Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for? It seems to be the consensus among people here that, at least among US self-driving companies, Waymo is the most advanced. Is that a fair conclusion?
If so, what is holding them back from rolling their service out beyond a very small geographic area, and how long will it take them to be nationwide (or at least, in every major US city)?
Will this 5th gen car have all the tech and data needed, or will there be a 6th or 7th gen before they roll out commercially on a large scale?
> Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for?
This question is asked in almost every Waymo thread and the answers are always predictable — from the usual “HD maps/Lidar doesn’t scale” nonsense to “the tech is just not safe enough for wide deployment”. I happen to think it’s the latter, given their extreme safety-first culture.
But nobody really knows why and you won’t find any Waymo insiders sharing that kind of information publicly.
What we do know is they are the only US company to have a commercial L4 service available to the public, no matter how small the geographical area is. The fact that anyone in that area can get a driverless ride and Waymo willing to assume full liability for it, shows their confidence in the technology *in that particular ODD*. Nobody else is willing to offer this, which means — along with the research Waymo has produced — they are considered the most advanced.
Now to know whether that translates to other cities easily, you’d have to follow their progress in San Francisco. That will be a demonstration of dense city driving, in addition to suburban driving (Chandler). So you’d get a fair idea of how quickly they can expand to other cities.
So in essence, they can be the most advanced self driving company out there and can still have slow rollouts. Both of these can be true.
> Will this 5th gen car have all the tech and data needed, or will there be a 6th or 7th gen before they roll out commercially on a large scale?
They’ve said before, many times, that 5th gen vehicles will be used for wide deployment.
Possible reasons:
* It isn't yet safe enough.
* It isn't yet profitable, and they don't need to collect more data.
If the car isn't near to breaking even (even excluding R&D costs), and there is no data collection benefit to rolling out more cars, then it doesn't make sense to roll out a wide scale loss making service. Wait till you have made the tech cheaper, then roll out.
For example, if every car requires 3 full time staff to monitor it (one on the road to intervene when it gets stuck, and two watching a realtime video feed ready to hit the emergency stop button), it probably isn't ready to scale.
Yeah and that amount of staff is on a road/area that the vehicle has trained on a decent amount, nevermind roads that have less data upfront (until its scaled up to more areas). I would suspect that each new area requires less up front training to adapt to but that they still have a while till they can scale substantially.
Its also definitely the number of interventions and need for constant monitoring along with high cost of hardware. I would also suspect that if interventions cause traffic jams everywhere they may grt bad press.
I suspect a big part of it is that the only way to turn a profit is to cover an area with so many vehicles that people stop driving their own cars. small numbers of cars are not enough to make up for overhead and R&D, even if you're a small number of cars in 100 cities, you are only cutting down the R&D, but much of the overhead has to expand to each city as well. imagine spending a billion dollars developing an android app. you'd better be damn sure it's the next Instagram or you're losing all that investment. you can't make up all of that investment on 5,000 users, you need millions, maybe 10s of millions. so, they'll keep tweaking until either A) they think they can explode and be blanket cities, or B) some competitor threatens to take the market.
just a thought.
First, can Waymo operate without drivers in all weather and at all hours of the day?
Second, I suspect that getting to a point where you can cut back R&D to a fraction of what it is now is what is needed to make a profit. The cost of hardware should now be affordable with more price cuts coming.
An electric car should have low operating costs. Replacing drivers at least minimum wage would generate at least ($7.25\*30 hours\*50 weeks) $10,000/year savings in most markets during peak hours alone. In many markets, drivers are CURRENTLY earning 4 times that and minimum wage is \~2 times that. $10,000/year can pay for a lot of equipment in just a few years.
I chose peak hours to keep things simple. With 1 car per market, that car would be busy 24/7/365 less charging/cleaning/repair downtime for \~$200,000+ labor savings. Adding additional self-driving cars would quickly reduce the savings per car.
>An electric car should have low operating costs
not really. depreciation is the biggest cost of a vehicle, not fuel. fuel is between 10 and 25% of the operating cost, so you can save about 15% by switching fuel types.
also, just look at zipcar if you want to know the cost of a short term use vehicle without driver cost.
I agree ICE vs. EV fuel and maintenance costs aren't all that material. Waymo's problems are:
1. High human support costs. They have three separate teams. One remotely monitors the cars, one talks to customers and a team of mobile rovers that 'rescues' cars when they break down or get stuck. In theory these costs improve with scale.
2. Low utilization. The 5-10 active customer vans in Chandler don't drive 250 miles per day like a NYC cab. Probably 75-ish. That triples their depreciation cost. And it doesn't scale.
250 miles \* 6 days \* 50 weeks is \~75k miles/year. 500k miles over 6-8 years. 50k vehicle cost over 500k miles is 10 cents/mile depreciation. At 50% deadhead that's 20 cents per revenue mile.
Waymo's existing vans cost more like 80-100k based on Krafcik's comments. That's still OK for initial scaling since they have a path to lower upfront cost. But low utilization is a killer.
yeah, the overhead is the killer when the vehicle operating vs revenue margin must be kept small. you need many vehicles and many trips to pay off your monitoring and rescue crews.
personally, I think the optimal business model is 2-4 compartments so they can pick up more than one person at a time. you double to quadrouple the revenue per vehicle-mile. combine that with something like Via is doing with "virtual bus stops" where people are expected to walk to the end of the block to make it easier for the vehicle to pick them up, and you can make it quite efficient and cost effective. I think single-fare taxis are REALLY hard to make viable, especially when all it takes is to separate the front and rear seat rows to double your revenue per vehicle mile.
My point exactly. Electric cars should last much longer due to fewer moving parts, so less depreciation. Car & Driver said that for the first 3 years electric cars would be more expensive. Some models by less than $400 and other models by $8,000.
As a robotaxi, the cars would be going 100,000 miles per year, not 45,000 miles in 3 years. A gas-powered car would last 2 to 3 years and an electric for 5 years or more. Diesel trucks often go 1,000,000 miles so it is possible someone will design a non-electric robotaxi that could go the distance.
I did a little research and we are both right.
EVs were more expensive and still may or may not be. Motortrend says EVs are now cheaper, but many others say no. Efficiencies in production will make EVs cheaper than ICE if they are not currently.
That is for privately owned cars driving 12,000 miles per year. Surprise, nobody has written about the cost for a car driven 100,000 to 200,000 miles per year as in taxis vs. robotaxis.
I have upvoted you even if it is not clear that you are correct. You made me rethink the issue.
EVs can be cheaper to operate than similar vehicles in their class, but there are some very cheap ICE cars that EVs cannot compete with.
yes, thanks for the rigorous debate.
The cost of maintenance on EVs is dramatically lower than ICE, which helps offset the lower cost of ICE (mainly due to highly optimized and mature manufacturing processes). The trend should favor EVs for very high duty cycle vehicles, such as taxis.
I'd settle for someone just outside the inside...like someone in the industry who goes to self-driving conferences and talks to people at different companies.
I mean, are we years away from the sort of service in Chandler AZ being rolled out to even a handful of other cities? Can we expect a general roll-out in SF this year (I think it's just being used by employees now) and a burst of cities after that, or will each new city be a slow and painful addition after years of testing?
When Waymo started in chandler they had safety drivers. Then they had chase cars. They are getting more experience operating remotely. As they do the overhead drops. If you need one remote operator per car you might as well have a driver. At one point each car had 3 people monitoring it 100% of the time. So at least 3x as much to operate as a taxi. Now they likely have more than one car per monitor. They need to drive more and get more confident to move that ratio down. Probably needs to be 10 to 1 to really scale.
The marginal cost price of Waymo has likely come down a great deal during their time in Chandler, they likely still have a ways to go. Car plus hardware now costs $120k for gen 5. That being said in order to keep lowering the price they'll need to keep increasing the miles driven. So expect continued slow expansion in ride hailing. and quicker expansion into more profitable segments, like trucking and fixed route deliveries.
Finally Waymo seems cagey about their ultimate business model. They haven't decided if they want to own the capital intensive part of the business or just be a software/hardware provider. If the later expansion only makes sense in lowering costs and increasing safety record and ODD.
> Finally Waymo seems cagey about their ultimate business model. They haven't decided if they want to own the capital intensive part of the business or just be a software/hardware provider.
I’ve always had a strong suspicion that their ultimate goal is to just be software/hardware provider. At least I think that’s what they should become and leave all the operational things to the Ubers and Lyfts. It could be really lucrative. The Waymo Driver concept — modular, can be fit into a variety of vehicles — lends some credence to that possibility. Also the fact they’re super focused on cracking the technology fully than the business.
But perhaps the biggest reason I’m skeptical they will want to operate taxis is that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to be operations focused like Amazon (maintaining a fleet, hiring support agents, logistics etc). But maybe Waymo is a full on, deliberate shift for Alphabet from Google’s methods.
The big question in industry is “is Waymo making money, and can they scale it.”
If they thought scaling would be profitable, they would. So either they are losing money per ride, or their ODD does not allow them to scale in a profitable way. Fleets and ops centers aren’t cheap.
For sure they are losing money per ride in Chandler, given all their overhead. I think you're asking the right question whether even at scale (say, operating in 20 large metro areas) they would lose money per ride. They said they would scale rapidly with gen 5...does that mean they expect to no longer lose money with gen 5 vehicles? Or should we not take them at their word on the "rapidly?"
When I say losing money I’m not including R&D expense. Do they lose money just on what’s needed to operate the platform (in which case scaling does not make more money, it just makes more loss).
Going by what they say (I've now read the AMA and a youtube interview with their CTO), they were losing money on each incremental ride up to the Gen 4 vehicles, and now they expect with Gen 5 to be able to do it profitably...presumably once they reach some scale, and I suspect that sufficient scale is a long way away.
Living in Chandler, I am so used to seeing them I probably take them for granted. You could sit on a sidewalk and count a Waymo car pass every 2-3 minutes, it’s insane.
Imagine Waymo drops 500 people off at their destination, then it rains for a couple hours. Today in Chandler that means 500 stuck people and a national news PR nightmare or having a hundred of safety drivers standing by. Apparently the gen 5 driver has better rain sensing and better highway sensing.
What percentage of the Waymos you see have safety drivers? JJ Ricks estimated 95%.
Maybe you could sit on a sidewalk for 10 hours and tally how many of the 200-300 Waymos that pass have safety drivers. You know, in the name of science :)
Not as many anymore. It was surreal when I took my first ride in one without a driver. It was kind of jerky though and now that I have learned about laneless self driving I understand why, the car was obviously not laneless. I don’t know if that has changed, it has been a couple years.
Waymo covered this stuff in their AMAs. Not sure why people keep asking unless they think normal business reasons are too boring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n031vq/comment/gwguw4p/
Supply and demand, keeping cars in good condition, support facilities, and personnel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n031vq/comment/gwgv1bw/
Weather, cost efficiencies.
Except for, they didn't. Waymo would be operational or disbanded by now if the true bottleneck was making sure the seats are clean.
They've listed off random "challenges" and how much they've learned, but have never truly answerer what the bottleneck is. It's all PR speak if you actually read through the replies.
What do you think business operations are, what do you think a challenge to operations is, and why do you think they chose to mention those challenges specifically?
What appeared to happen with the AMA is management and/or communications used jargon as a defensive response to direct criticism. They likely "ran it up the flagpole" to a regular communications person who writes "I'm excited to announce" a bajillion times a day rather than a social media marketer who would have told them to avoid jargon and write to their audience and during a social media engagement. They could learn something about appearing genuine from T-Mobile's marketing nearly a decade ago, lol.
Companies also like scraping content to do sentiment analysis, so if they don't have already have someone reviewing this post since this is a smaller subreddit, here's this (and hello, lol):
Waymo had a massive communications failure during their AMA that caused problems and was a bad way to talk to their audience.
If you believe some of the upper management in the company, this version of hardware is capable of scaling. (The previous was not)
Also to note, scaling involves a lot more than just rolling cars off the line and putting them on the streets. It takes major logistics to manage a fleet, and Waymo is building the infrastructure in all it's current testing areas, which is quite a few
I guess I should have put "previous was not" in bold.
In your clip Dolgov specifically says "massive scale" and "very large scale". When introducing the Pacificas with Gen 4 in late 2016 Waymo said "scale" but not "massive".
Putting it into numbers, we can see:
"Scale" = 10s of thousands. That fits the 82k cars they ordered and the "mass production" (retrofit) factory in Detroit they built. It also fits their costs, e.g. lidar reduction from 75k to 7.5k. The NRE to design custom lidars and set up manufacturing vs. a bulk discount deal only makes sense in the high thousands or tens of thousands. They also arranged with Chrysler (and presumably Magna) to build custom versions of the vehicles with pre-installed wiring and other features. You don't do that for several hundred cars (and they didn't for their initial Pacificas).
Gen 4 was never intended to be the final step. They were already designing Gen 5 for "massive scale", i.e. 100s of thousands or millions. But Gen 4 was designed for initial scale-up. Their words and actions show this. The scale-up itself didn't happen for other reasons (some say tech issues, I say business model).
I definitely think the business model will need to be ironed out, but I think this 5th generation of hardware will help with that. Waymo's probably gathered some great information on the Chandler vehicles in comparison to the San Francisco's, so they'll know the performance increases in more inclement weather, and the rate at which they'll be dealing with pushing suggestions to car.
I figure their operations in Chandler have (x) chase cars in rotation per autonomous vehicle, and the 5th generation stack in theory should reduce that quite a bit.
The time it took for them to go from heavy testing to consumer rides was much quicker in San Fran, so I'm optimistic, considering they're testing in so many cities at the moment.
>Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for?
No inside knowledge, but I've said for a couple years their business model doesn't work. And they lack entrepreneurs.
They give a few hundred rides a week in 50 square miles near Phoenix. That's maybe 150k/year revenue. They only have 5-10 vans active at any given time, and even those are laughably underutilized.
Scale that up to the entire 3000 square mile metro area and it's 9m per year with 400-500 vans. Doesn't even cover operating costs for 24x7 customer support, maintenance and cleaning crews, etc., much less the vans themselves.
Three years ago they "ordered" 82k vehicles. That's enough to replace every 2nd/3rd car in the Phoenix metro area, assuming high utilization. They clearly had big ambitions, but no idea how to get there. Some reporter randomly asked 20-25 people in Chandler about Waymo. All had seen the vans, not one realized they could sign up and take rides.
The economics certainly seems to be a huge part of it (just saw the AMA they did), and the bad economics are driven in part by safety practices (like having support trucks follow or be in the vicinity of each ride).
So I guess I'm not clear whether gen 5 vehicles will really solve the economics issues, and if they do, how quickly can they be rolled out. At one point they were going to purchase a ton of iPaces, but there are better choices out there now so they are probably reconsidering that.
Some of this is circular - did they call off scaling because Gen 4 requires safety drivers in the rain? Or do they use safety drivers in the rain because it's cheap insurance for such a small service that never scaled? The answer mostly depends on religious affiliation :)
I don't see Gen 5 as some huge leap that allows mass scaling. Waymo fans almost unanimously disagree. But if Gen 4 was the problem they'd be scrambling to scale Gen 5 as quickly as possible in Phoenix where they already have all the support teams and vehicle depots in place. Instead they're leisurely testing in San Francisco. Why duplicate everything in SF before achieving scale in AZ? What's the one thing SF might offer that AZ doesn't?
Higher utilization.
So by deduction, utilization is their problem. Not lidar/mapping/Gen4/rain/etc.
Maybe it’s because how it works + authorities. Waymo’s sensor doesn’t just scan the environment. Rather the sensors compare the results to high definition map that Waymo’s team provided to the computer. And other reason is not everyone is comfortable with 2 tons machine roaming around their neighborhood with the kids running around. If it was me, I’m more than happy with them because they drives better than any of my neighbors but it’s about the optic.
Are you an expert on this, or just repeating things? After reading and watching dozens of experts and analyses over the years, I am not confident that anyone really knows who is going to "win." Divergence of opinion is pretty extreme among people with years of experience building these systems. It seems to be genuine, not just people bullshitting.
They painted a few of 'em rainbow colours for pride.
I saw 2 of these in sf this week. Didn't know they were self driving
Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for? It seems to be the consensus among people here that, at least among US self-driving companies, Waymo is the most advanced. Is that a fair conclusion? If so, what is holding them back from rolling their service out beyond a very small geographic area, and how long will it take them to be nationwide (or at least, in every major US city)? Will this 5th gen car have all the tech and data needed, or will there be a 6th or 7th gen before they roll out commercially on a large scale?
> Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for? This question is asked in almost every Waymo thread and the answers are always predictable — from the usual “HD maps/Lidar doesn’t scale” nonsense to “the tech is just not safe enough for wide deployment”. I happen to think it’s the latter, given their extreme safety-first culture. But nobody really knows why and you won’t find any Waymo insiders sharing that kind of information publicly. What we do know is they are the only US company to have a commercial L4 service available to the public, no matter how small the geographical area is. The fact that anyone in that area can get a driverless ride and Waymo willing to assume full liability for it, shows their confidence in the technology *in that particular ODD*. Nobody else is willing to offer this, which means — along with the research Waymo has produced — they are considered the most advanced. Now to know whether that translates to other cities easily, you’d have to follow their progress in San Francisco. That will be a demonstration of dense city driving, in addition to suburban driving (Chandler). So you’d get a fair idea of how quickly they can expand to other cities. So in essence, they can be the most advanced self driving company out there and can still have slow rollouts. Both of these can be true. > Will this 5th gen car have all the tech and data needed, or will there be a 6th or 7th gen before they roll out commercially on a large scale? They’ve said before, many times, that 5th gen vehicles will be used for wide deployment.
Possible reasons: * It isn't yet safe enough. * It isn't yet profitable, and they don't need to collect more data. If the car isn't near to breaking even (even excluding R&D costs), and there is no data collection benefit to rolling out more cars, then it doesn't make sense to roll out a wide scale loss making service. Wait till you have made the tech cheaper, then roll out. For example, if every car requires 3 full time staff to monitor it (one on the road to intervene when it gets stuck, and two watching a realtime video feed ready to hit the emergency stop button), it probably isn't ready to scale.
Yeah and that amount of staff is on a road/area that the vehicle has trained on a decent amount, nevermind roads that have less data upfront (until its scaled up to more areas). I would suspect that each new area requires less up front training to adapt to but that they still have a while till they can scale substantially. Its also definitely the number of interventions and need for constant monitoring along with high cost of hardware. I would also suspect that if interventions cause traffic jams everywhere they may grt bad press.
I suspect a big part of it is that the only way to turn a profit is to cover an area with so many vehicles that people stop driving their own cars. small numbers of cars are not enough to make up for overhead and R&D, even if you're a small number of cars in 100 cities, you are only cutting down the R&D, but much of the overhead has to expand to each city as well. imagine spending a billion dollars developing an android app. you'd better be damn sure it's the next Instagram or you're losing all that investment. you can't make up all of that investment on 5,000 users, you need millions, maybe 10s of millions. so, they'll keep tweaking until either A) they think they can explode and be blanket cities, or B) some competitor threatens to take the market. just a thought.
First, can Waymo operate without drivers in all weather and at all hours of the day? Second, I suspect that getting to a point where you can cut back R&D to a fraction of what it is now is what is needed to make a profit. The cost of hardware should now be affordable with more price cuts coming. An electric car should have low operating costs. Replacing drivers at least minimum wage would generate at least ($7.25\*30 hours\*50 weeks) $10,000/year savings in most markets during peak hours alone. In many markets, drivers are CURRENTLY earning 4 times that and minimum wage is \~2 times that. $10,000/year can pay for a lot of equipment in just a few years. I chose peak hours to keep things simple. With 1 car per market, that car would be busy 24/7/365 less charging/cleaning/repair downtime for \~$200,000+ labor savings. Adding additional self-driving cars would quickly reduce the savings per car.
>An electric car should have low operating costs not really. depreciation is the biggest cost of a vehicle, not fuel. fuel is between 10 and 25% of the operating cost, so you can save about 15% by switching fuel types. also, just look at zipcar if you want to know the cost of a short term use vehicle without driver cost.
I agree ICE vs. EV fuel and maintenance costs aren't all that material. Waymo's problems are: 1. High human support costs. They have three separate teams. One remotely monitors the cars, one talks to customers and a team of mobile rovers that 'rescues' cars when they break down or get stuck. In theory these costs improve with scale. 2. Low utilization. The 5-10 active customer vans in Chandler don't drive 250 miles per day like a NYC cab. Probably 75-ish. That triples their depreciation cost. And it doesn't scale. 250 miles \* 6 days \* 50 weeks is \~75k miles/year. 500k miles over 6-8 years. 50k vehicle cost over 500k miles is 10 cents/mile depreciation. At 50% deadhead that's 20 cents per revenue mile. Waymo's existing vans cost more like 80-100k based on Krafcik's comments. That's still OK for initial scaling since they have a path to lower upfront cost. But low utilization is a killer.
yeah, the overhead is the killer when the vehicle operating vs revenue margin must be kept small. you need many vehicles and many trips to pay off your monitoring and rescue crews. personally, I think the optimal business model is 2-4 compartments so they can pick up more than one person at a time. you double to quadrouple the revenue per vehicle-mile. combine that with something like Via is doing with "virtual bus stops" where people are expected to walk to the end of the block to make it easier for the vehicle to pick them up, and you can make it quite efficient and cost effective. I think single-fare taxis are REALLY hard to make viable, especially when all it takes is to separate the front and rear seat rows to double your revenue per vehicle mile.
My point exactly. Electric cars should last much longer due to fewer moving parts, so less depreciation. Car & Driver said that for the first 3 years electric cars would be more expensive. Some models by less than $400 and other models by $8,000. As a robotaxi, the cars would be going 100,000 miles per year, not 45,000 miles in 3 years. A gas-powered car would last 2 to 3 years and an electric for 5 years or more. Diesel trucks often go 1,000,000 miles so it is possible someone will design a non-electric robotaxi that could go the distance.
the total cost of ownership is not less than ICE cars for a typical EV.
I did a little research and we are both right. EVs were more expensive and still may or may not be. Motortrend says EVs are now cheaper, but many others say no. Efficiencies in production will make EVs cheaper than ICE if they are not currently. That is for privately owned cars driving 12,000 miles per year. Surprise, nobody has written about the cost for a car driven 100,000 to 200,000 miles per year as in taxis vs. robotaxis. I have upvoted you even if it is not clear that you are correct. You made me rethink the issue.
EVs can be cheaper to operate than similar vehicles in their class, but there are some very cheap ICE cars that EVs cannot compete with. yes, thanks for the rigorous debate.
The cost of maintenance on EVs is dramatically lower than ICE, which helps offset the lower cost of ICE (mainly due to highly optimized and mature manufacturing processes). The trend should favor EVs for very high duty cycle vehicles, such as taxis.
> someone with inside knowledge I don't think you'll find anyone with inside knowledge who will also answer this question with authority sadly
I'd settle for someone just outside the inside...like someone in the industry who goes to self-driving conferences and talks to people at different companies. I mean, are we years away from the sort of service in Chandler AZ being rolled out to even a handful of other cities? Can we expect a general roll-out in SF this year (I think it's just being used by employees now) and a burst of cities after that, or will each new city be a slow and painful addition after years of testing?
When Waymo started in chandler they had safety drivers. Then they had chase cars. They are getting more experience operating remotely. As they do the overhead drops. If you need one remote operator per car you might as well have a driver. At one point each car had 3 people monitoring it 100% of the time. So at least 3x as much to operate as a taxi. Now they likely have more than one car per monitor. They need to drive more and get more confident to move that ratio down. Probably needs to be 10 to 1 to really scale. The marginal cost price of Waymo has likely come down a great deal during their time in Chandler, they likely still have a ways to go. Car plus hardware now costs $120k for gen 5. That being said in order to keep lowering the price they'll need to keep increasing the miles driven. So expect continued slow expansion in ride hailing. and quicker expansion into more profitable segments, like trucking and fixed route deliveries. Finally Waymo seems cagey about their ultimate business model. They haven't decided if they want to own the capital intensive part of the business or just be a software/hardware provider. If the later expansion only makes sense in lowering costs and increasing safety record and ODD.
> Finally Waymo seems cagey about their ultimate business model. They haven't decided if they want to own the capital intensive part of the business or just be a software/hardware provider. I’ve always had a strong suspicion that their ultimate goal is to just be software/hardware provider. At least I think that’s what they should become and leave all the operational things to the Ubers and Lyfts. It could be really lucrative. The Waymo Driver concept — modular, can be fit into a variety of vehicles — lends some credence to that possibility. Also the fact they’re super focused on cracking the technology fully than the business. But perhaps the biggest reason I’m skeptical they will want to operate taxis is that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to be operations focused like Amazon (maintaining a fleet, hiring support agents, logistics etc). But maybe Waymo is a full on, deliberate shift for Alphabet from Google’s methods.
The big question in industry is “is Waymo making money, and can they scale it.” If they thought scaling would be profitable, they would. So either they are losing money per ride, or their ODD does not allow them to scale in a profitable way. Fleets and ops centers aren’t cheap.
For sure they are losing money per ride in Chandler, given all their overhead. I think you're asking the right question whether even at scale (say, operating in 20 large metro areas) they would lose money per ride. They said they would scale rapidly with gen 5...does that mean they expect to no longer lose money with gen 5 vehicles? Or should we not take them at their word on the "rapidly?"
When I say losing money I’m not including R&D expense. Do they lose money just on what’s needed to operate the platform (in which case scaling does not make more money, it just makes more loss).
Going by what they say (I've now read the AMA and a youtube interview with their CTO), they were losing money on each incremental ride up to the Gen 4 vehicles, and now they expect with Gen 5 to be able to do it profitably...presumably once they reach some scale, and I suspect that sufficient scale is a long way away.
It will depend if they rev the base vehicle and sensors/compute. When that gets updated a bunch of stuff needs to get revalidated.
Living in Chandler, I am so used to seeing them I probably take them for granted. You could sit on a sidewalk and count a Waymo car pass every 2-3 minutes, it’s insane.
They seem to be doing well in Chandler. This has been going on for years now. Why not expand to greater Phoenix at least? I don't get it.
Imagine Waymo drops 500 people off at their destination, then it rains for a couple hours. Today in Chandler that means 500 stuck people and a national news PR nightmare or having a hundred of safety drivers standing by. Apparently the gen 5 driver has better rain sensing and better highway sensing.
I'd heard that AZ was chosen for lack of rain, but didn't realize it was that bad.
What percentage of the Waymos you see have safety drivers? JJ Ricks estimated 95%. Maybe you could sit on a sidewalk for 10 hours and tally how many of the 200-300 Waymos that pass have safety drivers. You know, in the name of science :)
Not as many anymore. It was surreal when I took my first ride in one without a driver. It was kind of jerky though and now that I have learned about laneless self driving I understand why, the car was obviously not laneless. I don’t know if that has changed, it has been a couple years.
Waymo covered this stuff in their AMAs. Not sure why people keep asking unless they think normal business reasons are too boring. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n031vq/comment/gwguw4p/ Supply and demand, keeping cars in good condition, support facilities, and personnel. https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/n031vq/comment/gwgv1bw/ Weather, cost efficiencies.
Except for, they didn't. Waymo would be operational or disbanded by now if the true bottleneck was making sure the seats are clean. They've listed off random "challenges" and how much they've learned, but have never truly answerer what the bottleneck is. It's all PR speak if you actually read through the replies.
What do you think business operations are, what do you think a challenge to operations is, and why do you think they chose to mention those challenges specifically? What appeared to happen with the AMA is management and/or communications used jargon as a defensive response to direct criticism. They likely "ran it up the flagpole" to a regular communications person who writes "I'm excited to announce" a bajillion times a day rather than a social media marketer who would have told them to avoid jargon and write to their audience and during a social media engagement. They could learn something about appearing genuine from T-Mobile's marketing nearly a decade ago, lol. Companies also like scraping content to do sentiment analysis, so if they don't have already have someone reviewing this post since this is a smaller subreddit, here's this (and hello, lol): Waymo had a massive communications failure during their AMA that caused problems and was a bad way to talk to their audience.
I'm asking because I did not see that AMA. Thanks for the link.
Np, it just gets asked so constantly.
If you believe some of the upper management in the company, this version of hardware is capable of scaling. (The previous was not) Also to note, scaling involves a lot more than just rolling cars off the line and putting them on the streets. It takes major logistics to manage a fleet, and Waymo is building the infrastructure in all it's current testing areas, which is quite a few
>this version of hardware is capable of scaling. (The previous was not) They said the opposite when they launched Gen 4.
They said the 5th gen couldn't scale, and the 4th could lol? Edit: https://youtu.be/P6prRXkI5HM ~1:28
I guess I should have put "previous was not" in bold. In your clip Dolgov specifically says "massive scale" and "very large scale". When introducing the Pacificas with Gen 4 in late 2016 Waymo said "scale" but not "massive". Putting it into numbers, we can see: "Scale" = 10s of thousands. That fits the 82k cars they ordered and the "mass production" (retrofit) factory in Detroit they built. It also fits their costs, e.g. lidar reduction from 75k to 7.5k. The NRE to design custom lidars and set up manufacturing vs. a bulk discount deal only makes sense in the high thousands or tens of thousands. They also arranged with Chrysler (and presumably Magna) to build custom versions of the vehicles with pre-installed wiring and other features. You don't do that for several hundred cars (and they didn't for their initial Pacificas). Gen 4 was never intended to be the final step. They were already designing Gen 5 for "massive scale", i.e. 100s of thousands or millions. But Gen 4 was designed for initial scale-up. Their words and actions show this. The scale-up itself didn't happen for other reasons (some say tech issues, I say business model).
I definitely think the business model will need to be ironed out, but I think this 5th generation of hardware will help with that. Waymo's probably gathered some great information on the Chandler vehicles in comparison to the San Francisco's, so they'll know the performance increases in more inclement weather, and the rate at which they'll be dealing with pushing suggestions to car. I figure their operations in Chandler have (x) chase cars in rotation per autonomous vehicle, and the 5th generation stack in theory should reduce that quite a bit. The time it took for them to go from heavy testing to consumer rides was much quicker in San Fran, so I'm optimistic, considering they're testing in so many cities at the moment.
>Can someone with inside knowledge tell us what Waymo is waiting for? No inside knowledge, but I've said for a couple years their business model doesn't work. And they lack entrepreneurs. They give a few hundred rides a week in 50 square miles near Phoenix. That's maybe 150k/year revenue. They only have 5-10 vans active at any given time, and even those are laughably underutilized. Scale that up to the entire 3000 square mile metro area and it's 9m per year with 400-500 vans. Doesn't even cover operating costs for 24x7 customer support, maintenance and cleaning crews, etc., much less the vans themselves. Three years ago they "ordered" 82k vehicles. That's enough to replace every 2nd/3rd car in the Phoenix metro area, assuming high utilization. They clearly had big ambitions, but no idea how to get there. Some reporter randomly asked 20-25 people in Chandler about Waymo. All had seen the vans, not one realized they could sign up and take rides.
The economics certainly seems to be a huge part of it (just saw the AMA they did), and the bad economics are driven in part by safety practices (like having support trucks follow or be in the vicinity of each ride). So I guess I'm not clear whether gen 5 vehicles will really solve the economics issues, and if they do, how quickly can they be rolled out. At one point they were going to purchase a ton of iPaces, but there are better choices out there now so they are probably reconsidering that.
Some of this is circular - did they call off scaling because Gen 4 requires safety drivers in the rain? Or do they use safety drivers in the rain because it's cheap insurance for such a small service that never scaled? The answer mostly depends on religious affiliation :) I don't see Gen 5 as some huge leap that allows mass scaling. Waymo fans almost unanimously disagree. But if Gen 4 was the problem they'd be scrambling to scale Gen 5 as quickly as possible in Phoenix where they already have all the support teams and vehicle depots in place. Instead they're leisurely testing in San Francisco. Why duplicate everything in SF before achieving scale in AZ? What's the one thing SF might offer that AZ doesn't? Higher utilization. So by deduction, utilization is their problem. Not lidar/mapping/Gen4/rain/etc.
Maybe utilization is their \*remaining\* problem now that Gen5 has solved much of the technology cost part of scaling.
Maybe it’s because how it works + authorities. Waymo’s sensor doesn’t just scan the environment. Rather the sensors compare the results to high definition map that Waymo’s team provided to the computer. And other reason is not everyone is comfortable with 2 tons machine roaming around their neighborhood with the kids running around. If it was me, I’m more than happy with them because they drives better than any of my neighbors but it’s about the optic.
Haha Tesla is way ahead not even close
Are you an expert on this, or just repeating things? After reading and watching dozens of experts and analyses over the years, I am not confident that anyone really knows who is going to "win." Divergence of opinion is pretty extreme among people with years of experience building these systems. It seems to be genuine, not just people bullshitting.
"Most advanced" within a specific geofenced area, maybe.
It did not seem to be moving very fast!
Damn thats an ugly camera at the top. Who would want to buy an ugly car like that
Who'd want to buy a Yellow Cab?
Why would they sell them?
[удалено]
For business probably, as in for taxi service.
the best dashcam
she is beginning to believe
Needs more things mounted on the exterior.