• 0x4f1@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      With the suite of sensors onboard this is the ideal mobile surviellance platform.

      Cameras, Lidar creating a 3D map, EM sensors, likely microphones. All circulating all day long under the guise of providing a service that no one needs or asked for while claiming a safety record that is great until it is not.

      Google paved the way with this idea when they created streetview maps 15+ years ago…which just so happened to be mapping wifi APs which is totally a necessary part of providing streetviews.

  • youmaynotknow@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    I’ve never been in one of those corporate controlled rolling cages, and hope to never be.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Still losing money. about $2B a quarter.

      Morons love to talk about robotaxis, autonomous bullshit but the reality is these companies are pissing money.

      • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        The economics really aren’t there for chatbots. They don’t scale well. Each additional user costs more money than they generate in revenue. But automated taxis? That’s a different story. Currently Waymo has to go through the laborious process of creating intricate 3D maps of the cities and places its vehicles will operate in. But that mapping cost is fixed, regardless of the number of taxis driving in that city. And a lot of R&D has gone into everything. But the R&D costs are the same whether we’re talking one taxi or a million.

        Robotaxis have very different economics than AI chatbots. They actually have very real economies of scale. Plus while their self-driving vehicles currently cost about $150k, that cost is only going to go down with time. And compared to the cost of a human driver? It’s hard to see how they won’t end up profitable eventually.

  • eicker@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    Waymo is quietly turning robotaxis from a tech demo into infrastructure. 500,000 paid rides a week, roughly 4,000 cars and 15 US cities is no longer a cute experiment. The interesting part: 80% of the fleet is still concentrated in California and Texas. Scale first where density works, then expand. Tesla has a real race on its hands.