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These are reasonable points, but there's no hard numbers showing why Waymo cannot scale and why it can never be profitable. In my opinion, despite the cost of

by eloff 5y ago

These are reasonable points, but there's no hard numbers showing why Waymo cannot scale and why it can never be profitable. In my opinion, despite the cost of the self driving hardware, which is much more than just Lidars, it can still be profitable. Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City. Certainly the costs for Waymo are far lower and scale better with volume. 3D mapping is another cost, but it's also potentially doable since it's a big upfront cost with small ongoing costs. Taking it one (or a few) city at a time could well work. At least nothing I've read here convinced me otherwise.

H8crilA 5y ago
Not to mention that most hardware has this magical deflationary property - gets cheaper over time. Look at lithium batteries or infrared sensors, for example.
- lumost 5y ago
  This is ultimately the bet. Even if Waymos taxi business does nothing more than start scaling up hardware manufacture and building trust. This isn’t a cheap strategy, but it’s believable that waymo could own most IP for self driving 10 years from now if they just outlast everyone else. They’re already on year 14 what’s wrong with another 2 decades?
breput 5y ago
I upvoted your comment because you make great points, but... > Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City I'm not defending the medallion system and it was corrupt af, but there were ordinary decent people who were destroyed by the subversion of this (completely corrupt and anti-competitive) system. As for the software, eh, the Google Streetview vs. Waymo requirements were one of the weaker points of this article. We don't actually know what data Google collects with their cars (we do know they collect WiFi data[1]), and it isn't inconceivable that they were collecting precise data. It is true that this data ages faster than Google can refresh it, though. I really believe that the software can scale but it is the real world/physical issues that will prevent this from ever becoming a real business. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

by eloff 5y ago

H8crilA 5y ago

Not to mention that most hardware has this magical deflationary property - gets cheaper over time. Look at lithium batteries or infrared sensors, for example.

lumost 5y ago
This is ultimately the bet. Even if Waymos taxi business does nothing more than start scaling up hardware manufacture and building trust. This isn’t a cheap strategy, but it’s believable that waymo could own most IP for self driving 10 years from now if they just outlast everyone else. They’re already on year 14 what’s wrong with another 2 decades?

breput 5y ago

I upvoted your comment because you make great points, but... > Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City I'm not defending the medallion system and it was corrupt af, but there were ordinary decent people who were destroyed by the subversion of this (completely corrupt and anti-competitive) system. As for the software, eh, the Google Streetview vs. Waymo requirements were one of the weaker points of this article. We don't actually know what data Google collects with their cars (we do know they collect WiFi data[1]), and it isn't inconceivable that they were collecting precise data. It is true that this data ages faster than Google can refresh it, though. I really believe that the software can scale but it is the real world/physical issues that will prevent this from ever becoming a real business. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/