- Everyone is racing to have the first
self-driving vehicle on the market,
because there is a lot
of money to be made.
Like, a stupid, huge
amount of money to be made.
And while there are many other benefits,
really, it all comes
down to the economics.
Or, at least, that's
what I'm guessing here.
And, so, I thought it'd
be fun to have a look
and just see who is
actually leading this race
and who is likely to be the first one
to have a self-driving
vehicle on the market.
Let's go.
(upbeat drums)
So despite all of the awesome benefits
that self-driving cars promise.
Like reclaiming our roads,
since we need less cars overall.
Reducing CO2 emissions,
since they're likely to be all electric.
Reducing accidents due
to their better driving.
Avoiding parking tickets by moving
when the meter-maid comes to cite you.
Okay, that last one was a joke.
But you get the idea.
There are countless ways that
self-driving vehicles
will benefit society.
And, of course, these companies
that want to make huge profits.
Hashtag Capitalism.
Wonder how big?
Revenue for ride-hailing
services in the US
could exceed to $26 billion by 2023.
And that's with only 18
percent of the people
in the country using the
service on a regular basis.
And with an electric vehicle
charged during off-peak hours,
that is relatively maintenance-free
and doesn't require a driver,
this means that these companies
could reduce their costs per mile,
of up to 87 percent.
So it makes sense when you see investors
jumping at the chance to get
a piece of these companies,
like Uber and Lyft, as
they prepare to go public,
even while not posting a profit.
But who's really gonna be the
first in the United States?
I say in the United States,
because Yandex already
has a service like this available in parts
of Eastern Europe and Russia.
With some pretty impressive
results that we even
saw demonstrated at CES 2019 in Las Vegas.
But here in the US we
have several big companies
pushing to be the first,
namely Tesla, Waymo
and Cruise Automation.
And a recent report which includes data
from the California DMV
and a website called
the last license holder,
shows how these companies
stack up in terms of miles
driven per disengagement.
This report shows that
in California alone,
these companies have racked
up over two billion miles.
However, you might wonder
why Tesla isn't actually
isn't on this list, and
I reached out to Tesla
to ask about that and I
learned something interesting
about this report and
basically, the California DMV
records disengagements
for self driving vehicles
as vehicles that have
a level three or higher
level of autonomy.
So right now Tesla's autopilot system
is only classified as
level two, meaning it is
a driver assist program.
You, as the driver as
we all know, still need
to remain fully alert, hands on the wheel,
and really in control of
anything that's going on.
So you are actually meant
to disengage autopilot
its not like a fully
autonomy system that is not
designed for you to ever have to do that.
So, when you see reports
like this out there
you need to have like
a bit of a caveat as to
the context in which
that data was collected
which is always important I think
when looking at numbers.
But what it comes down
to is how many miles
these systems have accumulated
in a real world scenario.
Not assimilation, not a
test track, but miles driven
on public roads.
So if we look at this
data, Waymo of this list
is clearly the leader,
however Tesla's autopilot
does count here since
basically what its doing
is training its algorithm.
And on the ARK Invest
Podcast, Elon had some
comments about this recently in terms of
how they're gathering this data.
- (Elon Musk) The advance
that we have I think
is very difficult to
overcome is that we have
just a vast amount of
data on interventions,
so effectively, the customers are training
the system on how to drive.
And there are millions of
cornea cases that are so
obscure and weirded,
you wouldn't believe it.
I mean, there's different road markings,
there's different rules
in different countries,
different expectations, you got rain,
snow, sleet, hail, you know hurricanes,
floods, fires, smoke, dust
(lady laughs)
its insane.
- (lady) I know.
- (Elon Musk) But we'll get cars in almost
all of those, in really
all of those environments.
And so we, every time somebody intervenes,
take over from autopilot,
its saves that information on
and uploads it to our system.
We don't know which car it was or how,
what haven't you know,
there's no individual
attribution for the car, we just know
that intervention took
place and then we see
what's required to fix that intervention.
- So the key thing here is
when a person is driving
in autopilot, and
something happens, and they
actually take control of
the vehicle, they intervene
with the system from doing its job.
This is a clear indication
to Tesla, that there
is something that they could improved.
They save that data and
then later upload it
so they can improve the system overtime.
This is known as supervised
learning, where a person
is telling the algorithm
what it should've done
and with Tesla's Fleet
of over 500,000 vehicles,
in all parts of the world,
its hard for anyone else
to really have a shot at
catching them in terms of
how much data they're collecting.
Elon, also had a comment on
this during that Podcast.
- (lady) Maybe highlight
for us like a, I mean
Tesla has more real world
miles than anyone else by far.
- (Elon Musk) I think we must have
- (lady) More than anyone else.
- (Elon Musk) Maybe a 100 times more.
- (lady) A 100 times more,
yeah you said five percent,
you said altogether they
have five percent of
- (Elon Musk) It's probably
closer to one percent.
- So when we include
Tesla's autopilot miles
which they publicly stated
reached over one billion
in November 2018 and
their current fleet size
with an average of ten
miles driven per day,
I'm trying to be conservative
with that amount,
I forecast that they're now at adding
500,000 autopilot miles
per day, giving them
a total of 1.46B autopilot miles driven.
And if we do the same math for Waymo,
we see that since they publicly reported
eight million miles driven
back in July of 2018
and they also stated 25,000 miles per day,
this puts them at 13 million miles total.
And when you think about
it, the Tesla Fleet
is now expanding rapidly
in Asia and Europe,
increasing even further those edge cases
Elon mentioned, which also
accelerates the growth
of the total autopilot miles driven.
So when it comes down
to it, I have a really
hard time imagining anyone catching Tesla
in terms of how much
data they're collecting
in this semi autonomous
fashion, with a Fleet
that is already substantially
bigger than anyone else,
about 100 times more
data than anyone else,
and a Fleet that is doubling
almost every single year.
Maybe this is why Elon
thinks that they'll be
feature complete with
this software this year
as well he thinks regulators won't put up
really too much of a fight and really
kind of slow it down.
But he does tend to be pretty optimistic
about his timelines in the past.
But I think for a fully autonomous vehicle
to exist where there isn't
even a steering wheel
and it can drive in any circumstance
that it encounters, we're still
ten years out at least.
But, in between now and
then, hopefully we can
still achieve a lot of those benefits,
we can reduce CO2 emissions, we can reduce
the overall cars on
the road, we can reduce
the cost of operating these things,
I think there are a
tremendous amount of benefits
that we can realize as
we go from where we're
at now level two, to level
three, and then level four.
So, I'm curious to here what you think,
of course, no one knows
what the future holds,
but looking at this data is always fun,
so I hope you'll join me on this journey
if you haven't already.
And lastly don't forget,
when you free the data
your model fall up.
I'll see you back in the next one.
(upbeat drum)
Hey, thanks for watching the video.
If you like data, want to learn more,
maybe make a career out of it,
I have a free course to help you
kick start your data professional career.
Its part of the FTD academy,
Free The Data academy,
and its free to you,
you can go check it out,
learn more and sign up
at ftdacademy.com.
(upbeat music)
