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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
I wish the "Waymo isn't scalable because they need maps" people would do some back-of-the-napkin math. The SF metro area has 43,000 lane-miles of roads. Say it costs $10 to map each mile. That's $430,000 for the whole region. Trivial relative to the potential market.
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David Watson 🥑
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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
"But Tim, doesn't Waymo need to pay someone to manually label every stop sign and pothole?" Tesla has a technology called fleet scale auto-labelling for this purpose. I bet Waymo has something similar!
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Tesla AI
@Tesla_AI
Replying to @Tesla_AI
All of this is enabled by fleet scale auto-labelling. By using video data from multiple trips in the same location, we can reconstruct the entire scene
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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
Waymo's maps are more detailed than the street view maps but I would expect they could add sensors to the street view cars to get the data.
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Shakeel
@ShakeelHashim
Also doesn’t Google have all these maps already, via Google Maps and StreetView etc? Or are they not suitable for whatever reason?
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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
Waymo's maps are more detailed, so it's possible the regular Google Maps data isn't good enough. But yes they shoudl be able to add some additional sensors to the Street View fleet and get the data they need.
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eric
@ericdfoley
It has to be less than $10/mile. The hardware for mapping isn't especially expensive not is the car. The data processing for that is essentially free compared to e.g. training some perception model.
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MR 🏳️‍🌈 he/him
@21five_public
They’re at 0.5% of the Uber/Lyft geo right now, so they need to scale that up 200x. Of course, they only have regulatory capture in four states, which they need because they can’t follow basic highway code rules. It’s not $10 per mile, based purely on how long it takes.
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John Berry (aniccia.bsky.social)
@aniccia
Waymo announced they are offering ridehail in 37 sq miles of Austin. That brings their total ridehail geo to <500 sq miles across 4 metros, which is <0.5% of US urbanized area (approx Uber & Lyft US geo) ~0.01 of US Waymo still excludes fwy despite testing since January. x.com/Waymo/status/1…
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AVP
@AvpElk
Fair, but if maps aren’t the reason why they can’t scale, why is it that they’re still not scaling?
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Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
They are scaling! 10x over the last year and they are currently expanding to Atlanta, Austin, and La. I think reason they aren’t growing even faster is mostly banal stuff like car manufacturing, depot construction, hiring support staff.
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Collin Philipps
@expectiles
San Francisco is a dense city with high revenue potential per mile. That's why the system isn't in Montana. Redo the math for a rural area and waymo is in trouble. Also, road maps are not a one-time expense. They have to be updated.
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David Germain
@echosdedavid
The problem is that you need to keep the map up to date. Potholes appear, road blocks, changes, etc... So even if it's 430k, it's each time, all the time...
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Marcelo P. Lima
@MarceloPLima
If it costs a competitor (Tesla) $0 to map a similar area, how is this trivial? You're also not considering the working capital aspects: Waymo needs to come out of pocket a lot of money to buy the cars and put sensors on them. Tesla *gets paid* by customers to put
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Noldor
@iyemono
and now let's say it costs $1 to map a mile. suddenly even more trivial! but wait, what if it actually costs $100?? suddenly not so trivial anymore.
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Carl Pham
@CarlPham9000
Where'd you get $10 from? If you paid *me* to map each and every mile of the SF metro area and keep that map continually updated, I'd charge way more than that.
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Ac
@Ac64940893
What percentage of US lane miles is the SF metro area? Trivial relative to the size of the US.
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Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
My strong hunch is that you are off by multiple orders of magnitude.
@aniccia
may be able to answer more precision, but if you look at the many billions Waymo has spent versus the number of miles Waymos are operating on, your math is highly suspect. They have likely spent
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Caleb Hannan
@calebhannan
Dude I’m literally in the city where Waymo has been operating (well!) for a dozen years and there are large portions of it where it can’t operate.
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Tristan Cunha
@cunha_tristan
The question is how often you have to map everything? It's more often than once, but is it annually? Weekly? It depends on how robust the cars are to changes in the underlying conditions.
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gdsimms
@gdsimms
Waymo stops its service area 3 blocks from my house. Is this limitation because of maps or lack of vehicles? Surely a few blocks of suburban streets is not a terrible obstacle.
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PRoales
@proales
Yes it is also shocking how cheap it is for Google Streetview to map the entire world every few years. Shockingly cheap
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Michael Bales
@mikekbales
My understanding is that waymo costs the same as an Uber. If that's true even with widespread expansion it won't fundamentally change anything about transportation. It will be cool but won't be a large effect on the economy.
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Jason Seba
@jason_seba
“The SF metro area has 43,000 lane-miles of roads” Source for this? Because it seems a bit implausible that there is nearly double the roads in SF than the circumference of the Earth
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Ilya V.
@nfinf5
Google literally took detailed scan of the entire road network in the country. It’s called StreetView.
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All-Source Tesla Analyst
@All_Source_TSLA
Well their speed to scale is definitely impacted by the fact that each new market they enter requires human drivers to collect the map data and then they run simulations on how to drive FOR THAT SPECIFIC CAR FOR THAT SPECIFIC MAP. Whenever they change platforms or change
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Ac
@Ac64940893
Are you invested in Lidar or Waymo, or just really don’t understand they cannot scale to ever be competitive.
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Josh Job 🌐🥑🔰🇺🇦🥥
@joshjob42
Even if they needed a Waymo car to drive down all ~4M miles of roads in America each day w each car going ~20mph & costing 70¢/mi & needed a full time googler per active car for labeling at $150k/yr pay, that’d be <$340/yr/mi & ~$1.4B/yr nationwide. A pittance vs the market size.
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Rick Ueltschy
@RUBluegrass
I rode in a Waymo in Scottsdale a few months ago. I first saw a Waymo about 5-6 years ago there and talked to the guy driving. They were mapping. Driving the routes again, and again and again. The cost per mile has to be very high and the mapping needs to be continually updated.
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Brennan M. Woodruff
@BrennanWoodruff
Waymo isn’t scalable yet because of the cost of vehicles/hardware/insurance/regulatory compliance costs…in addition to having to get utilization. Maps is hilariously bad take as you point out, parent company owns the best maps solution ever created.
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Ravi
@Ravi_711
It's always been the dumbest argument. This market is going to be worth trillions! but mapping roads routinely is unaffordable!
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Kushan Zulca
@kushanzulca
They are also owned by Google which literally owns Google Maps & Google Earth? I’m sure that brings some of the cost down at least.
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Matthew Williams
@MatthewW_eacc
Nobody is saying they can’t be profitable in their niches, they just can’t ever be a ubiquitous service. And they have to remap basically the whole city every year so it’s not like it’s a 1 time cost.
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Information Guardian
@InformantGuard
You have no idea what you’re talking about in terms of cost. Trying working in releasing products in that industry for a decade and then share your thoughts with the world.
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Roshan
@meta_x_ai
You also need license to operate in every city, and every city needs 2 years of safety-driver operated data. Tesla isn't even at step 0 of all these things. It's just a bunch of clueless idiots who take Elon words as gospel
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Russell de Silva
@GulaiOtak
Good to see you point this out, the cost of mapping us a non-issue. Not to mention that the data can be continuously updated by the fleet of waymo taxis.
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