Ark Invest says Tesla is the robotaxi leader despite the early start by Waymo and Baidu

Ark Invest analysts Tasha Keeney and Daniel Maguire weighed in on the recent robotaxi developments. The firm was noted to be excited to see Baidu (BIDU) and Waymo (GOOG) scale their robotaxi operations.

Waymo confirmed that its sixth-generation robotaxi, developed by Geely’s ZEEKR (ZK), will cut the number of onboard cameras from 29 to 13 and lidar sensors from five to four, compared to the hardware on Waymo’s Jaguar I-PACE. The cost of the new vehicle is likely to be much lower than the rumored +$100,000 for the current model, which is seen as a critical step toward scaling operations. Waymo also announced that it has ramped up the number of autonomous rides per week to more than 100,000. Meanwhile, Baidu (BIDU) highlighted that its autonomous ride-hail platform averaged ~75,000 rides per week in Q2. Despite the company’s progress, BIDU management noted that rolling out nationally and gaining a significant share of the ride-hail market could take years.

Ark Invest said that despite Waymo and Baidu (BIDU) being the first-to-market in robotaxi operations, its research suggests that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is training its autonomous system with ~70X more data. “As will be the case with most AI (artificial intelligence) projects, Tesla’s data scale advantage is likely to lead to commercial dominance in this winner-takes-most opportunity,” wrote the ARK analysts. The firm said it looks forward to monitoring the robotaxi space, with keen interest, and will be paying special attention to Tesla’s (TSLA) robotaxi event in October.