Episode Transcript
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Late last week, Business Insiderrode in a Ford Mustang Mach E
fitted with a company called Wave.
It's the EV2 point O. They did a nearly hour long
drive through San Francisco withno safety monitor takeovers
beyond parking. And what waves EV 2 point O is,
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it's basically Tesla's full selfdriving.
They did a review of this. So today I'm going to break down
what that test says about Waves approach compared to Tesla, how
it compares to Tesla's full selfDriving, and what drivers and
automakers can actually expect from the company.
It'll lay out the reporting in plain terms and show where the
technology delivers and where the gaps still sit.
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And I keep the focus on concretebehavior on the actual streets.
From this review, I'm not going to give you my opinion because I
didn't drive the vehicle, but I can tell you from this article
that there are some definite differences.
Now does WAVES approach give automakers a faster path to a
capable driver assist system than trying to match Tesla mile
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for mile and build their own from scratch?
Because that would be intense, alot of money, and also would
take a lot of time. Could they just swap this in to
their new vehicles and have fullself driving from the get go?
Because Wave likes they're goingto license this, they're going
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to license a hardware agnostic assisted driving stack to car
makers rather than run a robo taxi service.
They're going to give it to everybody else.
They're going to make money fromeverybody else.
So what does that mean in practice?
Why does it change the business math for OEMs?
Here we're going to analyze the system's behavior, the training
recipe that moved it from the UKto US roads, and the timing
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claims to set expectations for when drivers might see this in
showrooms. You know, I'm going to be
covering automated driving systems on this channel, so if
you're into that, make sure to hit the subscription or follow
button. We talk about how they're built,
how they get deployed and then we're going to jump into that
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right after this quick break. Now let's start with this test.
Business Insider rode in a wave equipped mock E during evening
rush hour around the Moscow and Center and Soma.
The car handled jaywalkers, dooropening drivers, and blocked
intersections without a human corrections during this route.
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The real world behavior sets a baseline for comparing Wave's
assisted driving approach to Tesla's FD that anyone can buy
today. Now Wave's targets are the
assisted driving market that automakers can ship widely, not
a geofence robotaxi product likeElon Musk and Tesla are doing
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right now. The company pitches software
that can drop into many vehiclesand sensor stacks.
So you have to have sensors on your vehicle.
You can't just add the software and their hardware.
And this approach gives OEMs theoption to sell advanced driver
assist without adding new hardware lines to the bill of
materials. They just go to this
manufacturer, they go to Wave and they say, hey, we need auto
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driving for a vehicles hook us up now that promise of no
additional hardware cost is the hook that Wave uses in talks
with manufacturers. The sister use a end to end
model that learns driving directly from data rather than a
rule book of hand coded behaviors.
The vehicle perceives the scene through cameras and compare it
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with radar or lighter when available, and the model outputs
control for steering and speed in one pipeline that adapts as a
trains on more examples. Now that architecture matters
because it let's wave keep one code base that can fit any car
now. This San Francisco demo set
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between SAE levels two and three.
The safety operator kept hands close but did not intervene
except to park at the very end. And now the car braked hard two
or three times while inching through heavy traffic, which
matches the twitchy, low speed behavior that we've all seen in
other automated systems. These small habits tell you the
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driver remains part of this loop.
And we have to make sure that people are in these vehicles
when they're still testing, haveto be able to get to that wheel
if needed. Now the comparison point
everyone asks for is Tesla's FSD.
It's the top of the line. Consumers can buy a Tesla and
activate FSD right now. And Tesla's running robotaxi
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trials in Austin and they have asafety monitor riding in the
front seat with them. Now that availability advantage
gives Tesla real world miles anda user base that can fund
constant iteration. And also any other vehicle with
FSD. Millions of vehicles.
Wave says mass market cars with its software likely arrive later
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in the decade though, which setsa different deployment curve.
Elon and Tesla are already there.
Wave needs to wait a little while till later on in the
decade. So two or three years from now
they're going to be deploying. Will vehicle manufacturers,
hardware and software manufacturers let Wave in or
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will companies build their own? I don't know.
It's it's really up in the air right now, but Wave's training
story deserves a little bit of attention here.
The company says it adapted Auk train driver to US roads with
about 500 hours of US specific data.
Now that's a small number compared to Tesla's claim of 6
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billion real world miles collected from its fleet of
vehicles. Everybody that has a Tesla,
they're gathering your data right now.
They're spying on you and gathering your data.
That's what they that's why theyhave you in that car.
They need your data. But it points to an efficiency
rather than a race to aggregate the largest pile of data.
This is kind of a bet that targeted data and strong
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simulation, and they're hoping that it can move a model into
new domains with less time and costs and train this model
without billions of miles. Now.
What kind of partnerships will they have?
What kind of scale would they have?
Wave has already announced a deal with Nissan in April to
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bring its assisted driving into mass produced vehicles.
Tesla said it's in talks to license FSD to major automakers,
but they have no named partners yet.
Automakers will compare costs, integration timelines,
liabilities and how each stack behaves in their own cars before
they commit. Of course they're going to be
doing testing on their own. They're not just going to take
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somebody's word for it. You know, if Tesla has billions
of miles driven and Wave only has thousands, even if it's
hundreds of thousands, that's not enough.
So unless they have this incredible software stack that
is just unbeatable, I don't see any manufacturers going with
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Wave or not many manufacturer going with Wave over Tesla at
this point. Does come down to price too.
So the licensing strategy influences sensor choices and
compute budgets too. It really depends.
You may have certain subscription models for this
type of full self driving. You could have like a low level
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and mid level and high level like anything else for any
subscription model. And wave positions as hardware
agnostic across camera only builds and richer stacks with
radar or Lidar so they can do anything.
Now that flexibility let's any OEM choose a lower cost camera
configuration for driver assist or a higher redundancy package
for a higher automation feature in premium trims.
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A Tesla single maker vertical stack gives it tight hardware
software control. But a licensable solution that
fits many platforms lowers frictions for traditional OEMs.
Tesla would control the hardwareand the software, but if they
license it to other hardware manufacturers, then they
wouldn't be the Apple of vehicles anymore.
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They would become more like the Android of vehicles.
A lot of different models, a lotof different makes, a lot of
different manufacturers doing a lot of different things.
And if Elon and his Tesla homiescan figure this out and be good
with all of those, that is goingto be ridiculous.
But that's what Wave is trying to do before Elon gets a hold of
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him. So performance through this,
through this test is how we're going to drop, how we're going
to judge this right, the trust of this.
The Business Insider writer saida passenger might struggle to
tell Waves behavior from Tesla'son the route that they actually
took. That's a sign that modern end to
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end systems have converged on similar lane keeping, pass
selection and gap acceptance behaviors in traffic that
follows familiar patterns. I mean, we have a Honda Civic
and it has you stay in your lane.
You know, they have that lane keeping gap acceptance in
traffic. It'll slow down, speed up on its
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own, you know, with cruise control.
And that's enough for a lot of people.
I don't really need much more than that.
I don't need my car to drive forme.
I actually enjoy driving. So for me, that's enough for a
long trip to stay in your lane, you know, and signal me when I
fall asleep or what, you know, when I'm going out of the lane
to signal me, OK. But the other people, they might
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need that assistance, especiallypeople that it's difficult for
them to drive for some reason. You know these familiar patterns
that Tesla does gap acceptance. Keep in your lane shift lanes
smoothly. The differences show up in edge
cases, intervention rates over millions of miles and how
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systems recover from ambiguous scenes.
Now this timing is a little bit far for me.
Wave points to fully autonomous tests in London with Uber in
spring of 2026, which will be great.
And while brought ADAS licensee into production vehicles could
land as soon as 2027 and might not be soon enough.
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Tesla continues public trials and sells supervised features
right now, and that split explains why you can ride an FSD
today, but still cannot buy a car from a third party with
Waves stack yet in the business case for OEMs hinges on total
cost to shipment and maintain. So Wave argues that integration
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happens on existing sensors and chips.
So anything that's out there already that reduces CapEx and
shortens timelines, If OEMs wantto get their own hardware, they
can and they can just plug in Wave.
Tesla's model would give an OEM mature software with a huge data
engine behind it. Also requires alignment on
update cadence, feature Rd. mapsin branding, decisions that
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matter to a car maker's identity.
Think about that. How many car makers, how many
automakers are ditching car play, Apple's car play, because
they want to build their own system because Apple Car play is
not their brand. They want to take control of
their brand within the vehicle, not only on the outside with
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their logos in their shiny stickers, things like that.
They don't want that anymore. They want everything interior
too. And sure, cars have been doing
this for a long time. Vehicle makers have been doing
this for a long time. But this way they have control,
complete control over your software.
Elon and Tesla, if you do full self driving, you might have to
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use their software for everything in your vehicle.
And would that be a bad thing? I don't think so.
You know, if you have a platformand say if you're Ford and you
have a platform that works for you, but Elon offers you full
self driving, billions of hours of data, billions of miles of
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data, and all you have to do is put a Tesla system in your car
and do a little Tesla branding in there somewhere.
Would you do that? That's going to be a tough
question for these automakers and you know, that's up to them.
If the price is right and they know they can have a superior
product to Tesla, they want to keep that market share because
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Tesla's blowing them out of the water.
That might be a good way to partner with Tesla.
You get some of that what they call the rub, you know, from
from basically your cool buddy comes along with you on a trip
or a date or something comes along with you and like or not
on a date. That's weird.
But if they come along with you and you're hanging out with a
bunch of people, like you get that rub from the cool person,
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right? Tesla's the cool guy.
And of course, Ford isn't as cool as Tesla to tech Bros and
to people like early adopters. So maybe Ford could get a little
bit of that rub. Tesla, I don't know.
It's up to them. Is that business case going to
be worth it now? Each option trades control for
speed in different ways. The road test details have also
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given us a clean read on a user experience.
For Wave, the car waited for a vehicle blocking an intersection
at a green light, which shows conservative conflict resolution
system handled jaywalkers and during hazards with appropriate
pauses and path adjustments, which signals solid short
horizon planning and the breaking spikes in creeping
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traffic show tuning work that still remains to be done.
It's a marginal thing. They can tweak that very easily.
The take away is pretty simple, though.
Waves Demo shows competent assisted driving behaviour in a
complex urban setting under supervision.
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Tesla offers a product you can buy now with ongoing trials that
push into high autonomy with a safety monitor.
Waves licensing story and domainadaption claims give automakers
an alternative route to ship useful assistance without owning
the full vertical stack. They can plug it in, plug and
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play on their vehicles. They have full self driving
because of Wave. It's a licensable, hardware
flexible driver assist system that performs cleanly in San
Francisco and Tesla. They hold the advantage right
now. They ship FST today and they're
building with data at scale. Hey, thank you so much for
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