[Panzer04]

If you aren't paying drivers, that's a lot of margin, yeah? If you're the only driverless game in town all of your vehicles can potentially earn an the salary of a driver, like 20$ an hour. They'd pay for themselves within a year pretty easily.

[obnauticus]

There are a ton of operational costs that Uber/Lyft have lobbied to give to cheap contractors with no benefits.

[mlyle]

Sure, Uber/Lyft have thus far been successful in claiming a really big share of the margin.

But there's still not too much margin when the driver needs some comp.

Waymo, on the flip side, has a lot of capital equipment added to cars to depreciate, but it's gotten way cheaper and stands to get much cheaper still.

[spyspy]

The cars may also last way longer when they’re driving around at 30mph and follow all the traffic laws to the letter. Humans are very hard on cars.

[obnauticus]

Can it? You still need a ton of very expensive infra, engineering, ops to manage all of this.

Waymo has clearly been playing the “but it’ll be cheaper” game for a long, long time now. It makes sense if you squint really hard and fudge some numbers about unit economics.

If the expected outcome is for it to be eventually cheaper, then why when I open the app does it costs almost twice as much as an Uber or Lyft? You’d think they would want to at least convince investors and train customers that the savings are real and they’re going to prove it by passing it on.

[mlyle]

Waymo obviously has nearly no economies of scale yet. We are just entering that part of the regime and it is going to be 2-3 years more before we are spreading those costs across a large fleet.

For me, costs have been comparable to Lyft.