Baidu's Radish Run, Robotaxi, a "new species", has for the first time set off a "nationalized" discussion in China, in which position debates, pros and cons analysis, I believe that after half a month of self-media bombardment, everyone has their own judgment.
Beijing time on July 24, the same U.S. stock "seven sisters" of Tesla, Google's parent company Alphabet took the lead in announcing the second quarter of 2024 financial results. Performance, Tesla and Alphabet revenue exceeded expectations, but the stock price fell after the plate.
Among them, because of the horse boss "mouth high painting cake" failed, once again staged a vote skipping drama, Robotaxi release date from August pushed to October Tesla, the stock price is a big turnover, the market value of the overnight evaporation of 96.92 billion U.S. dollars (about 700 billion yuan), wailed all over the place.
This morning, Musk again in his own social media, "the whole job", launched a "whether in favor of Tesla to xAI investment of $ 5 billion" poll, to explore the market wind. The results show that nearly 960,000 users participated in the vote, of which the number of people in favor of up to 67.9%.
As Musk's brand new AI venture, xAI has been extremely eye-catching since its birth, taking $6 billion (about 43.3 billion yuan) in Series B financing within 10 months of its founding, and playing an important role in the development of Tesla Robotaxi's FSD system. Therefore, although there is no lack of "happy people" in the vote, but we can also see that the public is optimistic about AI, self-driving and entangled.
Alphabet announced on its second quarter earnings call that it will make an additional $5 billion (about 36.1 billion yuan) investment in its self-driving subsidiary Waymo to help Waymo continue to build the world's leading self-driving company.
5 billion dollars, this number is enough to be staggering.
But in the case of the market continues to tighten, profitability prospects are not clear, Alphabet also firmly invested 5 billion huge sums of money, enough to prove that it in the unmanned driver track "must win" determination.
5G surfing Musk, but also look up the hilarity, sighing "Waymo money", may still draw inspiration from it, initiated "to xAI investment of 5 billion" vote.
Waymo's predecessor is Google's self-driving program, which officially became independent in 2016 and became a subsidiary of Alphabet.
From 2009 to 2024, Waymo as the industry's "big brother", has been in the field of autonomous driving for 15 years.
The same Robotaxi players Cruise, daily net loss of more than 5 million U.S. dollars (about 36.08 million yuan), Waymo is not bad.
According to Alphabet's second-quarter earnings report, Waymo's "other businesses" lost a total of $1.13 billion in the second quarter, with an average daily net loss of $1.26 million (about 9.09 million yuan).
However, backed by the rich and powerful parent company, Waymo's external financing was opened very late, until March 2020 to complete the first strategic financing.
According to public information, Waymo has previously completed 3 financing, the cumulative amount of disclosed financing amounted to 5.5 billion U.S. dollars (about 39.7 billion yuan), and the company's valuation reached 30 billion U.S. dollars (about 216.4 billion yuan) after the 3rd financing in 2021.
The lineup of shareholders is also very luxurious, including top-tier venture capitalists such as Silver Lake Investments, Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund, a16z, Fidelity Management Research, Temasek, Tiger Global Fund, and others.
If we add the $5 billion investment promised by Alphabet this time, Waymo's cumulative amount of known financing will exceed $10.5 billion (about 75.6 billion yuan).
However, with such a high level of continued investment, how long will the money on the books last, and can Waymo turn a profit in the foreseeable future, proving that Alphabet's all-out bet is a wise move? It's hard to say.
From the initial test, to gradually open the service in a specific area, and then to the multi-city spread, Waymo's cautious attitude, although to a certain extent limits the speed of expansion, but also for it to win a better market reputation, as well as regulatory trust.
On this earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Sundar Pichai) said that Waymo provides an average of 50,000 paid trips in five weeks, mainly concentrated in San Francisco, Phoenix and other cities, and has accumulated 2 million paid trips so far.
However, according to data previously released by Turnip Express, it provided more than 820,000 trips in the first quarter of 2024 alone, completing an average of 68,000 trips per week, a figure that has surpassed Waymo.
With the rapid rise of Chinese self-driving companies, the global competition pattern of Robotaxi is undergoing profound changes.
Recently, "unmanned circle top flow" radish fast running, not only in the scale of service beyond Waymo, but also in Wuhan, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and other places to carry out large-scale operation, and "queue list" continues to increase.
Driverless, as the most cutting-edge technology direction, is the hard bone that every country wants to gnaw down.