our service – which already provides over 150,000
trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Austin
Interesting. That's about 8 million rides per year.
I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast.
I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B?
If they at some point make $10 per ride, they would only need something like 50 million rides per year to justify that investment with a p/e ratio of 20.
To go from 8M rides to 50M in 5 years they would have to increase their capacity by 50% per year. Might be possible?
How many rides are there every day in developed countries?
Their internal business case probably has them targeting not 50 million rides per year, but per week… at an absolute minimum
Regardless; at some point specialised vehicles will be developed which are ultra small and lightweight - less than $1,000 to produce - to take care of short downtown rides, for example.
Profitable from an operations perspective? Surely close since they charge the same order of magnitude as an Uber/Lyft and have fewer than one driver per vehicle (monitoring the vehicles).
Since they're using entirely electric cars that they will likely never sell so depreciation and maintenance will be favorable. There is the up-front cost of equipping the cars with equipment though, which I imagine is substantial.
For the high resolution maps, that cost is fixed per market area. It could limit a rollout to new markets by driving area.
On the other hand, they certainly have a much better vehicle utilization than the other ride-app companies. They cars are cooperating in covering an area, not competing for the rides there.
I mean, they're Google -- I'm guessing they're pulling out their "pointcloud of the entire world" for this one. The first point is a great one, tho; rideshare companies exist by offloading as much cost as possible onto their employees, and even then barely make it work.
Plus, at least some of the Waymos are super-fancy Jaguars -- tho it looks like roughly 20K Jaguars to 65K Chrysler minivans, according to Wikipedia. Still, they're all brand new vehicles; even with bulk discount, that can't be cheap.
Waymo does not have 85k cars lol. In their latest CPUC report they only have 480 cars in California and that is their biggest market by far. If they had 85k cars and only 175k rides per week that would be the worst business in the history of businessing.
Google has invested and also drawn external funding. From what I've seen in the last 15 years since founding the lower bound for their cost seems to be higher than $12bn and I can only imagine expenses will only accelerate.
Assuming they don't license the technology to everybody else and keep running their own cars. How much is this technology worth to every taxi company, every car manufacturer, every fleet operator in the world?
I imagine it's hard to quantify "profit" with such a research-driven org. It's like penciling out the profitability of the metaverse after years of $XX billion dollar losses. In general I get the sense that Waymo is more of a diverse investment than a pure ride-hailing play; for example, as of 2020 they were working for Volvo, Chrysler, Jaguar, and Nissan[1], presumably for $$$.
It's also worth remembering that Zoox exists (Amazon's more futuristic self-driving car play, no steering wheel at all), and has not at all gone the way of Alexa/the Dodo bird (yet). I expect them to make a big splash sometime in the coming decade, personally.
That is, of course, assuming they survive regulatory capture by Tesla, which would need a miracle or an unfair advantage to beat these two at this point, even if they finally follow the science on the need for LiDAR. Another big unknown is how the electorate will react to self-driving cars becoming more than a novelty; Elon Musk is absolutely correct that a backlash of some kind is inevitable even if the safety stats pencil out, IMHO. Trusting a machine is kind of inherently creepy - see Prof. Weinersmith's lectures on the topic:
> Tesla is going to destroy Waymo, they can’t compete
You're both wrong. This remains an open question.
Tesla has promised a Level 5 product but hasn't delivered; FSD is Level 3. Waymo has a Level 4 product, but it requires an expensive sensor suite.
If Tesla can get Level 4 with cameras only, you're right. They win. We currently have no indication they've cracked that. We also have no evidence it's not doable with current technology.
I really didn't expect such a response from HN! I guess the Elon energy is still going strong. Thanks for staying polite though :) probably the only place on the internet where polite convos about such a divisive topic/figure/company are still taking place.
Suffice to say, I really don't think drive time comparisons by biased unpaid beta testers is a good way to measure viability in this market. Safety, regulatory cooperation, and ethics branding are going to be paramount, all of which Tesla is known to struggle with, to say the least.
Again though, the biggest problem is technical. I think the evidence is objective and clear that LiDAR guarantees a level of safety unattainable with cameras alone. Not only will this slow down development, it also highlights the issues above; how many more "Tesla swerves into a white semi-truck because the sun was reflecting off of it in a weird way" stories could they survive before backlash? Especially when the passengers are random people instead of invested enthusiasts, many of which have their retirement investments tied up in the company's worth.
You can laugh at Zoox, but A) based on what...? it's still in the R&D phase, there's no consumer product to laugh at, and B) there's certainly a lot of smart people still working on it, and money pouring in. Again, (AFAICT as an outsider-) it's night-and-day compared to orgs Amazon has abandoned, like Alexa.
Until you can hop into the back seat of your Tesla and tell it to drive you somewhere with complete confidence then don't even compare the capabilities of Waymo and Tesla FSD.
I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast.
I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B?
If they at some point make $10 per ride, they would only need something like 50 million rides per year to justify that investment with a p/e ratio of 20.
To go from 8M rides to 50M in 5 years they would have to increase their capacity by 50% per year. Might be possible?