Riffs on themes: Self-driving & Almighty Cautious Consumerism

Once you go Waymo and where luxury spending still thrives

• self-driving progress (or how Cembalest fudged his grades)

• once you go Waymo . . . Uber starts to feel it

• Buying luxury domestically, is so passe (aka Almighty Cautious Consumerism, still lives)

---

👉👉👉Reminder to sign up for the Weekly Recap only, if daily emails is too much. Find me on twitter, for more fun. 

---

Random Walk is still digesting the Big Tech earnings, but early returns are pretty good. Meanwhile, two quick riffs on themes.

Self-driving progress

Obviously, Michael Cembalest is pretty great, but when he scored his 2024 predictions, I think he got one pretty wrong.

Cembalest predicted that there would be “little to no progress on self-driving cars in the US.”

For that, he gave himself a top-grade:

Eye on the market

Cembalest scored his self-driving no-progress prediction “correct” because Tesla did a dog n’ pony show, and GM (embarrassingly) threw in the towel on Cruise.

While both of those things are true, Cembalest is definitely fudging a bit to give himself a “W.” Putting aside the ongoing improvements to Tesla’s FSD (which, whatever), the biggest reason that Cembalest’s prediction was wrong is because Waymo made tremendous progress on self-driving cars.

Cembalest dismisses Waymo’s “tiny footprint,” but I’d submit that any successful metro footprint is more than “little to no progress,” and for that, he should have at least given himself a yellow-card.

Once you go Waymo . . .

And Waymo’s footprint is definitely successful.

Random Walk has variously surfaced Waymo’s growing share and excellent retention curves—albeit small and early—but data and anecdata (and safety data) all otherwise confirm that Waymo is a hit.

Now, an even more recent cut of the data shows that Waymo is not only gaining share, but appears to be stealing share from Uber.

Look at what happens to the average customer’s Uber spend after they take their first Waymo trip: