[ugh123]

> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too.

Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely easier than scaling the amount of Uber/Lyft drivers available and willing to go to said area.

[nradov]

Nope. Cars are expensive. Waymo won't keep a bunch of extras sitting around just so that they have reserve capacity to scale up service during unusually busy events. It's more profitable just to make customers wait, or ask them to pay a higher fare for priority service.

[bigyikes]

Cars are extremely cheap compared to their drivers.

[aetherson]

I don't think that Waymo cars are.

[xw390111]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ce...

"Krafcik made the point, as some analysts predict autonomous vehicle technology will be too expensive to adopt en masse. Waymo uses LiDAR sensors in its vehicles, which previously retailed for as much as $75,000. In 2019, Krafcik signaled that its Honeycomb LiDAR units now cost around $7,500."

And price is only going to come down over time.

[fragmede]

Let's say the Waymo cars are $1 million each, which is probably high, given than a fully loaded i-Pace is $80k, which still leaves $920,000 for Google/Waymo devices and software costs to get to $1 million. Given the estimate for a human life at $7.4 million[1], I think they are.

[1]https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...

[foota]

You could pay someone California's minimum wage 24/7 for 140,000 a year.

[mckn1ght]

Labor cost pretty much always increases while the cost of research technology decreases once it encounters economies of scale.

A car today at the admittedly high cost estimate of $1M will “pay itself off” versus your labor estimate in less than 8 years. Humans don’t get paid off and then work for free afterwards.

[thereisnospork]

What they can do is trivially reroute cars from the suburbs - a level of supply control Uber can only approximate with surge pricing.

[nradov]

It turns out everyone in the suburbs is also going to a Superbowl party. Whoops.

[earthwalker99]

Simply not true. The US is constantly flooded with fresh immigrants who can get drivers licenses and drive for super cheap on unlivable wages.