Until this morning, I hadn't ever heard of Zoox, but I guess there's now one more competitor in the robotaxi game.
Not sure how Uber & Lyft compete against Tesla, Google, and Amazon...
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100 sats \ 4 replies \ @gmd 10 Sep
My buddy bought a bunch of uber and I thought he was an idiot after one ride in a Waymo, but I've since changed my mind.
The We Study Billionaires guys outlined the case for Uber recently in this video - essentially ridesharing is largely dependent upon surge availability- biphasic commute rushes and around big events. So waymos can supply base "grid bandwidth" for rider demand but can't do well to handle surges unless they have a bunch of cars sitting around doing nothing, and as such their wait times will be suboptimal unless they are plugged into and paying a tax to the Uber network.
At least in the near-term anyway, I'm not sure how this all changes if Tesla and other companies successfully flood the market with cheap, workable hardware.
Gotta be surreal to be a taxi driver seeing the AI replacement happen in front of you...
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105 sats \ 3 replies \ @kr OP 10 Sep
good point. tesla's response will likely be "the vehicles aren't on our balance sheet anyways, the customers have already bought them and they're sitting in their driveway, waiting for a rider to request them".
google and amazon will have to overcome that problem, though.
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @gmd 10 Sep
I don't own a Tesla but curious what % of owners would be open to letting their car join a taxi fleet while they're work... I suppose internal cameras would deter people from having sex or doing anything insane in your car... I might do it if they had a way to discriminate against riders by socioeconomic factors lol
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63 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 10 Sep
I wouldn't, just like I wouldn't Airbnb my home. The potential headaches outweigh the benefits, IMO. Seems like there are more preferable ways to make money.
In my experience of the "sharing economy", what starts out as "sharing" eventually just gets professionalized, kinda like how uber driving got professionalized and Airbnb hosting got professionalized.
I think most people like to keep a separation between personal and professional usage of their stuff, and so the share of providers who actually mix the two is usually small relative to the share who do it professionally.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 10 Sep
Yeah I've turned into a bit of a germaphobe and don't like the idea of strangers using my car... but it seems if you're not a "car guy", they are vastly underutilized- taking you to and from work and then they just sit there doing absolutely nothing for several hours. If they could get a no frills Tesla version in the 20-30k range I think a lot of people would be able to detach themselves from car ownership to a more utilitarian perspective.
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42 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 10 Sep
More details on the launch: https://zoox.com/journal/las-vegas/
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 10 Sep
worth mentioning the service is completely FREE for now apparently
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @2053456d48 10 Sep
Me too just got to know about Zoox! A lots of competition in Robotaxi as well 😁
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