Waymo is fully owned by a public company. Economically they are indistinguishable from Uber (other than having a huge ad profit center to subsidize them). What VCs are you referring to?
Waymo is definitely in the phase where they want to form a positive impression on all fronts: safety, convenience, price. Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.
>Once widespread, it's possible that they'll charge more than Uber because of the extra privacy and safety in a Waymo ride.
It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.
Engineers are significantly more expensive than chauffeurs, especially since the chauffeurs get paid roughly minimum wage - or less. I too am very curious where pricing settles out.
Well no, it depends on the multiple. Minimum wage is $15000, and an engineer costs Google an average of at least 10X that in base salary, plus another 10X that in equity. I think the break-even is probably closer to 20 cars per engineer.
Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.
To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.
Litigating accidents will cost more because suddenly it's not "partner" at fault but your own people. Also, someone's gotta buy that new yacht somehow...
Uber was trying the "there can be only one" approach of operating at a loss to squeeze out competitors on both sides of their business model. The pandemic and other factors disrupted that plan. So now they are scrambling for profit while not having being configured for it.