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Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI
Josh:
For the first time ever, cars are driving around a major American city with
Josh:
literally nobody inside.
Josh:
No driver, no passenger, no safety monitor, just software sensors and a steering
Josh:
wheel turning itself through the streets.
Josh:
But soon that steering wheel even is going to disappear.
Josh:
It's clear now that I think like
Josh:
autonomy isn't this abstract science fair project. It's an actual product.
Josh:
On the episode today, we're going to talk about how Tesla has been able to deploy
Josh:
these driverless tests starting in Austin, Texas, hopefully throughout the country
Josh:
very soon, and the two philosophies between the top competing companies.
Josh:
We have Waymo and Tesla, of course.
Josh:
And I think we're going to make the case that if Waymo was Uber,
Josh:
Tesla is more closer to iOS.
Ejaaz:
Josh, you've owned and have driven your Tesla for about eight years, right?
Ejaaz:
And I think for the last two years, you haven't even touched the steering wheel. Is that right?
Josh:
The progress of full self-driving has been remarkable, particularly over the
Josh:
last two years. I've had...
Josh:
These cars now with full-slope driving for eight years now. So I've seen the
Josh:
entire ramp up from very scary white knuckle driving to I feel like I could
Josh:
take a nap and it'll be totally fine.
Josh:
And the difference happened in the last two years because they switched over
Josh:
from hard-coded numbers.
Josh:
So they use like hard-coded C++ where if it saw a stop stein,
Josh:
it knew that it needed to stop.
Josh:
They switched over fully to neural nets. And that was the thing that made a
Josh:
difference. Once they switched to neural nets, the progress got unbelievable.
Josh:
And yeah, now there's, I don't even need to touch the steering wheel.
Josh:
It actually just drives me around anywhere I want to go.
Josh:
It parks in the parking lot. It backs out of the driveway. It's unbelievable.
Ejaaz:
What is like the longest journey you've done? Because you drive home like most
Ejaaz:
weekends, right? How long is that?
Josh:
Yeah, most of the time, like 50 miles, no problem. No oversights, door to door.
Ejaaz:
So it's navigating New York traffic and everything until it parks and your parents like-
Josh:
That's been the most impressive thing is the New York City navigation.
Josh:
Because it seems like everyone in New York City wants to get hit by a car.
Josh:
They're trying to get hit.
Josh:
And the fact that these cars are able to recognize that and navigate through
Josh:
all of that. And there's a lot of weird stuff that happens.
Josh:
There are cars parked in the middle of the road. There's people who are working
Josh:
on construction, giving hand signals.
Josh:
It's now capable of reading and understanding all these things and actually
Josh:
navigating through the world. And it's so impressive.
Josh:
EJS, we're going to have to, we'll have to record a video soon of us actually in a car doing a demo.
Josh:
Maybe we'll record a podcast in the car as it's driving because it really,
Josh:
it's truly remarkable. And if you haven't experienced it, it's tough to describe,
Josh:
But it is genuinely a full self-driving cyber cab out in production right now.
Ejaaz:
That's great. It's going to be like carpool karaoke, but just two nerdy guys talking about tech.
Ejaaz:
That's actually a good idea. Okay, let's get right into the news.
Ejaaz:
Something was spotted over the weekend in Austin, Texas, Josh.
Ejaaz:
And it was a normal regular Tesla Model Y, except there was no one in the front driving it at all.
Ejaaz:
And this was later confirmed by
Ejaaz:
Elon himself as the first test cases for unsupervised full self-driving.
Ejaaz:
Now, if you're new to this podcast or if you're new to Tesla in general,
Ejaaz:
Tesla's FSD or full self-driving is basically their autonomous driving program
Ejaaz:
or software stack that allows their cars to drive itself, similar to what Josh
Ejaaz:
has exactly explained, actually.
Ejaaz:
And why this is such a major leap forward is typically up until before the weekend,
Ejaaz:
these cars required at least one human person to be in the front seat.
Ejaaz:
They didn't need to be in the driver's seat, but they needed to be somewhere
Ejaaz:
in the passenger seat just in case the car got into any kind of an accident.
Ejaaz:
And it marks the transition from level two autonomous driving,
Ejaaz:
which is what Teslas have been fully capable of doing for a while now,
Ejaaz:
to level four, which is this driverless addition or rather subtraction.
Ejaaz:
And this worked out really well for the stock.
Ejaaz:
On monday's market open tesla closed at the highest weekly and monthly close
Ejaaz:
in tesla's history 475 dollars and 31 cents which is just insanely bullish it
Ejaaz:
was up five percent uh on the day end
Josh:
And it's funny because if you look at the stock you would think the whole world
Josh:
is aware of what's going on but the reality is this is not true this is a great
Josh:
visual that we have on the screen and for those listening it's basically it's
Josh:
a visual showing that the population of the u.s is 343 million people.
Josh:
Of that, 243 million are actual drivers.
Josh:
Of those 243 million, four of them are Tesla owners. And of the four million Tesla owners,
Josh:
only half a million people have actually used full self-driving.
Josh:
So the reality of this is that only 0.145% of the population have experienced
Josh:
the technological revolution that is being rolled out as we speak in real time
Josh:
to cities like Austin, Texas.
Josh:
And this, I believe, is going to lead to one of those moments,
Josh:
like the, oh my God, it's real moment, where things tend to advance very slowly.
Josh:
But if you're not in the know, it appears as if it's happening very quick.
Josh:
And there's a reality in which very soon, that someone's going to walk outside
Josh:
and get into a full self-driving car and freak out because they had no idea
Josh:
that this technology was even close to being ready, let alone here today.
Ejaaz:
What's really funny is of this 500,000 people that do know about it,
Ejaaz:
Josh, one of them is my auntie.
Ejaaz:
And I just texted her saying, hey, you need to give this thing a go.
Ejaaz:
And she replied, I'm terrified. I don't want to give it a go.
Ejaaz:
So even the people that do know about it are still kind of like they haven't
Ejaaz:
jumped the chasm across the chasm to yet to get there.
Ejaaz:
But Josh, I want to take a look at like what these things actually look like,
Ejaaz:
because they're not just rolling out this software upgrade, right?
Ejaaz:
It's going to become an entirely autonomous taxi service called the RoboTaxi.
Josh:
The cyber cab. And there's two parts of this story. So one of it is the software,
Josh:
one of it's the hardware.
Josh:
The hardware story is the cyber cab. The software story is the one that we just
Josh:
mentioned though, which is the existing fleet of 8 million Tesla vehicles that
Josh:
will be eligible to have this ability via over the air software update.
Josh:
So there is a person on this planet who is going to type a command into a computer,
Josh:
send this update to millions of cars, and overnight they will wake up and become
Josh:
fully autonomous cyber cabs.
Josh:
Now that is one thing, That is the existing fleet.
Josh:
The new fleet is what we're looking at on screen right now. That's the cyber cab, the robo taxi.
Josh:
This is the crown jewel of autonomy as we move into this next era.
Ejaaz:
Josh, sorry, I have to say this looks like a Hot Wheels car that I used to buy
Ejaaz:
as a kid. What is this? It's like it's like die cast.
Josh:
It's funny you say that because the Hot Wheels car that you had as a kid was
Josh:
made via die cast machine, which is injection molding.
Josh:
So basically you have this big metal mold you punch a bunch of this like hot
Josh:
molten stuff into it and then out pops this very cooled,
Josh:
um piece of a car and it looks like a car and what
Josh:
tesla's done is they've created this small die cast model that you
Josh:
use for your hot wheels back in the day but they made it
Josh:
into the biggest casting model in the planet and it's
Josh:
so large that it prints out actual full-size cars like the one you're seeing
Josh:
now which comes with a bunch of benefits because a lot of times if you have
Josh:
a car one of the pain points is your paint it scratches it's expensive to do
Josh:
there's no paint because it's injection molded the actual material that they
Josh:
mold it with is the color of the paint So there's no paint on this car.
Josh:
It's just the raw material that's on the outside.
Josh:
And because of that, there's other benefits like wires. There's miles and miles
Josh:
of wires in traditional cars and electronics.
Josh:
All of that's just printed right in. So it's this really efficient way of doing
Josh:
it, but it also has the second order effect of kind of looking like a spaceship.
Josh:
I don't know. I think it's pretty cool.
Ejaaz:
Okay, so do I. But of course, we can't really talk about cybercab or autonomous
Ejaaz:
driving without bringing up the obvious elephant in the room,
Ejaaz:
which is Waymo, which is already out there.
Ejaaz:
They have a paid taxi service, which does hundreds of thousands of paid trips
Ejaaz:
every week. It's just rolled out in London, my hometown.
Ejaaz:
And so the question that comes into mind is, can it compete?
Ejaaz:
And at least from a cost perspective, if that's the first framework we apply here,
Ejaaz:
robo taxis are just or like cybercams are
Ejaaz:
just way way cheaper we've pulled up a
Ejaaz:
graphic here which shows what you gotta keep scrolling
Ejaaz:
down yeah there's so many
Ejaaz:
which shows us what one million dollars worth
Ejaaz:
of waymo gen 6s which is their latest versus one
Ejaaz:
million dollars worth of tesla cybercams and uh you have about 10 waymos for
Ejaaz:
the price of one million dollars and for robo taxis or cybercabs you get five
Ejaaz:
and a half times more than that we've got 55 this is insane josh like the cost
Ejaaz:
must be like super cheap for these things and
Josh:
This makes all the difference so as we start to get into differences between
Josh:
waymo and tesla one of the most important things is the form factor what does
Josh:
it actually look like and why does it look that way
Josh:
Um, for those who are not familiar with the Waymo system, basically what it
Josh:
is, is the current way that it exists.
Josh:
And these are out on the road today is it's a Jaguar car that costs about $75,000,
Josh:
but then it costs an additional $100,000 to equip it with 29 cameras,
Josh:
five LiDAR sensors, and it's very custom. It requires a lot of human interfacing.
Josh:
So the net cost of those cars are about $175,000.
Josh:
What we're seeing on screen now is a much cheaper version of this car,
Josh:
the next generation Waymo,
Josh:
which they're hoping to get down to $85,000, but still
Josh:
does not compare to the cyber cab tesla cyber
Josh:
cab is looking to price itself at thirty thousand dollars per
Josh:
car and the reason this is important is because of
Josh:
the the cost per mile and we're going to get into cost per mile but the
Josh:
innovation that we're showing on screen now how they're able to do it is this
Josh:
thing called the unboxing process so easy as we briefly talked on the
Josh:
die cast process the casting how they're able to quickly mold them
Josh:
together the amazing thing the zinger here the big
Josh:
punch line is tesla is able to produce one of these cyber cabs
Josh:
every six seconds it'll roll off production line
Josh:
so if you're watching the end of a production line every six seconds a new car
Josh:
will be coming off of this line why because of the die casting and because of
Josh:
this unboxing process so typically when you assemble a car it goes down a singular
Josh:
production line it has to be assembled and then disassembled to paint it and
Josh:
then reassembled for final production this does it all in one shot it's assembled in six areas.
Josh:
Pressed together in one location and every six seconds a new one rolls off the
Josh:
line even if waymo gets this next version it's still going to be three times
Josh:
the cost of tesla cyber cab which has big downstream effects to you and i the
Josh:
user in how much it's going to cost to actually use these services i just.
Ejaaz:
Did some uh back of the napkin math and i figured if each waymo costs around
Ejaaz:
a hundred grand um if they wanted to deploy like let's say 500 000 more of these Waymo cars,
Ejaaz:
which is, you know, not crazy to think about, that would cost them $50 billion
Ejaaz:
worth of upfront CapEx, right?
Ejaaz:
Now, if they wanted to do this for Tesla, they could just push in a software
Ejaaz:
upgrade for just 10% of their existing fleet.
Ejaaz:
So I'm talking about cars that already exist, Josh. On the road right now,
Ejaaz:
there's like 5.5 million eligible Teslas that can get the software upgrade and
Ejaaz:
have the entire FSD benefits that we've just described to you,
Ejaaz:
just 10% of those can get that benefit right now from a single software push.
Ejaaz:
So it just goes to show that like Tesla versus Waymo is a completely different
Ejaaz:
beast because of the way that they've constructed FSD in this particular case.
Ejaaz:
And so it costs Tesla basically $0 because the customers that are purchasing
Ejaaz:
this, all fleet operators that want to buy these cars in the future can And
Ejaaz:
just do so for a cheaper cost, $30,000 versus 100 grand really kind of amplifies over time.
Ejaaz:
But Josh, I've noticed something, which is these robo taxis,
Ejaaz:
or rather the cybercabs, have only two seats in them.
Ejaaz:
When Waymo has five, surely the Waymo is better in that way, right?
Josh:
Well, this chart begs to differ. This chart says that 90% of robo taxi trips
Josh:
have been with two people or less. so what the differences you're seeing is
Josh:
a hyper customized approach versus a traditional approach i guess we're like
Josh:
waymo is basically saying well we have the
Josh:
software but we don't really have the hardware so we're just going to take an existing car
Josh:
strap some sensors on it and apply our super fancy software tesla's
Josh:
taking a total first principles approach so looking at this and saying well
Josh:
if nine out of ten trips are with two people or less let's just strip out the
Josh:
back seat and make the car even more efficient and more cost effective so the
Josh:
cyber cab only has two seats in it for two passengers whereas the waymo has
Josh:
five people so the assumption is that you will mostly need it for two people.
Josh:
If you need it for five, well, maybe get a Waymo or just get two cyber caps,
Josh:
because I mean, the idea is that they will be cheap enough that you can get
Josh:
a couple for the price of one Waymo ride.
Ejaaz:
I saw this amazing breakdown of Tesla versus Waymo by Marcelo and I've pulled
Ejaaz:
up his tweet and he goes, let's talk about scale first.
Ejaaz:
Waymo just reported over 100 million fully autonomous miles driven,
Ejaaz:
while Tesla has 6.8 billion
Ejaaz:
full self-driving miles driven, over 10,000 miles per minute.
Ejaaz:
And if you're wondering how on earth they were able to get this scale,
Ejaaz:
it's because the existing 5.5 million Teslas that are eligible for this FSD
Ejaaz:
upgrade gets input data every time a human takes it for a drive.
Ejaaz:
So its data can get fed back to its single generalized neural network that trains
Ejaaz:
FSD and gets fed to every single other Tesla that is operational on the planet
Ejaaz:
that has this FSD software, which is just the coolest thing ever.
Ejaaz:
It's ridiculous. Yeah. So it says here that Tesla has 5.1 million cars with
Ejaaz:
the AI4 computer chip, which is just like kind of like the base chip.
Ejaaz:
Actually, Josh, you were telling me before we started recording this that it's
Ejaaz:
actually a chip prior to this that is also capable for this,
Josh:
Right? They're going to be building software for that one as well.
Josh:
So they'll all be eligible.
Ejaaz:
Okay. Okay. So that would mean that Tesla's fleet is 2,000 times larger than
Ejaaz:
Waymo's when it comes to like a mile advantage. But wait. Today.
Ejaaz:
Yeah, today. Today. And then it goes, Tesla's FSD miles driven is growing at
Ejaaz:
over 10,000 miles every minute. That is crazy.
Ejaaz:
Waymo is doing 450,000 paid drives per week.
Ejaaz:
So the average Waymo ride is about six miles in length. This means Waymo is
Ejaaz:
collecting 2.7 million miles of data every week from its paid rides.
Ejaaz:
That's only 268 miles per minute versus Tesla's 10,000 miles per minute.
Ejaaz:
Josh, if I'm like an analyst looking at this from an investment perspective,
Ejaaz:
also from a customer experience and safety, like which car do I trust more when
Ejaaz:
it comes to autonomous driving?
Ejaaz:
It's going to be the one that has the most experience and mileage.
Ejaaz:
How does Tesla lose this?
Josh:
I don't believe they do in any reality, and I'm not sure it's particularly close.
Josh:
If you look at Waymo's strategy, it very much feels like they're shipping a
Josh:
service where they have this full self-driving software, but they don't own the full stack.
Josh:
And therefore, they're not able to manufacture cars quickly.
Josh:
And they also haven't really approached it correctly because theirs is very
Josh:
expensive. They have LiDAR sensors, which we're going to get into.
Josh:
And they also have it geofenced. So the way that Waymo expands is they have to first scan a region,
Josh:
get a high detailed map, and then they have to go city by
Josh:
city and it takes a very long time for this to roll
Josh:
out whereas the reality is tesla they're more shipping instead
Josh:
of a service they're shipping a model and their bet is that this vision first
Josh:
system plus the fleet data plus this continuous trading data gives you autonomy
Josh:
that is not specific to a city but generalized so then you take that technology
Josh:
and then you wrap it into a service but the reality is that when tesla rolled
Josh:
out their service in Austin.
Josh:
I believe Waymo had been there for already about 136 days.
Josh:
And in 42 days, Tesla was able to four times the original Waymo size because
Josh:
they have this generalized way of doing it where the neural network is smart
Josh:
enough to go anywhere in the world and drive fully autonomously. Whereas Waymo is not.
Josh:
Waymo not only has the hardware stack, but they don't have the software that
Josh:
can scale because they haven't gone deep in these neural nets.
Josh:
And the funny thing with neural nets, just a quick aside, is that they're trained
Josh:
learning based on what they see instead of programming them.
Josh:
So previously, they would program a car to stop at a stop sign.
Josh:
But the car was never told that in this new version. It was inferred that.
Josh:
But when it was reading drivers, it was watching drivers drive.
Josh:
The cars just kept rolling through the stop signs because no one really stops at a stop sign.
Josh:
So FSD started rolling through stop signs. And then the Highway Safety Committee
Josh:
got really upset because they were like, wait a second, your full self driving
Josh:
software isn't following the rules. It's rolling through stop signs.
Josh:
So they had to actually create artificial data of humans stopping.
Josh:
That way you could teach the car to stop and actually follow the rules because
Josh:
it was too much like a human.
Ejaaz:
This was really the big bet that
Ejaaz:
elon made almost a decade ago which is uh visual
Ejaaz:
data or vision learning uh in a single
Ejaaz:
neural net is way better than slapping a
Ejaaz:
bunch of detectors and sensors on a car he
Ejaaz:
thought maybe like if we just get visual input you could train a car much more
Ejaaz:
faster and when we look at the stats today 10 000 miles per minute uh across
Ejaaz:
an entire fleet of 5.1 million cars versus 268 miles or whatever that stat was
Ejaaz:
for Waymo. It's just obvious at this point.
Ejaaz:
But I did read that for a while, Elon was using LiDAR for Tesla cars.
Ejaaz:
In fact, I think he uses it to pre-train, and I say pre-train intentionally
Ejaaz:
here because it sounds like he's training a model for his Tesla cars, right?
Ejaaz:
He doesn't exclusively not use LiDAR. He does use it. Is that right?
Josh:
This is the most commonly wrong misconception about Tesla, where everyone believes
Josh:
that Tesla hates LiDAR. And the reality of it is that it is just not true.
Josh:
And it hasn't been spoken much, but the idea is that they do use LiDAR quite
Josh:
extensively, actually, and they like LiDAR as a sensor in the training time.
Josh:
So when cars are out collecting training data, when they're testing these things,
Josh:
the cars have LiDAR strapped to them.
Josh:
In fact, if you see any of these vehicles driving around that they've been running
Josh:
demos on, they have these big LiDAR things on top and they're really collecting a lot of data.
Josh:
The arbitrage opportunity occurs during test time when you actually package
Josh:
up these learnings and you deploy to the fleet
Josh:
They've taken what they've learned from the LiDAR and they have removed it,
Josh:
but they've compressed it into a way that the car can do just with cameras.
Josh:
So the car benefits from the safety of LiDAR in training, but does not require
Josh:
it in production when it's out in the real world driving.
Josh:
And that arbitrage that they're collecting is huge because the cost of these
Josh:
sensors is tens of thousands of dollars per car that they're removing.
Josh:
And the idea is that, well, if a human eyeball can see, and if we as humans
Josh:
can drive anywhere, then cameras with, what is it? I think there's eight cameras
Josh:
on these cars now with eight eyeballs can not only see much better,
Josh:
but they can then therefore drive much better than we can.
Josh:
And it doesn't require all the extra sensors that cost so much money.
Ejaaz:
Yeah, the more I learn about this, Josh, I keep seeing Waymo or LiDAR specifically
Ejaaz:
as this really kind of clunky mechanism.
Ejaaz:
And this isn't to kind of like crap on it. But if you kind of like,
Ejaaz:
think about this over the long term, it just seems that Vision scales way easier
Ejaaz:
and way better, like higher fidelity.
Ejaaz:
Like if I am Waymo and let's say we enter a new city or a city gets like an
Ejaaz:
extension or a new district, you now need to go map out that entire area, update your sensors.
Ejaaz:
Your sensors won't work as well in fog or during the dark as Vision does.
Ejaaz:
It just seems to have so many of the odds stacked against it.
Ejaaz:
I kind of think of it as, not to put my AI hat on all the time,
Ejaaz:
but it sounds like LiDAR is kind of like used for pre-training.
Ejaaz:
So it's like to train the corpus or the base level of the model.
Ejaaz:
Elon's kind of approach with visual learning is the post-training,
Ejaaz:
the reasoning, which typically so far for the last at least six months has made
Ejaaz:
AI models way, way more smart.
Ejaaz:
Like that's the kind of analogy that at least applies for me here.
Josh:
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And the point that you made earlier I think
Josh:
is an important one because if you asked any analyst on the street or if you
Josh:
asked any person on the street who's winning the cyber cab robo taxi wars currently
Josh:
the clear and obvious answer is Waymo they have,
Josh:
orders of magnitude more rides. They actually have a lot more cars than cyber
Josh:
cabs that are in the world actually giving people autonomous rides.
Josh:
But the truth is that it does not scale quickly.
Josh:
In fact, the earlier Waymo rides, they were giving rides over a decade ago.
Josh:
The difference in approach between the two allows Tesla to scale so much faster.
Josh:
So while Waymo has a very clear and obvious lead now, it is very clearly and
Josh:
obviously deteriorating rapidly.
Josh:
And by this time next year I suspect that lead will be zero if not they will
Josh:
be behind by a significant margin and it's all due to this pre-training post-training
Josh:
phase and just the way that they're really considering all these things from
Josh:
first principles the vertical integration they're building the car they have
Josh:
the software stack and it's ready to go in any place in the world that has roads.
Ejaaz:
Yeah, I think one really cool unlock of all of this, Josh, is that transport
Ejaaz:
is just going to be reduced to a cheap commodity that anyone can access.
Ejaaz:
And, you know, you don't need to blow tens of thousands of dollars on a car.
Ejaaz:
You can just hop into a cyber cab and get from A to B.
Ejaaz:
I was looking into the economics cost behind this and roughly with the new Model
Ejaaz:
Y RoboTaxi, it'll run at about at a cost of 60 cents per mile.
Ejaaz:
So let's say Tesla decides to charge $1 per mile.
Ejaaz:
Tesla will pocket a 40% margin per mile, which is way, way higher than any kind
Ejaaz:
of ride-hailing service that exists today.
Ejaaz:
And it just goes to show that the investments that Elon made a decade ago really
Ejaaz:
translates into both economical and scalable costs for his models today. It's just super cool.
Josh:
Yeah, and there's this important distinction to be made with this post,
Josh:
where that 60 cents per mile is referencing the cost per mile of a Model Y.
Josh:
That's the car that I drive. That's the car that is publicly available.
Josh:
The Cybercab, when it starts production in Q2 of next year, brings that cost
Josh:
per mile from 60 cents down to 20 cents because the cost to produce the car is much lower.
Josh:
The efficiency, the cost per kilowatt, the amount of range that the car will
Josh:
get per kilowatt of energy is much lower.
Josh:
It's the most aerodynamically efficient car in the world.
Josh:
It's the most efficient car in the world, and it's built that way from the ground
Josh:
up. So that cost drops even lower, which brings Tesla's margins much higher.
Josh:
And what's funny is, I mean, comparing against Waymo, some of
Josh:
these rides the shorter ones cost up to five to six dollars per
Josh:
mile with typical trips costing up to three dollars
Josh:
per mile and the tesla team has a
Josh:
very clear trajectory to reaching 60 cents per mile today but 20 cents per mile
Josh:
by the end of next year and 20 cents relative to six dollars is a gigantic delta
Josh:
that starts to really change the unit economics of how we move things around
Josh:
the earth as a whole when things cost 20 cents to transport per mile privately and
Josh:
Um, that begins to change things. Like it starts to make it economically viable
Josh:
or even economically incentivized to never even need to own a car because the
Josh:
ownership cost of owning a car will be higher than it would be to just call
Josh:
up one of these cyber caps to take you anywhere you ever want to be in the world.
Josh:
And that doesn't include delivery.
Ejaaz:
I just don't see a world where people are forced to buy cars in the future.
Ejaaz:
I just think it'll be, I don't want to say everything becomes a subscription,
Ejaaz:
but it seems like people will just kind of like go on a paper ride basis. Yeah. Yeah. It could be.
Josh:
Like the ballers in the future will own their own cyber cabs and they'll have
Josh:
their own custom matted out fancy like tits, but they're not driving it.
Josh:
There's no steering wheel or pedals in this car.
Josh:
And that's probably the difference is it will become economically unviable for
Josh:
most to have a car, nor will they want one.
Josh:
Who wants to spend their time driving when you could just be driven around by a private chauffeur?
Ejaaz:
Yeah, it's funny. We went from having to buy your own car and drive it to,
Ejaaz:
oh, get someone to drive for you to get no one to drive you.
Ejaaz:
And it's your own personal space.
Ejaaz:
And it's going to be cheaper per ride, which is awesome.
Ejaaz:
But despite all of this, if I went to my friends today, and I have,
Ejaaz:
and I've said like, look how cheap this is, look how affordable it's going to
Ejaaz:
be. their number one bit of criticism for Tesla specifically,
Ejaaz:
Josh, has been around safety.
Ejaaz:
They're like, oh, I've seen a
Ejaaz:
bunch of these viral videos go around where Tesla's crashed or something.
Ejaaz:
And the truth is, that's just not true.
Ejaaz:
In fact, recently, Tesla Cybertruck specifically was rated as one of the safest vehicles out there.
Ejaaz:
And if you just dig into the data beyond just that award,
Ejaaz:
you'll see that for every 6.36 million miles driven, as is demonstrated in this
Ejaaz:
tweet of where people were using autopilot technology, only one crash came from
Ejaaz:
all of those rides, which is just insane.
Josh:
This is an important point. Being in a Tesla that is full self-driving is the
Josh:
safest experience on the road, period.
Josh:
There is no safer car and there is no safer software than the current Tesla stack.
Josh:
And this is important because if we are making this transition,
Josh:
people need to be highly incentivized to do so.
Josh:
And one of the largest causes of death, I don't remember the numbers off the
Josh:
top of my head, but it is an astronomical amount of people that die every year to car crashes.
Josh:
And with this new software stack combined with these Tesla cars,
Josh:
like you just mentioned, they're the number one crash safety tested cars in
Josh:
the world every year since inception.
Josh:
Across the line even that big metal stainless
Josh:
steel cyber truck is safer than your like
Josh:
honda pilot or whatever you're driving around today by like a
Josh:
lot in fact they invented a brand new rating
Josh:
just for these cars because they're so much safer and that's
Josh:
one part of it but the second is the software when you're driving you're a
Josh:
human who makes errors who only has two data points that can process
Josh:
them so quickly and that variance happens a lot
Josh:
by distractions or whether you're tired or not and with
Josh:
a full self-driving robo taxi like this there's eight
Josh:
sensors that are always on that have a full 360 picture of everything
Josh:
all at once and this has happened to me on multiple occasions where a
Josh:
car will come from behind you and kind of swerve into your lane and and your
Josh:
first urge is to turn out of the way but you don't know if there's a car in
Josh:
the lane next to you the cyber cap has all of this in real time and they're
Josh:
able to keep you so much safer so that's why you see these numbers where miles
Josh:
driven per one accident is getting higher and higher and higher because more
Josh:
people are using it and it's getting better and it is the clear and obvious
Josh:
safe winner for yourself or your loved ones to put them in this.
Ejaaz:
Josh, I want to move on to what the future is going to look like,
Ejaaz:
because I don't think this story is just about autonomous driving or even like a robo taxi service.
Ejaaz:
I think this is going to completely change the way we kind of interact with
Ejaaz:
one another and the way we deliver items and do a whole bunch of other stuff
Ejaaz:
that isn't just about sticking someone in a driver's seat and getting from point A to B.
Ejaaz:
A few things that are at the top of my head is
Ejaaz:
Cars are typically seen as a depreciating asset, right? As soon as you buy the
Ejaaz:
car, it goes down like what, 20% in value or something ridiculous like that.
Ejaaz:
With this new version of a car, it starts becoming an investment asset that earns money for you.
Ejaaz:
Okay, what the hell do I mean by that? Well, think about all the hours you don't drive your car, Josh.
Ejaaz:
It could be out there doing a number of different activities.
Ejaaz:
Number one, it could be an autonomous Uber driver, which takes someone in your
Ejaaz:
local area from A to B and you collect a revenue or a fee off of that, right?
Ejaaz:
The other thing is last mile delivery is the most painful point of any kind
Ejaaz:
of delivery experience, right?
Ejaaz:
And so it could just simply be a thing that picks up a package and drops it off.
Ejaaz:
Someone kind of like opens your door and picks it up. Now, of course,
Ejaaz:
people might be initially uncomfortable with these kinds of ideas because it's
Ejaaz:
like, I don't want to let my personal kind of vehicle be out there.
Ejaaz:
But if it's earning you tens of thousands of dollars a month,
Ejaaz:
which is like what one estimate I saw earlier on before, as we were prepping
Ejaaz:
for this episode, seems to suggest, I feel like people would end up kind of
Ejaaz:
utilizing something like this.
Ejaaz:
And before I pass it on to you, the second thing that really excites me, Josh, is
Ejaaz:
I think traffic is going to reduce, dude, because of this.
Ejaaz:
Like imagine where everyone kind of subscribes to this and kind of gets in the
Ejaaz:
car when they need to, to go from point A to point B.
Ejaaz:
You technically don't need to park a car at any given point.
Ejaaz:
You can have a fluid motion.
Ejaaz:
Traffic always flows at the right speed. No one's held up in traffic trams.
Ejaaz:
To your earlier point, no one gets into accidents.
Ejaaz:
It just seems like a better world in general. No more parking lots in Manhattan.
Josh:
Yeah. Also think about how it reshapes the actual surface of the cities that we live in today.
Josh:
Like, Ijaz, if you've ever been to MetLife Stadium or any sort of stadium,
Josh:
90% of the footprint of the stadium is parking.
Josh:
It's almost the entire thing. There's miles of parking lots.
Josh:
And this is true with a lot of cities and even suburban areas where so much
Josh:
space is dedicated to parking.
Josh:
And in the case that you no longer need to park a car because there is these
Josh:
autonomous cybercamps that are rolling around, it actually alters the face of
Josh:
these cities. And those parking lots become either productive or parks,
Josh:
and both of which are great.
Josh:
You can either build more beautiful buildings or more green spaces that aren't
Josh:
required as opposed to these like really dingy parking lots.
Josh:
And the other thing is, to your point, Ejaz, about the appreciating asset.
Josh:
There's a lot of people, I guess more of the ambitious cab drivers,
Josh:
have been buying up cheaper Teslas with full-slub driving licenses in anticipation
Josh:
of being able to turn their fleet into an autonomous vehicle.
Ejaaz:
Operators that already ahead of the game.
Josh:
A lot of these new taxi companies are driving around in Teslas and that's not an accident.
Josh:
One, it's because the cost per mile is so low but two, there's a
Josh:
world in which by next year they don't need to have a driving workforce anymore
Josh:
and that autonomous workforce just becomes net productive without any of the
Josh:
human expenses and it becomes this really interesting business model as well
Josh:
where your car is actually an appreciating asset or if anything a net neutral
Josh:
asset or if you want to buy a car.
Josh:
You could let it go for 85% of the time that it's idle and have it actually make you money.
Josh:
The last final point about this, and this is to tie back to AI,
Josh:
is the distributed compute part of this story also.
Josh:
Because these AI chips, we talked about this on previous episodes,
Josh:
AI5, AI6 are incredibly powerful.
Josh:
And these cards are sitting idle 85% of the time. So that's a lot of idle compute
Josh:
that can talk to each other, that can possibly have second order effects when
Josh:
it comes to training AI models or inference or whatever. So there's a lot of
Josh:
open-ended possibilities. with this.
Ejaaz:
For that Harry Potter fans out there, I think the dark mark has officially been
Ejaaz:
released on LiDAR, Josh.
Ejaaz:
Elon called it back in 2019, right? He said that, you know, LiDAR is great,
Ejaaz:
but it's eventually going to be the thing that kind of kills Waymo and prevents
Ejaaz:
autonomous driving companies from ever winning.
Ejaaz:
Vision is the future. And, you know, after this conversation, I think he's right.
Ejaaz:
And the future is just going to be so cool.
Ejaaz:
Like we haven't even spoken about the other little company that Elon operates,
Ejaaz:
XAI, which is going to integrate Grok and frontier level AI intelligence into the car.
Ejaaz:
So right now with a Christmas update, I believe you told me,
Josh:
Josh. I got it yesterday.
Ejaaz:
Right. You could literally speak to your car and say, hey, can you get me from point A to B?
Ejaaz:
And in the middle of that journey, you could be like, hey, can you stop off
Ejaaz:
at this other gas station? I need to pick up A, B and C.
Ejaaz:
It's just, it's so cool. And like my mind, I think can't fully capture the immersive
Ejaaz:
process that this is going to result in.
Ejaaz:
It's super cool. I'm excited to see what happens. I think it is pegged to start
Ejaaz:
rolling out CyberCap, Robotaxi Service in 2026 in the summer.
Ejaaz:
That's at least the news headlines that I saw, Josh. It might be delayed in a classic Elon style.
Ejaaz:
But this is exciting. This technology is here right now. 500,000 people know
Ejaaz:
about it. Now you guys, you listeners know about it too.
Ejaaz:
Limitless, we try and strive to bring you the latest in news and insights.
Ejaaz:
Josh and I spend a lot of time learning about this stuff and sometimes testing
Ejaaz:
out the products themselves.
Ejaaz:
Josh, eight years of experience, two years not touching his steering wheel.
Ejaaz:
Come on, he hasn't got into a single accident just yet.
Ejaaz:
So if you want to hear more about these types of things, turn on your notifications,
Ejaaz:
subscribe to us, give us a rating.
Ejaaz:
All of this helps us massively. And we will see you in the next one.