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> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too. Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely
by ugh123 3y ago
> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too.
Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely easier than scaling the amount of Uber/Lyft drivers available and willing to go to said area.
- nradov 3y agoNope. Cars are expensive. Waymo won't keep a bunch of extras sitting around just so that they have reserve capacity to scale up service during unusually busy events. It's more profitable just to make customers wait, or ask them to pay a higher fare for priority service.
- bigyikes 3y agoCars are extremely cheap compared to their drivers.
- aetherson 3y agoI don't think that Waymo cars are.
- xw390111 3y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ceo-says-tesla-is-not-a-competitor-gives-estimated-cost-of-autonomous-vehicles/?sh=71f9dbee541b https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ce... "Krafcik made the point, as some analysts predict autonomous vehicle technology will be too expensive to adopt en masse. Waymo uses LiDAR sensors in its vehicles, which previously retailed for as much as $75,000. In 2019, Krafcik signaled that its Honeycomb LiDAR units now cost around $7,500." And price is only going to come down over time.
- fragmede 3y agoLet's say the Waymo cars are $1 million each, which is probably high, given than a fully loaded i-Pace is $80k, which still leaves $920,000 for Google/Waymo devices and software costs to get to $1 million. Given the estimate for a human life at $7.4 million[1], I think they are. [1]https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-valuation https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...
- foota 3y agoYou could pay someone California's minimum wage 24/7 for 140,000 a year.
- mckn1ght 3y agoLabor cost pretty much always increases while the cost of research technology decreases once it encounters economies of scale. A car today at the admittedly high cost estimate of $1M will “pay itself off” versus your labor estimate in less than 8 years. Humans don’t get paid off and then work for free afterwards.
- aetherson 3y agoA taxi doesn't have a lifespan of 8 years, and note that while I don't think that a Waymo car costs anything like $1M, it's also not actually the case that you pay taxi drivers $140k per year. I see very little to suggest that a Waymo car costs less all-in over the course of about two years than a Prius and an Uber driver does, and that's the much more relevant comparison. Nothing to say that this couldn't change in the future. But that's my guess for the status quo.
- fragmede 3y agoTake $40k* for TCO for a Prius for 5 years, plus $140k for the driver to get to $190k. Using $140k because that matches the availability of software that doesn't need sleep. $190k - $80k for a jaguar ipace leaves $110k per vehicle for Waymo to work with, multiplied by the size of their fleet. How much do we want to figure a pile of sensors, computer hardware, and custom housings to cost? Minus insurance and electricity, which I don't know how much to figure and the answer is yeah I don't know. $110k over 2 years doesn't seem like that much, but multiplied across a sizable fleet it adds up. I'm sure they're scaling up as fast as they can. * https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/prius/2022/cost-to-own/ https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/prius/2022/cost-to-own/
- mckn1ght 3y ago> about two years … that's the much more relevant comparison why is 2 years the relevant timeframe?
- thereisnospork 3y agoWhat they can do is trivially reroute cars from the suburbs - a level of supply control Uber can only approximate with surge pricing.
- nradov 3y agoIt turns out everyone in the suburbs is also going to a Superbowl party. Whoops.
- earthwalker99 3y agoSimply not true. The US is constantly flooded with fresh immigrants who can get drivers licenses and drive for super cheap on unlivable wages.