Andrew Miller

They're going to be very difficult to catch.

So, yeah, I wish Tesla all the best during this contest.

I think they're going to need it.

The rural case is easy to answer, no.

Just like Uber isn't a big thing in rural America now.

My take is that the American suburb is actually a good bet for robotaxis.

If you can get robotaxis cheap enough,

There's enough demand in the suburbs to make it work, particularly because the way that we've designed the North American suburbs since Levittown, it is really hard to retrofit those for public transit.

Whereas robo-taxis, it is entirely possible that the suburbs get them, but what it does is your local suburb pays...

some sort of stipend to a robotaxi company to offset the cost of doing business in that.

And that makes the economics profitable.

So I can absolutely see this being something that will work in the American suburb, but it may require us to put aside 20th century ideas of what a public transit agency is.

Well, now you get into an interesting question because there's two schools of thought.

There is the transport planning professionals school, and then there's everybody else's school, the average American school.

The transport planning professional says, look, roads are fixed, finite space.

There's only so many cars that can fit them.

This is an asset we have to use efficiently.

Therefore, we should have shared vehicles, just like we get 20 people on a bus.

We should have multiple people in every robo-taxi or shuttle bus.

You'll get more use of that road.