5 ms·

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

• acchow 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
        Should be doesn't help. This is what actually happens.
      • jeffbee 3y 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 3y ago
      Though, what are the wipers for if the cameras on the Waymo are outside?
  • fragmede 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.