Pretty sure every big tech company is Asian-overrepresented. Apparently almost 75% of tech employees in Silicon Valley are immigrants, no doubt the vast majority are Asian (East Asian and Indian).
I've heard in the past that the OEMs don't want to be relegated to being just some whitebox manufacturer so many of them have been very cold (in receptiveness) to working with Waymo. Probably explains the terrible selection of vehicles they have used, Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Jaguar i-Pace, the ionic 5 was surprising since I suspected the others were just OEMs offloading their turds onto Waymo and telling them to take a hike. Maybe Hyundai is getting something good in exchange.
Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
Tesla sold a bunch of cars to Hertz which turned out to be terrible for Hertz, but great for Tesla.
>Huh? Hyundai has Tesla-tier automated factories that churn out EVs, and they’re building plants around the world. I don’t think they care who buys their cars.
They very much care if they are selling their cars to an entity that is striving to make them irrelevant.
Think about it: If the world moves to a car sharing system where any type of car is available on demand and no one actually owns a car, do you think anyone will actually give one hoot about the badge on the front of the car? That puts manufacturers into the worst possible business model. Competing solely on price...ie a commodity.
So the manufacturers will either not want to work with them, give them whatever junk they can't sell and then tell them to go away...or they expect to get something big in return maybe like some technology sharing or a exclusive partnership.
Why else has Waymo partnered with the bottom of the barrel OEMs up to this point? Why not a Toyota or a Mercedes or hell even get the good cars from the OEMs they have partnered with?
Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
They’re one of the few companies mass-manufacturing affordable EVs in the US.
Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
>Waymo partnered with Hyundai on the Ioniq 5 because Hyundai just rolled out the first Ioniq 5 from their Georgia “metaplant” literally yesterday.
What does one have to do with the other? The I-Pace was built in Austria. They dont seem to care about where it was built.
>Toyota doesn’t make many EVs and none in the US? Mercedes doesn’t make affordable cars in general?
The Chrysler Pacifica was a gas powered vehicle, The I-Pace had a starting MSRP of ~70k. They didn't seem to care about propulsion method or cost of vehicle either.
What they do have in common is that they were both poorly selling cars made by manufacturers that were desperate to sell.
>Waymo is clearly focused on cost reduction and EVs. Hyundai is clearly focused on selling as many Ioniq 5s in the US they possibly can (and most to consumers directly!). I don’t know, seems pretty clear cut to me.
Any evidence to prove this assertion?
Going back to my previous comment I mentioned that an OEM could want to partner with them if they got something meaningful out of the deal. Seems like thats what Hyundai is getting: Waymo Tech transfer/possibly an exclusivity agreement.
>I also don’t see any future in which Waymo builds a metaplant?
You ignored the rest of my response which is again driving the point: What does Hyundai really get out of this?
Circling back to my point, this does not really explain why they are partnering with Waymo. Waymo is a rounding error in sales for Hyundai.
If Waymo was solely focused on cost, then they should have stuck with the pacifica which is cheaper or gotten something even cheaper like a Toyota. It makes no sense to go with Hyundai which is not even the cheapest for the features that it offers(compared to id 4, Niro EV, Hell even Kona EV). It is a smaller car compared to the Pacifica and the i-Pace and is far less equipped in terms of comfort and space.
We dont even know if they specifically wanted to go with an EV. Thats just something you just asserted without evidence.
It sure seems like their self-imposed constraint is EVs. Their goal beyond that is cost reduction. It seems like the actual key right now might be volume:
“The team at our new manufacturing facility is ready to allocate a significant number of vehicles for the Waymo One fleet as it continues to expand. Importantly, this is the first step in the partnership between the two companies and we are actively exploring additional opportunities for collaboration.”
but to your point, Hyundai may see this as an opportunity for “future collaboration” to get autonomous driving tech into their vehicles. But selling a “significant number of vehicles” is also very much in Hyundai’s interest.
If Hyundai was making the Niro or Kona EV in the US, then they may have been an option, but they’re not. They are not eligible for the tax credit. Toyota won’t make EVs here until 2025 or 2026.
The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
Uh that article is clearly a PR puff piece timed to coincide with the retirement of the Pacifica fleet which is nearing 5-6 years of service at that point.
Again given their strange choices in the past and their backpedaling on previous initiatives (having Chrysler produce special Pacificas and then going back to retrofitting them by hand themselves, going from commiting to purchasing 65k pacificas to NOT purchasing 65K Pacificas, getting Magna to go a custom design of the iPace for them to not having them do a custom design) I dont see this as a deal that Hyundai got into without major concessions.
>The ID.4 would meet that criteria, though, and I wonder if Waymo considered going with Volkswagen.
If my theory is correct I suspect they are not getting a warm reception from many manufacturers and they have to pick whatever they can get. I'd imagine their ideal company is Toyota. They have experience with those cars from the early days, they make cars that can help minimize downtime due to their reliability and costs can be reduced. There is a reason so many taxis are prisues. Why not apply that common sense cost savings to Waymo's fleet?
Waymo already beat Tesla to Full Self Driving. I use Waymo frequently in SF and it's great. It makes this Tesla robotaxi with an undefined release date not very interesting.
Based on some of the viral videos out of SF lately, I think we need Delamain from Cyberpunk 2077 more than Waymo at this point. I've been in a Waymo with other drivers trying to test its intelligence (trying to cut into the Waymo's lane with the signal on while right in the blind spot) and it's not fun.
Non-monogamy is a thing, especially since most 'dating' is ambiguous/casual now. Multiple women can share the same 'boyfriend'. Twice as many young men are single compared to young women.
Many young women these days don't realize their 'boyfriend' just sees them as an friends with benefits and is seeing multiple women simultaneously.
--
"Most young men are single. Most young women are not."
That isn’t what the article you linked ascribes the 60% single male to 30% single female (among the young). They ascribe it to prevalence of bi sexuality in genz females (I.e., cut the boys out entirely), and dating increasingly older men (I.e., bypass the boys for the men). Also women are increasingly improving their own educational and career attainment, looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out. I don’t think infidelity is a modern issue.
" looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out."
There's no need to use such angry and charged words when a single word suffices: "Hypergamy".
Female education is the absolute decisive and consistent factor across all societies in suppressing marriage and fertility rates, for good and bad. It both takes away prime fertility years, as well as raises female expectations (Because females always prefer a higher status/earning man than themselves).
So the more females earn, the fewer males they can accept emotionally. Hence the general collapse of marriage/fertility rates when this happens.
This phenomenon is very good for developing countries, preventing catostrophic malthusian booms. Even Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia now have normal and sustainable fertility rates. For highly developed industrial economies, like South Korea, China, or most of the west, its terrible in the other direction.
I think the assertion was “at least as good,” not better. Most of the women I know aren’t gold diggers but are looking for people to have a meaningful relationship with, and it’s hard for a graduate educated woman to have that with a community college dropout.
Given males are doing worse year over year educationally and presumably career wise as a result, fewer men are meeting the standard - at least among their age cohort. It sounds like women are dating and marrying older men as a result.
But honestly, fertility rates don’t worry me, and shouldn’t worry anyone. We have enough people. More than enough. A flattening or even decline would ease a lot of pressure on our planet and our social institutions that are both buckling under the load. The GDP growth through population growth model doesn’t value per capita value creation, and we should be optimizing for per captia growth.
While many Gen Z women identify as bisexual, very few are actually dating women. Most bisexual women have never dated or done anything sexual with a woman.
It's a fallacy to assume because a man can get with women, he is not emotionally stunted. Plenty of women are dating/sleeping with emotionally stunted men by their own admission and complaints. Many of the attributes it takes to get with a lot of women (especially arguably the most important: be hot) have very little correlation with being emotionally intelligent or a good person/partner to women. Hence the many "f-boy" archetype experiences many women have and complain about.
I'd upvote this twice if I could. Young male here and dating is rough; most of my friends are male and single...
But I find it a little ungenerous to interpret that young women are dating men who are cheating. I think it's more likely the case that single women who are in their 20s are willing to date men in their 30s, and so if you have to choose between a 23 year old who just graduated or a 33 year old well established in their career...
I don't mean to say they are cheating. I'm saying, in my experience, a lot of 'dating' nowadays in Gen Z is ambiguous. Zoomers call them 'situationships'.
Basically they're dating for a while and having sex, but never have a conversation about exclusivity or 'making it official'.
So in such a situation, one side might be under the impression they are 'boyfriend/girlfriend' because they are seeing each other frequently for months, having sex and so on, but the other side might think they're still just 'casually dating' and assume they're both free to play the field/'date around' still.
So it's not necessarily cheating. There's ambiguity/poor communication skills and one side thinks they're in a serious relationship, while the other thinks it's casual and therefore is seeing other people.
Those are good articles. I don’t think the numbers support non-monogamy as a major cause - men are not looking for “relationships or casual dating”, and things like poly communities are quite small outside of a few big US cities. The stat that 20% of gen Z identifies as queer is pretty fascinating. That’s going to be a big voting bloc in a few decades.
They realize it, and woman tolerate their male having multiple partners to an extent (as long as the male is high-status). However their preference is absolutely the monogamous commitment of their partners. And the long term lack of it, causes severe emotional pain and neuroticism.
The more low status males withdraw from the market, the harder woman have to compete over the high-status males with no fallback, and the more anguished they'll be at the end (Because in the end the male can only pick one to marry).
AI will absolutely first cause male withdrawals from the sexual market. As men are more visually stimulated (Male porn only requires a minimum of story), AI generated art is advancing far ahead of human artist capabilities, so will soon be able to generate an infinite variety of 10/10 girlfriends in any pose or expression or environment you want.
But woman will start to withdraw too. Female 'porn' is erotica, which have to portray the man's status, and the general story, for females to gain any enjoyment, which is why they are generally always in some sort of novel format. AI is quite far from being able to write engaging fiction, but only say 5 years away. In East Asia, there is already "Otome games" where the female roleplays in a human written visual novel (And pays money each month to buy their virtual boyfriend stuff). So the progression to AI, just makes the stories far better written and genuinely reactive to the female consumer. This is also incredibly attractive to many females, compared to chasing a real life high status man who can be incredibly callous and brutal given the choices they have.
