Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.
That's how competition should work. Every layer should have multiple providers until the companies get all of their profits squeezed away and users get the best possible price.
I sometimes prefer to enjoy the benefits of vertical integration, like Apple being able to codevelop hardware and software unrestricted from having to provide a public API at every layer (e.g. airpods device switching), and being able to unilaterally dictate user experience guidelines to app developers (e.g. ask app not to track).
For sure! It's an interesting point. But from an economic point of view, it's better for consumers if there are clean boundaries and every layer is commoditized.
A "layer" itself represents costs that can be eliminated which can lead to lower prices for buyers.
That is why vertically integrated businesses can peel away business from existing non vertically integrated businesses with lower prices (legal liability notwithstanding). Sometimes it pays to have the business with more to lose insulated from liability by having a layer without much to lose.
Curious what these ride sharing companies take for providing the platform. 30%? Having two play off each other they can probably push it down to 15% or lower.
Hoping someone in the rideshare space could shed some light on this for me but why would Waymo partner with rideshare providers instead of just going in by themselves? Is it just marketing/exposure (Uber/Lyft both have tons of users, Waymo could instantly tap into that user base instead of trying to grow their own) or is it more of a regulatory thing?
Yup, marketing. And Waymo can launch at a smaller scale in the market knowing that overflow and rides that Waymo can't do can be done by human drivers.
It's a way for Waymo to prepare to turn on the spigot, too, if they dump a bunch more cars into the market.
It's important for Waymo to do all 3: show they can run the service themselves in a market, and work with both Uber and Lyft, to be able to get fair terms and the option to expand rapidly.
What do uber and lyft get out of it, though? If Waymo succeeds they're out of business, right? Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
Uber and Lyft calculate that their cooperation doesn't affect Waymo's trajectory too much, and they immediately benefit from "more drivers."
> Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
This is one natural way that things may shake out and a natural path to scale. But Waymo needs to have a fallback plan of A) other parties to work with, or B) just doing it themselves to get a good deal with Uber/Lyft in the long term.
Uber/Lyft would like Waymo to not the the sole provider of autonomous technology and to work with them; they can expect to receive rides at just a bit above marginal cost in that case.
Uber and Lyft's business model is that they don't own cars. Waymo owns cars, so is at a disadvantage to them. Cars are still expensive and need maintenance even if they don't have drivers.
If Uber/Lyft develop their own driverless cars they can terminate the relationship with Waymo and just use their own. If they don't develop their own driverless cars, they can continue to partner with Waymo.
I think it’s more a matter of capital rather than marketing. Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive and that has to show up on someone’s books and financed somebow. They were bound to partner with rideshare sooner or later to derisk their own operation.
> Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive
Ha! Lyft doesn't own much of its fleet! There's a small fraction of vehicles that lyft rents through Flexdrive.
Just like Tesla Self self-driving, Waymo can ask people, if they want to offset related capital costs, to buy cars and rent them to Waymo to be reconfigured and run as autonomous vehicles on profit profit-sharing basis.
I think they will license the technology and get a cut of the profits. They want to focus on the technology, not building parking garages and maintenance lots everywhere. The local ride share companies will do that.
I strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
They don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
Not really: this past few years, listed companies tend to be _very_ pessimistic on their quarterly projection, and then reveal that either: it wasn't that bad, and nothing change, or that is was great, and their valuation shoots up. Weirdly the market doesn't react over those pessimistic projections, so it seems it's just a safe play for CEOs. They started doing that in Europe as well.
Usually, though not always, a company will tell you if they're making money on something, and if they're not they beat around the bush like this. Notice how, for example, Gywnne Shotwell never beats around the bush like this when talking about Starlink.
Notice the weird language:
> That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.
He says the "progress" is "very, very positive," but if you're not paying close enough attention you might come away thinking that the unit economics are what's very very positive.
All that said, what he's saying makes sense. They're able to charge more for their rides since they offer the convenience of not having to deal with a driver, and they're not paying the driver, who is the most expensive part, so yea, I'm bullish on them.
Because no highly indebted company is going to "strongly hint" that they aren't just hemorrhaging cash like everyone assumes--they will absolutely let you know. "Hints" are just best effort accounting aesthetics to seem like the dream is just around the corner.
LIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
They're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works. Waymo's are never remotely driven. They're just told what the operator thinks is the best place for them to go next in a situation where the vehicle can't make that decision. This is critical to controlling opex. Waymos operate 24/7, that means three shifts of operators plus coverage for weekends, vacation, and sick time. This is where the difference between a demo and a product is going to be decided. Alphabet could be reckless about spending on remote operators. But I think they're still processing the trauma of buying Motorola and won't tolerate a big jump in headcount.
Sure: I didn't say that the remote workers were driving the autonomous vehicles. The NYT article I linked gives a pretty clear account of what they're doing. (The big exception here would of course be Tesla, assuming it ever gets its current "robotaxi" plans to fruition.) In any case, while the "what the humans are doing is not driving" thing always seems to come up early in these discussions, it's a relatively secondary issue when it comes to the cost and profitability question, while (as you say yourself) things like human-assistant-hours per vehicle-hour are central.
> Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works.
Although not, as far as I've been able to find, videos that actually show the control center. Just semi-animated videos of the advising process. The number of customer support people per vehicle is not disclosed.
Employee stats are available.[1] Unclear how accurate they are. According to Unify, Waymo has 2,406 employees. Headcount is up only 6.6% since last year, even though the number of vehicles deployed has reportedly tripled. So they seem to have a big fixed labor cost in engineering, and but a low variable cost per car. Which means this scales well and becomes profitable.
The relatively low headcount growth enables estimating values for the number of remote operators per vehicle. It takes four FTEs to fill one seat in the remote operation center 24/7.
If the ratio of remote operators to vehicles is 1:10, and the fleet size is 2500, that's 1000 FTEs. That's more than 5X the headcount growth.
If all of the headcount growth goes to remote operations, it would be one seat for 50 vehicles. I'd guess it's more like one to 100.
That fits with the relative rarity of seeing Waymos stopped waiting for instructions.
Do we know that the remote operators (all? mostly?) show up in that data as employees, though? Waymo's development has presumably reached the point where it would want to start filling remote-assistance seats with contractors. (There's also offline but relatively labour-intensive work like updating maps, adjusting routes and the like.)
One remote assistant per 50 or 100 vehicles would also seem to put Waymo now far ahead of where Cruise was in 2023, when according to the NYT's sources Cruise's remote assistance staff "intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles", though I suppose it's not especially hard to believe that 2025 Waymo is beating 2023 Cruise handily.
Also cost savings because you can do things like work the 8AM rush on the east coast and then 3 hours later start picking up the 8AM rush on the west coast with its 3h time zone difference.
> maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
Just to add another data point, the co-CEO indicated on a podcast 18-months ago that the sensor package cost was <=$100k for the then current generation:
"But saying, you know, picking an upper bound, $100,000 worth of equipment on it, you amortize it over, you know, the lifetime, call it, say, 400,000 (miles), 25 cents per mile. Right. And, you know, it gives you some margin compared to the cost of paying a human driver."
He also mentioned that the next generation would see a "drastic reduction in the cost".
Those Jaguars they drive are not going to last 400,000 miles without several significant overhauls. And interiors will wear out and have to be refurbished. Exteriors will get dented and scratched. Is all that part of the $100k they are amortizing?
Waymo Driver 5 was introduced in 2020. Driver 6 was introduced August of last year. So if the interview was 18 months ago he would be referring to Driver 5.
Driver 6 hardware is probably built in batches of a few hundred each. Still a low volume CM job, but incrementally cheaper. Probably. If they start building in batches of thousands, that's going to drive costs down significantly.
Waymo can hit break even even with the relatively expensive Jaguar SUVs and Driver 6 hardware suite. As someone else pointed out, Google is making more money than most people realize on a per unit basis. My back of the envelope estimate is at least $2000 per vehicle per week. That easily covers financing the capex with thousands left over for opex and overhead.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
Think about it in comparison to a real-life taxi or Uber and the math is surprisingly strong.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
I wish they would target mass transit not rideshare cars. A bus with this technology could immediately run a lot more frequent with shorter buses, and because the route is fixed they don't have to verify the entire city, only the roads the bus will travel on. Fix route buses running at high frequency is the key to getting people to ride mass transit, but it isn't affordable because drivers are so expensive if you can even find them to hire.
Without major cultural shifts, you still need someone on the bus to prevent them from becoming moving dumpsters. The driving itself would be much easier, as you point out. That's not the only thing that a driver does.
Are they a lot cheaper than actual LEOs? I presumed that going rates would be similar. And I guess the "spicier" question is, are they cheaper than a bus operator?
LA metro has a stage below them called "ambassadors" who walk around with ipads, presumably to help people navigate the system and also call for maintenance or security should there be a need. From what I can gleam they are paid $25/hr.
This isn't exactly a direct source, but it's listing the hourly pay at 25.26$.
You wouldn't even need them to ride every single bus, just enough to deter weird behavior.
Even if hypothetically they cost as much as a real bus driver, this would be much safer. A bus driver doing overtime and possibly texting people isn't too hard to beat.
On BART safety concerns and union contracts restrict automation. This fun article from 2017 [1] could have been written today but shows why it's so hard for public infrastructure to be effective. Every actor is incentivized to get something out of public infrastructure. In the current AI mood I suspect opposition to automation by unions would be even stronger.
The Abundance movement has put a good moniker to this concept: Everything Bagel Liberalism.
Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service? Or is it the chicken-and-egg of "ridership isn't high enough to demand more frequent service" + the distraction of shinier rail projects? Bus drivers would be cheaper than rail construction, I think you need to sell "more busses" politically first.
The total cost of a bus is just over $100/hour (I last checked in 2019, so a bit more from inflation), and a driver directly makes around $30/hr plus benefits easially will put you over $50. Now add in all training and management that isn't directly per hour but if you didn't have a driver you wouldn't pay. You do have maintenance and fuel costs per hour, insurance and the cost of a bus. There are are a lot of "it depends" and I've never seen a formal analysis of the true costs, but to round numbers we can say half the costs are the driver and be close enough for discussion.
If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.
Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.
Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.
Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.
Are you factoring the purchase price of the bus? I believe they cost around $1m. Then there is also having to purchase the yard space to store the bus if that isn't already available. Maintenance and cleaning and associated costs. I'm not sure how often a bus is routinely replaced with a new one.
> Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?
On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.
However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.
Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.
The bus driver is making what 60k maybe 90k a year? According to LA metro their new electric fleet is costing about $1.1m per bus. It would take over a decade for labor to exceed just the initial outlay. I'm not sure that busses are even used that long before replacement.
In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.
Bus drivers in the US are often behind a plexiglass shield, have a panic button, etc. and with reason.
If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.
On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency. For most rail in the US the largest factor in maintenance is weather and so you could run a lot more trains without changing the costs much. You do need to buy more trains, and they will need to be cleaned, but it wouldn't be hard to get enough to people on board to pay those incremental costs. (in the US the bottleneck is often an expensive tunnel that is shared between several not busy lines, each line could itself handle many more trains all day than they have at the peak without changing maintenance costs - but the tunnel is full and it costs too much to build a new one - this is why so many in transit are focusing on construction costs - if we can build a short tunnel we unlock a lot of better transit)
On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency.
In the cities I've lived, it's not quite that.
Building rail is a lot of dollars, but politicians are often happy to throw money at that problem. It's good for a dozen industries, like construction.
But that money cannot then be used to operate the rail long-term. That burden is on the city entirely.
I've lived in two cities that turned down millions of dollars in federal transit grants because they didn't have the money for maintenance and operation.
Capital costs are paid differently and so we can often safely ignore construction costs as they are a different budget.
Putting maintenance into that capital bucket though is accounting fraud and illegal. If you have a rail line the largest cost is regular maintenance which is based on time not wear until you have a very large number of trains running. So my point stands even if you separate the buckets.
Bus drivers already have to assist handicapped passengers that are getting on and off the bus (at least for my metro area bus service), so someone will need to be in there anyways.
A better bus and stop design eliminates more of that. You can have call ahead for help if you need to. A busy bus route normal people will be glad to help the disabled as well so long as what they need to do isn't hard and doesn't take much time (which it shouldn't - see better design...). For the rest paratransit should take them because despite the higher costs disabled people if they need to much help are taking time from everyone else who wants to get someplace not wait while someone is slowly loaded onto the bus.
People in cities don't like to ride with strangers if they can help it, generally. This isn't absolute - if density gets high enough and people get used to it, they will absolutely do it, but if they have the choice to avoid it they generally will.
The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus - which is probably not usable for them anyway. Too many people do ride the bus all over the world (even in the US) to think that is really true. Statisticians and Psychologists have long known people lie about their reasons for doing something.
idiotsecant wrote "if they can help it". Which means people take into account things like travel time, congestion, safety risks, general comfort, etc.
>The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus
Is this supposed to be a tautology? Obviously people who justify it are people justifying it. I would bet real money that the vast majority of women will choose a private vehicle over a bus if they were the same price.
i was curious so i looked this up:
LA Metro (combined bus and rail) has a monthly ridership of like 25 million [0]. that's nearly a million people taking shared public transit every day. anecdotally, i chose to ride metro rail over driving when i had a "real" commute. lots of people do.
people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.
for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.
For a self-driving company, replacing a lot of drivers servicing some passengers is much better financially than replacing a few drivers servicing many passengers. Pencil it out yourself and you'll see that doing robotaxis is much better than doing robobuses. Plus, have any cities suggested that they would contract out their business driving to an automous company? Has anyone asked the unions to see what they might do about it?
Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
For the company maybe, but for everyone else it is worse. Taxis are worse for the environment than cars because you have to count all the driving around empty picking people up (demand is rarely even in all directions). Rideshare is only of limited use outside fixed routes as people have places to be an detouring to pick up someone else makes them mad.
What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.
The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'.
This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.
The customer is often merely a product to be farmed like livestock for as much of their disposable income as can possibly done. The people who are provided value are usually the shareholders not the people who are using the product or service.
And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.
Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
Assuming Chinese competitors get cut off as a "threat to national security", I'm sure Waymo would behave responsibility as a monopoly and won't be driving for a system that "accidentally" end with private car ownership being eroded along with public transport options in favour of their product.
It would be crazy if a self driving car company would undertake projects that undermine public transport, for example. Proposing mad things like vacuum pod trains to head off conventional HSR for example. Imagine!
Americans are incapable of constructing HSR all on their own. It doesn't matter if anyone tries to distract them, they'll be tied up in 200 years of lawsuits over whether the fake environment reports are long enough anyway.
They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school
You no longer need inner city parking, and people will be more willing to jump on public transport to skip traffic because you are not bound by the location of your own car anyway.
You think taxi companies are paying for enough parking spaces to store most of their fleet at once? A lot of those cars are stored on the street in front of the house of the driver.
Also, the problem of storing something like 10k taxis pales in comparison to storing 100k+ cars. Some large cities have millions of cars. When was the last time you drove to a stadium concert or ball game? It takes hours to get something like 30k cars in and out of those parking lots when everyone is trying to use the same roads at the same time. It's absolute gridlock.
So to implement anything like what you're talking about you'd need a network of garages and lots in the periphery of a large city, and the road infrastructure that can handle 100k cars driving from outside the city to your home all in time to whisk you away on your morning commute.
For that kind of civic planning & engineering complexity you could just build public transportation based on trains, light rail and busses.
For now, their Nashville test cars seem to be stored in a lot that's basically unused otherwise (I'm not even sure what building it belongs to). I drive by it occasionally. It's not the cheapest part of town, but it's probably pretty affordable.
They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic.
Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic.
We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation.
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
This argument never makes a lick of sense, these are entirely different problems. Trains, buses, subways, do not go to my house, and they do not go to my destination. They (sometimes) get close, and then I have to get through the last mile somehow, often a taxi or Uber. That transfer alone is annoying and it often makes sense to just take the taxi the whole way, even if it costs more, and it's a better experience than any public transit, so why not?
Maybe that setup works in China where everyone lives on top of each other in shoeboxes and you can just route a monorail through an apartment building, but I like both having my space and living adjacent to a large city. You could put a teleporter to the train station on my boulevard and I'd stand next to it while I wait for an Uber. You could build a train station a block from my house and I'd move somewhere else. I would pay multiples of any train ticket price to get into an autonomous sleeper Waymo and wake up in a city hours away in front of my hotel. You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option, and I don't think I'm alone in that, and building more of it doesn't solve that.
America's strength here is that it's full of great places where you can live like that, take public transit everywhere, walk everywhere else, if that's what you want, with the compromises it comes with. But instead of moving to those places people say "build more public transit", which then just sounds like "I wish public transit was more accessible to me specifically" and then we're just back at taxis, or building rail to connect the front doors of everyone on earth.
It doesn't, really. China sells absolutely fucktons of cars domestically. There are also dozens of brands that most people have never even heard of and don't even get exported because domestic demand for a functional 10-15,000 electric car is so high. Every residential complex is absolutely rammed with cars, ranging from tiny runabouts to Tank 700 plus-sized SUVs.
That demand doesn't exist because everyone lives 5 minutes walk from work and loves the subway. Though millions upon millions of people do both, and subways have expanded probably 1000% or more in the last 15 years, million upon millions also want a car. In many cases they may not represent all the miles a person travels (eg subway to work but car for other trips).
High speed rail also is a replacement for many car miles driven because while a cross-country ticket is expensive, driving is still expensive in fuel and wear and takes days to boot.
There are definitely places in the US that I would like to see intercity high-speed rail specifically. Flying is convenient and frankly magical but always feels like a huge chore to do.
Even in China, flying is usually cheaper than HSR, and over twice as fast once airborne (300km/hr train vs 800km/hr plane). But getting and through airports is still more of a hassle than the trains. Even when taxis are fairly cheap, there's nothing like popping out in the city.
Though it's not quite like a cosy European station near the old town: some some stations are the better part of half a mile across (not along the platforms, across), and aren't right in the city centre so there can still be some walking involved!
On the other hand, you can have takeaway food delivered to the station ahead and receive it at your seat. And it's far more comfortable even in economy.
-->You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option
The diversity of the world truly never ceases to amaze me. Thats a wild take. Driving is an awful experience - its expensive, its stressful, cars are uncomfortable, and the whole thing is extremely dangerous.
More over, I would argue that America is very much not a place where you can live car-free. There are very few places in the country where you can live without a car, certainly if you have a family.
That being said, building more public transit everywhere would allow more people to get out of the way of people like you who will drive no matter what.
Sure, the alternative view is just as wild to me, and I've travelled plenty both ways. It's only expensive if you don't value the advantages, and even in absolute terms it doesn't cost much more. Public transit is for me way more stressful because crowds are annoying, train and bus schedules are annoying, people are inconsiderate and you have no control over it at all. The worst part of public transit is the public; I love going to the theatre but I've mostly stopped for the same reason and got a nice setup at home instead. It's not IMAX but IMAX isn't that fun anyway with a bad audience.
Cars are clean and if they aren't, there's a rating system for that. Bus is dirty? The city will surely see to your ticket eventually.
Cars are uncomfortable? Pay another couple dollars and Uber will send you an SUV just for you if you want. Try offering a couple dollars to the people sandwiching you on either side on the subway and see if it makes you more comfortable.
I've never had a license beyond a temp, my family doesn't own a car. I agree driving is stressful, which is why I prefer to pay people who drive for a living to do it for me, so it's not about driving for driving's sake, it's about what's comfortable to use and convenient. Most public transit is neither.
While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them.
> We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains.
Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get.
Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it.
Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.
There are already places in the US that can financially justify Japan-tier high speed rail (specifically the northeast corridor), but Connecticut simultaneously wants high speed rail through the coastal towns and opposes the land acquisition required to get adequately straight tracks. If American politics is unable to get out of the way in such a slam-dunk case for rail, what hope is there to bring public transit and urbanism to all of the car-dependent suburbia in the rest of the country?
If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.
Tesla isn't really in the game. Their robotaxi's only purpose is to inflate the share price. Tesla hasn't driven a single mile without a safety driver in the car.
and RAPIDLY growing in Atlanta from what I see as I wander the city. I just saw one of their new Geely based vehicles today for the first time.
I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
And "Silicon Valley" (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Los Altos). Quotes because that excludes San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Milpitas.
Not, Lyft, Flexdrive. Flexdrive is a fleet management company which Lyft owns. They have the things Waymo needs - parking lots and vehicle maintainers.
Waymo doesn't need the rideshare service and Lyft app.
In San Francisco, Waymo has already passed Lyft in number of rides, and is projected to pass Uber by the end of the year.
Is this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.
Also interesting that it's not exclusive - they're saying you'll be able to use either the Waymo app or the Lyft app (and get a Waymo at random, presumably). I believe the previous deals with Uber have all been exclusive - no Waymo app in that market.
moat is in institutional knowledge of operations in ride hailing industry.
Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
it's not only about number of users. You also have regulations in different cities and states, existing models trained based on past supply demand behavior, somewhat optimized workflows for the ride hailing industry, payments, risks.
They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
Is there any hope of actually being able to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer? Seems that a concerning majority of the autonomous driving conversation is framed in the context of ride-sharing.
It makes sense to target ridesharing while the tech is being developed because:
(a) you can amortize the large up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day.
(b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe
(c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this).
Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote assistance will decrease. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own.
At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one that's exactly the type you need no matter where you are.
Vehicles also act as large portable storage, which is very convenient when you have kids. e.g. stroller, diaper bag, change of clothes, sports equipment, emergency supplies. It would be annoying to always have to keep things on your person. With a personal vehicle, you also don't have to worry about something falling out of a bag and being lost forever after the vehicle drives away, or accidentally leaving a piece of equipment in it; just go check the parking lot. Or what if you want to make a trip to multiple stores and want to keep bags from the first in the car while you're in the second?
EVs also have the potential to act as large backup batteries for your home.
You can also choose how to amortize your costs. My mom's been driving the same car for 22 years now.
“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee.
Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.
The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
Autonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers.
What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
I disagree. Building trains in America is next to impossible in the modern day. Obtaining the property for the railways would be extraordinarily difficult, because America has such strong property rights and is such a legalistic society. It's a recipe for way over-budget and behind schedule projects. Just look at the California project. There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades. Furthermore, the built environment is so spread out because it was built for cars, so you don't get the clustering effects of density around train stations. Rail isn't that helpful if you have to walk another 30 minutes from the station to actually get to your destination.
Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
Even with traffic waves, the capacity of a road is not infinite and trains beat it hand over fist, simply because of physics. Imagine a crowded highway with invisible cars: people would be sitting 30 feet x 15 feet apart. That is why there is traffic more than anything, the limits of that capacity with that really loose packing that cars enable.
Walking 30 mins from the station is no issue. Try walking through a far flung terminal at DEN or ATL or the new TBIT at LAX, you will walk 30+ mins from the gate before you hit your rideshare point I expect. Also, rail stations do not exist in a vacuum. They often interface with bus lines that go parallel or perpendicular to the rail routing, so that 30 min walk could just be a 2 min ride.
We also do have railbuilding experience in this country. LA metro has built out their entire network of over 100 rail stations within the last 35 years. This is the fastest rate of railbuilding on the entire continent, not just in the U.S., in a high land value land labor cost area to boot. As we speak multiple concurrent rail projects are being planned or actively built. Much of the build out is paid by a 1 cent sales tax measure that local voters approved with 71% in favor.
I don't believe that anyway. The USA has a very robust rail network, it's just all dedicated to freight. Building and maintaining railroads is not some forgotten capability; it's very high tech with robots/automation doing a lot of the work now.
The USA has proven to be... incapable of completing any public transport infrastructure anywhere near on budget or on time. This is a deeply rooted problem. Until this gets solved autonomous electric vehicles could theoretically just leapfrog the problem altogether. Point to point transportation also mostly solves the last mile problem.
Point to point transportation is not sustainable with a vehicle as large as a car. The physics are simply quite poor and there are too many people to move, at least in cities with real traffic like LA or NYC vs small edge case backups.
Meh, I'll stick to driving my own car or renting one. The last thing I want is paying for the "privilege" of being rated by the driver or spied on my an autonomous car.
Why would a company like Lyft/Uber partner with Waymo at this point? That sounds like doing a deal with the competitor who _will_ completely kill them off in the future.
Not necessarily. Does Waymo really want to run all the additional infra and services and people ops required to be a full soup-to-nuts ride hailing service?
I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
Privatization of many things is turning out to be a failure. Sewage, water - see the UK, failure. Healthcare: USA, failure. Utilities: UK, USA, failure. Mail: Denmark, failure. Transportation: UK, USA, utter failure. Further privatization will deepen this failure.
Yeah. Almost as if capitalism seeks to generate profits at the expense of the consumer especially if they have limited choices, which capitalism itself produces.
It doesn't really help consumers whose whole point is to get from point A to B in the quickest and most comfortable manner.
It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
> but we all know trains and trams are the better tech
Great, but I'm actually in Nashville and I know there's about zero chance we get a (real) train, and that the train stops would definitely be no closer than the bus stop that's already inconvenient enough to not be worth it. The bus system used to (I think they still have it in one area) have a program where you could get free Uber/Lyft rides to/from bus stops, and cheaper autonomous rides could definitely make that more feasible to continue offering.
> oil protectionism
The Waymo vehicles I've been in were electric. If electric cars are "oil protectionism", then you can probably warp trains into it too (the bus certainly would be).
> It doesn't really help consumers whose whole point is to get from point A to B in the quickest and most comfortable manner.
It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in. The time penalty is minimal (except for that time I had to chase a waymo around the block), and worth it for the comfort and safety.
> It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
It certainly helps me arrive to my destination quicker than muni metro which I can often run faster than. Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
> I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
> The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
My whole argument is that you can fulfill individual desires better through other means.
> It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in.
The lack of choices due to monopoly capitalism is a self fulfilling prophecy. (regular capitalism after some time is monopoly capitalism)
> Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
This is a false dichotomy brought about by living in an economy controlled by finance capital. Individual benefit does not have to look like this and can be more internally and externally consistent.
Especially since this industry contains the seeds of its own destruction IN its own logic. Like I said, its more expensive than rail and to have any speed benefits it requires the majority of cars to be autonomous, which most likely will never happen. Not to mention physical safety and cyber security/privacy.
> How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
A private room would cost less because there are less costs involved overall. Rail/tram is cheaper and better.
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I am, generally, arguing for medium and long distance travel tho. But in regards to short-distance specifically I think my argument still stands. I dont think it presents any greater benefit than the alternatives, of which some are definitely better. You'll see how mass use, if it even gets there, will make it just "another one". It doesn't scale.
Plus autonomous warfare dev right under our noses.
Don’t rule out Tesla’s Robotaxi. I’m 10 rides in (Bay Area— around SF proper), and it’s clean, cheap, and efficient. As good or better than Waymo.
IMO:
- Tesla is pushing Waymo on pricing and service areas
- Tesla will drop the safety monitor in the next 6 months**
**I say this as a FSD subscriber on my own car and seeing the arch of progress, albeit with a software branch that’s supposedly 3-6 months behind Robotaxi’s
Is Tesla robotaxi actually even close to Waymo? I thought they still needed someone in the car with the robotaxi and Waymo had been operating fully autonomous for quite a while already. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons people really like Waymo, it’s like a private ride.
Tesla lost the race and won’t even be in the space in any meaningful way in a few years. They’re only limping along because they have some guy pumping the stock.
As I commute on a motorcycle (often in the rain, causing lower visibility) this is terrifying to me and I hope regulators in my state don't let it happen here until Tesla can prove their "camera only" approach is safe.
I'm always flabbergasted by Tesla fans' commitment to vastly inferior product and their insistence that the big breakthrough is "just around the corner bro, believe me". I'm pretty sure you all just have Stockholm Syndrome after paying for FSD in like 2019 and ingesting copium for over 5 years. I hope you reach a place in your life where you have the confidence to ask for a higher standard.
Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.
That's how competition should work. Every layer should have multiple providers until the companies get all of their profits squeezed away and users get the best possible price.
I sometimes prefer to enjoy the benefits of vertical integration, like Apple being able to codevelop hardware and software unrestricted from having to provide a public API at every layer (e.g. airpods device switching), and being able to unilaterally dictate user experience guidelines to app developers (e.g. ask app not to track).
For sure! It's an interesting point. But from an economic point of view, it's better for consumers if there are clean boundaries and every layer is commoditized.
A "layer" itself represents costs that can be eliminated which can lead to lower prices for buyers.
That is why vertically integrated businesses can peel away business from existing non vertically integrated businesses with lower prices (legal liability notwithstanding). Sometimes it pays to have the business with more to lose insulated from liability by having a layer without much to lose.
They've also partnered with Moove in Miami and with Avis.
And GO in Tokyo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Japan)
Curious what these ride sharing companies take for providing the platform. 30%? Having two play off each other they can probably push it down to 15% or lower.
Hoping someone in the rideshare space could shed some light on this for me but why would Waymo partner with rideshare providers instead of just going in by themselves? Is it just marketing/exposure (Uber/Lyft both have tons of users, Waymo could instantly tap into that user base instead of trying to grow their own) or is it more of a regulatory thing?
Yup, marketing. And Waymo can launch at a smaller scale in the market knowing that overflow and rides that Waymo can't do can be done by human drivers.
It's a way for Waymo to prepare to turn on the spigot, too, if they dump a bunch more cars into the market.
It's important for Waymo to do all 3: show they can run the service themselves in a market, and work with both Uber and Lyft, to be able to get fair terms and the option to expand rapidly.
What do uber and lyft get out of it, though? If Waymo succeeds they're out of business, right? Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
Uber and Lyft calculate that their cooperation doesn't affect Waymo's trajectory too much, and they immediately benefit from "more drivers."
> Or is the idea that Waymo becomes a hardware provider and uber / lyft become operators?
This is one natural way that things may shake out and a natural path to scale. But Waymo needs to have a fallback plan of A) other parties to work with, or B) just doing it themselves to get a good deal with Uber/Lyft in the long term.
Uber/Lyft would like Waymo to not the the sole provider of autonomous technology and to work with them; they can expect to receive rides at just a bit above marginal cost in that case.
Uber and Lyft's business model is that they don't own cars. Waymo owns cars, so is at a disadvantage to them. Cars are still expensive and need maintenance even if they don't have drivers.
If Uber/Lyft develop their own driverless cars they can terminate the relationship with Waymo and just use their own. If they don't develop their own driverless cars, they can continue to partner with Waymo.
I think it’s more a matter of capital rather than marketing. Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive and that has to show up on someone’s books and financed somebow. They were bound to partner with rideshare sooner or later to derisk their own operation.
> Having hundreds or thousands of cars per city/metro is going to be capital intensive
Ha! Lyft doesn't own much of its fleet! There's a small fraction of vehicles that lyft rents through Flexdrive.
Just like Tesla Self self-driving, Waymo can ask people, if they want to offset related capital costs, to buy cars and rent them to Waymo to be reconfigured and run as autonomous vehicles on profit profit-sharing basis.
I think they will license the technology and get a cut of the profits. They want to focus on the technology, not building parking garages and maintenance lots everywhere. The local ride share companies will do that.
I wonder if Waymo is allowed to charge different prices, or advertise their own direct services, in these partnerships.
"Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
In Austin, Waymo app directs you to use uber instead.
Almost certainly Waymo has given Uber some kind of time-limited exclusivity in that market.
I strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
In a recent interview, Waymo strongly hinted they now have positive unit economics in markets like SF.
From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...:
> “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.”
So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
What is the reason or benefit of them being so secretive about this?
They don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
Waymo doesn't gain anything. Google i.e. Alphabet Inc, does.
Especially these days. Every scrap of news that could pump the stock price is publicized aggressively.
And this makes the absence of such actions suspicious.
Not really: this past few years, listed companies tend to be _very_ pessimistic on their quarterly projection, and then reveal that either: it wasn't that bad, and nothing change, or that is was great, and their valuation shoots up. Weirdly the market doesn't react over those pessimistic projections, so it seems it's just a safe play for CEOs. They started doing that in Europe as well.
Usually, though not always, a company will tell you if they're making money on something, and if they're not they beat around the bush like this. Notice how, for example, Gywnne Shotwell never beats around the bush like this when talking about Starlink.
Notice the weird language:
> That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.
He says the "progress" is "very, very positive," but if you're not paying close enough attention you might come away thinking that the unit economics are what's very very positive.
All that said, what he's saying makes sense. They're able to charge more for their rides since they offer the convenience of not having to deal with a driver, and they're not paying the driver, who is the most expensive part, so yea, I'm bullish on them.
Because no highly indebted company is going to "strongly hint" that they aren't just hemorrhaging cash like everyone assumes--they will absolutely let you know. "Hints" are just best effort accounting aesthetics to seem like the dream is just around the corner.
They have to follow SEC rules about disclosing it.
Even with expensive vehicles and hardware? Plus they are revenue sharing with the host Uber/Lyft platforms.
Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
LIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
They're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing.
I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works. Waymo's are never remotely driven. They're just told what the operator thinks is the best place for them to go next in a situation where the vehicle can't make that decision. This is critical to controlling opex. Waymos operate 24/7, that means three shifts of operators plus coverage for weekends, vacation, and sick time. This is where the difference between a demo and a product is going to be decided. Alphabet could be reckless about spending on remote operators. But I think they're still processing the trauma of buying Motorola and won't tolerate a big jump in headcount.
Sure: I didn't say that the remote workers were driving the autonomous vehicles. The NYT article I linked gives a pretty clear account of what they're doing. (The big exception here would of course be Tesla, assuming it ever gets its current "robotaxi" plans to fruition.) In any case, while the "what the humans are doing is not driving" thing always seems to come up early in these discussions, it's a relatively secondary issue when it comes to the cost and profitability question, while (as you say yourself) things like human-assistant-hours per vehicle-hour are central.
> Waymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works.
Although not, as far as I've been able to find, videos that actually show the control center. Just semi-animated videos of the advising process. The number of customer support people per vehicle is not disclosed.
Employee stats are available.[1] Unclear how accurate they are. According to Unify, Waymo has 2,406 employees. Headcount is up only 6.6% since last year, even though the number of vehicles deployed has reportedly tripled. So they seem to have a big fixed labor cost in engineering, and but a low variable cost per car. Which means this scales well and becomes profitable.
[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/waymo
The relatively low headcount growth enables estimating values for the number of remote operators per vehicle. It takes four FTEs to fill one seat in the remote operation center 24/7.
If the ratio of remote operators to vehicles is 1:10, and the fleet size is 2500, that's 1000 FTEs. That's more than 5X the headcount growth.
If all of the headcount growth goes to remote operations, it would be one seat for 50 vehicles. I'd guess it's more like one to 100.
That fits with the relative rarity of seeing Waymos stopped waiting for instructions.
Do we know that the remote operators (all? mostly?) show up in that data as employees, though? Waymo's development has presumably reached the point where it would want to start filling remote-assistance seats with contractors. (There's also offline but relatively labour-intensive work like updating maps, adjusting routes and the like.)
One remote assistant per 50 or 100 vehicles would also seem to put Waymo now far ahead of where Cruise was in 2023, when according to the NYT's sources Cruise's remote assistance staff "intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles", though I suppose it's not especially hard to believe that 2025 Waymo is beating 2023 Cruise handily.
Also (at least in the SF market anyways) their operating license does not allow cars to be remotely controlled.
I guess, but my interaction with a real person in a waymo was limited to 15 seconds on my many rides, so I don't know if I'm just an anomaly or not.
> it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy
Yes, this is the main reason to like it. I've had too many experiences with an Uber driver nearly falling asleep while transporting me.
> though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
Given how many Uber drivers are immigrants already, this is already happening if Waymo employs call center employees from the Philippines or not.
Also cost savings because you can do things like work the 8AM rush on the east coast and then 3 hours later start picking up the 8AM rush on the west coast with its 3h time zone difference.
> maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides.
The 'few months' bit doesn't seem quite right - the cost to get a human to drive a car would maybe be $50k per year, so i'm not sure how a $200k vehicle can pay itself off in a few months vs a $50k car + $50k per year driver.
I'm aware that the cost / ride is higher for Waymo, but it doesn't sound like that would be enough to cover the extra $200k and not certain that scales to other geographies outside of SF.
I mean to pay off a $200k vehicle in a few months you would need each car to be clearing $3k a day in revenue or something like that.
It's probably a few years per car if they are at $200k. If they are 'in the black' or not will probably depend more about their accounting rules (i.e. depreciation) more than anything else.
Note that you probably need 2 or 3 drivers per car to get a similar level of usage of the car that Waymo can do.
Very true, although even at 2 or 3 drivers it’s still more than months.
Though that will also result in faster depreciation of the (mostly-)autonomous cars.
Just to add another data point, the co-CEO indicated on a podcast 18-months ago that the sensor package cost was <=$100k for the then current generation:
"But saying, you know, picking an upper bound, $100,000 worth of equipment on it, you amortize it over, you know, the lifetime, call it, say, 400,000 (miles), 25 cents per mile. Right. And, you know, it gives you some margin compared to the cost of paying a human driver."
He also mentioned that the next generation would see a "drastic reduction in the cost".
https://www.shack15.com/podcast - ep41
Those Jaguars they drive are not going to last 400,000 miles without several significant overhauls. And interiors will wear out and have to be refurbished. Exteriors will get dented and scratched. Is all that part of the $100k they are amortizing?
Waymo Driver 5 was introduced in 2020. Driver 6 was introduced August of last year. So if the interview was 18 months ago he would be referring to Driver 5.
Driver 6 hardware is probably built in batches of a few hundred each. Still a low volume CM job, but incrementally cheaper. Probably. If they start building in batches of thousands, that's going to drive costs down significantly.
Waymo can hit break even even with the relatively expensive Jaguar SUVs and Driver 6 hardware suite. As someone else pointed out, Google is making more money than most people realize on a per unit basis. My back of the envelope estimate is at least $2000 per vehicle per week. That easily covers financing the capex with thousands left over for opex and overhead.
Just switching to the Hyundai SUVs takes tens of thousands of dollars out of capex.
Think about it in comparison to a real-life taxi or Uber and the math is surprisingly strong.
A real human driver needs to (vaguely) make a human salary, and cover things like gas, cleaning, car maintenance, car payments etc. That human salary is probably at least $50k if working full time in high end markets like SF. That “salary” also covers most OpEx costs for Uber like periodic cleaning and gas/charging of vehicles.
Lately, Uber has been $1.50-$3.00/mile in SF while Waymo has been $3.00+/m most times. Waymo also can drive 24/7/365 so should be able to command a higher per-car income.
I’ve heard rumors that a Waymo vehicle cost $200k to build with the sensors. Surely they’re aggressively lowering that cost now too. That’s 4-5 years of driving to pay off IF they’re making what Uber drivers make, but they’re almost certainly making much more.
Like Uber and Lyft before them, their biggest barrier to profitability is likely their HQ costs full of expensive engineering jobs - and they also have the R&D costs of training the car.
The Zeekr vehicle would've brought costs down, but it is now subject to a huge tariff. No telling how much that has set them back.
I wish they would target mass transit not rideshare cars. A bus with this technology could immediately run a lot more frequent with shorter buses, and because the route is fixed they don't have to verify the entire city, only the roads the bus will travel on. Fix route buses running at high frequency is the key to getting people to ride mass transit, but it isn't affordable because drivers are so expensive if you can even find them to hire.
Without major cultural shifts, you still need someone on the bus to prevent them from becoming moving dumpsters. The driving itself would be much easier, as you point out. That's not the only thing that a driver does.
You could have a guy making minimum wage sit in the back and tell people not to act stupid.
That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k.
Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.
Very optimistic for you to believe that politically entrenched unions in major US cities will allow this
Buyouts for the affected bus drivers.
For historical reference, this is how longshoremen/dockworkers were compensated when shipping containers increased efficiency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856522 (citations)
That was a very fun sub thread to read, both for the on-topic and off-topic discussion. Thanks for sharing.
In the Bay a police officer staffed on a rapid bus line in 2022 needed ~ $250k benefits included. It won't be that cheap
In LA you have contracted security guards who often just walk around the metro without the same authority of an actual LEO.
That's typically enough to stop most weird behavior like throwing trash on the ground.
Are they a lot cheaper than actual LEOs? I presumed that going rates would be similar. And I guess the "spicier" question is, are they cheaper than a bus operator?
LA metro has a stage below them called "ambassadors" who walk around with ipads, presumably to help people navigate the system and also call for maintenance or security should there be a need. From what I can gleam they are paid $25/hr.
From what I know of LA metro, most people ignore the ambassadors.
https://www.theladders.com/job-listing/-72867907153225138/un...
This isn't exactly a direct source, but it's listing the hourly pay at 25.26$.
You wouldn't even need them to ride every single bus, just enough to deter weird behavior.
Even if hypothetically they cost as much as a real bus driver, this would be much safer. A bus driver doing overtime and possibly texting people isn't too hard to beat.
The "driver" could become more armed security and janitor.
On BART safety concerns and union contracts restrict automation. This fun article from 2017 [1] could have been written today but shows why it's so hard for public infrastructure to be effective. Every actor is incentivized to get something out of public infrastructure. In the current AI mood I suspect opposition to automation by unions would be even stronger.
The Abundance movement has put a good moniker to this concept: Everything Bagel Liberalism.
[1]: https://sf.streetsblog.org/2017/03/06/lets-talk-seriously-ab...
Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service? Or is it the chicken-and-egg of "ridership isn't high enough to demand more frequent service" + the distraction of shinier rail projects? Bus drivers would be cheaper than rail construction, I think you need to sell "more busses" politically first.
The total cost of a bus is just over $100/hour (I last checked in 2019, so a bit more from inflation), and a driver directly makes around $30/hr plus benefits easially will put you over $50. Now add in all training and management that isn't directly per hour but if you didn't have a driver you wouldn't pay. You do have maintenance and fuel costs per hour, insurance and the cost of a bus. There are are a lot of "it depends" and I've never seen a formal analysis of the true costs, but to round numbers we can say half the costs are the driver and be close enough for discussion.
If we take the same $ and get rid of the drivers we can run twice as many buses and that increased service will get a lot of riders who previously thought the service was too bad. Though you will need to run the additional service for a few years before people figure out service is no longer bad and start using it.
Now we do have to assume some intelligence in bus routing. There are a lot of bad bus routes in cities that will never get more riders because of how stupid they are.
Of course you are right that politics gets in the picture. Rail gets far too much attention for projects where the lowly bus is cheaper for otherwise identical service (and where rail is needed it is often done wrong). As already pointed out unions will hate this plan and they have power to screw the rest of the population (who because they don't ride now don't think they would if this plan happened) and the environment (they care about the environment only after their own self interests.
Still the numbers work on paper: self driving buses should get a lot more riders on yoru bus system because you can afford to run more service.
Are you factoring the purchase price of the bus? I believe they cost around $1m. Then there is also having to purchase the yard space to store the bus if that isn't already available. Maintenance and cleaning and associated costs. I'm not sure how often a bus is routinely replaced with a new one.
> Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?
On rail I'm not as sure but on bus yes. Drivers are the largest cost associated with a bus line. There's also a whole set of downstream costs like bathroom breaks which requires that routes are aligned with bathroom stops and that bathrooms are kept in good working order. Breaks also decrease bus frequency (humans need breaks!) and running more buses is often limited by the number of drivers you can hire.
However bus drivers often play a dual role in US transit of discouraging anti-social behavior so it's unclear to me if you could even get rid of the bus driver and the associated inefficiencies or you'd just need to replace them with a police officer and deal with the exact same problems.
Many bus drivers are unhappy having to play this role, so that's also a factor.
The bus driver is making what 60k maybe 90k a year? According to LA metro their new electric fleet is costing about $1.1m per bus. It would take over a decade for labor to exceed just the initial outlay. I'm not sure that busses are even used that long before replacement.
In terms of bathroom breaks, I've seen the driver pull over to use the mcdonalds or grocery store bathrooms so that is probably "free." There are only a few places in LA metro system where there is a purpose built layover facility where one might imagine there being a metro maintained bathroom facility. Most layover facilities are just dedicated street parking for busses to queue, such as the one at the end of Western blvd and franklin where I've seen the drivers utilize the Lazy Acres grocery store facilities.
Bus drivers in the US are often behind a plexiglass shield, have a panic button, etc. and with reason.
If buses ran more often, they hopefully would become attractive to a lot more people. Anecdotally, I think most issues happen later at night where there are a handful of people on the bus. Having more people all the time would hopefully discourage anti-social behavior even if it wouldn't prevent incidents.
On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency. For most rail in the US the largest factor in maintenance is weather and so you could run a lot more trains without changing the costs much. You do need to buy more trains, and they will need to be cleaned, but it wouldn't be hard to get enough to people on board to pay those incremental costs. (in the US the bottleneck is often an expensive tunnel that is shared between several not busy lines, each line could itself handle many more trains all day than they have at the peak without changing maintenance costs - but the tunnel is full and it costs too much to build a new one - this is why so many in transit are focusing on construction costs - if we can build a short tunnel we unlock a lot of better transit)
On rail the largest costs are building and maintaining the rail until you get to very high frequency.
In the cities I've lived, it's not quite that.
Building rail is a lot of dollars, but politicians are often happy to throw money at that problem. It's good for a dozen industries, like construction.
But that money cannot then be used to operate the rail long-term. That burden is on the city entirely.
I've lived in two cities that turned down millions of dollars in federal transit grants because they didn't have the money for maintenance and operation.
Capital costs are paid differently and so we can often safely ignore construction costs as they are a different budget.
Putting maintenance into that capital bucket though is accounting fraud and illegal. If you have a rail line the largest cost is regular maintenance which is based on time not wear until you have a very large number of trains running. So my point stands even if you separate the buckets.
Are driver costs really the primary thing stopping increased bus route service?
It's usually that $transit_company needs $xxx,xxx,xxx to do a good job.
Politicians will only give it $yy,yyy,yyy to do the job.
Bus drivers already have to assist handicapped passengers that are getting on and off the bus (at least for my metro area bus service), so someone will need to be in there anyways.
A better bus and stop design eliminates more of that. You can have call ahead for help if you need to. A busy bus route normal people will be glad to help the disabled as well so long as what they need to do isn't hard and doesn't take much time (which it shouldn't - see better design...). For the rest paratransit should take them because despite the higher costs disabled people if they need to much help are taking time from everyone else who wants to get someplace not wait while someone is slowly loaded onto the bus.
The bus driver is often tying down the wheelchair with dedicated straps.
People in cities don't like to ride with strangers if they can help it, generally. This isn't absolute - if density gets high enough and people get used to it, they will absolutely do it, but if they have the choice to avoid it they generally will.
No amount of self-driving busses fixes that.
The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus - which is probably not usable for them anyway. Too many people do ride the bus all over the world (even in the US) to think that is really true. Statisticians and Psychologists have long known people lie about their reasons for doing something.
idiotsecant wrote "if they can help it". Which means people take into account things like travel time, congestion, safety risks, general comfort, etc.
>The only people who say that are people who are justifying their not riding the bus
Is this supposed to be a tautology? Obviously people who justify it are people justifying it. I would bet real money that the vast majority of women will choose a private vehicle over a bus if they were the same price.
People seem happy to get short-haul flights when driving is an option, so riding with strangers can’t be the issue.
It is because the airline ticket price filters out homeless people that scare suburbanites.
Short haul flights are usually faster than driving, and there is much more policing of strangers than with a train or bus.
i was curious so i looked this up: LA Metro (combined bus and rail) has a monthly ridership of like 25 million [0]. that's nearly a million people taking shared public transit every day. anecdotally, i chose to ride metro rail over driving when i had a "real" commute. lots of people do.
people in NY and Chicago are fiercely defensive of their mass transit options. the bay area would be a terrible place without BART and Muni.
for all its problems, shared mass transit is a net good and there are millions of people in this country who prefer it.
[0] - https://opa.metro.net/MetroRidership/
For a self-driving company, replacing a lot of drivers servicing some passengers is much better financially than replacing a few drivers servicing many passengers. Pencil it out yourself and you'll see that doing robotaxis is much better than doing robobuses. Plus, have any cities suggested that they would contract out their business driving to an automous company? Has anyone asked the unions to see what they might do about it?
Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
For the company maybe, but for everyone else it is worse. Taxis are worse for the environment than cars because you have to count all the driving around empty picking people up (demand is rarely even in all directions). Rideshare is only of limited use outside fixed routes as people have places to be an detouring to pick up someone else makes them mad.
What a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business.
- Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins.
- Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only.
- Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
Why do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world?
Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed.
Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.
The value of a business is entirely the part the second of the line - its entirely people speculating on the future value. Thats why Telsa is worth so much compared to other auto makers - its a small, niche player who makes poor quality cars - but investors believe it will take over the world hence its 'valuation'.
This is assuming you mean just the economic definition of value. If you mean value more broadly, then your statement is even less true; in that case hedge funds would be worth nothing.
>hedge funds would be worth nothing.
People who want to maintain their wealth find value in hedge funds. Being able to insulate your wealth from whateveris happening in the world, without you having to think about it is valuable.
The customer is often merely a product to be farmed like livestock for as much of their disposable income as can possibly done. The people who are provided value are usually the shareholders not the people who are using the product or service.
Both the business and the customer get value when the customer spends their income on something from the business.
If I charge you $100 for a glass of lemonade you get value too, but it is not a good value.
And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.
Do we still believe this propaganda? Really?
Because Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
Probably not ideal if one company controls the whole shebang though.
Currently it's looking like Waymo's most viable competitors are in China, namely Pony.ai and Baidu's Apollo.
Even without competition it will be a long time before Waymo is operating in most American cities.
Assuming Chinese competitors get cut off as a "threat to national security", I'm sure Waymo would behave responsibility as a monopoly and won't be driving for a system that "accidentally" end with private car ownership being eroded along with public transport options in favour of their product.
It would be crazy if a self driving car company would undertake projects that undermine public transport, for example. Proposing mad things like vacuum pod trains to head off conventional HSR for example. Imagine!
Americans are incapable of constructing HSR all on their own. It doesn't matter if anyone tries to distract them, they'll be tied up in 200 years of lawsuits over whether the fake environment reports are long enough anyway.
Autonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
They will make it worse, as it makes it easier to move a vehicle around. When the price goes down, the usage goes up. And it's traffic whether the vehicle has a human being transported, it's circling waiting for a fare, or it's on the way back, empty, from taking a child to school
That's what congestion pricing is for.
You no longer need inner city parking, and people will be more willing to jump on public transport to skip traffic because you are not bound by the location of your own car anyway.
Are all those cars going to keep circling the block at night when nobody is driving?
They’ll do what taxis have always done when not in use — go to a lot or garage in a cheap part of town.
You think taxi companies are paying for enough parking spaces to store most of their fleet at once? A lot of those cars are stored on the street in front of the house of the driver.
Also, the problem of storing something like 10k taxis pales in comparison to storing 100k+ cars. Some large cities have millions of cars. When was the last time you drove to a stadium concert or ball game? It takes hours to get something like 30k cars in and out of those parking lots when everyone is trying to use the same roads at the same time. It's absolute gridlock.
So to implement anything like what you're talking about you'd need a network of garages and lots in the periphery of a large city, and the road infrastructure that can handle 100k cars driving from outside the city to your home all in time to whisk you away on your morning commute.
For that kind of civic planning & engineering complexity you could just build public transportation based on trains, light rail and busses.
For now, their Nashville test cars seem to be stored in a lot that's basically unused otherwise (I'm not even sure what building it belongs to). I drive by it occasionally. It's not the cheapest part of town, but it's probably pretty affordable.
Maybe do some overnight legs to other cities? Need some sleeper cars.
Covid taught us that we don’t really have enough space to park all aircraft: we expect them to “park” in the sky.
I wonder how downtimes will go when one of the inevitable duopoly players has a system downtime.
They might fix it a bit. Cars might be able to travel at more consistent speeds, not speeding up and slowing down, that causes traffic, and fewer accidents would also reduce traffic.
Maybe in the future they could also travel closer together!
you are right, it probably won't fix the traffic, but it doesn't matter because if you are not steering the wheel then you can work or study while in the traffic.
there is a huge economic impact
Oh good, even more hours of the day my boss can take from me to wring even more labour out of me
Or you could use that time for your own purposes, no reason to allow for your boss to control your commute.
We already have solutions for this called trains, buses, subways, etc. Public transportation. Yes, America is huge but look at China building out high-speed rail at an incredible pace. The amount of money dumped into self-driving could have built out an impressive amount of infrastructure for public transportation.
Not to say this isn’t a worthy problem to solve or that cars have no use. They’re great for rural life. But maybe 80% of the use-case for self-driving cars is pretty much solved by trains. They’re fast, generate no traffic, are very safe, and reduce pollution in urban areas. Even electric cars produce noxious break dust.
Addendum
The “America is too big” argument drives me nuts. (1) Again, look at China. (2) The EU is decently large and connected very well by rail. (3) We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains. Not to mention what a boost it would be to the economy with all the jobs a project like that would create. Sure, we wouldn’t have an Elon but that’s fine by me.
This argument never makes a lick of sense, these are entirely different problems. Trains, buses, subways, do not go to my house, and they do not go to my destination. They (sometimes) get close, and then I have to get through the last mile somehow, often a taxi or Uber. That transfer alone is annoying and it often makes sense to just take the taxi the whole way, even if it costs more, and it's a better experience than any public transit, so why not?
Maybe that setup works in China where everyone lives on top of each other in shoeboxes and you can just route a monorail through an apartment building, but I like both having my space and living adjacent to a large city. You could put a teleporter to the train station on my boulevard and I'd stand next to it while I wait for an Uber. You could build a train station a block from my house and I'd move somewhere else. I would pay multiples of any train ticket price to get into an autonomous sleeper Waymo and wake up in a city hours away in front of my hotel. You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option, and I don't think I'm alone in that, and building more of it doesn't solve that.
America's strength here is that it's full of great places where you can live like that, take public transit everywhere, walk everywhere else, if that's what you want, with the compromises it comes with. But instead of moving to those places people say "build more public transit", which then just sounds like "I wish public transit was more accessible to me specifically" and then we're just back at taxis, or building rail to connect the front doors of everyone on earth.
> Maybe that setup works in China
It doesn't, really. China sells absolutely fucktons of cars domestically. There are also dozens of brands that most people have never even heard of and don't even get exported because domestic demand for a functional 10-15,000 electric car is so high. Every residential complex is absolutely rammed with cars, ranging from tiny runabouts to Tank 700 plus-sized SUVs.
That demand doesn't exist because everyone lives 5 minutes walk from work and loves the subway. Though millions upon millions of people do both, and subways have expanded probably 1000% or more in the last 15 years, million upon millions also want a car. In many cases they may not represent all the miles a person travels (eg subway to work but car for other trips).
High speed rail also is a replacement for many car miles driven because while a cross-country ticket is expensive, driving is still expensive in fuel and wear and takes days to boot.
There are definitely places in the US that I would like to see intercity high-speed rail specifically. Flying is convenient and frankly magical but always feels like a huge chore to do.
Even in China, flying is usually cheaper than HSR, and over twice as fast once airborne (300km/hr train vs 800km/hr plane). But getting and through airports is still more of a hassle than the trains. Even when taxis are fairly cheap, there's nothing like popping out in the city.
Though it's not quite like a cosy European station near the old town: some some stations are the better part of half a mile across (not along the platforms, across), and aren't right in the city centre so there can still be some walking involved!
On the other hand, you can have takeaway food delivered to the station ahead and receive it at your seat. And it's far more comfortable even in economy.
-->You literally could not pay me to take more public transit if I have any other option
The diversity of the world truly never ceases to amaze me. Thats a wild take. Driving is an awful experience - its expensive, its stressful, cars are uncomfortable, and the whole thing is extremely dangerous.
More over, I would argue that America is very much not a place where you can live car-free. There are very few places in the country where you can live without a car, certainly if you have a family.
That being said, building more public transit everywhere would allow more people to get out of the way of people like you who will drive no matter what.
Sure, the alternative view is just as wild to me, and I've travelled plenty both ways. It's only expensive if you don't value the advantages, and even in absolute terms it doesn't cost much more. Public transit is for me way more stressful because crowds are annoying, train and bus schedules are annoying, people are inconsiderate and you have no control over it at all. The worst part of public transit is the public; I love going to the theatre but I've mostly stopped for the same reason and got a nice setup at home instead. It's not IMAX but IMAX isn't that fun anyway with a bad audience.
Cars are clean and if they aren't, there's a rating system for that. Bus is dirty? The city will surely see to your ticket eventually.
Cars are uncomfortable? Pay another couple dollars and Uber will send you an SUV just for you if you want. Try offering a couple dollars to the people sandwiching you on either side on the subway and see if it makes you more comfortable.
I've never had a license beyond a temp, my family doesn't own a car. I agree driving is stressful, which is why I prefer to pay people who drive for a living to do it for me, so it's not about driving for driving's sake, it's about what's comfortable to use and convenient. Most public transit is neither.
For long distance trains:
While I also love trains and public transit, China is about the same physical size of the US, but has about four times the population, so it's four times denser. Definitely makes trains more appealing for them.
> We’re America. We went to the frickin moon. Defeated the Nazis. Etc. We can build trains.
Absolutely we can build trains. It's not that we're incapable. It's that it's not financially viable based on the usage it'll get.
Again, I'd love better trains in the US, but it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases in the US still due to density and current value props for individuals. If it was valuable, someone would do it.
Now, for intra-city transit, the lack of trains also drives me insane.
There are already places in the US that can financially justify Japan-tier high speed rail (specifically the northeast corridor), but Connecticut simultaneously wants high speed rail through the coastal towns and opposes the land acquisition required to get adequately straight tracks. If American politics is unable to get out of the way in such a slam-dunk case for rail, what hope is there to bring public transit and urbanism to all of the car-dependent suburbia in the rest of the country?
If there's a trillion dollar business there, it's on transporting goods, not people. Ultimately a self driving car is a cheaper chauffeur or a cheaper taxi. The addressable market doesn't change that much because of price, and the more it changes it, the worse it is for infrastructure. Deadhead miles traveled are not better for traffic because there is no human driving them. All we get is more miles traveled over the same limited infra.
Tesla isn't really in the game. Their robotaxi's only purpose is to inflate the share price. Tesla hasn't driven a single mile without a safety driver in the car.
This feels like an inflection point.
We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
They're in the Phoenix area as well.
List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/
And Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Tokyo
Los Angeles
No, not NYC. They have a testing permit but it's not even listed in "coming soon" on their site.
And Atlanta via Uber
and RAPIDLY growing in Atlanta from what I see as I wander the city. I just saw one of their new Geely based vehicles today for the first time.
I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
They have hired staff in San Antonio but not officially announced a launch yet.
And "Silicon Valley" (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Los Altos). Quotes because that excludes San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Milpitas.
There are a ton of them in Sunnyvale, so I expect that area to flip to public availability soon.
And Los Angeles
Not, Lyft, Flexdrive. Flexdrive is a fleet management company which Lyft owns. They have the things Waymo needs - parking lots and vehicle maintainers. Waymo doesn't need the rideshare service and Lyft app.
In San Francisco, Waymo has already passed Lyft in number of rides, and is projected to pass Uber by the end of the year.
Both Lyft and Flexdrive:
> Riders will hail via the Waymo app, and as our service grows, riders will also be able to use the Lyft app to match with a Waymo vehicle.
(Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not in partnerships)
Is this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.
Also interesting that it's not exclusive - they're saying you'll be able to use either the Waymo app or the Lyft app (and get a Waymo at random, presumably). I believe the previous deals with Uber have all been exclusive - no Waymo app in that market.
From market standpoint I am curious if Google or Amazon is willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base.
Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
what moat does lyft have? i know san francisco is a special case but waymo is already beating out lyft, with its own app: https://www.fastcompany.com/91347503/waymo-is-winning-in-san...
moat is in institutional knowledge of operations in ride hailing industry.
Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
What customer base (at least in the US) does Lyft have that Google or Amazon don't? Estimates for Amazon are ~250M and Google ~275M users in the US.
it's not only about number of users. You also have regulations in different cities and states, existing models trained based on past supply demand behavior, somewhat optimized workflows for the ride hailing industry, payments, risks.
They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
>> willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base
Sure - that seems like "tech" - I was asking about "customer base"
Is there any hope of actually being able to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer? Seems that a concerning majority of the autonomous driving conversation is framed in the context of ride-sharing.
It makes sense to target ridesharing while the tech is being developed because:
(a) you can amortize the large up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day.
(b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe
(c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this).
Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote assistance will decrease. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own.
At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one that's exactly the type you need no matter where you are.
Vehicles also act as large portable storage, which is very convenient when you have kids. e.g. stroller, diaper bag, change of clothes, sports equipment, emergency supplies. It would be annoying to always have to keep things on your person. With a personal vehicle, you also don't have to worry about something falling out of a bag and being lost forever after the vehicle drives away, or accidentally leaving a piece of equipment in it; just go check the parking lot. Or what if you want to make a trip to multiple stores and want to keep bags from the first in the car while you're in the second?
EVs also have the potential to act as large backup batteries for your home.
You can also choose how to amortize your costs. My mom's been driving the same car for 22 years now.
Yes, there is hope to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer. One example is comma.ai, inc.
“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee.
Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.
The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment
Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
Nashville's airport suffered gridlock yesterday: https://fox17.com/news/local/what-caused-the-over-14000-vehi...
Autonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers.
What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
I disagree. Building trains in America is next to impossible in the modern day. Obtaining the property for the railways would be extraordinarily difficult, because America has such strong property rights and is such a legalistic society. It's a recipe for way over-budget and behind schedule projects. Just look at the California project. There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades. Furthermore, the built environment is so spread out because it was built for cars, so you don't get the clustering effects of density around train stations. Rail isn't that helpful if you have to walk another 30 minutes from the station to actually get to your destination.
Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
Even with traffic waves, the capacity of a road is not infinite and trains beat it hand over fist, simply because of physics. Imagine a crowded highway with invisible cars: people would be sitting 30 feet x 15 feet apart. That is why there is traffic more than anything, the limits of that capacity with that really loose packing that cars enable.
Walking 30 mins from the station is no issue. Try walking through a far flung terminal at DEN or ATL or the new TBIT at LAX, you will walk 30+ mins from the gate before you hit your rideshare point I expect. Also, rail stations do not exist in a vacuum. They often interface with bus lines that go parallel or perpendicular to the rail routing, so that 30 min walk could just be a 2 min ride.
We also do have railbuilding experience in this country. LA metro has built out their entire network of over 100 rail stations within the last 35 years. This is the fastest rate of railbuilding on the entire continent, not just in the U.S., in a high land value land labor cost area to boot. As we speak multiple concurrent rail projects are being planned or actively built. Much of the build out is paid by a 1 cent sales tax measure that local voters approved with 71% in favor.
> There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades.
we could solve this by importing entire crews from Europe or Asia, but knuckledraggers insist on cREaTinG lOCal UNioN jOBs
I don't believe that anyway. The USA has a very robust rail network, it's just all dedicated to freight. Building and maintaining railroads is not some forgotten capability; it's very high tech with robots/automation doing a lot of the work now.
The USA has proven to be... incapable of completing any public transport infrastructure anywhere near on budget or on time. This is a deeply rooted problem. Until this gets solved autonomous electric vehicles could theoretically just leapfrog the problem altogether. Point to point transportation also mostly solves the last mile problem.
Point to point transportation is not sustainable with a vehicle as large as a car. The physics are simply quite poor and there are too many people to move, at least in cities with real traffic like LA or NYC vs small edge case backups.
We also need buses and mini-buses and taxis to get people to and from train stations. Autonomous driving makes this cheap and feasible.
Unfortunately, our airport traffic is getting a Tesla Tunnel instead of a real train.
I have a feeling Nashville normies are going to be super psyched having to drive behind these things.
Oh yes please, just a little closer! Come on bring it to Talladega AL where tons of blind people live!
Meh, I'll stick to driving my own car or renting one. The last thing I want is paying for the "privilege" of being rated by the driver or spied on my an autonomous car.
Why would a company like Lyft/Uber partner with Waymo at this point? That sounds like doing a deal with the competitor who _will_ completely kill them off in the future.
Not necessarily. Does Waymo really want to run all the additional infra and services and people ops required to be a full soup-to-nuts ride hailing service?
I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
Owning the user base seems like a huge strategic advantage.
Nobody needs this.
This is incentivized as private enterprise developing autonomous warfare tech.
People do “need” it but for the wrong reasons such as failures around zoning urban planning, public transportation, etc.
Privatization of many things is turning out to be a failure. Sewage, water - see the UK, failure. Healthcare: USA, failure. Utilities: UK, USA, failure. Mail: Denmark, failure. Transportation: UK, USA, utter failure. Further privatization will deepen this failure.
Yeah. Almost as if capitalism seeks to generate profits at the expense of the consumer especially if they have limited choices, which capitalism itself produces.
any technology is dual use if you squint hard enough
It doesn't really help consumers whose whole point is to get from point A to B in the quickest and most comfortable manner.
It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
> but we all know trains and trams are the better tech
Great, but I'm actually in Nashville and I know there's about zero chance we get a (real) train, and that the train stops would definitely be no closer than the bus stop that's already inconvenient enough to not be worth it. The bus system used to (I think they still have it in one area) have a program where you could get free Uber/Lyft rides to/from bus stops, and cheaper autonomous rides could definitely make that more feasible to continue offering.
> oil protectionism
The Waymo vehicles I've been in were electric. If electric cars are "oil protectionism", then you can probably warp trains into it too (the bus certainly would be).
> It doesn't really help consumers whose whole point is to get from point A to B in the quickest and most comfortable manner.
It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in. The time penalty is minimal (except for that time I had to chase a waymo around the block), and worth it for the comfort and safety.
> It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement.
It certainly helps me arrive to my destination quicker than muni metro which I can often run faster than. Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
> I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not?
How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
> The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
And fulfillment of individual desires
My whole argument is that you can fulfill individual desires better through other means.
> It does, I'm certainly more comfortable in an i-Pace than most of the economy hoopties I've ubered in.
The lack of choices due to monopoly capitalism is a self fulfilling prophecy. (regular capitalism after some time is monopoly capitalism)
> Throwing individual benefit under the bus for collective benefit is rightfully a non-starter in the US.
This is a false dichotomy brought about by living in an economy controlled by finance capital. Individual benefit does not have to look like this and can be more internally and externally consistent.
Especially since this industry contains the seeds of its own destruction IN its own logic. Like I said, its more expensive than rail and to have any speed benefits it requires the majority of cars to be autonomous, which most likely will never happen. Not to mention physical safety and cyber security/privacy.
> How much would a private room cost, even if we had ubiquitous Japan-tier rail?
A private room would cost less because there are less costs involved overall. Rail/tram is cheaper and better.
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I am, generally, arguing for medium and long distance travel tho. But in regards to short-distance specifically I think my argument still stands. I dont think it presents any greater benefit than the alternatives, of which some are definitely better. You'll see how mass use, if it even gets there, will make it just "another one". It doesn't scale.
Plus autonomous warfare dev right under our noses.
Don’t rule out Tesla’s Robotaxi. I’m 10 rides in (Bay Area— around SF proper), and it’s clean, cheap, and efficient. As good or better than Waymo.
IMO: - Tesla is pushing Waymo on pricing and service areas - Tesla will drop the safety monitor in the next 6 months**
**I say this as a FSD subscriber on my own car and seeing the arch of progress, albeit with a software branch that’s supposedly 3-6 months behind Robotaxi’s
Is Tesla robotaxi actually even close to Waymo? I thought they still needed someone in the car with the robotaxi and Waymo had been operating fully autonomous for quite a while already. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons people really like Waymo, it’s like a private ride.
Tesla lost the race and won’t even be in the space in any meaningful way in a few years. They’re only limping along because they have some guy pumping the stock.
6 normal months, or 6 Elon months?
Are you talking about the Robotaxi where there’s a man sitting behind the steering wheel?
His name is Rob. Rob-o-taxi.
Or the one with the fake man behind a white lever? https://youtu.be/eAkeZqAN_qU?t=20
Next to, not behind. I see a strong future for both Waymo and Tesla in the driverless car biz.
Tesla is probably a year behind on their software, but they can scale out infinitely faster than Waymo on the hardware.
Either way, we win.
No, I'm pretty sure this one is the one where he is behind the steering wheel.
As I commute on a motorcycle (often in the rain, causing lower visibility) this is terrifying to me and I hope regulators in my state don't let it happen here until Tesla can prove their "camera only" approach is safe.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...
I'm always flabbergasted by Tesla fans' commitment to vastly inferior product and their insistence that the big breakthrough is "just around the corner bro, believe me". I'm pretty sure you all just have Stockholm Syndrome after paying for FSD in like 2019 and ingesting copium for over 5 years. I hope you reach a place in your life where you have the confidence to ask for a higher standard.