Tesla surely has the FSD but nothing they're doing is earth-shattering or insurmountable. Others will also solve FSD... the only question the timing.
Google or Apple can design a chip... actually who's to say that Apple isn't secretly designing their own FSD chip right now?
And Google/Apple/Others can partner with a manufacturer to get cameras/sensors installed and their FSD chip/computer installed as well. Some people think this will take 5 to 10 years, but I look at it differently. If Google/Apple are motivated they can make it happen much, much quicker than that. Google (or Apple can announce a deal with Chrysler (or other company) that they're putting a google designed FSD system in one of their models, complete with FSD computer, cameras and sensors. Of course this is assuming that they've committed to a vision-focused FSD system, which I think it's possible that Google/Apple/etc already have teams working on.
IMO, The problem for Lidar FSD developer companies (e.g. Waymo, Apple, Zoox) who are not OEM's are four-fold:
1. Their testing and validation costs will be enormous because they won't have a fleet they can sell like Tesla. The recent Hamid Shoajee blog holds the same views that I do, if you take the total Tesla fleet and considered each owner a 'safety driver' the total cost of Tesla's fleet would be on the order of 50 billion in upfront costs.
2. Even if Waymo had a working FSD system today, the electric part of the equation is non-trivial, it accounts for a substantial fraction of the cost reduction for a robotaxi fleet. There aren't really any large-scale electric OEM's that Waymo/Apple could buy, although they could buy say Ford, Lucid, Rivian, etc., none of them are anywhere near scale yet. Waymo already contracted to buy something like 65k Jaguar i-Paces and that is a very small fleet relatively. To build a large electric robotaxi fleet means you also have to solve the cell-supply problem.
3. Even if they successfully put together electric robotaxis, their costs will be very high due to LIDAR, revenue share with electric OEM vehicle producers. For LIDAR, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward path to getting the costs down reasonably, and the roadmap for solid-state LIDAR as effective as the mechanical units being a few hundred dollars might be much further out than has been forecasted. This means that cost-per mile will essentially stay high.
4. Capital costs for bootstrapping a robotaxi fleet are high, while ride-share prices are likely to decrease over time. Let's say Waymo had a gasoline Robotaxi network. To buy all the vehicles at say 200k each and run them as taxis would produce a certain yield. This yield is almost certainly going to go down over time and depreciate all the vehicle values (i.e.. electric robotaxis will underprice gasoline robotaxis). If a lower cost-supplier enters the market and has winner-take all dynamics, this would be a huge amount of stranded capital. This means that OEM's have a natural economic advantage in being able to sell vehicles to consumers, who primarily own vehicles for their own use, and care less about capital depreciation due to competition. As long as vehicle owners can cover most of their own costs they will underprice other participants when putting their vehicles onto Tesla Network like marketplaces. Long-term robotaxi ride prices will be ridiculously cheap due to this factor. For OEM's that have something like Tesla Network, their margins will stay high since they are not supplying capital but taking revenue share. Waymo has to make a return on their capital if they own the fleet and this is an extremely risky proposition if low-cost producers like Tesla or any other OEM succeed with a Tesla Network like structure.
)) more difficult, but let's face it; the future is arriving at an accelerated pace! How lucky are we to witness such things?
