7 ms·

In what sense is self-driving “here” if the economics alone prove that it can’t get “here”? It’s not just limited coverage, it’s practically non-existent covera

by Denzel 2y ago

In what sense is self-driving “here” if the economics alone prove that it can’t get “here”? It’s not just limited coverage, it’s practically non-existent coverage, both nationally and globally, with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.
- ivanbalepin 2y ago
  Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of about 95+% of Bay Area residents.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Waymo's current operational area in the bay runs from Sunnyvale to fisherman's wharf. I don't know how many people that is, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it a big chunk of the bay. They don't run to SFO because SF hasn't approved them for airport service.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      I just opened the Waymo app and its service certainly doesn't extend to Sunnyvale. I just recently had an experience where I got a Waymo to drive me to a Caltrain station so I can actually get to Sunnyvale.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        The public area is SF to Daly City. The employee-only area runs down the rest of the peninsula. Both of them together are the operational area. Waymo's app only shows the areas accessible to you. Different users can have different accessible areas, though in the Bay area it's currently just the two divisions I'm aware of.
        riffraff 2y ago
        Why would you consider the employee-only area? For that categorization to exist it must mean it's either unreliable for customers or too expensive cause there's too much human drivers on the loop. Either way it would not be considered as an area served by self driving, imo.
        AlotOfReading 2y ago
        There are alternative possibilities, like "we don't have enough vehicles to serve this area appropriately" or "we don't have statistical power to ensure this area meets safety standards even though it looks fine", and "there are missing features (like freeways) that would make public service uncompetitive in this area" to simply "the CPUC hasn't approved a fare area expansion". It's an area they're operating legally, so it's part of their operational area. It's not part of their public service area, which I'd call that instead.
    - modeless 2y ago
      I wish! In Palo Alto the cars have been driving around for more than a decade and you still can't hail one. Lately I see them much less often than I used to, actually. I don't think occasional internal-only testing qualifies as "operational".
  - stouset 2y ago
    > preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates I just want to highlight that the only mechanism by which this eventually produces cheaper rates is by removing having to pay a human driver. I’m not one to forestall technological progress, but there are a huge number of people already living on the margins who will lose one of their few remaining options for income as this expands. AI will inevitably create jobs, but it’s hard to see how it will—in the short term at least—do anything to help the enormous numbers of people who are going to be put out of work. I’m not saying we should stop the inevitable forward march of technology. But at the same time it’s hard for me to “very much look forward to” the flip side of being able to take robocabs everywhere.
    - dullcrisp 2y ago
      Do you ever drive yourself or would you feel guilty not paying a driver?
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      People living on the margins is fundamentally a social problem, and we all know how amenable those are to technical solutions. Let's say AV development stops tomorrow though. Is continuing to grind workers down under the boot of the gig economy really a preferred solution here or just a way to avoid the difficult political discussion we need to have either way?
      - stouset 2y ago
        I'm not sure how I could have been more clear that I'm not suggesting we stop development on robotaxis or anything related to AI. All I'm asking is that we take a moment to reflect on the people who won't be winners. Which is going to be a hell of a lot of people. And right now there is absolutely zero plan for what to do when these folks have one of the few remaining opportunities taken away from them. As awful as the gig economy has been it's better than the "no economy" we're about to drive them to.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    > preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates You haven’t paid attention to how VC companies work.
  - danenania 2y ago
    Waymo has approval to operate in San Mateo County so it’s likely coming pretty soon.
- Denzel 2y ago
  You’re narrowing the market for self-driving to the ridehail market in the top 10 US metros. That’s kinda moving the goal posts, my friend, and completely ignoring the promises made by self-driving companies. The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without a driver present, possibly to pick up your child from school, and bring them back home. In that sense, yes, Waymo is nonexistent. As the article author points out, lifetime miles for “self-driving” vehicles (70M) accounts for less than 1% of daily driving miles in the US (9B). Even if we suspend that perspective, and look at the ride-hailing market, in 2018 Uber/Lyft accounted for ~1-2% of miles driven in the top 10 US metros. [1] So, Waymo is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world. Self-driving isn’t “here” in any meaningful sense and it won’t be in the near-term. If it were, we’d see Alphabet pouring much more of its war chest into Waymo to capture what stands to be a multi-trillion dollar market. But they’re not, so clearly they see the same risks that Brooks is highlighting. [1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIUskVkj9lsAnWJQ6kLhAhNoVLjfFdx3/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIUskVkj9lsAnWJQ6kLhAhNoVLj...
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    There are, optimistically, significantly less than 10k Waymos operating today. There are a bit less than 300M registered vehicles in the US. If the entire US automotive production were devoted solely to Waymos, it'd still take years to produce enough vehicles to drive any meaningful percentage of the daily road miles in the US. I think that's a bit of a silly standard to set for hopefully obvious reasons.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    > ..is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world. Calculator was a small device that was made in one tiny market in one nation in the world. Now we all got a couple of hardware ones in our desk drawers, and a couple software ones on each smartphone. If a driving car can perform 'well' (Your Definition May Vary - YDMV) in NY/Chicago/etc. then it can perform equally 'well' in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, etc. It's just that EU has stricter rules/regulations while US is more relaxed (thus innovation happens 'there' and not 'here' in the EU). When 'you guys' (US) nail self-driving, it will only be a matter of time til we (EU) allow it to cross the pond. I see this as a hockey-stick graph. We are still on the eraser/blade phase.
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
Here in the product/research sense, which is the hardest bar to cross. Making it cheaper takes time but generally we have reduced cost of everything by orders of magnitude when manufacturing ramps up, and I don't think self driving hardware(sensors etc) would be any different.
- Denzel 2y ago
  It’s not even here in the product/research sense. First, as the author points out, it’s better characterized as operator-assisted semi-autonomous driving in limited locations. That’s great but far from autonomous driving. Secondly, if we throw a dart on a map: 1) what are the chances Waymo can deploy there, 2) how much money would they have to invest to deploy, and 3) how long would it take? Waymo is nowhere near a turn-key system where they can setup in any city without investing in the infrastructure underlying Waymo’s system. See [1] which details the amount of manual work and coordination with local officials that Waymo has to do per city. And that’s just to deploy an operator-assisted semi-autonomous vehicle in the US. EU, China, and India aren’t even on the roadmap yet. These locations will take many more billions worth of investment. Not to mention Waymo hasn’t even addressed long-haul trucking, an industry ripe for automation that makes cold, calculated, rational business decisions based on economics. Waymo had a brief foray in the industry and then gave up. Because they haven’t solved autonomous driving yet and it’s not even on the horizon. Whereas we can drop most humans in any of these locations and they’ll mostly figure it out within the week. Far more than lowering the cost, there are fundamental technological problems that remain unsolved. [1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-mapping https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
jsnell 2y ago
Where's the economic proof of impossibility? As far as I know Waymo has not published any official numbers, and any third party unit profitability analysis is going to be so sensitive to assumptions about e.g. exact depreciation schedules and utilization percentages that the error bars would inevitably be straddling both sides of the break-even line. > with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in That argument doesn't seem horribly compelling given the regular expansions to new areas.
- Denzel 2y ago
  Analyzing Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions gives you all the evidence necessary. It’s safe to assume that a company’s ownership takes the decisions that they believe will maximize the value of their company. Therefore, we can look at Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions, with respect to Waymo, to see what they think about Waymo’s opportunity. In the past five years, Alphabet has spent >$100B to buyback their stock; retained ~100B in cash. In 2024, they issued their first dividend to investors and authorized up to $70B more in stock buybacks. Over that same time period they’ve invested <$5B in Waymo, and committed to investing $5B more over the next few years (no timeline was given). This tells us that Alphabet believes their money is better spent buying back their stock, paying back their investors, or sitting in the bank, when compared to investing more in Waymo. Either they believe Waymo’s opportunity is too small (unlikely) to warrant further investment, or when adjusted for the remaining risk/uncertainty (research, technology, product, market, execution, etc) they feel the venture needs to be de-risked further before investing more.
  - VirusNewbie 2y ago
    >believes their money is better spent buying back their stock, Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award.
    - davedx 2y ago
      > Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award. Wait, really? They're a publically traded company; don't they just need to issue new stock (the opposite of buying it back) to employees, who can then choose to sell it in the public market?

by Denzel 2y ago

AlotOfReading 2y ago

It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.

ivanbalepin 2y ago
Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of about 95+% of Bay Area residents.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Waymo's current operational area in the bay runs from Sunnyvale to fisherman's wharf. I don't know how many people that is, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it a big chunk of the bay. They don't run to SFO because SF hasn't approved them for airport service.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    I just opened the Waymo app and its service certainly doesn't extend to Sunnyvale. I just recently had an experience where I got a Waymo to drive me to a Caltrain station so I can actually get to Sunnyvale.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      The public area is SF to Daly City. The employee-only area runs down the rest of the peninsula. Both of them together are the operational area. Waymo's app only shows the areas accessible to you. Different users can have different accessible areas, though in the Bay area it's currently just the two divisions I'm aware of.
      - riffraff 2y ago
        Why would you consider the employee-only area? For that categorization to exist it must mean it's either unreliable for customers or too expensive cause there's too much human drivers on the loop. Either way it would not be considered as an area served by self driving, imo.
        AlotOfReading 2y ago
        There are alternative possibilities, like "we don't have enough vehicles to serve this area appropriately" or "we don't have statistical power to ensure this area meets safety standards even though it looks fine", and "there are missing features (like freeways) that would make public service uncompetitive in this area" to simply "the CPUC hasn't approved a fare area expansion". It's an area they're operating legally, so it's part of their operational area. It's not part of their public service area, which I'd call that instead.
  - modeless 2y ago
    I wish! In Palo Alto the cars have been driving around for more than a decade and you still can't hail one. Lately I see them much less often than I used to, actually. I don't think occasional internal-only testing qualifies as "operational".
- stouset 2y ago
  > preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates I just want to highlight that the only mechanism by which this eventually produces cheaper rates is by removing having to pay a human driver. I’m not one to forestall technological progress, but there are a huge number of people already living on the margins who will lose one of their few remaining options for income as this expands. AI will inevitably create jobs, but it’s hard to see how it will—in the short term at least—do anything to help the enormous numbers of people who are going to be put out of work. I’m not saying we should stop the inevitable forward march of technology. But at the same time it’s hard for me to “very much look forward to” the flip side of being able to take robocabs everywhere.
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    Do you ever drive yourself or would you feel guilty not paying a driver?
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    People living on the margins is fundamentally a social problem, and we all know how amenable those are to technical solutions. Let's say AV development stops tomorrow though. Is continuing to grind workers down under the boot of the gig economy really a preferred solution here or just a way to avoid the difficult political discussion we need to have either way?
    - stouset 2y ago
      I'm not sure how I could have been more clear that I'm not suggesting we stop development on robotaxis or anything related to AI. All I'm asking is that we take a moment to reflect on the people who won't be winners. Which is going to be a hell of a lot of people. And right now there is absolutely zero plan for what to do when these folks have one of the few remaining opportunities taken away from them. As awful as the gig economy has been it's better than the "no economy" we're about to drive them to.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates You haven’t paid attention to how VC companies work.
- danenania 2y ago
  Waymo has approval to operate in San Mateo County so it’s likely coming pretty soon.
Denzel 2y ago
You’re narrowing the market for self-driving to the ridehail market in the top 10 US metros. That’s kinda moving the goal posts, my friend, and completely ignoring the promises made by self-driving companies. The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without a driver present, possibly to pick up your child from school, and bring them back home. In that sense, yes, Waymo is nonexistent. As the article author points out, lifetime miles for “self-driving” vehicles (70M) accounts for less than 1% of daily driving miles in the US (9B). Even if we suspend that perspective, and look at the ride-hailing market, in 2018 Uber/Lyft accounted for ~1-2% of miles driven in the top 10 US metros. [1] So, Waymo is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world. Self-driving isn’t “here” in any meaningful sense and it won’t be in the near-term. If it were, we’d see Alphabet pouring much more of its war chest into Waymo to capture what stands to be a multi-trillion dollar market. But they’re not, so clearly they see the same risks that Brooks is highlighting. [1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIUskVkj9lsAnWJQ6kLhAhNoVLjfFdx3/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIUskVkj9lsAnWJQ6kLhAhNoVLj...
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  There are, optimistically, significantly less than 10k Waymos operating today. There are a bit less than 300M registered vehicles in the US. If the entire US automotive production were devoted solely to Waymos, it'd still take years to produce enough vehicles to drive any meaningful percentage of the daily road miles in the US. I think that's a bit of a silly standard to set for hopefully obvious reasons.
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  > ..is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world. Calculator was a small device that was made in one tiny market in one nation in the world. Now we all got a couple of hardware ones in our desk drawers, and a couple software ones on each smartphone. If a driving car can perform 'well' (Your Definition May Vary - YDMV) in NY/Chicago/etc. then it can perform equally 'well' in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, etc. It's just that EU has stricter rules/regulations while US is more relaxed (thus innovation happens 'there' and not 'here' in the EU). When 'you guys' (US) nail self-driving, it will only be a matter of time til we (EU) allow it to cross the pond. I see this as a hockey-stick graph. We are still on the eraser/blade phase.

YetAnotherNick 2y ago

Here in the product/research sense, which is the hardest bar to cross. Making it cheaper takes time but generally we have reduced cost of everything by orders of magnitude when manufacturing ramps up, and I don't think self driving hardware(sensors etc) would be any different.

Denzel 2y ago
It’s not even here in the product/research sense. First, as the author points out, it’s better characterized as operator-assisted semi-autonomous driving in limited locations. That’s great but far from autonomous driving. Secondly, if we throw a dart on a map: 1) what are the chances Waymo can deploy there, 2) how much money would they have to invest to deploy, and 3) how long would it take? Waymo is nowhere near a turn-key system where they can setup in any city without investing in the infrastructure underlying Waymo’s system. See [1] which details the amount of manual work and coordination with local officials that Waymo has to do per city. And that’s just to deploy an operator-assisted semi-autonomous vehicle in the US. EU, China, and India aren’t even on the roadmap yet. These locations will take many more billions worth of investment. Not to mention Waymo hasn’t even addressed long-haul trucking, an industry ripe for automation that makes cold, calculated, rational business decisions based on economics. Waymo had a brief foray in the industry and then gave up. Because they haven’t solved autonomous driving yet and it’s not even on the horizon. Whereas we can drop most humans in any of these locations and they’ll mostly figure it out within the week. Far more than lowering the cost, there are fundamental technological problems that remain unsolved. [1]: https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-mapping https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

jsnell 2y ago

Where's the economic proof of impossibility? As far as I know Waymo has not published any official numbers, and any third party unit profitability analysis is going to be so sensitive to assumptions about e.g. exact depreciation schedules and utilization percentages that the error bars would inevitably be straddling both sides of the break-even line. > with no evidence that the system can generalize, profitably, outside the limited areas it’s currently in That argument doesn't seem horribly compelling given the regular expansions to new areas.

Denzel 2y ago
Analyzing Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions gives you all the evidence necessary. It’s safe to assume that a company’s ownership takes the decisions that they believe will maximize the value of their company. Therefore, we can look at Alphabet’s capital allocation decisions, with respect to Waymo, to see what they think about Waymo’s opportunity. In the past five years, Alphabet has spent >$100B to buyback their stock; retained ~100B in cash. In 2024, they issued their first dividend to investors and authorized up to $70B more in stock buybacks. Over that same time period they’ve invested <$5B in Waymo, and committed to investing $5B more over the next few years (no timeline was given). This tells us that Alphabet believes their money is better spent buying back their stock, paying back their investors, or sitting in the bank, when compared to investing more in Waymo. Either they believe Waymo’s opportunity is too small (unlikely) to warrant further investment, or when adjusted for the remaining risk/uncertainty (research, technology, product, market, execution, etc) they feel the venture needs to be de-risked further before investing more.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  >believes their money is better spent buying back their stock, Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award.
  - davedx 2y ago
    > Alphabet has to buy back their stock because of the massive amount of stock comp they award. Wait, really? They're a publically traded company; don't they just need to issue new stock (the opposite of buying it back) to employees, who can then choose to sell it in the public market?