Self-driving is the crown jewel of Smart Car in the end game. Even today, it’s still not clear when is the tipping point of the mass adoption. But, the middle game is about to start. The frontrunners have warmed up or dropped off. It’s a two-horse race. Waymo leads the RoboTaxi track and Tesla leads the consumer self-driving track. While both tracks are unique in their own way, the convergent may come earlier than expected.
RoboTaxi Day 2
Jun. 2, 2022 was the Day 1 of RoboTaxi when Cruise first to offer paied RoboTaxi rides around San Francisco. Unfortunately, Cruise dropped out the race because of one tragic crash on Oct. 2, 2023. And, Cruise lost its self-driving license on Oct. 24.
Welcome to the Day 2 (almost). Waymo started offering RoboTaxi rides around L.A. from Mar. 13, 2024. It’s still city only without freeway rides. Still, it’s a big step forward, considering how fun L.A. traffic can be. So, what is the scale of Waymo RoboTaxi operation? Hundreds of RoboTaxi running 24/7 is an incredible milestone according to:
- Its L.A. fleet is less than 50 cars according to a Los Angeles Times report on Mar. 13, 2024.
- Waymo told state regulators there are 250 driverless cars in San Francisco, and 100 cars on the road at any given time. The numbers remain largely unchanged, according to a Waymo spokesperson as NBCBayArea reported on Sep. 6, 2023.
Consumer Self-Driving Day 2
On Mar. 25, 2024 Tesla CEO, Elon Musk twittered: “All US cars that are capable of FSD will be enabled for a one month trial this week”. Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) already come a long way since 2020 first opening to select testers, aka the Public Beta. In Jan. 2023, Tesla given FSD access to 400K owners. To now, millions of Tesla maybe driven by FSD. From 0 to a million in 4 years, it’s an even more incredible milestone.
How long for a follower to catch up is a question. But, the question is who still has that kind of money & time to burn. Especially, once highly anticipated “Tesla killer”: Apple gave up a $10B & 10 years car endeavor. On Apr. 4, 2024, Bloomberg first reported: Apple started to lay off at least 600 workers.
A Whole New Race
Tesla’s FSD V12 is a paradigm shift. It’s now fully end-to-end “Software 2.0". Because Tesla removed the last piece of rule based vehicle control code, more than 300K lines of code. FSD V12 is now fully Machine Learning driven. For Tesla, Self-Driving is now a compute and data bounded problem now. Whereas, others are still bounded by their engineer talent and their hard works to hand craft algorithms for Self-Driving.
Tesla changed the game as we know it. Now, it’s not only racing for the scale in the unit of million, but also the speed of improvement for the long-long tail: 99.9999…% real work driving situations. The crazy claim from Musk on Mar. 21, 2024, Tesla is no longer AI training compute constrained anymore. It’ll be very interested to know Tesla’s AI training compute mix: X% of NVIDA + Y% of Tesla Dojo. Do share if you know better.
So, what problems does one month FSD trail solve? tl;dr
- Mass real world data harvesting in millions.
- Reinforce Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in millions.
- Software service revenue to pave the way for “Tesla Prime”.
The Low-End Disruption of Self-Driving
In my inaccurate Bayesian interpretation, the probability of FSD becoming the de facto self-driving service is 70% now. A few more key observations:
- Camera is much cheaper than Lidar. Thus, easier to reach mass adoption and also drive the cost down and performance up.
- Computer Vision with Scaling Law for AI will not only add emergent abilities over time, but also more generic & transferable among other domains, e.g. humanoid - Tesla Optimus.
- On Apr. 3, 2024, Musk reiterated that Tesla will license the tech to other car makers. It’s not only an tech. stack race now, but also the data, usage & infra at scale race. In a such game, Tesla FSD is the frontrunner of “Google Street View for Self-Driving” leading with a few magnitudes ahead.
- By Aug. 8, 2024, Tesla Robotaxi will be unveil as Musk just twittered. Do take Musk’ ambitions a grain of salt because he often too optimistic on the when. But, he has been walking the talk for quite a few crazy ideas. He also a rare founder can lead teams to execute ruthless on the proved wining formula of “Next Big Thing”: persistently iterating quickly to develop innovated products/services according to the actual market feedback.
