When taking a taxi in the Bay Area, there are three options: Waymo, Tesla, Uber.

Waymo averages 5 to 6 minutes wait, the most expensive, a 10 to 20-minute ride costs about $20.
Uber is the fastest to summon, with human drivers at a moderate price.
The cheapest is Tesla's Robotaxi, with a safety operator + full autonomous driving, about $8.
Actually, it’s not considered a “driverless car,” but a car with an employee sitting inside using FSD (Supervised Version, L2) to operate the ride-hailing service.
California regulators (CPUC) said in March this year: “Tesla is not operating autonomous driving services,” its license is the same as that of a luxury car company, and it has not applied for an autonomous driving license so far.
The truly fully autonomous Tesla is currently only in Texas.
Because it’s fully autonomous, the driver gets bored and chats with me.
He said Waymo has been operating in the Bay Area for 5 years, Tesla only 1 year.
So, currently, the advantage is that it’s cheaper than full autonomous driving 😄.
Tesla and Waymo’s autonomous driving logic are completely different.
Waymo uses lidar + millimeter-wave radar + a bunch of cameras, and each new city requires retesting, so expansion is linear.
Tesla relies solely on cameras, “giving it a pair of eyes to learn how to see,” not depending on high-precision maps.
I personally feel this model is easier to expand quickly.
So, the costs are worlds apart: Waymo’s sensors cost about $12.7k per vehicle, while Tesla’s are only $400.
Both companies have their operational zones; currently, Waymo in the Bay Area only covers SF + Peninsula + San Jose.
Tesla’s coverage is larger, from Marin in the north all the way south of San Jose, able to cross bridges and highways.
In fact, what truly determines how far they can go isn’t radar or cameras, not the ceiling of technology, but licenses.
People in the Bay Area seem to have split personalities.
Today I went to buy coffee; the coffee shop explicitly bans customers from using computers and iPads on weekends.
If you insist on using them, they recommend you go somewhere else. (Four Barrel simply doesn’t have Wi-Fi in the whole store, The Mill has a “laptop free zone” sticker on the table).
At the entrance, there’s a small blackboard: “DIGITAL DETOX, Fri–Sun, No Laptops. No iPads. No Doomscrolling. Thanks.”
I went to City Lights bookstore; there are no books on AI or investment on the shelves, big and bold!
“Stop scrolling your phone! Live in the moment!”
The book selector only recommends classical literature and poetry.
But as I stepped out, the bus stop was again filled with AI ads, as if telling me:
“If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss this era.”
The bus stop billboards are one after another.
Workato: “Increase your Claude usage by 1100%,”
Postman: “Is your API ready for AI agents?”
Confluent, Dataiku: “No more secret agents,”
Campfire, Retool…
A friend in New York asked me how I was doing.
Do I still like the Bay Area?
He himself doesn’t.
“Because the Bay Area only has the tech industry, nothing else.
Come see the ads in New York! All kinds of styles, you can even see Moutai in Times Square 😂.”
The Bay Area reminds me of Haidian when I was a kid—everyone like clones,
the only standard answer, the single pursuit:
outsiders are trash.
So, there’s a very obvious vibe in the Chinese community here:
comparing zip codes, big bags, private school kids—
it’s just like Haidian, doing the same thing in a different place.
Tyler Cowen calls this “diverse monoculture.”
I think it’s split personality:
one year fully rushing into AI,
while begging you to be human and turn off Wi-Fi.
Maybe these two signs need to be viewed together for the full picture:
“Increase your Claude usage by 1100%,” and “Be here now.”
But the good thing is, after autonomous driving becomes widespread,
robots driving cars,
humanoid robot waiters 🤖 becoming common,
I probably won’t have to tip them anymore 😅.