Limitless: An AI Podcast - Tesla Rolls Out Full Self-Driving: How Your Car Can Make You Money

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Tesla began launching of fully autonomous driverless Robotaxis in Austin, marking a pivotal moment in self-driving technology. Competition between Tesla and Waymo heats up, but one thing is for sure: society is changing.Josh’s relays his personal experiences with Tesla FSD,  and we delve into the cost-efficient Cybercab's potential to transform urban living and vehicle ownership, alongside Tesla's safety statistics and future AI integrations.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️https://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro2:24 The Rise of Unsupervised Driving5:17 Introducing the RoboTaxi7:09 Tesla vs. Waymo11:06 Form Factor14:02 The Data Advantage15:58 The Neural Network19:04 Future of Transport22:13 The Economics of Cyber Cabs22:57 Safety in Self-Driving25:22 Transforming Urban Landscapes29:06 Idle Compute Power29:48 The Future of AI in Cars------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

For the first time ever, cars are driving around a major American city with literally nobody inside. No driver, no passenger, no safety monitor, just software sensors and a steering wheel turning itself through the streets. But soon that steering wheel even is going to disappear. It's clear now that I think, like, autonomy isn't this abstract science fair project. It's an actual product. On the episode today, we're going to talk about how Tesla has been able to deploy these driverless tests, starting in Austin, Texas, hopefully throughout the country very soon, and the two philosophies between the top competing companies. have Waymo and Tesla, of course, and I think we're going to make the case that if Waymo was Uber,

Tesla is more closer to iOS. Josh, you've owned and have driven your Tesla for about eight years, right? And I think for the last two years, you haven't even touched the steering wheel. Is that right? The progress of full self-driving has been remarkable, particularly over the last two years. I've had these cars now with full-self driving for eight years now. So I've seen the entire ramp up from very scary white knuckle driving to I feel like I could take a nap and it'll be totally fine. And the difference happened in the last two years because they switched over from hard-coded numbers. They used like hard-coded C++ where if it stopped Stein, it knew that it needed to stop, they switched over fully to neural nets. And that was the thing that made a difference. Once they

switched to neural nets, the progress got unbelievable. And yeah, now there is, I don't even need to touch the steering wheel. It actually just drives me around anywhere I want to go. It parks in the parking lot. It backs out of the driveway. It's unbelievable. What is like the longest journey you've done? Because you drive home like most weekend, right? How long is that? Yeah, most of the time like 50 miles no problem, no oversights door to door. So it's navigating New York traffic and everything until it parks and your parents like that's been the most impressive thing is the the New York City navigation because it seems like everyone in New York City wants to get hit by a car. They're trying to get hit. And the fact that these cars are able to recognize that and navigate through

all of that. And there's a lot of weird stuff that happens. There are cars parked in the middle of the road. There's people who are working on construction, giving hand signals. It's now capable of reading and understanding all these things and actually navigating through the world. And it's so impressive. We're going to have to, we'll have to record a video soon of us actually in a car doing a demo. Maybe we'll record a podcast in the car as it's driving because it really, it's truly remarkable.

And if you haven't experienced it, it's tough to describe. But it is genuinely a full self-driving cyber cab out in production right now. That's great. It's going to be like carpal karaoke, but just too nerdy guys talking about tech. that's actually a good idea. Okay, let's get right into the news. Something was spotted over the weekend in Austin, Texas, Josh, and it was a normal regular Tesla model Y,

except there was no one in the front driving it at all. And this was later confirmed by Elon himself as the first test cases for unsupervised full self-driving. Now, if you're new to this podcast, or if you're new to Tesla in general, Tesla's FSD or full self-driving is basically their autonomous driving program or software stack that allows their cars to drive itself, similar to what Josh has exactly explained, actually. And why this is such a major leap forward is typically up until before the weekend,

these cars required at least one human person to be in the front seat. They didn't need to be in the driver's seat, but they needed to be somewhere in the passenger seat just in case the car got into any kind of an accident. And it marks the transition from level two autonomous driving, which is what Tesla's have been fully capable of doing for a while now, to level four, which is this driverless addition or rather subtraction. And this worked out really well for the stock. On Monday's market open, Tesla closed at the highest weekly and monthly close in Tesla's history, $475.31, which is just insanely bullish. It was up 5% on the day end. And it's funny because if you look at the stock, you would think the whole world is aware of what's going on.

But the reality is, this is not true. This is a great visual that we have on the screen. And for those listening, it's a visual showing that the population of the U.S. is 343 million people. Of that, 243 million are actual drivers. Of those 243 million, four of them are Tesla owners. And of the 4 million Tesla owners, only half a million people have actually used full self-driving. So the reality of this is that only 0.145% of the population have experienced the technological revolution that is being rolled out as we speak in real time to cities like Austin, Texas. And this, I believe, is going to lead to one of those moments, like the, oh my God, it's real moment where things tend to advance very slowly. But if you're not in the know, it appears as if it's happening very quick. And there's a reality in which very soon that someone's going to walk outside and get into a full self-driving car,

and freak out because they had no idea that this technology was even close to being ready, let alone here today. What's really funny is, of those 500,000 people that do know about it, Josh, one of them is my auntie, and I just texted her saying, hey, you need to give this thing a go. And she replied, I'm terrified. I don't want to give it a go. So even the people that do know about it are still kind of like, they haven't jumped the chasm across the chasm yet to get there.

But Josh, I want to take a look at what these things actually look like, because they're not just rolling out this software upgrade, right? It's going to become an entirely autonomous taxi service call the Robotaxi. The cyber cab. And there's two parts of this story. So one of it is the software, one of it's the hardware. The hardware story is the cyber cab. The software story is the one that we just mentioned, though, which is the existing fleet of 8 million Tesla vehicles that will be eligible to have this ability via over-the-air software update. So there is a person on this planet who is going to type a command into a computer, send this update to millions of cars, and overnight they will wake up and become fully autonomous cybercabs. Now, that is one thing. That is the

existing fleet. The new fleet is what we're looking at on screen right now. That's the cybercab, the robotaxie. This is the crown jewel of autonomy as we move into this next era. Josh, this looks pretty funky. I have to say, this looks like a hot wheels car that I used to buy as a kid. What is this? It's like it's like die cast. It's funny you say that because the Hot Wheels car that you had as a kid was made via die cast machine, which is injection molding. So basically you have this big metal mold, you punch a bunch of this like hot molten stuff into it, and then out pops this very cooled piece of a car. And it looks like a car. And what Tesla's done is they've created this small die cast model that you used for your hot wheels back in the day,

but they made it into the biggest casting model in the planet. And it's so large that it prints out actual full-sized cars like the one you're seeing now, which comes with a bunch of benefits. because a lot of times, if you have a car, one of the pain points is your paint. It scratches, it's expensive to do. There's no paint. Because it's injection molded, the actual material that they mold it with is the color of the paint. So there's no paint on this car. It's just the raw material that's on the outside. And because of that, there's other benefits like wires. There's miles and miles of wires in traditional cars and electronics. All of that's just printed right in. So it's this really efficient way of doing it, but it also has the second order effect of kind of looking

like a spaceship. I don't know. I think it's pretty cool. Okay, so do I. But of course, we can't really talk about cybercab autonomous driving without bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is Waymo, which is already out there. They have a paid taxi service, which has hundreds of thousands of paid trips every week. It's just rolled out in London, my hometown. And so the question that comes into mind is, like, can it compete? And at least from a cost perspective, if that's the first framework we apply here,

Robotaxies are just, or like, cybercabs are just way, way cheaper. We've pulled up a graphic here, which shows what one million... You gotta keep scrolling down. Yeah. There's so many. Which shows us what $1 million worth of Waymo Gen 6 is, which is their latest, versus $1 million worth of Tesla cybercabs. And you have about 10 Waymos for the price of $1 million.

And for robotaxies or cybercabs, you get five and a half times more than that. We've got 55 Tesla. This is insane, Josh. The cost must be super cheap for these things. And this makes all the difference. So as we start to get into differences between Waymo and Tesla, one of the most important things is the form factor. What does it actually look like and why does it look that way?

For those who are not familiar with the Waymo system, basically what it is is the current way that it exists, and these are out on the road today, is it's a Jaguar car that costs about $75,000. But then it costs an additional $100,000 to equip it with 29 cameras, 5 LiDAR sensors, and it's very custom. It requires a lot of human interfacing. So the net cost of those cars are about $175,000. What we're seeing on screen now is a much cheaper version of this car, the next generation Waymo, which they're hoping to get down to $85,000, but still does not compare

to the cyber cab. Tesla Cybercab is looking to price itself at $30,000 per car. And the reason this is important is because of the cost per mile. And we're going to get into cost per mile, But the innovation that we're showing on screen now, how they're able to do it is this thing called the unboxing process. So, as we briefly talked on the die cast process, the casting, how they're able to quickly mold them together. The amazing thing, the zinger here, the big punch line is Tesla is able to produce one of these cyber cabs every six seconds. It'll roll off a production line. So if you're watching the end of a production line, every six seconds, a new car will be coming off of this line. Why?

Because of the die casting and because of this unboxing process. So typically, when you assemble a car, it goes down a singular production line. It has to be assembled and then disassembled to paint it and then reassembled for final production. This does it all in one shot. It's assembled in six areas. It's pressed together in one location and every six seconds a new one rolls off the line. Even if Waymo gets this next version, it's still going to be three times the cost of Tesla CyberCab, which has big downstream effects to you and I, the user, in how much it's going to cost to actually use these services.

I just did some back of the napkin math and I figured if each Waymo costs around 100 grand, And if they wanted to deploy, like, let's say, 500,000 more of these Waymo cars, which is, you know, not crazy to think about, that would cost them $50 billion worth of upfront CAPEX, right? Now, if they wanted to do this for Tesla, they could just push in a software upgrade for just 10% of their existing fleet. So I'm talking about cars that already exist, Josh. On the road right now. Like on the road right now, there's like 5.5 million illegible Tesla's that can get the software upgrade and have the entire FSD benefits that we've just described to you. Just 10% of those can get that benefit right now from a single software push.

So it just goes to show that like Tesla versus Waymo is a completely different beast because of the way that they've constructed FSD in this particular case. And so it costs Tesla basically $0 because the customers that are purchasing this, all fleet operators that want to buy these cars in the future can just do so for a cheaper cost, $30,000 versus $100,000 really kind of amplifies over time. But Josh, I've noticed something, which is these robotaxies or rather the cybercaps, have only two seats in them. When Waymo has five, surely the Waymo is better in that way, right?

Well, this chart begs to differ. This chart says that 90% of Robotaxis trips have been with two people or less. So the differences you're seeing is a hyper-customized approach versus a traditional approach, I guess. We're like, Waymo is basically saying, well, we have the software, but we don't really have the hardware, so we're just going to take an existing car, strap some sensors on it, and apply our super fancy software.

Tesla's taking a total first principle's approach. So we're looking at this and saying, well, if nine out of 10 trips are with two people or less, let's just strip out the back seat and make the car even more efficient and more cost-effective. So the cyber cab only has two seats in it for two-pay. passengers, whereas the Waymo has five people. So the assumption is that you will mostly need it for two people. If you need it for five, well, maybe get a Waymo or just get two Cybercaps because, I mean,

the idea is that they will be cheap enough that you can get a couple for the price of one Waymo ride. I saw this amazing breakdown of Tesla versus Waymo by Marcelo here. And I've pulled up his tweet. And he goes, let's talk about scale first. Waymo just reported over 100 million fully autonomous miles driven, while Tesla has 6.8 billion full self-driving miles driven, over 10,000 miles per minute. And if you're wondering how on earth they were able to get this scale, it's because the existing 5.5 million Teslas that are eligible for this FSD upgrade gets input data every time a human takes it for a drive. So its data can get fed back to its single generalized neural network that trains FSD and gets fed to...

every single other Tesla that is operational on the planet that has this FSD software, which is just the coolest thing ever. It's ridiculous. Yeah. So it says here that Tesla has 5.1 million cars with the AI4 computer chip, which is just kind of like the base chip. Actually, Josh, you were telling me before we started recording this, that it's actually a chip prior to this that is also capable for this, right?

They're going to be building software for that one as well. So they'll all be eligible. Okay. Okay. So that would mean that Tesla's fleet is two. thousand times larger than Waymo's when it comes to like a mile advantage. But wait, today. There is, yeah, today, today. And then it goes, Tesla's FSD miles driven is growing at over 10,000 miles every minute. That is crazy. Waymo is doing 450,000 paid drives per week. So the average

Waymo ride is about six miles in length. This means Waymo is collecting 2.7 million miles of data every week from its paid rides. That's only 268 miles per minute versus Tesla's 10,000. thousand miles per minute. Josh, if I'm like an analyst looking at this from an investment perspective, also from a customer experience and safety, like, which car do I trust more when it comes to autonomous driving? It's going to be the one that has the most experience and mileage. How does Tesla lose this? I don't believe they do in any reality. And I'm not sure it's particularly close. If you look at Waymo strategy, it very much feels like they're shipping a service where they have this full self-driving software, but they don't own the full staff.

and therefore they're not able to manufacture cars quickly, and they also haven't really approached it correctly because theirs is very expensive. They have LiDar sensors, which we're going to get into, and they also have it geo-fenced. So the way that Waymo expands is they have to first scan a region, get a high detailed map, and then they have to go city by city. And it takes a very long time for this to roll out, whereas the reality is Tesla, they're more shipping, instead of a service, they're shipping, a model. And their bet is that this Vision First system, plus the fleet data, plus this continuous trading data gives you autonomy that is not specific to a city, but generalized. So then you take that technology and then you wrapped into a service. But the reality is that when Tesla rolled out

their service in Austin, I believe Waymo had been there for already about 136 days. And in 42 days, Tesla was able to four times the original Waymo size because they have this generalized way of doing it, where the neural network is smart enough to go anywhere in the world and drive fully autonomously, whereas Waymo is not. Waymo not only has the hardware stack, but they don't have the software that can scale because they haven't gone deep in these neural nets. And the funny thing with neural nets,

just a quick aside, is that they're trained learning based on what they see instead of programming them. So previously, they would program a car to stop at a stop sign. But the car was never told that in this new version. It was inferred that. But when it was reading drivers, it was watching drivers drive,

the cars just kept rolling through the stop signs because no one really stops at the stop sign. So FSD started rolling through stop signs. And then the Highway Safety Committee got really upset because they were like, wait a second, your full self-driving software isn't following the rules is rolling through stop signs. So they had to actually create artificial data of humans stopping. That way you could teach the car to stop and actually follow the rules because it was too much like a human. This was really the big bet that Elon made almost a decade ago, which is visual data or vision learning in a single neural net is way better than slapping a bunch of detectors and sensors on.

a car. He thought maybe like if we just get visual input, you could train a car much more faster. And when we look at the stats today, 10,000 miles per minute across an entire fleet of 5.1 million cars versus 268 miles or whatever that stat was for Waymo. It's just obvious at this point. But I did read that for a while Elon was using LIDAR for Tesla cars. In fact, I think he uses it to pre-trained. And I say pre-trained intentionally here because it sounds like he's training a model for his Tesla cars, right? He doesn't exclusively not use LiDAR. He does use it. Is that right? This is the most commonly wrong misconception about Tesla, where everyone believes that Tesla hates LiDar. And the reality of it is it is just not true. And it hasn't been spoken much, but

the idea is that they do use LiDAR quite extensively, actually, and they like LiDAR as a sensor in the training time. So when cars are out collecting training data, when they're testing these things, the cars have LiDAR strapped to them. In fact, if you see any of these vehicles driving around that they've been running demos on. They have these big LIDAR things on top, and they're really collecting a lot of data. The arbitrage opportunity occurs during test time. When you actually package up these learnings and you deploy it to the fleet, they've taken what they've learned from the LIDAR, and they have removed it, but they've compressed it into a way that the car can do just with cameras. So the car benefits from the safety of LIDAR in training, but does not require it in

production when it's out in the real world driving. And that arbitrage that they're collecting is huge because is the cost of these sensors is tens of thousands of dollars per car that they're removing. And the idea is that, well, if a human eyeball can see, and if we as humans can drive anywhere, then cameras with, what is it? I think there's eight cameras on these cars now with eight eyeballs can not only see much better, but they can then therefore drive much better than we can. And it doesn't require all the extra sensors that cost so much money. Yeah, the more I learn about this, Josh, I keep seeing Waymo or LIDAR specifically

as this really kind of clunky mechanism. and this isn't to kind of like crap on it, but if you kind of like think about this over the long term, it just seems that vision scales way easier and way better, like higher fidelity. Like if I am Waymo and let's say we enter a new city or a city gets like an extension or a new district, you now need to go map out that entire area,

update your sensors. Your sensors won't work as well in fog or during the dark as vision does. It just seems to have so many of the odds. stacked against it. I kind of think of it as not to put my AI hat on all the time, but it sounds like LIDAR is kind of like used for pre-training. So it's like to train the corpus or the base level of the model. Elon's kind of approach with visual learning is the post-training, the reasoning, which typically so far for the last at least six months has made AI models way, way more smart. Like that's the kind of analogy that at least applies for me here. Yeah, no, that's

absolutely right. And the point that you made earlier, I think, is an important. one because if you ask to any analyst on the street or if you ask to any person on the street who's winning the cybercab robotaxie wars currently, the clear and obvious answer is Waymo. They have orders of magnitude more rides. They actually have a lot more cars than cybercabs that are in the world actually giving people autonomous rides. But the truth is that it does not scale quickly. In fact, the earlier Waymo rides, they were giving rides over a decade ago.

the difference in the approach between the two allows Tesla to scale so much faster. So while Waymo has very clear and obviously lead now, it is very clearly and obviously deteriorating rapidly. And by this time next year, I suspect that lead will be zero, if not, they will be behind by a significant margin. And it's all due to this pre-training, post-training phase and just the way that they're really considering all of these things from first principles, the vertical integration, they're building the car, they have the software stack. And it's ready to go in any place in the world that has roads. Yeah, I think one really cool unlock of all of this, Josh, is that transport is just going to be reduced to a cheap commodity that anyone can access. And, you know, you don't need to blow tens of thousands of dollars on a car. You can just hop into a cyber cab and get from A to B.

I was looking into the economics cost behind this. And roughly, with the new Model White Robotaxi, it'll run at about at a cost of 60 cents per mile. So let's say Tesla decides to charge $1 per mile, Tesla will pocket a 40% margin per mile, which is way, way higher than any kind of ride-hailing service that exists today. And it just goes to show that the investments that Elon made a decade ago really translates into both economical and scalable cost for his models today. It's just super cool. Yeah, and there's this important distinction to be made with this post where that 60 cents per mile

is referencing the cost per mile of a model Y. That's the car that I drive. That's the car that is publicly available. The cyber cab, when it starts production in Q2 of next year, brings that cost per mile from 60 cents down to 20 cents because the cost to produce the car is much lower. The efficiency, the cost per kilowatt, the amount of range that the car will get per kilowatt of energy is much lower. It's the most aerodynamically efficient car in the world.

It's the most efficient car in the world, and it's built that way from the ground up. So that cost drops even lower, which brings Tesla's margins much higher. And what's funny is, I mean, comparing against Waymo, some of these rides, The shorter ones cost up to $5 to $6 per mile, with typical chips costing up to $3 per mile. And the Tesla team has a very clear trajectory to reaching 60 cents per mile today, but 20 cents per mile by the end of next year. And 20 cents relative to $6 is a gigantic delta that starts to really change the unit economics of how we move things around the earth as a whole.

When things cost 20 cents to transport per mile privately, that begins to change things. It starts to make it economically viable or even economically incentivized to never even need to own a car. Because the ownership cost of owning a car will be higher than it would be to just call up one of these cybercabs to take you anywhere you ever want to be in the world. And that doesn't include delivery. I just don't see a world where people are forced to buy cars in the future. I just think it'll be, I don't want to say everything becomes a subscription, but it seems like people will just kind of like go on a paper ride basis. Yeah, yeah, it could be. Like the ballers in the future will own their own cybercabs and they'll have their own custom.

It's a flex. Matted out, fancy like tits, but they're not driving it. There's no steering wheel or pedals in this car. And that's probably the difference is it will become economically unviable for most to have a car, nor will they want one. Who wants to spend their time driving when you could just be driven around by a private chauffeur? Yeah, it's funny.

We went from having to buy your own car and drive it to, oh, get someone to drive for you, to get no one to drive you. And it's your own personal space and it's going to be cheaper per ride, which is awesome. But despite all of this, if I went to my friends today and I have, and I've said, look how cheap this is, look how affordable it's going to be. Their number one bit of criticism for Tesla specifically, Josh has been around safety. They're like, oh, I've seen a bunch of these viral videos go around where Tesla's crashed or something. And the truth is, that's just not true. In fact, recently, Tesla Cybetruck specifically was rated as one of these safest vehicles out there.

And if you just dig into the data beyond just that award, you'll see that for every 6.36 million miles driven, as is demonstrated in this tweet, of where people were using autopilot technology, only one crash came from all of those rights, which is just insane. This is an important point. Being into Tesla that is full self driving is the safest experience on the road, period. There is no safer car and there is no safer software than the current Tesla stack. And this is important because if we are making this transition, people need to be highly incentivized to do so. And one of the largest causes of death, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it is an astronomical amount of people that die every year to car crashes. And with this new software stack combined with these Tesla cars, like you just mentioned,

They're the number one crash safety tested cars in the world every year since inception across the line. Even that big metal stainless steel cyber truck is safer than your Honda Pilot or whatever you're driving around today by like a lot. In fact, they invented a brand new rating just for these cars because they're so much safer. And that's one part of it, but the second is the software. When you're driving, you're a human who makes errors who only has two data points that can process them so quickly. and that variance happens a lot by distractions or whether you're tired or not. And with a full self-driving a robotaxy like this, there's eight sensors that are always on that have a full 360 picture of everything all at once.

And this has happened to me on multiple occasions where a car will come from behind you and kind of swerve into your lane and your first urge is to turn out of the way, but you don't know if there's a car in the lane next to you. The cyber cap has all of this in real time and they're able to keep you so much safer. So that's why you see these numbers where miles driven per one accident is getting higher and higher and higher because more people are using it and it's getting better. And it is the clear and obvious safe winner for yourself or your loved ones to put them in this. Josh, I want to move on to what the future is going to look like because I don't think this story is just about

autonomous driving or even like a robo taxi service. I think this is going to completely change the way we kind of interact with one another and the way we deliver items and do a whole bunch of other stuff that isn't just about sticking someone in a driver's seat and getting from point A to B. A few things that kind of like are at the top of my head is cars are typically seen as a depreciating asset, right? As soon as you buy the car, it goes down like, what, 20% in value or something ridiculous like that. With this new version of a car, it starts becoming an investment asset that earns money for you. Okay, what the hell do I mean by that? Well, think about all the hours you don't drive your car, Josh. It could be out there doing a, uh,

a number of different activities. Number one, it could be an autonomous Uber driver, which takes someone in your local area from A to B, and you collect a revenue or a fee off of that, right? The other thing is, last mile delivery is the most painful point of any kind of delivery experience, right? And so it could just simply be a thing

that picks up a package and drops it off. Someone kind of like opens your door and picks it up. Now, of course, people might be initially uncomfortable with these kinds of ideas because it's like, I don't want to let my personal kind of vehicle be out there. but if it's earning you tens of thousands of dollars a month, which is like what one estimate I saw earlier on before, as we were prepping for this episode,

seems to suggest, I feel like people would end up kind of utilizing something like this. And before I pass it on to you, the second thing that really excites me, Josh, is I think traffic is going to reduce, dude, because of this. Like, imagine where everyone kind of subscribes to this and kind of gets in the car when they need to to go from point A to point B. You technically don't need to park a car.

at any given point. You can have a fluid motion. Traffic always flows at the right speed. No one's held up in traffic trams. To your earlier point, no one gets into accidents. It just seems like a better world in general. No more parking lots in Manhattan. Yeah. Also, think about how it reshapes the actual surface of the cities that we live in today. Like I just, if you've ever been to MetLife Stadium or any sort of stadium, 90% of the footprint of the stadium is parking. It's almost the entire thing. There's miles of parking lots. And this is true. with a lot of cities and even suburban areas where so much space is dedicated to parking. And in the case that you no longer need to park a car, because there is these autonomous cybercamps that are

rolling around, it actually alters the face of these cities. And those parking lots become either productive or parks, and both of which are great. You can either build more beautiful buildings or more green spaces that aren't required as opposed to these like really dingy parking lots. And the other thing is, to your point, he does about the appreciating asset. There's a lot of people, I guess more of the ambitious cab drivers have been buying up cheaper Teslas with full self driving licenses in anticipation of being able to turn their fleet into an autonomous. Oh, they're becoming fleet operators that already ahead of the game. A lot of these new taxi companies are driving around in Tesla's, and that's not an accident.

One, it's because the cost per mile is so low. but two, there's a world in which by next year, they don't need to have a driving workforce anymore. And that autonomous workforce just becomes net productive without any of the human expenses. And it becomes this really interesting business model as well, where your car is actually an appreciating asset, or if anything, a net neutral asset, or if you want to buy a car, you could let it go for 85% of the time that it's idle and have it actually make you money. The last final point about this, and this is to tie back to AI, is the distributed compute part of this story also because these AI chips, we talked about this on previous

episodes, AI5, AI6 are incredibly powerful. And these cars are sitting idle, 85% of the time. So that's a lot of idle compute that can talk to each other that can possibly have second order effects when it comes to training AI models or inference or whatever. So there's a lot of open-ended possibilities with this. For that, Harry Potter fans out there, I think the dark mark has officially been released on LIDAR, Josh. Elon called it back in 2019, right? He said, that, you know, LIDAR is great, but it's eventually going to be the thing that kind of kills Waymo and prevents autonomous driving companies from ever winning. Vision is the future. And, you know, after this conversation, I think he's right. And the future is just going to be so cool. Like,

we haven't even spoken about the other little company that Elon operates, XAI, which is going to integrate GROC and frontier level AI intelligence into the car. So right now, with a, with a Christmas update, I believe you told me, Josh. I got it. I got yesterday. Yeah. Right. You could literally speak to your car and say, hey, can you get me from point A to B? And in the middle of that journey, you could be like, hey, can you stop off at this other like gas station? I need to pick up A, B, and C. It's just, it's so cool. And like my mind, I think can't fully capture the immersive process that this is going to result in. But it's super cool. I'm excited to see what happens. I think it is pegged to start rolling out cybercap, Robotoxy Service in 2026 in the summer. I, at least the news headlines that I saw, Josh, it might be delayed in a classic Elon style. But, you know, this is exciting. This technology is here right now. 500,000 people know about it.

Now you guys, you listeners, know about it too. Limeless, we try and strive to bring you the latest in news and insights. Josh and I spent a lot of time learning about this stuff. And sometimes testing out the products of itself. Josh, eight years of experience, two years, not touching his stereo. Come on. He hasn't got into a single accident just yet. So if you want to hear more.

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