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Amortized over 1 year. Was trying to be super conservative. Zero chance a Waymo lasts 10 years. I mean maybe you could say the body will last 10 years, but woul

Amortized over 1 year. Was trying to be super conservative. Zero chance a Waymo lasts 10 years. I mean maybe you could say the body will last 10 years, but would imagine quite a bit of the car, over the course of 300k miles driven, would need to be replaced? Not too many cars on the road with over 300k miles. But still your point stands that maybe that $150k car cost would be spread out over a longer time frame, which makes the economics much better. Like I said was trying to be conservative. As for the $250k price point, when I search for that most pundits think that figure is several years old and may have been overly high to begin with, but if it's true at $250k then obviously a lot of margin pressure there. Still think it's likely the car cost will drop precipitously and the $150k figure won't be far off.

fragmede 2y ago
How do you price engineering samples for an iPhone, Tesla Model 3, or a Chromebook, or an Xbox, or anything else? The $250k number includes a lot of custom engineering work amortized over a relatively small number, since, the build hasn't been mass productionized and they're not pumping out thousands of cars per week.
- harmmonica 2y ago
  Hey, not sure I fully understand your question, but are you talking about the initial capital costs to get to a fully "productized" self-driving car? I would leave those out of the unit economics because (I think) those get treated differently financially/accounting-wise and also are not really representative of whether the future business is sustainable (it's more about whether the initial investors get the proper return on their investment). Might not be addressing your question with that, but I think that's what you're asking. And I think you're assuming the opposite of me which is that they haven't yet productized their offering, but I think they actually have at this point. I definitely could be wrong about that. Just an opinion.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    my point was that using $250k as the cost of the fully loaded waymo car, and then doing math based on that, is basing the math on what is essentiallu a made up number.

fragmede 2y ago

How do you price engineering samples for an iPhone, Tesla Model 3, or a Chromebook, or an Xbox, or anything else? The $250k number includes a lot of custom engineering work amortized over a relatively small number, since, the build hasn't been mass productionized and they're not pumping out thousands of cars per week.

harmmonica 2y ago
Hey, not sure I fully understand your question, but are you talking about the initial capital costs to get to a fully "productized" self-driving car? I would leave those out of the unit economics because (I think) those get treated differently financially/accounting-wise and also are not really representative of whether the future business is sustainable (it's more about whether the initial investors get the proper return on their investment). Might not be addressing your question with that, but I think that's what you're asking. And I think you're assuming the opposite of me which is that they haven't yet productized their offering, but I think they actually have at this point. I definitely could be wrong about that. Just an opinion.
- fragmede 2y ago
  my point was that using $250k as the cost of the fully loaded waymo car, and then doing math based on that, is basing the math on what is essentiallu a made up number.