[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.

[aetherson]

A taxi doesn't have a lifespan of 8 years, and note that while I don't think that a Waymo car costs anything like $1M, it's also not actually the case that you pay taxi drivers $140k per year.

I see very little to suggest that a Waymo car costs less all-in over the course of about two years than a Prius and an Uber driver does, and that's the much more relevant comparison.

Nothing to say that this couldn't change in the future. But that's my guess for the status quo.

[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.