Not sure if you have a recent side-by-side example with Uber, but this seems like it would have to happen if the demand is there. How else can you offer a quality product (i.e., car shows up in a reasonable amount of time) if you don't have enough cars to satisfy the demand? Pricing is the primary demand lever.
There's so much polarizing opinion on Tesla's offering and whether they'll get to Waymo's level sooner than later, but this seems like it's going to be or already is a huge issue for Waymo where they can't manufacture the vehicles fast enough to satisfy the demand as they expand both locally (because they capture more of the market) and into new geographies. Will they try and acquire a manufacturer? I don't think that's economically feasible for Waymo (Geely market cap is $25b, per Google snippet fwiw), and obviously being in the car business is different than autonomous, but I'm sure Google would bankroll a purchase if they thought it was the right growth strategy.
I guess Tesla, even if their autonomous is on par with Waymo tomorrow, also has to manufacture the fleet, but it seems extremely beneficial to have that capacity in house vs. relying on partners. Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that much of an advantage, but at first glance it would seem to be.
The CEO of Uber was quoted as saying Waymos complete more rides per day than 99% of Uber drivers. He didn't give a precise ratio but this makes me think that hundreds of Waymos can replace thousands of Uber drivers and their cars.
CMs like Magna have the flexibility to manufacture, at the low end, hundreds of vehicles, and at the high end thousands. I doubt Waymo will ever make their own vehicles. They are already working with Toyota on adapting Waymo technology to privately owned cars. That implies mass production. That would be a supply of vehicles that are probably simple to adapt to robotaxi use.
That's a crazy statistic and an interesting one for him to actually say out loud. Was that in the context of Uber partnering with Waymo in Austin? And thanks for the insight on the manufacturing side. Sounds like it might actually be to their advantage to use third parties because you can spread the demand around and since auto margins are not high the added cost for that benefit is minimal.
Private cars have a ridiculously low duty cycle. They mainly sit around waiting for their owners to use them. I suppose at some point in the future there might be a traffic jam of autonomous vehicles, but only if the providers are antisocial and don't coordinate ride destinations and routes.
@harmmonica I do. we prefer to use Waymos in SF but Uber has been a lot cheaper in the last six months or so regardless of time of day...
Also saw some Zoox self driving boxes on the las vegas strip last week but no one seemed to be using them.
Thanks for sharing, oliver. For anything local I've almost entirely switched and I guess I haven't been doing much price comparison between the two. One thing I have noticed here in LA, albeit only a couple of times, is that during rush hour the waiting time is significantly longer for Waymo. I've taken some Ubers because the wait for a Waymo has been way too long.
I think self-driving is what makes Waymo premium. A Waymo is a better experience because the Waymo is safer and smoother driver than any human could ever be.
Not sure why you're downvoted. I've tried Robotaxi a few times and has been great. They still have a safety driver these days and wait time is a big high though.
I think anyone with an ounce of common sense is aware that EVs are analogous to the steam era with similar dangers. Coal power is used to create and force tremendous amounts of trapped energy into batteries, which like a steam boiler is highly stressed with the added danger of explosion, thermal runaway and toxic chemical fire that can't be extinguished.
Where EVs - heavy, tire and road shredding devices requiring enormous amounts of largely unrecyclable materials in their batteries etc - have virtually no regulatory burden (why is there not legislation requiring mechanical door locks for example?) ICE vehicles, which are now highly sophisticated and efficient, are subject to endless meddling and restrictions.
An entire airport car park burnt down last week, which is an unprecedented event masked by a compliant media who are obsessed with selling the concept that EVs are our future - all just because a bunch of bungling politicians have tried to legislate change.
It's all a terrible mess compounded by encouraging people to abandon common sense and buy into the hallucinatory idea grids and the planet can support EVs within a few short years
Automakers blast US plan to hike fuel efficiency rules
The US is on track to completely destroy the western world's automotive industries, with a huge knock on effect in Europe. Millions of jobs will be gone forever and in the near future we will be completely reliant on areas of the world that don't care about pollution control for (probably mediocre quality) vehicles.
There is actually no way to 'put out' thermal runaway Li-ion batteries chemical fires. They have to be left to burn out which can take days and produces immense heat and toxic chemicals.
There is speculation that batteries undersides were scraped as the EVs were loaded onto the boat, damaging a battery underside.
A useful youtube shipping channel and discussion of this latest incident:
Reminds me of the Theranos scam crash - discredit the figure heads when it all goes wrong with increasingly bizarre 'they were nuts' stories. Meanwhile the board members and backers are subjected to zero scrutiny.
I wouldn't say it's on purpose. Ford has always been a marginal (financially) automaker, and while the US gov is providing substantial support (>$10B) via battery and vehicle subsidies, it will be a painful transition based on the financials and balance sheet. Too much financial and institutional debt considering the swiftness at which they must transform. Tesla has a lot of room in their margin (and also generous subsidies due to US component content) to eat price reductions due to rising interest rates, Ford does not while also trying to retool their entire manufacturing supply chain.
TLDR Efficient, nimble innovators can kick the can, laggard incumbents cannot.
Ford Credit (loans to purchasers of their vehicles) is on Ford's balance sheet while the others had to spin off those businesses in '08. So the debt situation is a bit misleading if you just compare the top level numbers to industry peers.
Ford Credit is what sells Ford vehicles, but it’s also where the profit is (roughly half of profits). Take away the credit biz, and that’s a material impact to both profits and volume.
As the below article notes, it’s a balance and pushing risk around.
Ford probably isn't selling you the vehicle for a loss, but you are contributing far less to the profit margin. In normal times dealers operate on fairly thin margins, which is why they're always looking for ways to extract extra cash from the customer. Financing is an amazing vehicle for this. But it's also why dealers are so interested in the window tint, undercoating, racing stripe, nitrogen filled tires, etc... add ons. Those are almost pure profit to the dealer and can account for the lion's share of what the dealer actually takes home.
I think that creating money always raises prices, so you're probably merely being screwed less, rather than being subsidized.
(I count loans as "creating money" because buyers look at how much X to buy based on how costly it is to borrow money. People are seeing this in the housing market now; when loans were 2.5%, sellers raised their price to fit the monthly payment budget. Now at 7%, it's harder to sell at those prices. If everyone had to pay cash for everything, everything would probably be cheaper, because money would be intrinsically more valuable.)
yes, but it was more circumstantial. by lucky happenstance they had arrange a significant loan facility almost directly before the financial crisis. they leveraged this heavily but because the financing had been arranged ahead of time it left them more sound. Ultimately, the other vehicle makers just got loans from the government post-hoc.
The Ford family are significant shareholders. The “No dividends” clause of the bailouts would have hit them hard. If they hadn’t timed it well with the pre-GFC loan, it’s likely they would have tried harder not to take the bailout regardless.
Why is 'sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that then kick off earthquakes' a loopy idea?
We are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity. It seems reasonable to me that the complex relationship between the moon's gravitational pull and massive sun activity could affect our tiny little planet
The idea is loopy because the energy that reaches the earth from even a massive solar flare is orders of magnitude less than the energy released by a major earthquake, and that is orders of magnitudes less than the energies that drive the dynamo in the Earth's core.
It's possible for a falling leaf to hit a mountain in just such a way that it dislodges a boulder balanced on top, but you need to tell a pretty compelling story about why this sensitive arrangement came about. Similarly, you'd need to explain how gigatons of molten iron sloshing around deep underground might feel the kiss of the Sun in just such a way that it levels San Francisco (for example).
In fact i hypothesise they've inverted cause and effect.
Tectonic movements absolutely have the energy to move the earths magnetic field and the magnetic field blocks cosmic radiation. Something that moves the magnetic field would allow more cosmic radiation
There's only a handful of detectors outside of earths magnetic field. Orbiting satellites are even within its field of influence. Comparing this data to the measure of cosmic radiation from a deep space probe would be interesting to rule out that it's the earth movement increasing detected radiation and not the reverse
They may have simply discovered that tectonic movement changes how much cosmic radiation reaches our detectors.
From the article, that is in fact their explanation. There's just possibly some other data that could point the other way, but it's not heavily emphasized.
There have been other studies that showed weird correlations to ionospheric activity and earthquakes, but only ever in retrospect.
What you wrote, is a good place to start future observations. There is a lot of unexplored dynamics to investigate, in the earth. Roiling hot fluid and gaseous systems in flux, which are magnetic - due to iron (and other minerals), is a fluid dynamics dream subject.
But, how to finance? In today's research systems driven by funding to support specific answers, instead of expanding knowledge just to see what we learn.
Ps. An attempt at modeling the inner Earth's systems and flows might be more useful for earthquake prediction.
Tectonic plates are nearly permanently in a "sensitive arrangement", as you say. Compressive, shear, and tensional stress is the normal. Plates accumulate more and more stress over time, until a small trigger causes the plates to slip and release all that energy at once (earthquake).
In other words, tectonic plates are nearly permanently in a state similar to a boulder delicately balanced on top of a mountain.
Right, the potential energy due to stress in the crust could be released to kinetic energy by a falling feather or some cosmic rays, would be the idea. There doesn't need to be the same energy in cosmic rays as released by the earthquake.
Yes, but we're talking about a system in which thousands of 4oz pulls are happening in different directions at any given moment. You model doesn't only have to explain why a particular pull triggered it, but also why the other thousand didn't.
Throwing a cocked handgun into the dryer is different than a leaf falling on it.
Consider how an atomic bomb requires relatively little energy input compared to what is released. Combined with how very little practical observation we have of what's really going on in the Earth's core. It is certainly possible some phenomena is in play with Earthquakes.
Not exactly atomic bombs, but we do have evidence of naturally occurring, self sustaining nuclear reactors having operated for potentially hundreds of thousands of years in Earth's past (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor)
That's a fair point, I just thought the natural fission reactors were cool while completely forgetting the one in the sky responsible for my ability to think that haha
I'm suggesting we know enough to rule out the spontaneous self assembly of nuclear bombs. And there's probably a few other things we can rule out by the same logic.
when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?
(i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
The wikipedia article was actually pretty interesting on this point. They suggest that 10 is commonly used, but other bases may be contextually relevant.
> An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10
I guess you could think of it like a _really_ low precision float or something.
I suspect the phrase is a cliche often used to sound scientific and sometimes by folks unaware, like how description of growth as “exponential” is a cliche used by non-mathematical discussion.
I agree with this. As a layman, I've always understood "orders of magnitude larger" to just mean "way too big" and "exponential" growth to imply "out of control".
x^2 and 2^x manifestly both involve exponents, so I think it's valid - outside math class - to call anything involving accelerating growth "exponential".
> when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?
Yes, and that has always bothered me just a little bit, given that there is nothing intrinsically special about base 10 and yet the phrase seems to suggest something fundamental.
No, 1 decibel is 10^1/10. Bels are multiplicative, not additive. You multiply 10^.1 by itself 10 times and you get 10^1. Similarly if you multiply x^1/2 by x^1/2 you get x.
That seems confusing. If I say my new service is orders of magnitude more efficient than previous services, I don’t mean any thing about scaling but current performance, and I wouldn’t say orders of magnitude if it was just twice as many calls/second/core, but more than ten, or really more than 30, halfway between ten and a hundred, logarithmically.
Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.
What do you mean by, "we are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity"?
Because i can't read that as anything other than, we are in solar cycle 20, and it's currently building such that i predict with hours of right now, there will be a coronal mass ejection that will knock out the global power grid. But I've googled and we appear to currently be in solar cycle 25 with solar cycle 20 occurring in the 60s and 70s. Do you mean that a coronal mass ejection event takes hours to get to earth? Then why the "right now"? Does the delay of such events change on a sufficiently short time scale to warrant "right now"?
