Jefferies analysts took 34 autonomous ride hailing trips across the Austin autonomous vehicle operating zone on Feb 8-9. With autonomous ride hailing, the three drivers of market share will be the interplay of price, ETA, and efficacy (does the car drive itself), On price, TSLA won hands down although the Jefferies analyst suggested that Teska’s discounts likely reflected that “Teslas generally underperformed across KPls.” On wait time, $Tesla(TSLA.US) lagged far behind Waymo/Uber making TSLA almost unusable. On efficacy, TSLA was inferior to Waymo, since all but two of the 15 TSLA trips used safety monitors, which suggested to the Jefferies analysts “the technology remains a work-in-progress.”
Jefferies analysts’ conclusions: “AVs still fall short on what matters most for adoption…. the interplay of price and ETA. However, with longer trip times and similar/higher prices (ex-Tesla in Austin), we think AVs have initially relied on hype to help drive adoption. Our work suggests a scaled standalone AV fleet does not have a cost advantage vs. rideshare making wait times the potential critical swing factor of long-term adoption. While AVs will inevitably make progress closing the gap as the tech improves and fleet sizes expand, we believe a hybrid model that leverages both AVs and humans will ultimately provide the best experience.“The copyright of this article belongs to the original author/organization.
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