That can be said about everything so does it play out in real? For e.g. phones have been labeled as commodities a while ago. But, are they?
Edit:
Self driving is a super specialized tech and it’s still not fully developed yet. A lot of weak areas. I don’t see it getting commoditized in the next 20 or 30 years.
The real opportunity would be in monetizing the time that people would be getting back while not driving.
The difference is that in the phone market, you have one premium brand that makes all of the profit from hardware sales (Apple), one that makes money by manufacturing hardware for the non premium brands (Samsung) and one that gets a cut from all of the manufacturers for licensing (Qualcomm) even when they use non Qualcomm chips.
Tesla’s brand is toxic and seeing declining sales, China is doing the manufacturing, and no one is going to license Tesla’s inferior unproven technology compared to Waymo.
It's a potential commodity in that there is potentially no network effect stopping people from using any competitor that offers a cheaper ride, unlike how when you're an iPhone user you get locked into Apple's ecosystem. But then there's the thing where despite having had 18 years to catch up, nobody makes phones (including software) better than Apple.
One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?
1. Have an option for long-term rental fleet - on a per-day or per-month basis. Provide a 40+ inch screen in the back for people to use the car as an office on wheels. Equip it with a Super high-speed network. Launch an app store on that screen or charge a premium for other apps.
2. Provide an option to get unlimited booze, food, essentials by partnering with Food delivery apps
3. Convert big SUVs/RVs into self-driving vehicles to enable them to be rented by families for summer picnics, long travel, and wedding trips. Many people still dislike air travel, especially given the current issues with flight delays, baggage limitations, and other uncertainties. Any alternative would be a huge win. Imagine travelling for 12+ hours overnight while having the comfort of a home.
4. Make it possible to deliver food, drinks, and essentials anywhere - via drones or other partners, if they've rented your self-driving vehicle.
5. Have super-comfy interiors just like a private jet. Of course, people would love it.
There's no moat in anything you listed. If you want a mobile app you need either Apple or Google's permission to get it. The roads are a public good, they by law cannot be monopolized by a single company (or two).
Yes, yes they are. There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Once self-driving has been generally "cracked", with the normal mobility of talent, most other car manufacturers will catch up on a timespan that's too small for the first-mover to completely dominate the market with that alone.
> There are new (second-tier, semi-competitive) phone manufacturers popping up almost every year, e.g. Nothing[0].
Good for them. Meanwhile, the vast majority of smartphones people buy, and the vast majority of profits from smartphones, are coming from Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and maybe Sony. There are no signs whatsoever of the market commodifying.
That can be said about everything so does it play out in real? For e.g. phones have been labeled as commodities a while ago. But, are they?
Edit: Self driving is a super specialized tech and it’s still not fully developed yet. A lot of weak areas. I don’t see it getting commoditized in the next 20 or 30 years.
The real opportunity would be in monetizing the time that people would be getting back while not driving.