In This Article:
Tesla (TSLA) is in the process of rolling out and launching its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, next month. Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management CEO Ross Gerber — a long-time Tesla investor and critic of Musk — comes on the program to talk about the tough competition Tesla's autonomous driving faces from Waymo's own robotaxis.
Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL).
Also catch Gerber discuss Tesla CEO Elon Musk's recommitment to the electric vehicle developer.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Your point about self-driving cars being a long-term trend, and it's well taken. I do wonder whether you think, I don't want to overstate it, Ross, but whether you think something might be shifting there. I mean, I was just struck by this. The Waymo co-CEO telling reporters this week they have reached 10 million trips, doubling in the past five months. As an investor in a long-time tech investor, Ross, are you excited about that trend, not in the near term, or in the intermediate term, but 5, 10 years out? And how do you think about Tesla's potential role in it?
Well, this is kind of one of my favorite things to do as an investor is really try to like, you know, brainstorm what does this future really look like when you think about it from a more human perspective, not what the tech people expect us to do, you know. So there's two issues here. One, Waymo is incredible. It's doing an incredible job. It drives safer than humans. It's incredibly effective service and we see them as the leader in robo taxi, and they're rapidly expanding and people love the experience with Waymo. They're doing phenomenally well here in Los Angeles in the Santa Monica area. You see Waymos working non-stop and I have yet to hear anybody say anything bad about it, and we talk to a lot of Waymo customers. So Uber really has to worry about Waymo for sure. Secondly, there's no doubt in my mind that Waymo has solved robo taxi in a way that makes driving safer, where Tesla has not yet. And this is an important difference because until you can make the car safer than humans, you know, driving, it's really hard to get mass adoption of, of sort of not driving. So, you know, in my mind, the, the robo taxi has been solved by Waymo and Tesla should look at what Waymo's doing and, and in a lot of ways, they're copying them. And I think eventually we'll see very big similarities between what Tesla's doing and what Waymo's doing, especially with the hardware on the car, which Elon's gonna have to admit at some point isn't adequate for real safe, full self-driving. So the real issue is, are you going to give up your car and the convenience of having a car whenever you want it to do errands and drop off your kids and pick up the dry cleaning, and then go stop by the beach for a run, you know, like, people, this is a symbol of who you are and your independence. And I personally don't see myself giving up driving because I, I love cars and I love driving. And I asked my kids this, like, you know, because my kids are like 13, and I'm like, you know, should I teach you how to drive a car, or are you just cool like taking robo cabs your whole life? And he looks at me like I'm nuts. He can't wait to have a car. You know, so there's a part of the human behavior here that I think isn't going to change. And even replacing the vehicle fleet would take 20 years and Elon told me that himself, many years ago when I asked him. And so I just don't see robo taxi expanding the market for taxi services substantially on the near term at all. So it's really a competition between Uber, Waymo, and Tesla in the end to, to get your ride service needs done. But how does this market really expand? That's the big question. And I'm not sold that humans are giving up their cars.