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Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft
- menusu 1y ago[dead]
- telotortium 1y agoIs this the first time Waymo has partnered with Lyft? I’ve only heard of Uber partnerships before? From what I can find, previous Lyft collaborations were only pilot testing, not commercial rollouts.
- daemonologist 1y agoAlso interesting that it's not exclusive - they're saying you'll be able to use either the Waymo app or the Lyft app (and get a Waymo at random, presumably). I believe the previous deals with Uber have all been exclusive - no Waymo app in that market.
- testfrequency 1y ago“As families and businesses move to Tennessee in record numbers, our state continues to lead the nation in finding innovative solutions to transportation challenges," said Governor Bill Lee. Innovative. That must have felt nice to claim
- Zigurd 1y agoI strongly suspect Waymo has hit break-even. If Google's published numbers on rides per week and fleet size are accurate, and the estimates of price per ride are close, expansion isn't going to be capital constrained.
- leetharris 1y agoEven with expensive vehicles and hardware? Plus they are revenue sharing with the host Uber/Lyft platforms. Feels very unlikely. I think they will need to bring car cost down to hit break even.
- xnx 1y agoThe Zeekr vehicle would've brought costs down, but it is now subject to a huge tariff. No telling how much that has set them back.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoLIDAR prices are falling fairly rapidly over time (although I’m not sure about the impact of tariffs). The car and computing resources are otherwise boring costs, maybe they are at around $200k/vehicle? That would be pretty easy to pay for a with a few months of rides. If most of the rides are going through the Waymo app, they aren’t paying a lot to uber and Lyft, and I doubt they are paying the full 30% to the ride sharing platforms anyways.
- leoc 1y agoThey're also spending an unclear amount of money on human driving-assistance workers https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zoox-self-driving-cars-remote-control.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... and the supporting infrastructure. Presumably it works out to a lot less per vehicle-hour than an in-vehicle, US-resident human driver, but a lot more than nothing. I suppose another wrinkle is that driverlessness isn't only a cost saving (aspirational or real), it's also a positive attraction eg. for anyone who worries about their safety with a rando taxi driver or Uber guy. There are also cost savings achievable by timeshifting antisocial-hours work to elsewhere in the world, though presumably a significant part of the savings will be simply be the result of outsourcing to lower-wage countries.
- Zigurd 1y agoWaymo has published videos about how their remote operator system works. Waymo's are never remotely driven. They're just told what the operator thinks is the best place for them to go next in a situation where the vehicle can't make that decision. This is critical to controlling opex. Waymos operate 24/7, that means three shifts of operators plus coverage for weekends, vacation, and sick time. This is where the difference between a demo and a product is going to be decided. Alphabet could be reckless about spending on remote operators. But I think they're still processing the trauma of buying Motorola and won't tolerate a big jump in headcount.
- ra7 1y agoIn a recent interview, Waymo strongly hinted they now have positive unit economics in markets like SF. From https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-could-be-a-trillion-dollar-opportunity/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/09/03/waymo-co...: > “Each car, the amount of revenue it's making would be shocking to most people,” Panigrahi said, without elaborating. “Because it just continuously keeps delivering ride after ride. On a per asset basis, it’s doing really well. That’s making progress in terms of unit economics very, very positive.” So much so that in busy markets like San Francisco, Waymo could soon move into the black. “Not making specific statements about if we’re positive or not, but what I can tell you is that yes, key markets are showing us that we are,” Panigrahi said.
- eatonphil 1y agoWhat is the reason or benefit of them being so secretive about this?
- weatherlite 1y agoThey don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
- PhantomHour 1y agoWaymo doesn't gain anything. Google i.e. Alphabet Inc, does. Especially these days. Every scrap of news that could pump the stock price is publicized aggressively. And this makes the absence of such actions suspicious.
- orwin 1y agoNot really: this past few years, listed companies tend to be _very_ pessimistic on their quarterly projection, and then reveal that either: it wasn't that bad, and nothing change, or that is was great, and their valuation shoots up. Weirdly the market doesn't react over those pessimistic projections, so it seems it's just a safe play for CEOs. They started doing that in Europe as well.
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- losvedir 1y agoThis feels like an inflection point. We're now at San Francisco, SFO airport, Austin, Nashville, and NYC, is that right?
- yiweig 1y agoAnd Atlanta via Uber
- avs733 1y agoand RAPIDLY growing in Atlanta from what I see as I wander the city. I just saw one of their new Geely based vehicles today for the first time. I will say as someone who is suspicious of self driving cars...they are not really worse than Atlanta drivers as a typical pedestrian. They are dangerous in different ways...but not necessarily more or less.
- baseballdork 1y agoThey're in the Phoenix area as well. List of cities here: https://waymo.com/rides/ https://waymo.com/rides/
- dehrmann 1y agoAnd "Silicon Valley" (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Los Altos). Quotes because that excludes San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Milpitas.
- zbrozek 1y agoThere are a ton of them in Sunnyvale, so I expect that area to flip to public availability soon.
- jayd16 1y agoLos Angeles
- panarky 1y agoAnd Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Tokyo
- willahmad 1y agoFrom market standpoint I am curious if Google or Amazon is willing to acquire Lyft for the tech and customer base. Lyft is a good distribution channel for their self driving car initiatives with good coverage, Uber is too expensive at this moment.
- AnishLaddha 1y agowhat moat does lyft have? i know san francisco is a special case but waymo is already beating out lyft, with its own app: https://www.fastcompany.com/91347503/waymo-is-winning-in-san-francisco https://www.fastcompany.com/91347503/waymo-is-winning-in-san...
- willahmad 1y agomoat is in institutional knowledge of operations in ride hailing industry. Also, pleasing the customer, imagine opening Waymo app and not being able to order a taxi 40% of the time. With Lyft/Uber you can easily switch the ride mode and get a car with driver if all self driving cars are busy
- sib 1y agoWhat customer base (at least in the US) does Lyft have that Google or Amazon don't? Estimates for Amazon are ~250M and Google ~275M users in the US.
- willahmad 1y agoit's not only about number of users. You also have regulations in different cities and states, existing models trained based on past supply demand behavior, somewhat optimized workflows for the ride hailing industry, payments, risks. They both can build themselves, but if you provide solely self-driving ride hailing, a lot of times customers might not be able to find cars in upcoming 6-7 years until they ramp up full production to meet demand.
- sib 1y ago
- blinding-streak 1y agoInteresting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.
- xnx 1y agoThey've also partnered with Moove in Miami and with Avis.
- ddeck 1y agoAnd GO in Tokyo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Japan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(Japan)
- adrr 1y agoCurious what these ride sharing companies take for providing the platform. 30%? Having two play off each other they can probably push it down to 15% or lower.
- jerlam 1y agoI wonder if Waymo is allowed to charge different prices, or advertise their own direct services, in these partnerships. "Use the Waymo app instead, save 10%, and get a guaranteed Waymo!"
- kunjanshah 1y agoIn Austin, Waymo app directs you to use uber instead.
- mlyle 1y agoAlmost certainly Waymo has given Uber some kind of time-limited exclusivity in that market.
- _fat_santa 1y agoHoping someone in the rideshare space could shed some light on this for me but why would Waymo partner with rideshare providers instead of just going in by themselves? Is it just marketing/exposure (Uber/Lyft both have tons of users, Waymo could instantly tap into that user base instead of trying to grow their own) or is it more of a regulatory thing?
- Atlas667 1y agoNobody needs this. This is incentivized as private enterprise developing autonomous warfare tech.
- barbazoo 1y agoPeople do “need” it but for the wrong reasons such as failures around zoning urban planning, public transportation, etc.
- komali2 1y agoPrivatization of many things is turning out to be a failure. Sewage, water - see the UK, failure. Healthcare: USA, failure. Utilities: UK, USA, failure. Mail: Denmark, failure. Transportation: UK, USA, utter failure. Further privatization will deepen this failure.
- Atlas667 1y agoYeah. Almost as if capitalism seeks to generate profits at the expense of the consumer especially if they have limited choices, which capitalism itself produces.
- rangestransform 1y agoany technology is dual use if you squint hard enough
- Atlas667 1y agoIt doesn't really help consumers whose whole point is to get from point A to B in the quickest and most comfortable manner. It doesn't help traffic, and it only will if self driving cars are already the majority, which is a convenient perspective for developers of this tech, but is not viable and not a true statement. I don't want to be that guy, but we all know trains and trams are the better tech. Luxury trains/trams would be a banger. Private rooms with better amenities than a car, why not? The autonomous car industry is a few things: car protectionism, oil protectionism, autonomous warfare development and gimmicks.
- noahmbarr 1y agoDon’t rule out Tesla’s Robotaxi. I’m 10 rides in (Bay Area— around SF proper), and it’s clean, cheap, and efficient. As good or better than Waymo. IMO: - Tesla is pushing Waymo on pricing and service areas - Tesla will drop the safety monitor in the next 6 months** **I say this as a FSD subscriber on my own car and seeing the arch of progress, albeit with a software branch that’s supposedly 3-6 months behind Robotaxi’s
- Hamuko 1y agoAre you talking about the Robotaxi where there’s a man sitting behind the steering wheel?
- dwood_dev 1y agoNext to, not behind. I see a strong future for both Waymo and Tesla in the driverless car biz. Tesla is probably a year behind on their software, but they can scale out infinitely faster than Waymo on the hardware. Either way, we win.
- Hamuko 1y agoNo, I'm pretty sure this one is the one where he is behind the steering wheel.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- parodysbird 1y agoBeing next to the steering wheel is worse. If the human needs to be in the car, then he should be behind the wheel. Putting him next to the wheel is categorically stupid and only serves as theater for fools.
- barbazoo 1y agoHis name is Rob. Rob-o-taxi.
- mwigdahl 1y ago
- yalogin 1y agoUber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. They don’t own any cars anyway, now they don’t even have to deal with drivers. Also I am glad google finally found a GTM strategy for their tech. They are building these machines themselves though. These are expensive and cost a lot in maintenance, wonder how the numbers look for them
- xnx 1y ago> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment Maybe they get something out of it in the short term. Longer term, they are janitorial and service staff that are interchangeable with any number of companies.
- evgen 1y ago> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment. The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.
- trevor-e 1y agoWhy would a company like Lyft/Uber partner with Waymo at this point? That sounds like doing a deal with the competitor who _will_ completely kill them off in the future.
- zhengyi13 1y agoNot necessarily. Does Waymo really want to run all the additional infra and services and people ops required to be a full soup-to-nuts ride hailing service? I mean, they do today, but maybe they don't want to be in that business.
- bigyikes 1y agoOwning the user base seems like a huge strategic advantage.
- dkobia 1y agoWhat a time to be alive. 3 companies competing for what might be the next trillion dollar business. - Waymo has the advantage of launching sooner but has much more expensive vehicles which will eat into margins. - Tesla has the advantage of full vertical integration owns their hardware and cheaper cars but also trying to do this with vision only. - Zoox has the advantage of building purpose-built autonomous vehicles from the ground up with Amazon's deep pockets behind them, but faces the challenge of manufacturing at scale for a novel vehicle.
- oldjim798 1y agoWhy do we want a trillion dollar business? Why is that good for society/the world? Tesla also seems to have the 'advantage' of ruthlessly exploiting labour; I very much hope they do not succeed. Zoox being owned by Amazon also makes me deeply suspicious of their business practices.
- bpodgursky 1y agoBecause Americans spend 93 billion hours driving each year and tens of thousands of people literally die each year in car crashes. Unlocking that time and those lives is an unimaginably large quality of life improvement.
- oldjim798 1y agoAutonomous cars would be safer, I completely agree. They won't fix traffic though.
- devinprater 1y agoOh yes please, just a little closer! Come on bring it to Talladega AL where tons of blind people live!
- garrtt 1y agoIs there any hope of actually being able to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer? Seems that a concerning majority of the autonomous driving conversation is framed in the context of ride-sharing.
- brian_spiering 1y agoYes, there is hope to fully own a self driving vehicle as a consumer. One example is comma.ai, inc.
- fragmede 1y agoI have one of those and all I can say is holy shit it works. It doesn't hook into GPS, so it's not totally self driving (at least mine isn't, there's a GitHub for their software), so I still gotta pay enough attention on the freeway to know when to exit, but after I get on the freeway, left right gas brake is all taken care of. Great for sitting in stop and go on the freeway. It's also made me think that Waymo's a) don't need lidar, and b) don't actually need the extensive mapping that the public has been lead to believe they need. They're being overly cautious, because they know people's lives are on the line here.
- jonas21 1y agoIt makes sense to target ridesharing while the tech is being developed because: (a) you can amortize the large up-front cost of the hardware over many more trips per day. (b) you can geographically restrict where the vehicle operates to areas you've mapped in detail and know to be relatively safe (c) you can collect lots of raw data for training and allow remote operators to assist if the vehicle gets stuck (many people would have privacy concerns if their personal car was doing this). Over time, the hardware cost will come down, geographic availability will increase, and the need for remote assistance will decrease. Then you might start to see ones you can fully own. At that point, though, the question becomes would you want to own one? Particularly if ride-share vehicles are ubiquitous and you can nearly instantly summon one that's exactly the type you need no matter where you are.
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- deathanatos 1y agoNashville's airport suffered gridlock yesterday: https://fox17.com/news/local/what-caused-the-over-14000-vehicle-jam-at-nashville-airport-according-to-mnaa-bna-traffic-nashville-news-local-google-trends https://fox17.com/news/local/what-caused-the-over-14000-vehi...
- oldjim798 1y agoAutonomous cars are not the solution to traffic issues. At best, the may make some driving situations slightly safer because humans are terrible drivers. What we need is trains. Trains everywhere. We had this once in fact; we had passenger rail to every corner of europe and north america. Turning that back on would massively improve traffic.
- triceratops 1y agoWe also need buses and mini-buses and taxis to get people to and from train stations. Autonomous driving makes this cheap and feasible.
- choilive 1y agoThe USA has proven to be... incapable of completing any public transport infrastructure anywhere near on budget or on time. This is a deeply rooted problem. Until this gets solved autonomous electric vehicles could theoretically just leapfrog the problem altogether. Point to point transportation also mostly solves the last mile problem.
- asdff 1y agoPoint to point transportation is not sustainable with a vehicle as large as a car. The physics are simply quite poor and there are too many people to move, at least in cities with real traffic like LA or NYC vs small edge case backups.
- cman1444 1y agoI disagree. Building trains in America is next to impossible in the modern day. Obtaining the property for the railways would be extraordinarily difficult, because America has such strong property rights and is such a legalistic society. It's a recipe for way over-budget and behind schedule projects. Just look at the California project. There's also very little expertise in the rail industry in America due to underinvestment in recent decades. Furthermore, the built environment is so spread out because it was built for cars, so you don't get the clustering effects of density around train stations. Rail isn't that helpful if you have to walk another 30 minutes from the station to actually get to your destination. Also, I think your assertion that autonomous cars don't solve traffic is partially wrong. If entire fleets of cars can "think" as a whole, you can avoid some traffic problems, such as traffic waves, that occur due to individual decision-makers.
- menusu 1y ago[dead]
- boh 1y agoI have a feeling Nashville normies are going to be super psyched having to drive behind these things.
- bluGill 1y agoI wish they would target mass transit not rideshare cars. A bus with this technology could immediately run a lot more frequent with shorter buses, and because the route is fixed they don't have to verify the entire city, only the roads the bus will travel on. Fix route buses running at high frequency is the key to getting people to ride mass transit, but it isn't affordable because drivers are so expensive if you can even find them to hire.
- lostdog 1y agoFor a self-driving company, replacing a lot of drivers servicing some passengers is much better financially than replacing a few drivers servicing many passengers. Pencil it out yourself and you'll see that doing robotaxis is much better than doing robobuses. Plus, have any cities suggested that they would contract out their business driving to an automous company? Has anyone asked the unions to see what they might do about it? Autonomous buses will come, but only after the approach has fully taken over the taxi market first.
- bluGill 1y agoFor the company maybe, but for everyone else it is worse. Taxis are worse for the environment than cars because you have to count all the driving around empty picking people up (demand is rarely even in all directions). Rideshare is only of limited use outside fixed routes as people have places to be an detouring to pick up someone else makes them mad.
- MostlyStable 1y agoWithout major cultural shifts, you still need someone on the bus to prevent them from becoming moving dumpsters. The driving itself would be much easier, as you point out. That's not the only thing that a driver does.
- 999900000999 1y agoYou could have a guy making minimum wage sit in the back and tell people not to act stupid. That would be much cheaper than a union bus driver who can clear 100k. Safer too since bus drivers often go tons of overtime which isn't great for being alert.
- Animats 1y agoNot, Lyft, Flexdrive. Flexdrive is a fleet management company which Lyft owns. They have the things Waymo needs - parking lots and vehicle maintainers. Waymo doesn't need the rideshare service and Lyft app. In San Francisco, Waymo has already passed Lyft in number of rides, and is projected to pass Uber by the end of the year.
- boulos 1y agoBoth Lyft and Flexdrive: > Riders will hail via the Waymo app, and as our service grows, riders will also be able to use the Lyft app to match with a Waymo vehicle. (Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not in partnerships)
- drnick1 1y agoMeh, I'll stick to driving my own car or renting one. The last thing I want is paying for the "privilege" of being rated by the driver or spied on my an autonomous car.