I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself.
I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career.
I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.
The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.
Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m...
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you in a large city where taxies are common? Or do you have a local taxi service and app that is very good?
I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.
My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.
[edit: riding not driving]
Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"
Absolutely would choose the robot.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.
Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.
So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.
Or, a woman can take a Waymo.
I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.
Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.
More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person).
I hate traffic, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.
Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.
https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
If you manage to stretch $10k cars out to 5 years on average with zero maintenance it's less than $200 /mo but ... no maintenance in 5 years?
I think $300 /mo plus fuel and parking is probably a reasonable estimate for frugal behavior.
This can vary a lot.
6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.
Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.
> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.
I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Yep, that describes cars. High up front cost that barely goes up when you need more done (meaning: family of 5? Car beats even the bus fare for a 3km ride to school). In trade for independence, cheap groceries, cheaper travel (at least in opportunity cost), cheap days out with the family, bigger house is realistic, ability to go work in not so well connected places (I'm a consultant), capacity to actually get heavy things, collect people, not waiting/dragging things around in cold/rain/...
Oh and these DON'T add up. Bring the kids to school AND drive to work AND get groceries by car? You don't pay 3 times like you do with any other means of transport, you pay 1.2 times what you pay when doing only one.
With 2 people in the car it easily matches public transport costs if you use it enough. Oh and even by yourself it's like half taxi/uber fares, a third or less of waymo fares (though at least those don't charge per person).
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
What an absurd statement. Mine has gone down in the past several years, and I pay around that per 6 months.
And you don't use "ingenious" there.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
When I can park my car in my driveway at no marginal cost to myself, most people (including me) would call that free.
The driver of housing cost in US cities is lack of supply. Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing. The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-parking-spot-sells-...
That was 2022, $56k is probably about 10% of a one or two bedroom condo price.
> The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
Tokyo is, as I understand it, the libertarian ideal for a city that doesn't let zoning get in the way of a good time, and parking space prices are still expensive there:
> Monthly rental rates for spots in the 23 Wards range from ¥30,000 to over ¥80,000, which reflects high underlying property value.
That's $200 to $500 a month.
I'm claiming that removing parking (ie converting the raw sq footage over to living space) would not meaningfully impact housing prices. The existence of parking, free or otherwise, is not a significant contributor to the housing shortage. The issue is one of scale. That's what my "drop in the bucket" comment is referring to.
You specifically said "American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them". That is technically correct but in context it is blatantly wrong. The price increase as it stands is approximately zero.
The error is failing to differentiate between cost due to construction and maintenance versus cost due to land value. The latter is linked to total supply and thus height restrictions. The former is not the primary component in HCoL cities. You can easily verify this by checking the cost to purchase an apartment building in say San Francisco versus a small town in the midwest. (I refer to the cost to purchase the entire building there, not the cost to rent a single unit.)
> you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game. The shortage is far larger than all of the current parking combined. We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market? Even at the scale of the entire market it would still be well under 10%, probably under 5%. The typical apartment in the US is definitely larger than a 5x2 grid of parking spaces. Meanwhile most HCoL cities could do with double the housing inventory at absolute minimum. Probably substantially more.
This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
We are suffocating under our own political dysfunction.
In HCOLs places, parking garages, usually basements, are the solution to this problem. If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods...well, SFHs aren't going to solve the housing problem anyway that you look at it, so...
> We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
You are also right. You just need to add your budget of the garage into your housing projects costs, or not, since people of the option to buy condos in buildings that do not mandate you also buy a parking spot (which can pay for the underground garage construction).
> Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market?
OMG, yes, if you mean major cities in China. How the heck would you even build enough underground garage space to even think about doing that? The US is nice because our cities are small and not very dense, so we aren't talking about adding parking for every unit in a 40 story...heck, the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.
> This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess. No, I disagree, but you should really visit Tokyo.
I am arguing that anyone who blames the presence of parking for housing supply issues has failed to understand both the geometry and scale of the problem (or more likely imo is actively attempting to push an anti-personal-car narrative).
> the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.
I wasn't talking about traffic engineering problems. Only raw square footage for living space. You can generalize the question I posed as - in an alternate reality where every housing unit in (say) Beijing were precisely 10% larger, and total stock were reduced proportionally to accommodate that change, but everything else were exactly the same (improbably, I know) would that make or break the housing market in terms of supply and demand? The answer is that it would not. Housing supply problems are not due to a mere 10% shortage.
> More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess.
I don't follow? What about my objection to reducing buffer space comes across as "American exceptionalism" to you? And why do you disagree?
It's simply a matter of geometry. Expanding the footprint by a few feet versus duplicating the entire structure upwards multiple times. Obviously that doesn't apply to places that already build upwards to the extent physically possible but since approximately nowhere in the US does that it's neither here nor there.
Which means people were willing to pay to have a place to park. WAI
Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.
I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.
I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well.
Either way, less human drivers is better.
I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win.
There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.
No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life?
Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.
Yes, I have. I never drove a car myself and maybe used a taxi 10 times in the last 30 years.
Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas? It seems more reasonable for them to go for dense places instead and leave the unprofitable regions for someone else.
Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"
But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.
Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.
Personal transit just looks incredible inefficient and unscalable if everyone would use it. I could totally see it as a last resort solution for situations where nothing else is available, but that's an unattractive market that isn't going to make anyone rich.
They don't want me to go home and fall asleep, because it is possible that I have a brain injury and will never wake up, but their advice is going to be "Can you get somebody else to drive, or maybe call a taxi?" not "We will Blue Light an ambulance to you ASAP".
Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit.
I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance.
That was not what I expected, ok.
Still, I just naively assumed that major German cities would be even better. Guess not though.
This isn't about poor people, at least for me, I'd much rather be alone than with Elon fucking Musk. If I want to hang out with people I will choose when and who. The least good bit of being in a taxi is small talk with the driver.
- Geofenced areas
- HD pre-mapped roads
- Curated infrastructure
- Remote ops fallback
This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
"Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem." If you consider SF and LA suburbs, than Europe is a suburb.
If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
See you at the next construction zone...
With real drivers mapping the roads. [1]
If you rent a car in Madrid or Paris, do you spend years "mapping" the towns before you are able to drive safely from A to B?
Waymo is nothing more than a geofenced Disney ride.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/partnering-with-nihon-kotsu-a...
No maps no driving....carnival ride...
"High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios..."
[1] - https://waymo.com/research/hdmapgen-a-hierarchical-graph-gen...
I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.
There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet, which is why Waymo is run as a subsidiary with its own sources of capital.
When I was at Uber 10 plus years ago and we were ideating autonomous vehicles. The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Waymo has concluded either we are too early in the journey to decouple the tight vertical integration or they want to go very big and own all of the capital expenditure for what will presumably be a global rollout ultimately.
For anyone like me with a finance and technology crossover interest I actually think this is as interesting, maybe more interesting, than the private equity play around data centers at the moment because all of that is constrained against chip delivery and power constraints.
Can you tell us those reasons? I think this is basically _the_ question.
Giving firms that they get along well with (like Sequoia) allocation feels like a mix between a favor and possibly a way to signal that the valuation has some external buy-in too.
Private equity, or private capital (debt investors)? Although I guess PC was less of a thing 10 years ago.
Also, keep in mind the Alphabet doesn't fully own Waymo. I don't know the percentage ownership of hand, but that also feels like it's probably a prorated investment based on ownership so Alphabet doesn't reduce its voting control.
That's what I'm talking about.
They have made many comments over the years about this too.
I am not claiming a transition is happening in this round, so asking for evidence of one misses the point. Transition here means enabling future shifts in who owns and operates the capex, not changing the cap table today. If Alphabet wanted permanent full-stack ownership, an entirely internal recap would have been cleaner. Bringing in outside capital, even minority, is about signaling and optionality, not dilution.
If you'll notice, all I am doing is asking the brigade of snarky know-nothings to stop talking. I'm not pretentiously claiming to know, unlike all of you. You clearly aren't in any position to understand the internal working of Google, and it's unfortunate that HN used to be a place where a question like the original one would have been answered by a person who does, but is now flooded with people like you. I will gladly take the downvotes if they're from a bunch of garage band stock pickers.
You are not “just asking questions.” You are dismissing any analysis that is not insider gossip as illegitimate, which is a convenient way to avoid engaging with the substance. No one claimed NDA level insight. We are talking about incentives, capital structure, and signaling, which is literally what outsiders analyze. If only Googlers are allowed to reason about Google, then HN has no purpose beyond rumor laundering.
(You)
> Nobody is being rude to you
(Also you)
I guess things are only rude if they're said to you, and not by you? Seems logically consistent with all your other takes.
Sorry no advice for you but relax and step back!
My finance people care about the cents, a ROI of 7% is average but at 8.5% and now you are a world class asset of that inventory type. That’s sometimes the difference of a few hundred k out of 20m but they would not take the deal if it is slightly over due to their risk appetite.
The 3b external either matters a ton to fit their risk models OR they are doing a favor to an outside party. Probably a bit of both.
Obviously you're entitled to your view, but I don't think it's that kind of finance model right now - it's far too speculative and the upside too unknown to be adjusting for small amounts on risk models.
This lets them validate their valuation and build a base of investors who could play a bigger role in writing chequew in the future. When IPO comes, those factors make the sell simpler.
There's also a strategic partnership angle in these rounds. For example, Magna and Autonation were early investors in Waymo. Magna operates Waymo's factory in Arizona to upfit their vehicles with sensors, Autonation (the huge dealership/service network) is the maintenance partner.
In general, the Alphabet playbook is that projects "graduate" out of Google X, and are expected to operate as a standalone company, including being responsible for raising funds.
Isn't that what they are kinda doing? 13bn out of the 16bn is coming from Google itself.
I think the reason they are taking 3bn from outside high-profile investors is to validate the valuation, for legal or accounting reasons.
Why not 100% internal funding, not sure, but the reason why companies don't always IPO is because taking on debt is more efficient (i.e. it's cheaper in terms of cost of capital) than equity, because of the "tax shield" effect, debt can be raised in a non dilutive manner, and a few other (less important) game-theoretic reasons.
He raises a good point, and the answer is likely that they can run into legal issues by either under or overvaluing the company in a capital raise where they're the controlling shareholder, then the IRS or existing investors have grounds for a lawsuit (or audit). They likely just want to bring the capital raise out in the open to get a fair market value, and then they will be 90% of the capital in the raise.
i.e. why should I use my money if I can use someone elses'?
That's the price for infinite scaling. If a business can't make more than that it should be shut down.
i.e. do you want to make 25% of 1 billion or 5% of 1000 billion?
institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
so to me, aside from making money, making money this way, for a lot of people, protects them from the political grandstanding and their fast demise in their absence.
This. They're letting wall street in on it so wall street goes to bat for it. It's the big boy version of how some widget manufacturer will revise a product to necessitate or cut out a trade lobby depending on whether they want those people to go to bat for it, or make all the people who don't wanna pay rent to those people go to bat for it.
And it will be 100% the kids fault, but the headlines will look terrible.
Kids can be naive and reckless, and the result makes them look downright suicidal with the things they do. They will dart into traffic, and even if the Waymo has single-digit millisecond reaction times, people will still blame the Waymo.
I wouldn't be so certain on the fault front. I share the SF streets with Waymos on the daily, and they are extremely far from perfect drivers.
It's one thing to call an Uber. It's another to pack your car for a road trip to the beach or mountains.
Waymo is going to make vacationing even bigger than it already is. It'll be easy, especially for remote workers.
Van life with a Waymo is a whole new thing.
If Uber goes away, Lyft or others can take over the entire market overnight, precisely because they don't have their own fleet or unique technology. Waymo is placing itself as first mover into a completely new category of transportation which will require capital investment and new tech, so it will be much harder to displace once it gets going. It could target automated cargo transport in the future too.
I don't think there's ever been a giant centralized global taxi fleet.
Tesla is the other way around. They can definitely make lots of cars and make a profit. But they haven't quite gotten FSD to the stage where it can do rides properly. Supposing they at some point figure that one out, they are very well positioned to start producing vehicles by the hundreds of thousands pretty soon after. That's indeed the premise for their valuation. It's risky but not completely without merit.
Another point to make is that Waymo and Tesla are not going to have this market to themselves for very long. There are quite a few autonomous ride hailing companies serving rides at this point. And while the attention is often on the US, China is moving pretty quickly as well. Several companies competing there in several huge Chinese cities, for example.
On the US side, I think there are a few players that might become competitive soon. Zoox is looking pretty solid. And Rivian is rumored to be pushing autonomy as well. There are a few more players in various stages of technical readiness.
The real battle will be in a few years when we are past the basic "does it work", "is it safe" questions and legal approvals all over the world become more routine. Then it will be all about volume and scaling. That's going to take probably at least until 2030.
And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another.
Aside from destroying about $1.25 trillion of market cap, this would leave everyone better off.
I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs.
So IMO Waymo has something far more valuable than Tesla. (Obviously the market isn't rational though so I wouldn't necessarily invest based on that.)
Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their Atlas humanoid robots.
I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general. They only really make sense in a scenario where you’re back porting robotics to factories built for humans. That has value but feels temporary; factories designed to be robotic feel like the future, and there’s no need for them to do the job the same way a human would.
Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work. Find a couple hundred tasks like this (including household use), and that platform now has huge economies of scale.
Now, when you're starting a small factory, using the existing humanoids might make more sense than getting custom tooling, at least for some tasks. You'll often see factories where some tasks that could, in theory, be automated are left to humans because they're relatively small tasks and not worth automating with a custom machine. Humanoids could fill that gap.
This feels inverted to me, but perhaps I’m reading it wrong. A lot of the core challenges are shared, but the humanoid has to solve a bunch of additional challenges. Eg balancing is difficult with moving loads of various weights. Humanoids have to deal with that, while something more forklift-like practically opts out of that issue by just being designed with a high mass and low center of gravity.
I don’t see a universe where a humanoid is ever cheaper, but I could maybe see it generalizing well enough for usage to make it worth it. I’d still be a bit surprised, because operating costs would surely be higher (way more servos or hydraulics to fail, higher power usage hauling around unnecessary parts and weight).
This seems doubly true for factories where opex is so much more meaningful than capex. It’s worth spending $4M on custom tooling rather than $2M on generic tooling if it drops your opex by $500k/year on a factory with a 20 year lifespan.
I want one personally, so it can rake the leaves, mow the lawn, tend the garden, do the laundry and dishes, replace the roof, etc., when I'm old. But they should also be used to pick up litter along the highway, paint over graffiti, etc..
Eg lawn mowing robots already exist, and have for a decade or so. Garden tending also exists, though I think only commercial prototypes at the current moment. Roofing feels very possible, but I only roofed once so ymmv.
Is the future going to be buying a humanoid robot with a thousand servos for $100,000, or texting a number to have a self-driving car drop off a bladed roomba made from bargain bin brushless motors and plastic to mow your lawn for $0.50?
And the two-handed spot will have a hard time grabbing something under the sofa.
A buddy demo-ed something from work doing exactly that like a decade ago, but it was commercial and designed for an assembly line.
Slightly depressing that we're back to replacing the big industrial robots rather than new markets.
I would guess the long term strategy is to do this for economies of scale and then push into new markets opened up by the lower price point. I would guess these are horribly expensive right now, given something like Spot is way simpler and still like $40k
0: The magical creature, not a 1bn company
(Just experienced this multiple times in Phoenix. It’s impressive at navigating and braking, but not rational planning or flocking.)
Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
So a $110B valuation is not currently that significant in terms of exposure. It's only 2.7% of it overall.
You also get some Starlink.
Oh ye of little faith! Here are some ideas off the top of my head, I am sure the suits at Google already have a bigger list.
* Ads in vehicle
* Adjust route so you see partner companies or billboards
* Offering alternative destinations (I see you are going to Burger King, would you rather go to our partner McDonalds?)
* Listening to conversations in car
* Selling ride data.It'll be up to you, just like whether you want your Netflix cheaper with ads, or more expensive but without.
I see that choice as a good thing.
The rest of your suggestions are incredibly unlikely. Google doesn't even scan your Gmail anymore, you think they're going to create a privacy scandal by listening to your conversations? And they certainly don't sell your Maps timeline which is far more valuable than just a few car trips, so why on earth would they do that with Waymo? Nor does Google Maps offer to send you to Burger King when you hit directions for McDonald's. And taking a longer route that wastes time, battery and money, on the chance you'll be looking out the window to see a billboard rather than looking at your phone, doesn't make sense at all.
- offer a service well below market rate, gain dependent customers
- crank up the price
No need to do much of the other stuff
* Stop doing any meaningful in-person inspection of the vehicle to ensure that it is in good condition before joining the network
* Stop requiring cars to be <= 4 years old
* (Seemingly) stop requiring drivers to maintain trunk space free for passengers' luggage
Ads in cars, partnerships with alternative destinations, etc. definitely would feel like enshitification for a demographic comparable to the hacker news one here. But these are all per session/user settings just like most of us have a paid Spotify account and never see advertising and those who don't get a very different monetized experience.
What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
That's actually a really interesting angle. The same way businesses often provide free parking now... what if they start providing free self-driving round trips?
E.g. spend $75 or more at Whole Foods, and get free round-trip up to 20 miles or something. Especially for bulky items like groceries where a car makes a big difference, I can totally see that becoming standard. Home Depot too. Plus entertainment like amusement parks, movie theaters, spas...
I buy Whole Foods French fries shipped to the store via Amazon logistics and purchase those at Amazon owned Whole Foods, at a discount via my Prime membership on my Amazon credit card which is processed on AWS infrastructure and I ride home on an Amazon owned Zoox that also runs on AWS infrastructure.
Amazon owns so much of the profit margin across that stack that they can afford to give rides away for example.
people used to feel that way about search queries, email (gmail) and IP laws (LLM training).
> What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
this won't happen. alphabet will collect on both ends.
Why not? You can consent to having your audio recorded. They can even offer a higher “private” price and a lower “ad supported” price. I write “private” because I assume the microphones will always be listening no matter which price you pay.
You could opt in to have blood or plasma taken on every ride if you so wanted I guess.
As a plasma donor you can earn $30-$70 per session for 800 ml. Let's call it $50. A session takes about 90 minutes, or 533 ml/hour, and you make $33/hour
Waymo charges $0.50 - $1.00 per mile. Let's use the high end.
To break even, your Waymo will need to consume < $33/hour, or < 33 mph. That's not bad!
If you go any faster, you won't be able to extract enough plasma in the same amount of time.
Oh, you'll agree to that when you accept the terms of service.
Can't wait for the "This ride with ads: $17. Ad free: $26" choice.
Also, cheap rides cut into stocks margins. That won’t fly by investors either. These companies are not charities. They are in the business of maximizing profits. We lost “don’t be evil” over a decade ago.
If you fly United, the in-flight entertainment has pre-roll ads.
I can't say how well that model translates to car rides.
Raise the price?
Self-driving taxis have a high floor for 'making the product worse' because the car fundamentally has to drive itself.
My guess is that once Waymo starts to extremely take off, law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen. It will disproportionately impact an entire segment of the population and will put them out of work.
You think the folks on City Council enjoy chauffeuring their own children around and will block a solution to it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1pdzd2f/some_m...
> The bill prohibits the use of autonomous vehicles as motor carriers of passengers or property without a human operator who (i) meets any state and federal qualifications for the operation of an autonomous vehicle; (ii) is physically present in such autonomous vehicle; and (iii) has the ability to monitor the performance of such vehicle and intervene in the operation of such vehicle, including operating such vehicle without the use of the automated driving system and stopping and turning off such vehicle if necessary.
It seems that many people, after trying out the service for themselves first hand, in a locale that has it available today, are very eager to have the service available to them in their home locale.
If NJ consumers (and politicians) had a 10x better product dangled in front of them every day, then the regulation side would solve itself.
Waymo is truly just such a vastly superior product that consumers will get exposed enough to it to care, and when they care, they will solve the regulation side.
Uber and Lyft will survive exactly to the extent they successfully adopt self-driving.
I think this is correct and I want to point out something that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
If and when Uber/Lyft move heavily in this direction, the cost/operational benefits of having their "fleet" of vehicles be privately owned-vehicles will almost certainly disappear.
I will take whichever one is cheaper. Just like now I open up both uber and lyft to see which costs less, I'll open up waymo as well
I don't hate Uber/Lyft (though many in NYC are legitimately horrible, just like taxis)
Waymo is simply an order of magnitude better than the best Uber ride I've ever had
Mamdani, the new nyc mayor, has been a long time friend and advocate for NYC taxi workers alliance. He even participated in a hunger strike with them in 2021.
Waymo is right now starting the wheels turning on getting NYC permits, but taxi workers have already made their (obvious) stance clear: No Waymos.
No they won’t. And Waymo’s playbook would be Uber’s if they did: preëmpt at the state and federal levels.
From an outside perspective, they're constantly obstructing traffic and driving in erratic and confusing ways. It's gotten to a point that if I see one ahead of me, I'll turn down the next block and change my route to avoid being behind it and dealing with whatever slowdown its about to cause.
I took one once via Uber with some coworkers and it was also jarring to ride in. I'd rather take my chances with a random human.
No IPO for us little people
When nobody drives manually you could even do things like getting rid of traffic lights.
You might not even need buttons - driverless cars are already going to have to handle zebra crossings somehow.
That said this is a tech forum, and while I don't think Waymo will be the only solution the tech is quite impressive and it's likely going to change how society works. Most people don't want to take public transit, they want to take a car and this is a much better solution for them. Forcing people to bike when they don't want to seems like bad form imo.
Edit: there is a paywall in my country. Why downvotes? I’m just curious.
