alt Hacker NewsI think this article is underestimating Tesla and very much underestimating how hard Level 4 autonomy is. The long-tail of edge conditions to handle is really long, and Rivian is only at the beginning.
What Rivian is going to release at the end of 2026 is what Tesla had 3 years ago. All that time has gone to dealing with edge conditions: bike lanes, emergency vehicles, construction zones, and all the crazy one-off situations that their fleet has seen.
Tesla's fleet is an order of magnitude larger, so events that Rivian has seen only once, Tesla already has ten examples of. And rare events that Tesla has trained on, Rivian has never yet seen.
I will say this, though: Rivian is the closest competitor to Tesla (not counting Chinese cars). Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing. And the robotaxi game is going to be all about manufacturing.
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Waymo is first to market by retrofitting a bunch of Jaguars nobody else would buy. They can keep that arbitrage up for a while.
Can you elaborate why robotaxi success will hinge on manufacturing?
> Waymo FSD is obviously more advanced than Tesla, but they will lose out to both Tesla and Rivian when it comes to manufacturing
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but the car itself (chassis, bodywork, drivetrain) is a commodity today. If you can turn any car into an autonomous car then the car isn't worth that much in the self-driving game. Tesla's stock is propped by the promise of becoming the first to achieve autonomy not by its ability to build cars, or else VW and Toyota would be worth multiples of Tesla. They aren't because cars are a commodity. Autonomous car brains are the hot deal.
If manufacturing ever became Google's Achilles heel, they can take a majority stake in something like VinFast and manufacture a Google car.
It's like saying Linux will lose out to Microsoft when it comes to manufacturing. Yes, they do lose out by not manufacturing anything and yet their product is slowly taking over the market. Local loss (no profit from manufacturing), global win (core product is increasing market share).
I control+f'd LiDAR and got hits confirming they're using it, which means it's already better than anything Tesla is capable of offering