota and capable to drive everywhere in any weather conditions.
By anonymous908213 2026-02-1222:562 reply I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
People who drive their own cars are larger than all. You can find single markets where those people are more than all combined world wide.
I think there is probably a healthy subset of people on here who take Uber etc. all the time. I, on the other hand, maybe take it a half-dozen times a year (plus some private cars to the airport).
I'd love a really good driver assistive system for my car (ala FSD today) but I likely wouldn't actually get driven around a lot more unless the economics were more compelling than seem likely anytime soon.
For most people the economics won't every work out. Uber/Taxis make sense if you only need them a few times per year. However even if the driver is free, if you are using your car daily as most people do it won't work out.
People who yell "share" forget that most people are driving during rush hour, and so the car will be idle the rest of the day anyway. As such there isn't that much money to save by sharing a car.
By ghaff 2026-02-1317:36 In my observation, some cities that have "OK" public transit, people can make-do without cars if they Uber, Zipcar, traditional rentals, walk, and use transit. I also observe that it involves a lot of juggling and probably not regular well-outside-of-town trips.
Absent driving yourself at all, you're going to be very limited most places. Which may be OK for continuing a college lifestyle but mostly doesn't work unless you have a partner who handles the driving.
By ForHackernews 2026-02-1311:10 Try to raise prices and see how fast those regional "monopolies" evaporate. MoviePass was the winner in the "unlimited movie tickets" subscription space.
What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
By RivieraKid 2026-02-130:061 reply 1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world.
2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
By soperj 2026-02-1315:49 Tesla has already done a geofenced system in Austin (in the shape of a penis). It went poorly.
By nradov 2026-02-1222:57 For national security reasons, several other countries won't allow Waymo (or Tesla or any other US company) to "win" in their territory. This will ensure that at least a couple other competitors remain worldwide regardless of whether it makes sense in purely economic terms.
By ibejoeb 2026-02-1218:32 Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
By someonehere 2026-02-1219:181 reply I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
By Rohansi 2026-02-1219:51 Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
By Hawkenfall 2026-02-1218:29 Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]
replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.
By KenSF 2026-02-1418:12 The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?
By SoftTalker 2026-02-1318:06 That and making them look like normal cars not futuristic golf carts.
By rangestransform 2026-02-132:12 “Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner
By hypercube33 2026-02-1312:07 Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course.
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
By kjkjadksj 2026-02-1218:38 It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior)
He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.
By red75prime 2026-02-138:22 Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.
By cortesoft 2026-02-1318:48 Sure, but he test drove with them until they shut down, and they never improved (according to him)
By Eridrus 2026-02-1317:47 Cruise seemed to have a significantly inferior product based on observed safety and what Cruise employees have said on HN.
"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs"
Nice abbreviation.
