Good morning.
It's a big week for next-gen transportation tech.
Tesla officially launches the Cybercab at an exclusive event in Austin, Texas, on September 3.
The event is nothing more than a press conference.
Elon and co have learned to mirror the beloved keynotes made famous by Steve Jobs.
For anyone new to this: the Cybercab is a two-seat electric car with no steering wheel and no pedals.
There is nothing to drive.
You get in, and it takes you where you're going.
We've said it before: the first step in the Aerial Economy is autonomy.
Autonomous driving is the biggest shift in transportation technology since the stagecoach.
The stagecoach was the first time an ordinary person could buy a seat instead of owning a horse.
The Cybercab is that same trade, two hundred years later, without the driver.
Why Is This Such A Big Unlock?
Start with the part nobody wants to talk about.
36,640 people died on American roads last year.
The overwhelming majority of those crashes trace back to a human being making a mistake.
Now look at the machines.
Waymo has driven 220.6 million miles with nobody in the driver's seat.
Over that distance, its vehicles were involved in 92 percent fewer crashes causing pedestrian injuries than human drivers.
That's Waymo's own number, so take it with a grain of salt.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ran the data independently this year and found 81 percent fewer injury crashes overall.
I'm a data-driven guy.
If the numbers hold, autonomy shouldn't be an option. It should be the standard.
Then There’s The Money
The real-world financial ripple effects of what Cybercab unlocks are undeniable.
The company's goal is twenty cents per mile. Fully considered. Energy, maintenance, cleaning, insurance, depreciation.
AAA puts personal vehicle ownership at seventy-seven cents per mile. Uber and Lyft run a dollar to four.
Imagine you're a youngster starting out in America.
The cost of breathing is rising exponentially, and you need a reliable vehicle to get to work.
Twenty cents a mile changes that math.
Sure - not everyone is a customer of the Cybercab.
But I suspect the individuals who receive the greatest benefit are the ones who need the most assistance.
We're just going to have to get used to sharing.
A foreign concept for many of us.
But what's fascinating is that this concept of shared mobility thrives in the aviation community.
Pilots, like most folks, feel the pain of rising costs.
To combat this, they connect. They create partnerships and offload a percentage of the cost of ownership.
There's much to learn from the aviation community.
Tesla's driverless fleet went from a handful of cars to roughly 186 in about fourteen months.
None of those are Cybercabs. Not yet. They're modified Model Ys.
But look at the slope of that curve.
Active unsupervised Tesla vehicles seen in the last 90 days. Source: [tracker name]. Figures are estimates.
I understand the desire to own our "own" means of transportation.
But is it more important to own the thing that moves us?
Or is it more important to actually just move?
ICYMI: Listen to the latest episode of Founders + Friends on how drones are transforming emergency response!