| Fascinatingly, every argument you make is wrong. > it cost twice as much as an Uber Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup. > while having a longer wait time for a car Obviously incidental? > It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. Obviously easily fixable? > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free. > Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc. > I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term. > They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. "The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that." > Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves. --- To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term. |
There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookie store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees.
In the same way, an uber or taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them.
Let’s not forget that at Waymo they still need a human to clean, fix, and charge/gas up, interact with customers and police, resolve driving edge cases, etc, all costs that a human driver essentially includes with their pay and does for “free.” Then you’ve got car storage and the capital expense of the vehicle that the uber driver heavily subsidizes and splits between business and personal use.
Basically, Waymo is looking to compete using their very complex and sophisticated solution in a market where its competitors are hiring lowest bidder temporary contractors.