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Real estate is one of the hardest open problems in scaled self driving — Kevin Chen

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Over the past few months, I’ve flown a drone as part of a stakeout to understand how they work. And I’ve taken a deep dive into an apparent Waymo outage to find the company charging its electric vehicles from temporary diesel generators. The reason for my obsession? I believe depot buildouts will be one of the last hard problems in scaled autonomous driving. Long after the hardware, software, and AI have been perfected, real estate acquisition will remain a limiting factor in large-scale AV deployment. Waymo’s main depot at 201 Toland Street, San Francisco. In 2021, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla FSD’s release will be “one of the biggest asset value increases in history.” Musk is arguing that, once autonomous driving has been solved, it can be instantly rolled out at the push of a button. Nearly all of Tesla’s fleet could be put to productive use without humans behind the wheel. While Musk’s viewpoint is on the extreme end, it’s a sentiment shared by many who have worked on or invested i

Real estate is one of the hardest open problems in scaled self driving Why parking & charging will become the limiting factor to bringing autonomous driving to the masses 03 Sep 2024 I’ve had a minor obsession with Waymo’s autonomous vehicle depots recently. Over the past few months, I’ve flown a drone as part of a stakeout to understand how they work. And I’ve taken a deep dive into an apparent Waymo outage to find the company charging its electric vehicles from temporary diesel generators . The reason for my obsession? I believe depot buildouts will be one of the last hard problems in scaled

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