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What is a Waymo anyway? Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Travis Hoyum, joined by Rachel Warren and John Quast. Guys, we have got to talk about Waymo today. We've been hearing about autonomous driving from companies like Tesla for a very long time. It's about a decade ago that Elon Musk said that Teslas were going to be able to drive themselves across the country.
It's a huge part of their valuation. But they've been stuck in test mode in Austin and slowly but surely Waymo is really taking over this autonomous vehicle market with no safety driver. That's a big caveat here. And that's what I think is really interesting and worth sort of diving into as we have this holiday week, it's a little bit of a slow news week.
So let's talk about something that could be really impactful to a lot of different companies. Waymo is completing over 250,000 rides. By the way, that's about eight months old at this point. So it's probably significantly more than that. Rachel, I want to start with you. Is Waymo already winning the autonomous vehicle market before anyone else really gets off the ground?
I think for now, yes, they have a significant lead. You know, as you noted, Waymo is offering fully driverless rides to the public. And this is in major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix. And the list keeps growing. And there's been this very consistent strategy of methodical deployment.
On the other hand, Tesla's public service, even in Austin, as you noted, requires human safety drivers to be present in every vehicle. And there's some really key reasons for this. We've talked about this in the past, but it's worth mentioning. Waymo and Tesla operate on completely different systems when it comes to their autonomous vehicles or their approach to autonomy, right?
So Waymo uses this comprehensive sensor suite. It includes multiple LIDAR units, radar, numerous cameras. And basically what that means in layman's terms is it allows for really effective operations in a wide range of conditions, even though it comes at a higher per vehicle cost. Now, on the flip side of that, Tesla relies on a vision-only approach. So they use just eight cameras.
They use various neural networks to replicate human vision. Elon Musk has previously said that LiDAR is a crutch, that they prefer this cheaper human-like approach. But so far, Waymo's approach has proven to be far more effective and allowed for much faster and broader deployment. One final thing as well, Waymo meticulously maps every inch of its operational cities down to millimeter precision.
And that is something that I think is allowing them to deploy at a very fast rate with minimal incident and in a way that's resonating with consumers. And I think that that so far is putting them ahead of the pack. Will that change in the next decade? It's possible, but certainly right now they're the leader in this space.
John, are we at the point where they're building an insurmountable lead and as they deploy more vehicles, as they reduce their costs, we'll talk about the cost side in just a second because that is important, but is this something where somebody else can catch up or a number of other companies can catch up or are they that far ahead?
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