Praveen Penmetsa

So my quick thought going in to this week: be cautious on the $50K headline floating around for production cost on on next gen Waymo IONIQ 5 with Hyundai Motor Company as reported by Gasgoo 盖世汽车, The Verge, Electrek and others. There is a big difference between an OEM providing vehicle and a fully functional autonomous vehicles outfitted with an L4 autonomous system. I worry this number will become parroted as price anchor, and then embedded in reports and financial estimates because the reporting is not precise--so let me be: the initial 2024 press release (see here: https://lnkd.in/gAQHZtCw) stated the vehicle with be delivered "autonomous-ready" so that figure should NOT be interpreted as the all-in cost of a fully-functional, Level-4 autonomous vehicle. Furthermore our research at the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative doesn’t support that level of cost compression on the AV stack itself. Our assumption is that the $50K reflects the base cost of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicle — not the fully integrated L4 system components — which could range from $100-200K based on our (albeit dated) work https://lnkd.in/gUEXvCHU. Furthermore, given that Waymo’s self-driving architecture grew out of the DARPA/robotics tradition and is heavily sensor-fusion based — it’s unlikely that they would want to relinquish control over hardware/software integration in the vehicles. Even as companies increasing rely more on end-to-end AI approaches with leaner sensors, this hardware / systems integration is still a key to performance. https://lnkd.in/g79UpNAt

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Very interesting news out of the EV and Autonomous Driving spaces this morning. Lucid Motors, Nuro and Uber announce they are throwing their hats into the Waymo x Tesla robotaxi ring. Here's the details that seem to be getting overlooked: 1. Uber plans to deploy 20,000 vehicles or more... over the next six years. 2. The first scheduled launch doesn't happen until... late 2026. 3. There is a single prototype already driving around... a closed circuit. 4. Vehicle pricing is still TBD... while Lucid loses $200,000 on avg. at current retail pricing. 5. Nuro is best known for autonomous delivery vehicles for... Domino's / food delivery. I don't see this having a meaningful impact for any of the three parties, and it just gives Tesla and Waymo a further head start. Ignore the headline, the details matter. $LCID stock up >30% today, let's see how it settles over the next few days as more people learn of the details of the deal. The Verge: https://lnkd.in/dxYuR6h4 #Leadership #PersonalDevelopment #Sustainability #Productivity #Sales

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