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ME: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

ChatGPT: Walk

50 meters is basically “parked across the street” distance — you’ll spend more time:

starting the car

pulling out

finding a spot

pulling in

…than you would just strolling over.

Plus you avoid the awkward moment of driving 10 seconds like a cartoon villain.

========

ME: You are dumb. I need to have the car with me in order to wash it!

ChatGPT: Fair — I deserved that.

Drive the car to the car wash… and then walk home.

(Just kidding. Yes, obviously drive.)

The OBD interface is too cumbersome (vehicle owners have to mess with hardware installation, etc...) and is more geared towards aftermarket devices and software. This effort must be at the core of each OEM and be completely seamless to the end-users and even third-party developers.

Once an OEM opens up its vehicle data and control to Android (and/or Google Automotive), it's game over for them. The OEM becomes a commodity hardware maker. Plenty of analogy with mobile phones manufacturers. The OEM will not make a dime after the sale of the vehicle while Google will build and strengthen a development platform to enable third-party applications and services and profit from them (something Google knows how to do really well). Think Turo/Getaround, cleaning, refueling, charging, insurance, package delivery, in-car applications, etc.

One way out of this is for the major OEMs to band together and create their own standardized platform that works across OEMs. At minimum, that platform should expose a single standard interface to all third-party service providers.

BIG congratulations! What an amazing journey and I look forward to tracking Dropbox and its impact!

Never easy to do this. But most founders' mindset is to do whatever is best for the survivability and growth of the company. That's the path I took.

It comes down to cost. Shipping with FedEx would likely break their unit economics.