Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, remember the hype about self driving cars from like ten years ago, Like that really died out?
Can I tell you something? Yeah, I'm still holding out hope for the self driving cars because I can't drive, and it was kind of I forgot. It was kind of acceptable when I was in my twenties, but now it's starting to get a little embarrassing. So I really need the self driving cars to become viable options.
So when we go on the road and like do podcasts, like in another.
City, you have to drive. I have to drive all the time, don't It hadn't because I think I've asked you. I'm like, oh, Tracy, you're renting a car.
And then you like sort of change the discussion or you bring up something else, like oh, I think there's Ubers in that town or something.
But this is the real reason, isn't it.
Well, I mean there are Ubers everywhere, you know. What we should talk about whether or not Ubers have decreased enthusiasm for self driving cars as a business model.
Remember when people used to say Uber would never make any money if they still had to pay humans, but.
Now they're making a little money.
It's true.
But I do think like generally, like when people talk about like tech that didn't live up to the hype and now you see it now with like chatbots and stuff like that, and whether they're legan chain like people go back to the self driving cars, Like to me, that's the sort of quintessential example of the like modern times, maybe three D printing. You don't really hear that much about it.
Yes, but don't you also find it weird to imagine a future in two or three hundred years where there wouldn't be self driving cars. It feels at once both inevitable and like hype, if that makes sense, like an artificiality.
No, I mean I definitely, I definitely agree two hundred and three hundred years, that's like that's a long time, like fifty years from now.
I've kind of you think fifty years from now.
Well, so this is the question, which is like my is not an area I know that well, but my impression is it's like look sort of classic thing where like tech got us like ninety five percent of the way there, and then there are some edge cases that
make self driving cars difficult. I don't know exactly what they are, but that getting that last five percent or whatever is so hard that it renders the whole thing very difficult, and that whatever that last percent is is the difference between the tech being like wow, versus actually changing the world.
We are so close and yet so far.
Yeah, it's one of those things.
And I feel like again with chatbots and some of these other like current like artificial intelligence applications, it comes back to this question of like, yes, it's really great and it sort of blows your mind, but there are these hallucinations another thing, and like if it's not it's not one hundred percent reliable, does that mean it really won't be as disruptive as people expect.
Well, the other thing I'm curious about is whether or not that sort of last five percent that you're describing, whether that's on the software or the hardware.
Oh yeah, because that has.
Implications for you know, if we do make huge leaps and artificial intell leigence, maybe that solves a software problem. But maybe the issue is actually that the sensors are too basic or too expensive, that sort of thing.
I don't know the answer to any of these questions.
The one other thing I'll say too, is like there is a lot of car talk these days.
We've been doing more and more on the podcast.
It's entirely like on the sort of EV charging side, and how are EV's and how EV production and batteries, like how are they going to reshape the industry? Or Chinese exports, how are they going to reshape the industry? It does not seem like again ten years ago the big question was like who's ahead in the self driving car race? Google, GM or Ford. There was much less talk then about EV's is the big disruptor?
Right, So I think it is time for a checkup, right on what's going on with self driving cars?
It is time for a checkup.
And our guests says they're back, that they're happening for real. And I do believe him to some extent because I follow some people who live in San Francisco and they're tweeting about it more and more that they see them
on the road. And sometimes when I'm up but four in the morning to read the Internet in the dark and drink coffee, I see like people who are still out at night in San Francisco talking about all the self driving cars around them, So there might actually be it may not be totally over.
There might be they might be back.
Well, the things I see on the internet about self driving cars are those edge cases where it's like a car flum mixed by a traffic cone in the middle of the street, which they're simultaneously like impressive and amusing and disappointing all at the same time. If that makes sense.
It's interesting.
You're very pro self driving cars. It hadn't clicked, like you really want this to happen.
I have a personal self interest in not having to learn how to drive. I figure if I'm super optimistic, maybe maybe if I just hang on for like another ten years, Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Let's ask our guests.
Let's ask our guests. We have the perfect guest, longtime tech journalists, a tech understander, someone who really deep delves deep into technology to understand like how things work and what's really happening. I followed his work for a long time. We're actually like we're colleagues together, like eighteen years ago, I think at a side called tech dirt.
Tim Lee.
He is the author of the understandingai dot org newsletter longtime tech journalist, and he recently wrote a piece the death of self driving cars is greatly exaggerated.
So, uh, Tim, great to have you on the show.
Hey, I'm great to be and I'm a fan of the podcast.
Thank you very much, appreciate that.
Let's start ten years ago, and you know, I think ten years ago there was a lot of self driving car hype and my impression was, and this is so vague and fuzzy, it's like, oh, most of it solved, but this last part's really hard.
Is that true? What was that.
Last part that has proven to be very challenging to like turn these from like prototypes onto track or a very like organized grid like suburb in Arizona to something that could actually be used on the road.
So it is true that about ten years ago, Google was the leading company and they had vehicles that could go on certain routes with a fair amount of kind of preparation. And about six years ago Google rebranded itself as Weimo, it's self driving cart projects as Wemo, and started testing a taxi service in Phoenix, and they've been
plugging away at that ever since. There were a bunch of other startups that were started between about twenty fourteen and twenty eighteen, say, and a lot of those failed or were forced to sell to some of the tech giants, And so there's many fewer companies operating in this space than the word five or six years ago. In terms of what the last little bit is, it's just a lot of little things. I mean, that's the thing about a long tail is there's a lot of stuff out
in the long tail. One thing, for example that Weimo and Cruz the kind of industry leaders have been struggling with is when you deal with first responders. For example, if we hope to an active fire site, you're not supposed to dive over the hoses that firefighters are using. I mean, that's something you might only encounter every one hundred thousand miles or something.
And so there's just lots of it's a really big deal to do it.
Yes, absolute there's another case where a crew is vehicle like drove through a police tape in a crime scene. So there's lots of little things that I saw a headline. I haven't actually looked into this yet, but apparently a care is like drove into web codcrete. So the real world is complicated and there's just lots of weird situations that a human being because we kind of understand how the world works. You see, Oh that looks like web concrete.
I shouldn'tdrive on that. But you just have to, Like it's like whack mole. You have to like hit every single like bad thing a vehicle can do it. That just takes a lot, a lot, a lot of work.
Yeah, I don't know why, but I find all the stories of like robotic self driving cars behaving badly absolutely hilarious. And not the ones where they hurt people I should just caveat that, but the ones where, you know, something that we wouldn't even think about, you know, there's an object in the road, just go around it, and they seem to really struggle with I want to ask you more about why that seems to be an issue and sort of get into some of the edge cases that
Joe mentioned in the intro. But before we do, why, here's a basic question. Why have a lot of these self driving car companies struggled Because on the face of it, it would appear that there is a lot of money floating out there in venture capital land that often goes into unrealistic or unprofitable unprofitable projects. So why has this been an issue for self driving cars in particular?
I mean, I think on some level the basic issue with safety a lot of other areas of tech. You kind of build them in a viable product and you put it out in the world and you know it breaks sometimes, but that's fine, Like that gets you more feedback. And because you can kind of iterate rapidly, you can like scale up very quickly and get to a profitable scale pretty quickly. That obviously doesn't work if if the moving fast at breaking things is like literally breaking things
and killing people. And so you have to be very close to perfect before you can launch a commercial service and start making money. And so you had a bunch of startups that were trying to do this. They had all starts of strategy to do that. Some were trying to operate in retirement communities or do like package delivery. They try to find kind of less demanding applications than like drive anywhere any time. But it's just really really hard.
And so the companies that have sustained are the ones that have Amazon, Google, GM like big companies behind them who are willing to put like a billion dollars a year behind them for several years in a row while they kind of try to iron out these final little wrinkles.
So zooming forward today and that makes a lot of sense.
I hadn't really thought about that.
It's like for many tech it's okay if there are edge cases where it doesn't work, because you just sort of like, well, you put out in the world and like, yeah, it's not a perfect product, but into minimum via, it's free.
And we're refining it.
It's free and we're iterating.
But you cannot do that when there's big safety issues and if it's a threat to other drivers or pedestrians, it's not really an acceptable way to do product. Going to today and you are more optimistic and we'll get to that about the prospects for their existence. But has there been a breakthrough in recent years or has it just been this slow, iterative grinding away at the edge cases that it makes it so that there are fewer and fewer edge cases.
I would say the second one. I mean, Weymo's technology has worked pretty well. They started doing fully driver less operations in Phoenix in the fall of twenty twenty, and I have just very gradually expanded that service now weimo I just a week or two ago they got permissioned from California regulators to begin operating commercially in San Francisco after a year or two of doing practice driving there, and so yeah, they've they've just been plugging away at it.
And it's hard to tell from the outside because they're not super transparent about all the details of you know, how many incidents they have or how much work they have to do on the back end. But yeah, it seems like they're just very gradually making the technology better. And they seem to think because they're now talking about scaling up much more quickly, they seem to think that the companies seem to think that they're that this is ready for it to be a commercial product.
Just a really simple question. If I were to go to San Francisco right now, could I go there and download an app or whatever and get in a self driving tax.
You know, I haven't checked that recently, So it was literally like last week or the week before the California regulators gave them permission to do that, I think, And so till like last week, I think it was a waiting list. But it's definitely case, you go to certain parts of Phoenix, including the Phoenix Airport, you can hail a taxi and it's just like Uber left.
You can try it.
I want to do it. I want to do it, Tracy. Let's go.
Let's go to Phoenix, just so that for the one ride then fly back.
Sure. Yeah, I talk to people there. I mean it works, it works quite well. I mean the people.
I've talked to several people who've written in those vehicles and at least in both rides they say it's flawless, that drives very comfortably.
And yeah, the service they just aren't that many refuges.
Can we talk a little bit more about the edge stuff, because my my impression is that, Okay, computers learn from repetition and from modeling out various scenarios, but driving is such an infinitely unpredictable experience, especially if you're in New York.
You could get you get it, Like if this technology you'd never taken off, I have confidence you could do.
I don't know. I think I've missed the boat on that one. But anyway, okay, but there are all these different possibilities that a self driving car could be grappling with. So for instance, an animal runs out in the middle of the street, and you know, maybe after that happens several times, the self driving car starts to realize, well, it's this animal, and then it's going to behave in this way and keep moving or stop, and I need
to respond to it in a certain way. But that kind of seems to be the issue here as far as I understand it.
Yes, absolutely, And there's a bunch of ways that the companies have tried to do this. So, for example, Google has long had a big test track facility out in in California about an hour I went out there a few years ago, where they have some fake roads and
they'll create kind of fake scenarios. They'll have cars cutting other cars off, or have somebody like moving box of the Cross, the three People and Halloween costumes something like that, and so they try to think of what are all the situations of the self driving car could run into and kind of anticipate that. And this is also why they started in Phoenix, is one of their strategies was, Okay, there's so many ED cases, we can't do them allay all at once, and so let's start a kind of
easy mode. And so Phoenix has very nice weather, nice wide streets, well marked, you know, not a lot of pedestrians, not a lot of bicyclists, and so that was kind of way most theory was that we'll do the easiest one first. The issue with that is that the economics of running a taxi service in theaters are not that great because most people already have cars, and so Cruise
has kind of had the opposite approach. It's is, we want to see these educations as fast as possible, So let's start in downtown San Francisco, because that's where there's a ton of crazy situations, and so we will kind of be harder in the first place, but we gathering data very quickly and they will master it.
And is not yet clear yet.
I mean, both both companies now seem to think they're ready, but I don't think we've seen them in a while long enough to have a sense for kind of which of those strategies are working better.
But yeah, it's really tough, and so so I.
Should say, like for the first few years, both of these companies had safety divers behind the wheel of every vehicle, and so the vehicle was mostly diving itself. But if it got stuck, that says or down would have to take over. And the kind of big switching. The big risky point is when they take the first starts out of the car, which WM one did about two years ago, and cruise did I think maybe a.
Year ago, and then you know, and then that is it because the.
Must trickier because if the vehicle screws up, it's a big deal.
I love the idea of having to train the self driving cars by like putting people in Halloween costumes in front of them, and it reminds me a lot of socializing my dog because we used to have to like wear weird hats right, or like bring balloons into the house so that he would get used to them and
not freak out. But this goes back to something that I mentioned earlier, which is is the issue here the software, so like the actual modeling of the reaction to an unknown or unfamiliar event or stimulus, or is it more on the hardware side where maybe you need better sensors that are better able to appreciate the things in front of you.
I would say it's more software, particularly more data. But yeah, the hardware has stayed pretty constant. I mean that the trio of sensors. Most of these vehicles have our cameras, radar, and then lighter, which is a like laser laser range finding technology that gives you kind of a three D map of your environment. And so ten years ago Google's car has had those three sensors, and I think now
those sensors are better. But I don't think anybody thinks the main issues that we need to upgrade in the quality to light are really they just need they need examples of every possible educase, and they you know, it's hard to get enough of that data because some educses happen very rarely but can be very serious if you encounter them.
Can you give us a quick industry overview? You know you mentioned Weimo, it's Weimo's Google Cruises, GM Cruises GM and then obviously Tesla and Elon's all Like if you just like raid Elon's Twitter feed, you would think that they've already had self driving cars like in the wild, And I don't really think that's true, but I don't
really understand what's going on. Can you give like a really just sort of quick like overview who the big players are, like who owns them, and just sort of like what their status is.
Yes, absolutely so.
Wemo is mainly owned by Google, Cruise is mainly owned by GM. I consider Tesla to be in a different market, and some of the Tesla fans get mad at me when I say this, But Tesla is building a.
Driver systems product.
So all pretty much any car you drive now they have advanced cruise control where it stays in your lane and doesn't hit the car in front of you. In some ways, I think Tesla has a more advanced version of that, although also in some ways I think it's Elon must just has a low or risk tolerance and
so he's kind of pushing a technology that's anyway. But so so, the key thing about the Tesla product is you were not supposed to, like crawl in the back seat and take a nap, right You're supposed to be there making sure it doesn't break.
And have people crawled in the back seat and taken a nap.
I'm sure somebody has that. There are videos of people doing it appropriate things well behind the wheel of the Tesla, but you're definitely not supposed to. And you know the vehicles that they have ways.
Of monitoring the driver so that that doesn't happen.
But anyway, So theoretically Elon Musk thinks they're going to at some point to get to the point where you don't have to be behind the wheel. But I do not think they're close to that or really laying groundwork, because one of the things for any service like that is you need an operation staff because the vehicle is occasionally get to get stuck, and when that happens, it used to be able to phone home and get kind
of remote guidance about how to deal with it. And as far as they know, Tesla's not doing it anyway. So that's Tesla and then the other two companies. There are a few other companies I would say a little behind. So Amazon has a company called Zookes that used to be a startup but acquired by Amazon a couple of years ago.
And there's a company called Motional.
That is also I think close to being ready for driver lists, but not to driver lists. And then there's a company called MOBILEI that supplies the hardware for most of these driver assistance systems and they have been working on this technology. So that's another company. But guess I say those four or five companies are the kind of the remating players.
Am I hallucinating this memory? Or was there a situation in which Uber hired every single member of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics department to work out self driving cars for them?
Yes? Absolutely, so, yeah that was one.
That's a real thing that actually happened.
Yes, that was in I mean, I don't know if it was every member, but yes, Uber hired a bunch of talent in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and then one of their vehicles struck and killed somebody in Tempa, Arizona in twenty eighteen, and that basically destroyed their program. And so I think the remnants Oh actually I should say there's a startup called Aurora that is doing tracking.
I think Uber. They acquired Uber's thing.
But anyway, yeah, so Uber is now not a player because in large part because they're really the only only one of these fully self driving programs that have had a fatality with their with their testing.
So let's assume that self driving cars become a realistic thing. How viable is that as a business model, Because on a first reading, it seems extremely expensive to develop, possibly extra extremely expensive to maintain if you have to provide operational support to all these robot cars out in the field. And then thirdly, it does seem like there's a big regulatory slash, safety slash, maybe legal liability risk if something were to happen.
I mean, I'm pretty optimistic about it because you think about if you think about Uber and Lyft, about half of the cost of running Uber and Lyft is the labor of the human driver, and so if you take that out, then Wayman Cruise need to get the new costs. The cost of the sensors plus whatever operational stuff in r indeed to be less than half the cost of the driver, and that's a pretty significant amount of money.
And so I think it'll take them a while to get to the scale where it's profitable, because certainly Wayman crews both have I think hundreds or maybe thousands of people working on this technology, and the sensors are currently
pretty expensive. But one of the most predictable things in business is that mass manufacturing technologies like light our sensors and computer chips get cheaper at scale, and so I have no doubt that in the long run this is going to be a viable business and is really I think a question of how much patience the big companies back in Google, GM and Amazon companies like that, how many billions of dollars they want to spend to get
to this. But I think that in the long run, I think that the taxi industry will be operated by self driving cars. And I think that in the long run, I also think it'll be cheaper and probably expand the market a lot. So my long run expectation is that this is going to be a big and profitable industry.
Do you envision it just or primarily for taxis or could you have a situation where people like me are buying self driving cars?
Well, just to add on to Tracy's question, because sort of dovetails, could Tracy drive to work and then make some extra money by during the day when it would be parking for eight hours, have it be a taxi, and then could that impair total volume sales for the automakers because basically Tracy takes her self driving car to work, but then also is a You know, I could the taxi.
Industry driving car capitalists.
Rather than having the car sit for eight hours in the parking lot ten hours?
Smart?
Right?
So I think certainly, I think the initial product is going to be a taxi service. That's what all the people doing passenger nobody's talking about selling them in the short run. Obviously, people like owning cars, and so in the long run, I think there.
Will be a business model you'll be able to have a car.
My guess is that it's going to be something more like a long term lease than actual outright ownership.
But partly for liability reasons.
I mean, if you imagine if you own the car and the brak needs a replacement and you don't replace it in the car crashes to kill somebody, the people who made the software going to get suited for that, and so I think they're going to be reluctant to sell people sell driving cars out right, but you might be able to have something that's a long term release. It's effectively the same as ownership. I'm not sure it
would make that much sense. I mean, if if you're the kind of person who wants to share a car with other people, then probably you would just take a taxi.
So I'm not sure.
I mean, there's a lot of ways the economics could work out with My guess is that you'll have some people who will lease a South diardan car long term, and other people who will just take taxis. And I think that hopefully, like in the long run, if economy skill bring costs down, it'll be much cheaper than the taxi today, like roughly half the price if you figured that half is labor and so then that'll allow lots of people, especially in cities, to own fewer cars and take more taxi rides.
But I was just going to say, even if you didn't, and I know other people have said this before, but maybe Tracy doesn't want to share her car with other people during the day, but it could mean less need for parking, right, the car could drive home and go back into your driveway or garage while you're at work, yes, and then pick you up with Then then the amount of space that a city or a neighborhood needs for parking probably could be significantly diminished.
Yes, absolutely, And I think I think one underestimated benefit of this from an urban planning perspective is it'll be much easier to do congest and charging because the vehicles will all be connected, and so I could imagine more kind of complicated pricing where you give people a strong incentive not to drive their car into downtown. If you're going to go downtown, take a taxi or maybe some kind of shared vehicles.
So there's a lot of I think sell driving cars will.
Open up a lot of new options for the way you kind of organize, especially commutes, because yeah, you can have different kinds of vehicles and different kinds of business models for how people pay for them.
Could I use my self driving car to deliver packages as a sort of gig FedEx worker or something. I hear ups drivers cost a lot nowadays, so you know.
Right, I mean again, I think that'll be a different market. So there's a company called Neuro that is trying to do this. Several companies act, but I think they're the market leader, so I think it's possible. I mean, one of the issues is, you know, with the FedEx drive, the FedEx Star physically gets out of the car, out of the truck and carries the package to your front door.
And obviously your self driving cars can to be able to do that.
So I'm not sure exactly what that market will look like, but my guess is that there'll be customized delivery vehicles that are much smaller and lighter and cheaper than a full sized car, because there's no reason you need a full car if there's nobody in the vehicle.
Can I ask a question about safety? You know, you mentioned that Uber's self driving car pilot program ended basically because a car struck and killed a pedestrian. It is also true that human driven cars are killing people every day. I believe there's tens of thousands of people every year
die in auto accident. Do we have meaningful apples to Apple statistics or is it that's still so far that the test that the self driving car universe is too narrow or in two ideal conditions to actually do a safety comparison.
It's actually just the raw number of miles is not high enough. So well, it's true that humans kill forty thousand people a year.
That's a staggering number. Yeah, number of people.
But humans humans drive billions or trillions of miles every year, and so it's like one there's a fatality once every hundred to hundred million miles roughly on the roads. And self driving cars are in the tens of millions of miles. So if they were as safe as a human you would expect about one less than one death so far, and so the fact that there has been only one death doesn't really tell you that much about.
You know, is is it more or less safe?
I mean, so far the way one Cruise, the leaders have had zero deaths, but they've gotten less than hundred million miles.
So you just guessed. I think it's just too soon to say for sure.
How much does the business model or the eventual profitability of a lot of these self driving car companies depend on the way the insurers react, because I imagine, you know, if there is an accident involving a self driving car and there's negligence involved, or you know, something's wrong with the model, the legal liability is almost infinite at that point, potentially millions and millions of dollars of payout if there
are actual fatalities. And I guess my question is a lot of this is going to depend on the insurers being willing to take on that risk, right, Yeah, you.
Know, I'm not actually sure exactly what Google and Cruise's insurance situations are. I mean, they're big enough companies that I would guess they can self ensure, so that's actually not something I have and I assume they've disclosed in some regulatory filing how they're insured. But it's a different market because it's not especially in the early years, it's
not going to be individual consumers buying insurance. And so yeah, I'm not actually sure what the structure of that market is right now, and whether they have third party insurance or they're just on the hook for the liability.
That'd be interesting to look at.
You can this just a really simple regulatory question right now. If one of these companies said, we're good, we got it. You want to get a taxi at or you want to do canniball run, and you want to go coast to coast We'll drive you from New York to California. Could they legally do it or is there still some sort of like regulatory blessing that would need to happen for that to exist.
There's very little regulation at the federal level. There's some regulation of the design of the vehicle. For example, you still need to have a steering wheel in the car, but at the federal level, I don't think there'd.
Be any legal barriers to do that at the state.
Level, at state by state, I think if you weren't challenged, if you weren't charging for it, and just doing as a demonstration.
I don't think there'd be any issue in most but.
As I mentioned, so, California I think is one of the states that regulates these things more heavily, and they do have a fairly substantial process. They treat Way one cruise similarly to the way Uber lift or regulated, and they just got the approval to start doing commercial taxi rides in San Francisco. So yeah, it's state by state, and Phoenix I believe this close to no regulation of that kind of thing, so yeah, and I think Texas is probably similar, so that the more kind of Republican
leaning states, there's very regulation. In California has some, but not enough that it's really I think of a major bottlement.
So we discussed that there are some self driving cars available out there, but they're kind of a novelty slash experiment at the moment. How will we know when self driving cars are a sort of viable, realistic thing. What are you watching out for?
I think they're running the experiment right now. So Cruz has announced I think eight to ten new cities, mostly in the Southwest, places like Houston, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, and we'll just kind of have to see how quickly that happens, or if it happens. I mean, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a company has made an announcement in the self driving space that hasn't panned out.
But they've gone from just Phoenix to now Phoenix and San Francisco, and I think anyway, so we'll just have to watch and see if those announcements actually turned into operating services. Like I said, right now you can go to Phoenix, you can try it. I think in the next few weeks or months, you'll be able anybody to be able to pail a car in San Francisco. And
then the other thing is the service territory. So right now it's not all of the Phoenix Matoria, it's I think a couple hundred square miles, and so yeah, we'll want to watch what cities are they're going into and how big of a service foot and then that does that service footprint grow over time, And then ultimately we'll have to see the financial results. I mean, these are both publicly traded companies, so eventually I assume they'll tell us if it's profitable. I don't think it is yet,
but yeah. I think if you see them rapidly scaling up the number of vehicles in the number of cities, then that'll be a sign that it's going well.
And if it's if it doesn't, then probably isn't going as well.
I'm not kidding, by the way, about going to Arizona just to travel, because we already want to do an Arizona tour anyway with all of our land and water and ELFELFA and Chips episodes we do there, So we got to fly there just to take a self driving car. I just have like one more question, and it's basically, you know here in New York, I don't think there's anything. But let's put a real time frame on this, like
you say, like you know, you say they're coming. We're going to start seeing them more and more in some of these other cities. When can we say, like, you know, when will we have them in New York and give us a year by which we could say, Okay, Tim was right or Tim was wrong.
So I don't have to make if I'm making a strong prediction that you know that on a specific So I will say what Wimo and Cruz have said.
I believe Weimo has said.
They're planning to increase their footprint by ten x by the end of next year, and Cruise has says they're going to reach a billion dollars in revenue, which I think will be about a fifty x increase by twenty twenty five.
So I'm a little.
Skeptical that hit those numbers, but that's that's the scale they're talking about now. That would still be a small fraction of the overall taxi industry, sure, And I think one of the things you'll see is that they haven't entirely figured out the weather situation, and also to some extent, they're like really dense infrastructure. So if this question of when will you be able to hail a vehicle in Manhattan, I could still see that being five to ten years away.
But I would not be surprised if Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Miami, those kind of cities, you know, Southwestern kind of suburban cities. If three to five years from now, it's very common to see self diving taxis as just like a on power with the.
Uber and left in terms of popularity.
Similarly, we'll have you back in five years and we'll see if all of this born. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Sound good, thank you.
I'm telling you, Tracy, it always comes back to Arizona for US Chips. Seriously, we're gonna chips, water, ELFLFA.
And now driving.
Okay, I'm serious.
Intersect with I'm telling you they got to take a trip. I'm not being facetious.
Okay.
Well, I would happily go to Arizona. I think that'd be fun, but I don't know. I'm just going to go back to what I said earlier, which is like self driving cars at once feel far away and very close and sort of inevitable and also quite difficult, if that makes sense.
You know what, if it was really fascinating and I hadn't really appreciated this, his point about one of the companies starting in Phoenix, where they're driving is super easy, and then you sort of like progressively get better to go to more complicated places, and then the other one starting or mainly operating in San Francisco, where the driving is really difficult, and it's like, if you can master San Francisco, you could probably master anyway.
I wonder what the better approaches, like getting.
Progressively you know, progressively better, or just like really taking all the hard stuff on day one.
Well, you know what I don't get just thinking about that conversation. You know how all the captures to identify robots are like identify the motorcycles in this photo or identify the buses. That doesn't bode well for self driving cars.
Why Why?
Well, because it seems like robots struggle to identify motorcycles on the road and humans doe.
I see what you're saying, right, Like, our whole approach to even identifying whether someone is it's.
Always traffic lights or cars or motorcycles. So maybe maybe actually self driving cars are ultimately a threat to our existing captures.
Wow, yeah, right, Like if we could solve self driving cars, that guarantees that we're going to have spam.
And other internet attacks. Right, I hadn't really thought about that.
Well, I mean, I think we didn't touch on it much there. But there are also obviously societal implications of this. We talked a little bit about the notion that well, maybe companies could just replace all the taxi or the Uber drivers, maybe even some mail delivery drivers get replaced. That seems to be an issue as well. And then the other thing, Actually, I want to look into this after this conversation, but I am really curious what the insurance is like on these things and who's provided.
Yeah, who has to pay and how I do think there are a lot of big questions like that, or like who's ultimately responsible when when these malfunction? I think in San Francisco recently there was something where a bunch of them all shut down at the same time and they create all these traffic problems, which is also not something that comes up with human drivers. I also think like the political debates are going to get like super weird, like what if they say, well, you know, to mention
congestion taxes. What if they say, oh, like you can't even do that route because the computer is determined that would like use too much energy?
Could it end?
The interesting could like you know, it's interesting like the Red States, as you mentioned, have been a bit more liberal about allowing them. But then there's all in twenty years, will you be allowed to be a human driver, were allowed to be like gohot sight seeing? Like all these things like kind of some like big interesting questions that could reshape society and then the reshaping like sort of
of our physical space maybe less need for parking. If these actually take off, I think like it will change the world in ways we don't really anticipate.
Yeah, maybe we need to do a self driving cars episode from the perspective of a city planner or that's a good idea yea interesting? Yeah, all right, well shall we leave it there for now?
Leave it there?
Okay, And this has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and I'm Jill Wisenthal.
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