Cruise, waymo, zooks etc
How are they differentiating themselves? Will any succeed? Feels like each has issues
They’re differentiating themselves in that they’re taking different approaches to solving the problem. First of all, Cruise and Waymo are currently the only two companies with enough money to make this happen. It will be a war of attrition, trust me. Regarding strategy, Cruise is taking the more difficult approach of deploying initially in the busy urban environment of SF, compared to Waymo in Arizona and in more suburban settings. That’s harder, but obviously the market capitalization potential is vastly greater if they can figure it out. Cruise is also growing at a much faster pace than the others, and the offers are pretty damn good.
Cruise growing faster in terms of hiring?
I disagree, Waymo started at GoogleX and they had the stupid Panda pod driving around a pretty damn busy environment in Mountain View. So they had a lot of data already. And then moved to AZ for higher speed data. Zoox is also doing the same thing, starting in high traffic SF and slowly moving outward in a circle from the center.
Yes, as in hiring. Cruise is in hypergrowth atm. Not familiar with Argo as much.
Hence lots of pain points and organizational issues at Cruise.
I feel Cruise and Waymo might have a clear path in sight, but lol Zoox? Why are we even talking about it.. If we talk about Zoox then we can easily talk about 50 other AV companies which would definitely outperform it in tech and business strategy.
I’d offer you watch a PBS Nova episode called “Look whose driving now!” PBS.com/nova Looks at both sides and Zoox was the biggest contributor as to where the tech stands. Funny how both sides have diametric opinions of where autonomous vehicles really are at. IMO the industry as a whole has to make great strides to win legislators and public adoption!
Zooxs seems to be taking a slightly harder approach by building their own vehicle in parallel to figuring out self driving. Auto manufacturing is capital intensive so I worry about their longevity without a revenue stream, which can't come until they've got vehicles manufactured and self driving figured out, so kind of a bind. Waymo has the funding, Cruise seems to be taking a big bet, but they have a decent sized fleet so would appear they're further ahead than Zoox. But I have a few friends at Zoox and none of them seem worried.
Why does zoox needs to solve ad and vehicle problems ? What prevents them to launch Lexus based robotaxi and start making money while the vehicle is being figured out? Zoox definitely is playing a long term game building their own cars. Cruise has a big advantage of having gm on their side, waymo not having their own cars would struggle with margins because cruise and zoox would catch up to them
It'll be interesting to see their respective burn rates vs their target time to market for revenue...
At this point, there isn’t a focus on differentiation because there is no need to differentiate. There is a focus on launching in the market.
This, but also different companies are targeting different cities. For example we are testing in Vegas as well as SF.