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Once it's confident in the technology and business model, Google can absolutely afford the capex of putting a million Waymo cars on the road. They'd probably ta

Once it's confident in the technology and business model, Google can absolutely afford the capex of putting a million Waymo cars on the road. They'd probably take out a massive loan, and the worst case is having to ditch the lidar gear and sell the fleet on the second hand market. But it's doable. But where did you get a million cars from? To equal Tesla's existing fleet? Uber has 3 million active drivers globally. If you assume that they're working in 8 hour shifts, 1 million Waymo cars is a rollout sized to replace Uber. Coming at the math from another direction, Uber does 1.6 billion rides a quarter. A million cars would mean 18 rides per car per day. Totally doable. But Waymo would surely focus on countries with high wages - US, Canada, UK, Australia, most of Western Europe. Replacing Uber in only those countries would only need perhaps 500,000 cars. Of course they're going to ramp up towards those numbers, but once the tech works and it's just a matter of cash, it's going to happen very quickly.

gbronner 6y ago
Current setup seems to work on existing cars. They can just sell conversion kits for a few years -- it will be like an aftermarket stereo. They don't need to own all the cars.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  I just don't see that happening. Uber is worth $65 billion and they have to give 80% of their revenue to their drivers. If Waymo can get a 60% gross margin instead of a 20% gross margin, their profits could be an order of magnitude higher. This is a trillion dollar opportunity, and its the first thing Alphabet is seriously pursuing that can rival search. Aftermarket conversion kits are a rounding error and there's no long term moat. And that's before you start to get in to issues like improper installation and use, aftermarket modification, accidents causing bad PR when the gear isn't even running etc. Remember that AEB demo a decade back where the car just slammed in to the object it was meant to stop for and it turned out they hadn't turned it on? Nightmare.

gbronner 6y ago

Current setup seems to work on existing cars. They can just sell conversion kits for a few years -- it will be like an aftermarket stereo. They don't need to own all the cars.

reitzensteinm 6y ago
I just don't see that happening. Uber is worth $65 billion and they have to give 80% of their revenue to their drivers. If Waymo can get a 60% gross margin instead of a 20% gross margin, their profits could be an order of magnitude higher. This is a trillion dollar opportunity, and its the first thing Alphabet is seriously pursuing that can rival search. Aftermarket conversion kits are a rounding error and there's no long term moat. And that's before you start to get in to issues like improper installation and use, aftermarket modification, accidents causing bad PR when the gear isn't even running etc. Remember that AEB demo a decade back where the car just slammed in to the object it was meant to stop for and it turned out they hadn't turned it on? Nightmare.