The Alphabet-scale comparisons are fair wrt to whether this is a "big" bet or not, but trying to minimize this via comparison to total world sales or California

The Alphabet-scale comparisons are fair wrt to whether this is a "big" bet or not, but trying to minimize this via comparison to total world sales or California registrations less so (given that a primary promise of transit AVs is that they may replace many privately-owned vehicles). While some have projected how many traditional vehicles they can displace, I don't think anyone really knows how that'll play out. I doubt any of these companies will go making bets that obviously rival the scale of traditional vehicle sales/ownership at the time they're made, especially before they get a sense of how reliable AV transit affects the decisions individuals make about car ownership as they face major maintenance, repairs, and replacement. I've read one projection that says each could replace 10 traditional vehicles. If that worked out, it seems like a bet on 10m vehicles, enough to replace all 100m sold worldwide, would be astonishingly bold. If you assumed an initial scope of the entire US, the equivalent bold bet would be 1.7m vehicles. If you reduced the scope to California, that bet would be about 200k vehicles. If we guess that the difference between "astonishingly bold" and "bold" is an order of magnitude, these would be reduced to 1m, 170k, and 20k...