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.
Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing just speeding and turning correctly(I.e 2 params)
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....
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.
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.
That's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?
Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia
https://youtu.be/pcVGqtmd2wM
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.
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
Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.
I've seen it in North Dakota fwiw, summer only obviously. Loads of them in Palm Springs also.
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.
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+
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745
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...
> 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.
> 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.
the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that
Yup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.
Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.
http://zoox.com
Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
You can’t trade market cap for goods and services. Tesla is not exactly rolling in cash these days.
They squandered their lead with the CEO's focus elsewhere.
$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)
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.
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.
Then they're way behind others in the industry, and I'm not sure I believe that given the people I know there.
If you ordered 8M LIDARs, the unit price would quickly plummet. Thankfully, this is already happening thanks to Chinese efforts in that space.
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.
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)
This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.
If they had done so, their financials wouldn’t have attracted investors and they wouldn’t be worth near 1.3T
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.