How many robotaxis are there in the world today?
Also: Google responds to DOJ, Discord bans, and more!
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
📈 Trending Up: Success theater … Nobel Prizes for computer kids, no really … X in Brazil … work to steal OpenAI’s secrets … AI media deals … Braintrust … Latin American fintech … Tesla in China … armed service as matchmaking? …
📉 Trending Down: Social networks not all converging on the same bucket of slop … interest rates in New Zealand … fiscal intelligence … the U.K.’s population …
Here comes Hurricane Milton: The latest public advisory from NOAA, wind arrival estimates, storm surge expectations, spaghetti models, CNN live updates, Guardian liveblog, @NWS Tampa Bay, @FOX 13 Tampa Bay, @Noah Bergren
🙅 Google responds to DOJ: Google said that it would appeal a court order to open up Android earlier this week. Today, Google argued that the Department of Justice’s plans to remedy the company’s search monopoly by possibly breaking up the company would be a mistake.
If you are playing defense, you are losing.
Discord bans? I feel like a missed something, but a day after Russia blocked Discord, Turkey has done the same? 🇷🇺 Russia says the ban is due to the company failing to “prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist services, recruitment of citizens to commit them, for drug sales, and in connection with unlawful information posting.” Censorship, in other words.
🇹🇷 Turkey, in contrast, writes that its ban is due to “the existence of sufficient suspicion that the crimes of ‘child sexual abuse and obscenity’ included in Article 8/1 of the Law No. 5651 on the Regulation of Publications Made on the Internet and Combating Crimes Committed through Such Publications have been committed.” [Machine translation]
I guess it’s the sign that a social platform has made it when authoritarian governments start to block access. Congrats, Discord!
How many robotaxis are there in the world today?
Tesla’s robotaxi event lands tomorrow after delays. The EV giant will show off some neat existing tech, and some cooler future tech that it intends to bring to market in the near-ish future. I doubt those predictions are a stretch.
No matter what Tesla shows off however, it’s running behind. Waymo and Cruise are already operating robotaxi services in the United States. Tesla fans will argue that Tesla’s data collection operation thanks to its in-car driver-assist service mean that it is not lagging competitors, per se.
Ahead of Tesla’s news, however, I am curious how many truly self-driving cars there are on the roads today in commercial operation. The number is low, but growing. The curve of this particular chart is going to go vertical in time, so it’s good to understand where were starting from. Let’s collect data from Waymo, Cruise, and self-driving operations in China to get a rough handle on the figure.
Waymo
April 6, 2024: “The company said it has not significantly scaled its fleet of about 250 robotaxis in San Francisco since August [2023].”
August 26, 2024: “The company has over 400 vehicles in its three key markets, plus early expansion into Austin, Texas, and currently has about 50 driverless cars in Los Angeles.”
August 27, 2024: “There are around 200 Waymo cars on [Phoenix-area] roads right now and soon, you may start noticing even more of them.
September 13, 2024: Expansions in Atlanta and Austin are underway along with an expanded Uber partnership.
It appears that Waymo is still under the 1,000 self-driving car threshold. But with $5 billion in funding from its parent company, waitlists, and the ability to finally monetize a very, very long investment I expect the Google vassal to quickly expand its fleet footprint in the coming quarters.
Cruise
October 27, 2023: “Cruise, the autonomous vehicle operator backed by General Motors, says it decided to ‘proactively pause’ its fleet of driverless cars across the United States.” The company’s response to an accident dramatically undercut trust in its product.
April 9, 2024: “Cruise resumes manual driving as next step in return to driverless mission.”
June 11, 2024: “Cruise resumes supervised autonomous driving with safety drivers.”
The number of true self-driving cars on the roads from Cruise today appears to be zero, but I doubt it will stay single-digit for long. Cruise is slowly working its way back to market. Given its prior goals to expand its market footprint, Cruise should help grow the number of self-driving cars in the United States’ tally greatly next year.
China
June 13, 2024: “A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around [the city of Wuhan]. The company that operates them, the tech giant Baidu, said last month that it would add a further 1,000 of the so-called robot taxis in Wuhan.”
June 14, 2024: “Shanghai is allowing 10 Tesla vehicles to carry out tests of the company's most advanced autonomous driving software to pave way for its rollout in China.”
July 8, 2024: “China's capital Beijing has plans to support the use of self-driving cars in online ride-hailing services, the official Beijing Daily reported.'“
July 16, 2024 (state media): “Shanghai is set to begin public testing of autonomous cars as early as next week, offering free rides for residents throughout the trial period.”
July 18, 2024: “Shenzhen plans to deploy 20 autonomous buses by the end of 2024, as part China’s push for the commercialization of self-driving technology amid safety and job loss concerns.”
That’s one busy summer. More recently, VOA reported that at “least 19 Chinese cities are running robotaxi and robobus tests,” while a total of seven “have approved tests without human-driver monitors by at least five industry leaders: Apollo Go, Pony.ai, WeRide, AutoX and SAIC Motor.”
The Apollo Go mention there is not idle. Just today Nikkei reported that Baidu intends to take Apollo Go outside of China’s borders.
Answering our question for China, the answer appears to be thousands just as the answer in the United States appears to be hundreds. Next year I suspect that the numbers will be tens of thousands in China, and thousands in the United States. After that it’s a race to get the global figure to 100,000 — maybe late 2026 or early 2027?
Faster, please. I hate driving.