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Waymo is amazing and has fully replaced Uber for me in SF. They're also expanding to the entire peninsula from SF down to Cupertino - you're out of date on this

Waymo is amazing and has fully replaced Uber for me in SF. They're also expanding to the entire peninsula from SF down to Cupertino - you're out of date on this. Waymo driving in SF is way better than human. It's not timid either. This Mercedes post is marketing - it's not really what people consider autonomous given the constraints. > "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states." The above makes it nearly useless and far less useful than what Tesla has been shipping for years imo.

bko 2y ago
How is Waymo pricing compared to Uber or other ride share? I originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs but considering the tens of billions dumped into these companies, they can't charge lower prices as they have to recoup investments.
- acchow 2y ago
  If you tip on Uber/Lyft, then Waymo pricing is close (maybe a 5% premium). But during peak hours, Waymo is much more expensive.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  It's a dollar or two more expensive than the corresponding Uber (non-shared) fare in my experience, so a bit less after tips. Keep in mind that the "true" price of these services probably isn't the biggest pricing factor right now. The cost is a way to manage demand, get some additional income, and investigate what the market will bear.
  - bko 2y ago
    I doubt they're profitable though. From Bing: > As of the latest available information, Waymo is not yet profitable. Alphabet’s Q2 2023 earnings report indicated that its “Other Bets” category, which includes Waymo, had revenues of $285 million and an operating loss of $813 million. This was a decrease in operating loss from $1.34 billion in the second quarter of 2022, but still significant. Over the last five years, “Other Bets” has generated $3 billion in cumulative revenue but incurred $20 billion in operating losses, with Waymo constituting the bulk of these losses. I just don't see the end game. Are marginal rides not profitable even at Uber fates? Uber for instance was losing money because they were taking rev from profitable cities to give incentives and build up drivers in the new markets. But Waymo doesn't have that problem. Is it just GPU spend that they can eventually stop?
    - suzakus 2y ago
      Nothing about that quote indicates that waymo loses money on marginal rides, rather that it loses money in aggregate which is not particularly surprising considering low overall volume , r&d overhead of both head count and things like cars and facilities to store said cars
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      I suspect it's vaguely near gross profit, that is excluding almost all the expensive engineers, marketing, R&D costs, new silicon development costs, etc. It's not remotely operationally profitable though, you're right. The business model is pretty simple. Robotaxis can operate much cheaper than humans and simultaneously provide a better service. Competing at the same cost as existing services makes them massively profitable. You can unlock additional efficiencies through things like fleet management, not supporting unprofitable cities the way Uber has to, vehicles designed for longer service lives and so on. Most companies plan to use that market (and closely associated ones like food delivery) as a profitable beachhead to scale down the technology to the point where it can be applied more ubiquitously in things like consumer vehicles. Some are more vocal about this than others.
  - jackcosgrove 2y ago
    I wonder if anyone has done an analysis looking at a set of tasks and ordering them according to the ease of automating them compared to the cost of labor. Self-driving cars seem like a poor choice of market, since the task is very complex and there are also many people worldwide who are willing to work as drivers. The sweet spot would be a task that is easy to automate and also doesn't have much human competition. Obviously the OG automation case of assembly lines fits this. LLMs can occupy this space since there are probably more people who can drive a car than can write grammatically correct natural language. I would put self-driving trains in this category as well but that's an outsider's perspective.
- ra7 2y ago
  In addition to what others have said about pricing, you need to compare Waymo with Uber Black, not UberX or shared rides. Waymo says they are aiming to be a premium service because the cars (Jaguar I-pace) are much nicer and, of course, there’s the novelty of not having a driver.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Uber has sent me cars that did not have tires, wipers, or headlights. The fact that Waymo sends you a roadworthy car is, by itself, worth $5 per trip.
    - jen20 2y ago
      Is it? Or should a roadworthy car be considered table stakes for actually being on the road, and one which is not is instead worth a police report?
      - yCombLinks 2y ago
        Should be doesn't help. This is what actually happens.
      - jeffbee 2y ago
        At least in my city (state, really) the police have vacated their duties to enforce roadworthiness because hand-wringing quasiliberals said that enforcing the laws against bald tires and missing headlights was hurting the poor. Also my state does not have and never had annual safety inspections.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Though, what are the wipers for if the cameras on the Waymo are outside?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    It's not a novelty that the driver in the driverless car won't hit on, or harrass a woman taking a trip late a night in an altered state. Uber and Lyft have paid out to settle thousands of lawsuits brought by women who get assaulted by drivers.
- perryizgr8 2y ago
  > originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs In general, it's a mistake to think that selling price has anything to do with the costs. The price is simply what the market will bear. If people are paying Uber $x for a service, waymo would be stupid to price the same service much lower than that. If their costs are much lower, they would rather make that much more profit. If the rider wants a small piece of that pie they can invest in the business (via stocks in the case of Google).
  - dageshi 2y ago
    I think more realistically google right now does not want to undercut uber and by extension real drivers who're doing it for a living. They don't need that kind of bad publicity when potentially the licenses they operate under could be pulled given enough political pressure. I wouldn't consider current pricing indicative of what it might ultimately be, consider that if aggressive enough google could divert a big portion of the countries car spend to themselves.
tempestn 2y ago
It's not useless, but it's a very specific use case: commuting in rush hour traffic.
- dandy23 2y ago
  And that's a very annoying condition to drive under. So quite useful.
bhauer 2y ago
> "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology. called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states." It's remarkable how often these significant limitations are ignored. The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher. But you could compare such a system that works only in parking lots against Tesla's Supervised FSD Level 2 system which controls the vehicle at prevailing speeds on all city streets and highways, executes left and right turns, stops at traffic controls, executes U-turns, parks, and everything else. Tesla doesn't want to assume liability yet because they are still iterating fast. The last few builds have been released about two weeks apart. The functional domain of a Level 2 system can be significantly greater than a Level 3 system. And that is the case when comparing Tesla Supervised FSD versus Mercedes Drivepilot. It remains commendable for Mercedes to take on liability, but we should not kid ourselves. Doing so is a play for cheap media wins and punchy-sounding milestones like what we see in this article. It's not actually moving autonomy forward in any meaningful way when compared alongside Waymo and Tesla FSD. The scope of the Mercedes system is simply too narrow.
- ra7 2y ago
  > The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher. No one’s going to take liability if their technology is not ready for the conditions they want to work in. And no one’s creating systems that only work in 5 mph parking lots just to claim the L3 title. So comparison to hypothetical systems aren’t useful.
  - 2y ago

bko 2y ago

How is Waymo pricing compared to Uber or other ride share? I originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs but considering the tens of billions dumped into these companies, they can't charge lower prices as they have to recoup investments.

acchow 2y ago
If you tip on Uber/Lyft, then Waymo pricing is close (maybe a 5% premium). But during peak hours, Waymo is much more expensive.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
It's a dollar or two more expensive than the corresponding Uber (non-shared) fare in my experience, so a bit less after tips. Keep in mind that the "true" price of these services probably isn't the biggest pricing factor right now. The cost is a way to manage demand, get some additional income, and investigate what the market will bear.
- bko 2y ago
  I doubt they're profitable though. From Bing: > As of the latest available information, Waymo is not yet profitable. Alphabet’s Q2 2023 earnings report indicated that its “Other Bets” category, which includes Waymo, had revenues of $285 million and an operating loss of $813 million. This was a decrease in operating loss from $1.34 billion in the second quarter of 2022, but still significant. Over the last five years, “Other Bets” has generated $3 billion in cumulative revenue but incurred $20 billion in operating losses, with Waymo constituting the bulk of these losses. I just don't see the end game. Are marginal rides not profitable even at Uber fates? Uber for instance was losing money because they were taking rev from profitable cities to give incentives and build up drivers in the new markets. But Waymo doesn't have that problem. Is it just GPU spend that they can eventually stop?
  - suzakus 2y ago
    Nothing about that quote indicates that waymo loses money on marginal rides, rather that it loses money in aggregate which is not particularly surprising considering low overall volume , r&d overhead of both head count and things like cars and facilities to store said cars
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    I suspect it's vaguely near gross profit, that is excluding almost all the expensive engineers, marketing, R&D costs, new silicon development costs, etc. It's not remotely operationally profitable though, you're right. The business model is pretty simple. Robotaxis can operate much cheaper than humans and simultaneously provide a better service. Competing at the same cost as existing services makes them massively profitable. You can unlock additional efficiencies through things like fleet management, not supporting unprofitable cities the way Uber has to, vehicles designed for longer service lives and so on. Most companies plan to use that market (and closely associated ones like food delivery) as a profitable beachhead to scale down the technology to the point where it can be applied more ubiquitously in things like consumer vehicles. Some are more vocal about this than others.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  I wonder if anyone has done an analysis looking at a set of tasks and ordering them according to the ease of automating them compared to the cost of labor. Self-driving cars seem like a poor choice of market, since the task is very complex and there are also many people worldwide who are willing to work as drivers. The sweet spot would be a task that is easy to automate and also doesn't have much human competition. Obviously the OG automation case of assembly lines fits this. LLMs can occupy this space since there are probably more people who can drive a car than can write grammatically correct natural language. I would put self-driving trains in this category as well but that's an outsider's perspective.
ra7 2y ago
In addition to what others have said about pricing, you need to compare Waymo with Uber Black, not UberX or shared rides. Waymo says they are aiming to be a premium service because the cars (Jaguar I-pace) are much nicer and, of course, there’s the novelty of not having a driver.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Uber has sent me cars that did not have tires, wipers, or headlights. The fact that Waymo sends you a roadworthy car is, by itself, worth $5 per trip.
  - jen20 2y ago
    Is it? Or should a roadworthy car be considered table stakes for actually being on the road, and one which is not is instead worth a police report?
    - yCombLinks 2y ago
      Should be doesn't help. This is what actually happens.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      At least in my city (state, really) the police have vacated their duties to enforce roadworthiness because hand-wringing quasiliberals said that enforcing the laws against bald tires and missing headlights was hurting the poor. Also my state does not have and never had annual safety inspections.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Though, what are the wipers for if the cameras on the Waymo are outside?
- fragmede 2y ago
  It's not a novelty that the driver in the driverless car won't hit on, or harrass a woman taking a trip late a night in an altered state. Uber and Lyft have paid out to settle thousands of lawsuits brought by women who get assaulted by drivers.
perryizgr8 2y ago
> originally thought autonomous cars would greatly reduce costs In general, it's a mistake to think that selling price has anything to do with the costs. The price is simply what the market will bear. If people are paying Uber $x for a service, waymo would be stupid to price the same service much lower than that. If their costs are much lower, they would rather make that much more profit. If the rider wants a small piece of that pie they can invest in the business (via stocks in the case of Google).
- dageshi 2y ago
  I think more realistically google right now does not want to undercut uber and by extension real drivers who're doing it for a living. They don't need that kind of bad publicity when potentially the licenses they operate under could be pulled given enough political pressure. I wouldn't consider current pricing indicative of what it might ultimately be, consider that if aggressive enough google could divert a big portion of the countries car spend to themselves.

tempestn 2y ago

It's not useless, but it's a very specific use case: commuting in rush hour traffic.

dandy23 2y ago
And that's a very annoying condition to drive under. So quite useful.

bhauer 2y ago

> "Drivers can activate Mercedes's technology. called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven't been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states." It's remarkable how often these significant limitations are ignored. The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher. But you could compare such a system that works only in parking lots against Tesla's Supervised FSD Level 2 system which controls the vehicle at prevailing speeds on all city streets and highways, executes left and right turns, stops at traffic controls, executes U-turns, parks, and everything else. Tesla doesn't want to assume liability yet because they are still iterating fast. The last few builds have been released about two weeks apart. The functional domain of a Level 2 system can be significantly greater than a Level 3 system. And that is the case when comparing Tesla Supervised FSD versus Mercedes Drivepilot. It remains commendable for Mercedes to take on liability, but we should not kid ourselves. Doing so is a play for cheap media wins and punchy-sounding milestones like what we see in this article. It's not actually moving autonomy forward in any meaningful way when compared alongside Waymo and Tesla FSD. The scope of the Mercedes system is simply too narrow.

ra7 2y ago
> The difference between SAE Level 3 versus Level 2 is liability, not functionality. Conceptually, it would be relatively simple to create a Level 3 system that only worked in parking lots and never drove over 5 MPH. And yes, such a system would be "Level 3," which naively sounds better than "Level 2" because the number is higher. No one’s going to take liability if their technology is not ready for the conditions they want to work in. And no one’s creating systems that only work in 5 mph parking lots just to claim the L3 title. So comparison to hypothetical systems aren’t useful.
- 2y ago