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Cars & mobility
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The questions the field argues about, and each side in the words of the people who hold it.
How quickly can autonomous vehicles move into commercial operation?
Near-term expansion
Autonomous services and trucking are nearing commercial operation, with vehicle volumes and markets set to grow.
Fully commercial operations before New Year's Eve is what I'll put out there as a marker. That's where I think they're going.
I'm going on the record, I'm saying by Q1, Waymo launches commercial driver out service with their own APS permit in the uk, but he who holds the permit holds the keys.
Commercial scale will take time, and pace, permits, and local uncertainty can limit planned deployments.
At its current pace, they're not going to meet 20,000 vehicles. So that pace has to get even faster. Otherwise, you know, we would estimate them maybe hitting 14,000 vehicles or so.
Fatal crashes typically result from compounding factors—like low visibility, high speeds, and poor road design—that even sober drivers cannot always overcome.
Without shared preemption, local rules may differ and add requirements that complicate deployment.
And because we have no federal preemption and there's no state preemption here, you could see even very crude ways of doing it requiring certain physical changes to the vehicle to identify it as an autonomous vehicle.
So my guess is, particularly if in the scenario you put it where the House and maybe even the Senate flipped to Democratic hands, I don't see the Democrats extending preemption into this area.
Should automakers prioritize new technology or lower costs?
Cost before more tech
Automakers should use existing technology to reduce costs and focus on manufacturability and supply resilience.
What I've grown to appreciate more in these last couple years being in industry is how important designing for cost, designing for manufacturability and understanding one's supply chain is to having a viable product.
My experience is the most of the OE customers are not interested in that right now. They have plenty of technology. They've invested a lot in technology. Now it's, how do we take the cost out with the technology that we have?
Higher local EV demand is the route to expanding domestic battery manufacturing and realizing the EV market's potential.
I'll tell you the way to have the biggest impact on the domestic battery manufacturing industry is by having high demand. If you get high demand here locally, that domestic manufacturing will follow very quickly.
The EV market is much, many times bigger than you'll ever get in the ESS market. So the, and we think, I mean, I think the upside here is tremendous on the EV market side.
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Cars & mobility
Direction
Forecasts point to expanding autonomous services and vehicle volumes, while commercial scale remains uncertain and depends on deployment pace and operating conditions.
You're getting things in place for a volume ramp in 28, 29 and ultimately that date 2030, which is like how many cars these guys and Tesla at that point can have on the road.
Forecasts and visions, with when they were said and when they can be checked.
But I also think the new metric, or if you want to say the updated amended end metric should be paid commercial unsupervised miles and then have a subset of that breaking down deadhead miles.
Autonomous vehicles are already close to meaningful commercial scale.
What the sources show
Some forecasts anticipate launches and rapid growth, while another says meaningful scale in the markets discussed remains a way off.
I'm going on the record, I'm saying by Q1, Waymo launches commercial driver out service with their own APS permit in the uk, but he who holds the permit holds the keys.
Automakers' next move is simply to add more technology.
What the sources show
One industry account says customers already have substantial technology investment and are now asking how to reduce cost with what is in place.
My experience is the most of the OE customers are not interested in that right now. They have plenty of technology. They've invested a lot in technology. Now it's, how do we take the cost out with the technology that we have?
What practitioners ahead of the curve say they do now.
Bring engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, finance, product planning, and design together on one platform team.
The first platform team was the LH and it was cross functional engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, finance, product planning, design, all working together on the same team and got that one launched.
Use virtual development and lighter, less expensive materials to reduce the need for physical iterations.
Instead of building and testing everything, can you do stuff virtually so you're not building and testing as many iterations as we have in the past? And then are there lighter materials, less expensive materials to put in the tires?
Separate fleet operations from technology provision, with partners handling on-the-ground operations.
Xpeng says it will not operate the fleets. It won't be a fleet operator. It will act as a technology provider and ecosystem enabler, earning from hardware sales services and commission sharing and handing offline operations to global partners.
Integrate vertically and source materials directly to reduce exposure to supply disruptions.
I think it also de risks us from supply disruptions, being vertically, vertically integrated and having our own source of materials. I'd say it's more from a resilience standpoint, ensuring supply.