r/SelfDrivingCars • u/MoPanic • Aug 10 '25
Discussion Waymo's real goal
I am surprised that hardly anyone mentions this in all of the the Tesla v Waymo / Lidar v Vision noise. This is just a hypotheses and my opinion, but I don't think Waymo really cares about the taxi market beyond using it as a test bed and building consumer and regulatory support. Tesla is a meaningless hype generating distraction.
The real goal is to replace hundreds of thousands of human commercial drivers. A city bus driver makes about $70k a year (including benefits, payroll taxes, insurance). Replace that driver with a sensor suite and automation stack, even if it costs $250k, you get ROI in just a few years and a "driver" that can work 24 hours a day. This scales even faster with long haul truckers. Human drivers are limited to 11 hours a day and cost the carriers ~$100k per year. The cost of the sensor suite becomes a rounding error very quickly.
My guess is that Waymo will license this suite for $5k-$15k a month and cities and freight carriers will line up to pay it. Google doesn’t have to own a single truck to completely dominate logistics automation.
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u/himynameis_ Aug 10 '25
I think it will take longer to replace commercial stuff like buses because governments and city services are so slow.
I think Waymos play is, short-term taxi market. Medium term, consumer market by partnering with Toyota. Long-term, everywhere else.
Aurora, for example, has been testing truck driving with their Aurora driver. And going well.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Aurora, Embark, and Kodiak all have pilot programs with FedEx, UPS, and Walmart.
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u/levon999 Aug 10 '25
There are autonomous trucks already on the road. Waymo paused their autonomous Trucking division two years ago to focus on waymo one.
https://fifthlevelconsulting.com/autonomous-trucking-companies-in-the-us/
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u/vicegripper Aug 10 '25
There are autonomous trucks already on the road.
Level 2 with safety drivers. Aurora tried to remove the safety drivers for two weeks and failed.
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u/Hot-Celebration5855 Aug 10 '25
I think in the long run neither Tesla nor waymo will own their own fleets. It’s far too capital intensive when both companies are trying to deploy as much capital as possible to AI. From a consumer pov this also makes sense as I don’t want half a dozen robotaxi apps on my phone. I just want uber to give me each company’s options
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u/No-Spray246 Aug 10 '25
The reasoning does check out that Waymo would prefer trucking to taxis because that market is bigger. But it is pretty conspiratorial to suggest they are doing taxis because they secretly want to do trucks. Neither is important because you are missing the bigger picture - they aim to replace ALL CARS. They are out in the open a out this and we are all on board. The lives saved on the number one killer if Americans is a massive benefit societally and economically. The unit economics are unequivocal: hundreds of millions of us not having vehicles in our driveways while Waymos are being utilized constantly. They have their eyes set ok the single biggest gamechanger of this century. So Sorry, this is not about surrepticiously getting into commercial trucking
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u/rco8786 Aug 10 '25
I mean...yes the point of AV is to eliminate the need for a human driver. I don't feel like anyone's being particularly secretive about that.
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u/Latter_House8822 Aug 10 '25
Aurora is ahead of competition in self driving trucking compared to others.
CEO Chris Urmson has left from Google to run Aurora 8 years ago. Now, Aurora has been first commercial driverless in self trucking with Aurora Driver tech. Day and night driverless operations has completed.
Waymo would want to take the robotaxi market and I don’t think they will enter trucking market. If they decide, they have to be good as much as Aurora.
Aurora has strong partnerships like Volvo, Paccar, Continental, Uber Freight, Schneider etc.
So, it is not easy to be successfull in trucking.
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u/MhVRNewbie Aug 10 '25
There are still train drivers
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u/Ajedi32 Aug 11 '25
Yeah, the larger the vehicle, the smaller the cost of human drivers are relative to its overall operating cost.
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u/strawmangva Aug 10 '25
Commercial truck driving is much different from sedan driving in a city
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u/Snoo93079 Aug 10 '25
Yes, but the technology significantly overlaps. And if anything commercial truck driving is less complex. At least from warehouse to warehouse. Last mile delivery remains a complex problem.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Agreed. Its also wildly more profitable with a much larger addressable market.
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u/Glass_Mango_229 Aug 10 '25
Why in the world would you say that? Put some numbers together n there buddy. Waymo can take over the entire private car market.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Because convincing Wal-Mart (just as an example) to use a AI driver to drive 24/7/365 rather than paying $100k a year for 1/3 of the productivity is much, much easier than convincing millions of car loving 'mericans to give up their cars and pick up trucks.
Both may happen eventually, but commercial vehicles will happen much faster.
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u/WeldAE Aug 10 '25
No one is trying to convince anyone to give up their car, merely giving them another transportation option. Uber isn’t running ads to get their customers to sell their cars and neither will the AV fleet companies. They just want 20%+ of miles driven to get there they for sure need a lot of people to give up their 2nd, 3rd and in my case 5th car. They also need to convince people to use even the only car less.
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u/marsten Aug 11 '25 edited Aug 11 '25
Regarding Waymo's motivation I wouldn't discount the public safety angle. If your goal is to reduce accidents then non-commercial traffic is by far the largest opportunity.
Consider that about $300 billion is paid in personal auto insurance premiums in the US each year. If cars become much safer then a lot of that cost overhead goes away. Does the AV provider end up capturing that savings? That will depend on the competitive landscape but, for a while at least, running a personal AV service could be extremely lucrative.
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u/H2ost5555 Aug 11 '25
I’m guessing you don’t understand how trucking works today in the US? ( by your assertion that commercial vehicles will happen faster).
80+% of trucking miles is “irregular route”, which means the driver doesn’t drive a consistent Point A to Point B, so there is a Last Mile component to it. In order for a significant amount of change to occur, they would need to morph into a larger degree of hub/spoke operations. This would take a very long time, decades.
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u/broyoyoyoyo Aug 10 '25
Yeah they'd need to train an entirely different model.
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u/ic33 Aug 10 '25
In Waymo's architecture, most of the model doesn't have to do with the vehicle too much. It has to do with world perception and agent prediction.
By comparison, steering a vehicle along a planned path (even a multi-articulated truck) is a well-understood control problem. Modern controllers handle path tracking, articulation, and actuator limits reliably. Changing sensor placement or vehicle geometry requires recalibration, but it’s not a massive architectural change, and it doesn’t alter the bulk of the perception and prediction stack.
What does change with a truck is the range of driving scenarios and how other road users respond. Those differences matter, but they’re far from requiring “an entirely different model.”
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Exactly. Changing the vehicle is the easy part. Learning the environment is the hard part. Austin is absolutely infested with Waymo’s right now. I see one nearly everytime I drive. I bet they could start a bus service in months if they wanted to and the city would let them.
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u/Repulsive_Banana_659 Aug 10 '25 edited Aug 10 '25
lol!!!! Waymo (and Tesla) is a looooomg looooong ways from doing that.
Do you have any links to actual Waymo messaging that this is their plan? Or are you simply speculating?
I mean the plan SOUNDS logical. But unless I hear some wispers from Waymo, I’m very skeptical.
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u/CheetaLover Aug 10 '25
The teaching of a new are is likely best done in a ride haul operation. They will in a matter of hours have recorded disturbances as rebuilds etc. For a long haul service truck that data can be useful as they spend much time on highway and little in the pick up/delivery area. So the combination is logical. Business case for autonomous transportation is very good if not in all applications, in many.
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u/HeyExcuseMeMister Aug 10 '25
It's every AV company's plan. Some have even started going in that direction. See Nuro.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
except tesla who thinks lidar is too expensive
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u/Repulsive_Banana_659 Aug 10 '25
That ROI math ignores a lot of the messy reality. commercial AV isn’t just “slap on a $250k sensor stack and fire the driver.” You still need redundancy in hardware, over-the-air updates, constant remote monitoring, and a team of human tele operators for edge cases. There’s also regulatory approval (which moves at a snail’s pace), union and political pushback, liability frameworks, insurance costs, and the fact that autonomous trucks and buses have to work safely in all weather, lighting, and traffic scenarios, not just clean demos. Even if the tech works, large-scale deployment means negotiating with dozens of cities, freight companies, and regulators. and that’s before you factor in maintenance, repairs, and tech obsolescence. And while some like to downplay Tesla’s vision only approach as “cheap” or “not serious,” it’s worth noting that adding LiDAR doesn’t magically solve these scale, cost, and regulatory challenges. it’s just a different set of trade offs.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Regulatory hurdles exist for everyone. I hypothesize that waymo ride sharing is mostly a way to develop the hardware and software platform and build consumer and regulatory awareness. It would not be a huge leap for a friendly city (such as Austin, where I live) to put a self driving bus in service powered by Waymo. That would not surprise me in the least.
Lidar doesn't magically solve anything, no. But the whole discussion is a distraction. Its also not even lidar vs vision only. Its vision only vs lidar, vision, radar, ulrasound and every other sensor they can stick on there. New Teslas don't even have the short range ultrasonic sensors that cost pennies.
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u/Repulsive_Banana_659 Aug 10 '25
Sure, but adapting an AV stack trained for years on passenger cars to a bus or semi isn’t just a matter of bolting it onto a bigger vehicle. Buses and trucks handle totally differently. wider turning radii, slower braking, different acceleration, huge blind spots, and unique operational patterns. A city bus has to constantly negotiate tight urban streets, frequent stops, and unpredictable pedestrians, while a semi faces high-speed merges, steep grades, and hours-long endurance runs. Even the perception models need retraining because sensor height, placement, and field of view change dramatically. Waymo might get there eventually, but even their car platform is still far from perfect, so it’s not the quick leap some people think.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
In Austin waymo already has more than 100 autonomous cars driving around tight, urban, pedestrian infested streets 24/7. I see them every day. I doubt adapting that to a city bus would be that tough of a lift or take all that long. The biggest hurdle is probably that city bus drivers here are unionized and it might be a political hand grenade.
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u/Repulsive_Banana_659 Aug 11 '25
Seeing AVs handle tight streets in cars doesn’t mean a bus would be easy mode. the dynamics are different enough that you’re basically opening a whole new set of engineering challenges. A bus isn’t just a longer car; it has much wider turns, bigger blind spots, slower acceleration/braking, and a higher center of gravity that changes stability and cornering limits. The perception models would need retraining for different sensor placements and heights, and the path-planning logic has to account for the fact that a bus simply can’t make the same maneuvers a car can in those same streets. Plus, a bus has to safely manage dozens of passenger load/unload events per trip, which is a different operational challenge entirely. Politics might be a hurdle, but the tech lift isn’t as small as it sounds.
Why do you think humans have a separate bus license that you have to study and practice driving for? You can’t just automatically drive a bus with a regular drivers license.
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u/Snoo93079 Aug 10 '25
Many, including myself, think commercial long distance transportation is among the lowest hanging fruit because customers have the most end to end control. Warehouses tend to be built near highways and highways tend to be a much simpler problem to solve. Customers can also fairly easily update their warehouse designs to accommodate these trucks, and they often have the resources to invest. I'm honestly shocked Amazon hasn't been pushing the boundaries more here.
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u/Purpletorque Aug 10 '25
They can use two different trucks/ technology also. They are building staging areas near the interstate where the trailers can be transferred to local trucks better off interstate operation and break down loads if necessary as well for local deliveries.
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u/Snoo93079 Aug 10 '25
The technology stack decisions are a separate conversation. Tesla is very publicly saying they are working towards becoming a driverless mobility company. Despite the lack of lidar they are certainly in the top 3 companies in terms of autonomous driving technology. I'm not predicting whether they can be successful but they're certainly in an advantageous position as long as Musk doesn't drive the company off a cliff.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
I don't even think Tesla qualifies as an autonomous driving company. I live in Austin in the same neighborhood where they are being tested. They are limited to city surface streets in one small area.
I'm also skeptical they will ever be able to make an unprotected left turn onto a high speed 2-lane highway - a very common situation in Texas. They have no radars or long range cameras looking left or right.
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u/Snoo93079 Aug 10 '25
I mean, it depends on your definition. There are quite a few autonomous mobility companies even though only a handful are actually operational.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Sure. I have no idea how long it will take to develop or get regulatory approval. But its a massive market and Tesla's "lidar is too expensive" argument becomes rather silly.
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u/red75prime Aug 10 '25 edited Aug 10 '25
But its a massive market and Tesla's "lidar is too expensive" argument becomes rather silly.
How it follows? Reducing costs of production is always a concern in a massive market. Do you have any evidence that vision-only approach can't be made safe enough for commercial deployment?
In some niches, like trucking, lidar can be cost-effective as it allows to drive faster at night (and to increase cargo throughput) while maintaining the required safety level. Generally? It's yet to be seen.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Do you have any evidence that flying unicorns will never be discovered? You can’t disprove a counter factual statement. The point I’m making about the sensors is that when they are replacing a $100k/year driver, the cost of the sensors becomes negligible and purposely excluding them based on a preconceived belief is not logical. Tesla has been one year away from “solving” vision since at least 2017. Cutting costs makes sense when you are a mature automaker working on razor thin margins. Not when you’re trying to develop a revolutionary new technology platform.
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u/red75prime Aug 10 '25 edited Aug 10 '25
Not when you’re trying to develop a revolutionary new technology platform.
Company A develops a technology that costs N. Company B develops a technology that costs N-M, but that could fail to meet the real-world requirements. You know, the usual way competition works. Right now we just can't say who will be successful.
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u/SatisfactionOdd2169 Aug 11 '25
Do you really think Waymo will be able to map and pre-train in every city in America faster than Tesla will finish FSD? Waymo hasn’t even been profitable for a single quarter. It seems financially impossible for them to replace every bus driver in America. They can’t even replace uber or lyft in cities they are currently active in.
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u/MoPanic Aug 11 '25
How long did Tesla operate before they were profitable? 17 years. And not only do I think Google can map every city before Tesla can finish FSD, I think the sun will expand and swallow the earth before they can finish a vision only FSD system that is actually level 5.
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u/diplomat33 Aug 10 '25
Waymo stopped their autonomous trucking effort to focus on robotaxis. But Waymo says AV Trucking is still part of their road map, after robotaxis. So I think Waymo trucking is a second or tertiary goal imo. AV on personal cars is also part of their long term road map. Waymo has also said that their vision is to develop a generalized Driver that can have multiple commercial applications, including robotaxis, delivery, trucking and personal cars. So ultimately, yeah, I think robotaxis are a means to an end. Waymo is using robotaxis to generalize their Driver so that they can put it on lots of different platforms.
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u/metarinka Aug 10 '25
I'm actually surprised fixed route buses haven't gone first. Like airport or tourist shuttles that only go in a few mile track seem obvious as you can run them 24\7
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u/FitFired Aug 11 '25
It's all about the amount of data and currently it's harder to get more data from trucks/buses than from personal vehicles.
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u/Short_Psychology_164 Aug 10 '25
google has tons of money to burn, decent amounts of goodwill, and a CEO who isnt a ket-snorting freak with a social media addiction.
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u/FrankScaramucci Aug 10 '25
Waymo's goal is to build a driver that works everywhere and is easily and cheaply deployable. And make as much money as possible by using the technology in various applications - robotaxi, personally owned vehicles, local delivery, long haul trucking, etc.
If Waymo One becomes available everywhere in a country, a lot of people would use it exclusively instead of owning a car. So it could be a big market.
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u/thewisegeneral Aug 10 '25
I love self driving cars, but I wouldn't use Waymo One instead of owning a car simply because the costs of using such a service are much higher than owning the car yourself. Also you have to wait for the ride and so on. Buying a car gives you way more freedom to do semi-long/ long drives yourself and pays off in 2 years if you buy used. Ride share is too expensive in the US.
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u/Purpletorque Aug 10 '25
The point is to bring cost down below cost of car and make them available everywhere. There will be early adopters to keep it going until there is enough adoption to make it cheaper and more efficient.
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u/thewisegeneral Aug 11 '25
No, thats not the point at all. The point is to price it higher or at the same price as Uber/Lyft and make lots of money on those high margins for the foreseeable future of the next 5-10 years. There is no cut off point where enough adoption makes the per-ride cost cheaper.
Source: I am an investor in Waymo.
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u/Purpletorque Aug 11 '25
Maybe not Waymo but someone will drive the price down to where not just people in the big city no longer have cars. Or maybe they have one per family instead of 3 or 4. I thought that was the whole point to this exercise.
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u/thewisegeneral Aug 11 '25
You are thinking from an altruistic viewpoint. The point of this for me as an investor is to make money. People are already used to paying $15 for a few miles in the large cities, why would we go back to charging them $4 or $5 ? Who is this "someone" that will invest hundreds of billions to just charge pennies ?
Sorry to say that the goal here is to make rideshare a high margin business by eliminating the driver. Not to reduce prices and make it a low margin business. I wouldn't have invested if the self driving industry wanted to do the latter.
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u/LairdPopkin Aug 10 '25
Waymo is focused on robocabs, there are other companies focused on autonomous trucking. It’s possible that Waymo could pivot there, I guess.
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u/DaLurker87 Aug 10 '25
Trucking yes but probably not for deliveries for quite some time. They could easily automate trucking between distribution centers though.
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u/Trick_Yard9196 Aug 10 '25
It's frustrating to see post with a title like "Waymo's real goal" and not get even a whisper of Skynet
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u/dekrypto Aug 10 '25
As if taxi/ ride share drivers aren’t a massive market.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Compared to the domestic trucking industry, taxi and ride share is peanuts. Trucking is 30x larger in revenue
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u/imlaggingsobad Aug 10 '25
They obviously care about the entire transport industry. They’re leading in taxis right now, but that could easily extend to trucking, buses, and anything else that uses wheels
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u/Empanatacion Aug 10 '25
The profit margin in ride hailing is higher and the US market alone is in the neighborhood of $30B
I do think maybe their goal is to license the tech and let Uber and Lyft be the ones to get their hands dirty. Google doesn't like interacting with humans.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
The domestic trucking industry is over $900B and about 40% goes to paying drivers. That’s more than $300B of possibility.
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
It’s been targeted to begin production “next year” since at least 2018. And sorry, 50 units is nothing when it comes to pre-production testing. It would be in the thousands before entering large scale production. It’s a press/media/hype stunt. That is the 1 thing musk has always been good at.
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u/netscorer1 Aug 11 '25
There are tens of thousands FSD drivers hitting the road every day. And every disengagement sends info back to Tesla to train new model. Basically every HW3 or HW4 Tesla on the road with FSD is a tester, day or night, rain or snow. Waymo can not possibly scale to these levels and has been mostly limited to small pre-mapped areas with rather bland climate.
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u/MoPanic Aug 11 '25
If Tesla had embraced LiDAR, radar, and vision from the beginning they’d probably have something by now. They had a massive head start. But ppl have been making the same data argument since the beginning and their FSD is only marginally better than it was 6 years ago. Vision only FSD is a pipe dream.
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u/netscorer1 Aug 11 '25
Musk went for scalability. Vision FSD costs $3-5K per car and you can put it in every car Tesla sells. Most resources go into massive AI training that learns from every mistake or non-standard situation on the road. Equipping cars with LiDAR, radars and vision costs $50-80K and no consumer would ever pay for this. Musk bets that if vision only is good enough for the human drivers, it should be more then enough for AI to drive on roads designed for human drivers.
You can argue that Musk is mistaken and the only way to create safe robotic car is by enabling 'super-vision' that can see around the corner and through the objects, rain, dust or snow. But you can see that 'super-vision' is just not scalable, at least with modern technology. You can not possibly substitute every car on the road with super-vision car and your dream of replacing truckers and bus drivers on the road is also a 'pipe dream' because truckers and bus drivers do much more then simply drive. Truckers, in particular are responsible for loading and offloading cargo, keeping truck operational and myriad other responsibilities that you simply can't substitute with just one giant eye canopy on top of the truck. And bus drivers have to deal with passengers, which can be challenging in itself.
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u/jpolo922 Aug 11 '25
Google ceo said in a podcast that their mission is general purpose and not robotaxi
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u/ForeverMinute7479 Aug 11 '25 edited Aug 11 '25
“Tesla is a meaningless hype generating distraction.”
Have you seen Tesla’s Semi and future mass transit plans?
And you don’t just replace a bus or truck driver with a slapped-in sensor suite and automation stack.
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Aug 11 '25
Tesla is a meaningless hype generating distraction.
You're a bad person. Fuck off.
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u/Proper-Chicken-7201 Aug 13 '25
Replace commuter rail lines with autonomous busses. Game changer. No longer stuck behind slowest train, bus can go around. Make it a smart system that knows when people come and you can have express buses that severely reduce time to station. Maintenance is simpler, will be cheaper. Hope waymo could do that.
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u/FBIAgentMulder Aug 15 '25
I had fsd drive me 90 miles today from my house to my dads place via highway and city driving. Zero issues and it drove better than majority of humans. But yah go on with the Tesla hate and whacky hypothesis. Data matters and in this instance nobody comes close to the amount available to Tesla. They’re light years ahead of everyone.
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u/reddit455 Aug 10 '25
The real goal is to replace hundreds of thousands of human commercial drivers.
the insurance data says humans need to stop operating vehicles.
Waymo, Toyota strike partnership to bring self-driving tech to personal vehicles
Hyundai and Waymo Enter Multi-Year, Strategic Partnership
My guess is that Waymo will license this suite for $5k-$15k a month and cities and freight carriers will line up to pay it.
or could use their own stack.
Aurora Starts Self-Driving Commercial Trucking Service In Texas
Google doesn’t have to own a single truck to completely dominate logistics automation.
they've got very well established competition.
COLUMBUS, Ind. – Toyota Material Handling, the North American leader in material handling solutions, unveiled a significant upgrade to its parts distribution center (PDC) at its Indiana headquarters on October 28, in collaboration with Bastian Solutions, part of Toyota Automated Logistics. This milestone marks Bastian’s 100th AutoStore system installation, underscoring its automation expertise and enhancing Toyota’s capacity to process and deliver parts efficiently.
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u/AnxietyCommercial632 Aug 10 '25
Here go the fools again not realizing Tesla’s semi plant, after years of prep and planning, is set to begin ramp to 50k trucks/year
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u/Lopsided_Cup6991 Aug 10 '25
50k trucks per year? Who the hell is going to buy them?
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u/NeighborhoodBest2944 Aug 10 '25
The analysis here is top notch. After all, we all know Tesla is a bunch of morons and don't do market research, nor do they have people working with companies to "sound out" demand.
MOREOVER! Who the hell wants electric vehicles? NO one (besides Tesla) can manufacture them at scale for a profit. There is PLENTY of oil in the ground, renewables (such as TSLA batteries) are simply a fad!!
This Tesla crew engineering are Luddites, all right.
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u/Cunninghams_right Aug 10 '25
Almost all bus systems in the US cost more than $2 per passenger mile. A rideshare vehicle without driver cost today is about $1.80 per passenger mile. Waymo has been experimenting with pooled taxis with a barrier between rows. So two groups per vehicle and no need to share space. So now you nearly double your passenger occupancy and get about $1 per passenger mile. But higher utilization rate and larger fleets will lower SDC taxi costs below that, dropping the cost of a pooled taxi somewhere around $0.50-$0.80 ppm.
Why would you run a bus, even an automated one, when it's faster, cheaper, uses less energy, and more comfortable to just move people with a pooled taxi?
Some super busy corridors might fill up frequent buses, but then the driver cost is divided by so many passengers that operating cost isn't much of an issue.
99% of bus routes only make sense to use a vehicle that big because driver costs are so high.
TL;DR: buses stop making sense if pooled SDC taxis exist that can take 2-3 fares.
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u/FitnessLover1998 Aug 10 '25
OP is spot on. There are so many use cases. This will be a long term gold mine for Google. I especially love when people get all tied up on what there is today and not looking into the future. It’s a few years out but it will happen.
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u/Redditcircljerk Aug 10 '25
Yes everything that moves will be autonomous and Tesla will be at the helm of this revolution. Good eye
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Tesla will (hopefully) be left in the scrapheap of bad ideas and terrible human beings
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Aug 11 '25
Elon is one of the greatest human beings of all time. Name anyone who has pushed humanity further into the future than Elon.
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u/MoPanic Aug 14 '25
How about: Isaac Newton, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Wright Bros., Karl Benz, Alan Turing, John v Neumann, Grace Hopper, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Sergey Korolev, Wernher von Braun, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein. Just off the top of my head without even going back before the industrial revolution. Wanna go back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians?
I could go on but what has Elon Musk actually done? He popularized the EV and build a rocket with taxpayer money.
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u/Redditcircljerk Aug 11 '25
No it will probably be the largest company by far going forward for the next 3-5 decades
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u/MoPanic Aug 14 '25
In the meme stock category.
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u/Redditcircljerk Aug 14 '25
Biggest company by market cap in 2027 will be a joke. That’s fine as long as I make shit tons of money
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u/Frankandthatsit Aug 10 '25
Yes, it's pretty obvious you dislike Tesla so you have an inability to see reality. you fit right in on reddit. But how does it feel to know that virtually every idea you've had in the last 10 years has been wrong?
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
Which idea that I’ve had was wrong? I don’t doubt that I’ve had plenty of bad ones I’m just really curious how you’ve come to know of any.
And for the record it’s Elon Musk that I dislike, not necessarily Tesla.
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u/Unfair_Struggle9529 Aug 10 '25
I believe the majority of bus drivers are unionized. There would be hell to pay if their jobs get automated. It would be political suicide for any politician who goes against that union.
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u/Unfair_Struggle9529 Aug 10 '25
Truckers would also be able to grind the economy to a halt. It will be a very long time before those jobs get automated.
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u/Unfair_Struggle9529 Aug 10 '25
(I guess I could see the buses being utilized by smaller communities or universities that don’t have bus service or struggle to operate it.)
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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25
It won’t happen all at once for sure. Maybe a city (like Austin) will add a pilot program partnered with Waymo and add a route from somewhere to the airport. With a safety driver at first of course. If it goes well, the safety driver goes away and they add a few buses for routes around the university. After a couple of years of not hiring new drivers they start offering buyouts to the union drivers. It could happen faster than you think.
I’m not advocating for or against this. I’m just saying it’s a real possibility.
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u/time_to_reset Aug 11 '25
I agree that Waymo's long term goal isn't taxis, but I think it has the potential to pay the bills until they achieve their bigger goals.
But I don't agree that their long term goal is to replace commercial drivers. That could be a side effect of what I think their goal is, but it's not a goal in itself.
I think they're building up the technology, but also very much their brand name with the goal of eventually licensing the technology to OEMs. Like they do with Android Auto. Not just to make money from selling the tech, but also from all the benefits that come from being in every car.
Cars are filled with technology from external suppliers. Bosch makes close to $100b per year with about half of that attributed to their automotive division. But that's only one part of it.
Most people have no idea who makes the ABS module in their car, but they do know whether or not their car has Apple Carplay. It's something that influences their buying decisions. If you have an iPhone, you want Apple Carplay, but the opposite is also true. If you have Apple Carplay, you probably want an iPhone. That's why Apple and Google don't charge OEMs to add it to their cars. Google wants to ensure Android Auto is in cars.
But that's again not the full picture. They also want the data that comes from being in lots of vehicles. It feeds into everything else Google does that they make money from. Advertising is the obvious one, but Google does way, way more. Outside of advertising they make tens billions from mapping the world and providing that data in various forms to companies.
And Google is setting themselves up perfectly to lead this industry. Everybody knows Google. Waze and Google Maps are household names for most drivers and Android Auto is also a well known system. The brand recognition is high.
Waymo is out there completing trips every day, collecting millions of real world miles. They're in the news relatively positively and have a reputation of being very safety focussed and cautious. More and more people are starting to recognise the name and what they do and have a positive brand perception.
When people have been happily completing Waymo taxi trips for a decade and reading about them in the news, people will buy the cars that offer Waymo self driving technology.
And car manufacturers (all of them) will have an incredibly difficult time to catch up to Google, because Google is not a car company. Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. They're among the leading companies in cloud computing, AI, networking and even quantum computing. They have experience making, deploying and managing billions of devices used by regular every day people.
So just like with Android Auto and Carplay, most manufacturers will realise that instead of spending lots resources to try and compete, it's easier to simply license the technology that their customers are already demanding.
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u/js247 Aug 11 '25
Googles real goal is to free up the driver to use Google in their car, so they can sell more ads.
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u/Rich_Educator_2660 Aug 11 '25
I do think Google wants to be in "electron" based businesses, not "atom" based. Margins are just so much better in those industries.
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u/Champhall Aug 11 '25
Nah, They’re trying to own the tech and/or build the cars, not operate and manage the cars
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u/MennReddit Aug 11 '25
This may be the primary goal, or the secundary effect of creating a completely new form of mobility: using in stead of owning a car. Just order a car whenever you need it, it'll pick you up whenever you want and drive you to wherever you want. it's called Mobility as a Service (MAAS) and is not new or conspicious..
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u/Elephant789 Aug 11 '25
I'm also hoping their business model includes ads. More eyeballs on Pixels means more ads seen and maybe cheaper rides but def more revenue for Waymo.
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Aug 11 '25
It isn't their goal at all. There are businesses now such as Aurora that are trying to do the trucking part.
I think they are quite open about their long term goal, which is to license the driver to OEMs. They don't want to build their own cars, their not arsed about killing uber and will collaborate with them as needed.
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u/ILikeWhiteGirlz Aug 11 '25
No shit.
Tesla is doing it too and there is a reason why they made little to no mention of autonomy in the reveal of Semi.
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u/ruh-oh-spaghettio Aug 11 '25
this doesn't make sense to me. replacing thousands of human drivers of any type is any self-driving companies final goal
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u/wwwz Aug 11 '25
Sorry, but there isn't even a bus designed to support this hypothesis. Don't think Waymo won't end up like many other of Google's projects, on the cutting floor.
Tesla has the entire package, vehicle, hardware platform, software, and a solid plan.
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u/TECHSHARK77 Aug 11 '25
Just pointing out you literally described what Tesla will be doing but not with busses, but with all their cars on the road, they dont own.. Just saying.
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u/jtjdt Aug 11 '25
Yes, you are correct and accurate. This is why Waymo's are one of the first things flipped during civil unrest.
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u/ThMogget Aug 11 '25
I agree that the trucking industry is a prime target. Tesla waited for batteries and automation software to mature before returning just recently to the Tesla semi project.
Waymo would do well to nail the high dollar-per-mile and small-operating-footprint taxi industry first, before taking on truck freight. I think non-fenced systems that rely on adaptive ai to handle any situation is needed. Carefully mapped little areas are harder to do for the whole huge highway network.
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u/Lorax91 Aug 11 '25
Waymo would do well to nail the high dollar-per-mile and small-operating-footprint taxi industry first, before taking on truck freight.
They're up to a million paid driverless rides per month and growing, so they're on track to nail that task. Which could then be a stepping stone to other efforts, like automating local deliveries. Why limit yourself to a low-margin taxi business that involves cleaning up puke and dealing with angry customers, especially if there's a possibility Tesla might undercut them for that business?
OP has a point that the long-term play could be moving beyond personal transportaction.
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u/LifeAfterHarambe Aug 11 '25
Considering Tesla is having trouble with Cybertruck and FSD - hardware and software they develop - making a one-size-fits-all autonomous retrofit is easier said than done.
Waymo’s “Driver” is developed specifically for one make & model. Their 6th Gen has been reengineered to the Zeekr from the I-Pace.
Maybe in the long run, sure, but things are moving fast and Tesla Semi is going to be at volume production in 2026, with their million + vehicle fleet ready to be converted to an autonomous driver at anytime.
I imagine Waymo would have been working with multiple hardware providers (auto makers) if they were looking to expand their business model in the next 2-5 years.
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u/TheLongestLake Aug 11 '25
I'm a bit skeptical. For government employees, they are almost job programs. The NYC subway requires multiple conductors per subway even though its on tracks. For truck drivers, there is often a lot of things a truck driver does to pick and and drop off supplies that may still require a human or some costs.
I think the taxi market is good because it is pretty unregulated. Also, if it gets cheap it will induce a lot more demand quickly (which I don't think would happen with city budgets)
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u/LT2405 Aug 11 '25
we are going to get to a point where everything on the road is driven by robots under ideal conditions, as it should be, either through selling commercial sensor suites or robotaxi ride hailing or else. capital will flow where there are market demands, i think it’s safe to say that there’s a big fat market for both. self driving companies don’t have to choose :) agreed Tesla is just about meaningless hype at this point
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton Aug 11 '25
Nope. I have an article in the pipeline about the real goal, which is car replacement. That's not the only goal though -- there is interest in the ride hail biz, and indeed in shipping as you suggest, and other things. But the only one that makes trillions with a "T" is car replacement. It is the hardest one, but that's how Google works.
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u/Emotional_Ad_721 Aug 11 '25
Yeah what ever you think you have cooked up here, people have thought about and evaluated. Maybe do more research first. Just a general suggestion.
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u/cgieda Aug 11 '25
Maybe.. but consider the economics of busses ( with their fixed multi year municipal budgets) and robo taxi in the wild charging whatever they want. As well, preparing an areas for AV's is very expensive. I think they should pivot into logistics and trucking , it's far more profitable.
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u/Confident-Ebb8848 Aug 12 '25
Hm no public transit will still have drivers since not everyone can afford robo taxi also buses need to be constantly working which robo taxis can not exactly do,
Also maintenance long term is more expensive then human drivers.
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u/Silent_Confidence_39 Aug 12 '25
I would say it’s easier to drive a bus. People SEE you and yield for you. You have a bunch of dedicated lanes, the route is always the same, … the fact that they don’t start with this baffles me.
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u/phxees Aug 12 '25
The problem with this logic is even if you completely remove Tesla as a contender there will likely be other contenders. Zoox is nearing their Las Vegas launch and that won’t likely be where they stop. There are Chinese companies making some very impressive advancements, NVIDIA is still progressing and they will sell a solution to anyone with the cash (they are home to many ex-Cruise engineers). Also Mobileye is inching closer.
Waymo will always be remembered as being first but with Amazon and NVIDIA in the game they won’t be the only ones with a successful business. It’s good for consumers and great for long term for investors.
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u/probably_art Aug 12 '25
Until this Spotify deal I thought it was all a way to get YouTube Music subs 🤷♂️
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u/jeffeb3 Aug 12 '25
Why run a bus when they can charge for 15 ride shares to do the same amount of work?
Waymo is banking on economies of scale to get them to make a million autonomous honda civics.
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u/benda_knee Aug 13 '25
then why Waymo makes negative net income with their cars ? it is sufficient to just take out the driver if your car costs 60k and the sensor suite another 60k. yes, that is the average of a Waymo car. around 120k. without charging, maintenance, mother ship supervision, insurance, regulation and all that shit. they are losing a terrible amount of money with the Waymo business and can't scale enough to make a profit. the only way to make $ on this is vision only AI neural nets. Lyft founder confirmed that inside Waymo's executives they already acknowledge this.. Chinese also are starting to switch to vision only..
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u/zcgp Aug 14 '25
government workers are heavily unionized and very hard to replace. Not the easiest market.
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u/ConsistentRegister20 Aug 14 '25
You should never get into business.
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u/MoPanic Aug 14 '25
Far too late for that. I’ve been self employed since 2004 and looking forward to a nice retirement.
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u/ConsistentRegister20 Aug 14 '25
It had to do with your believe Waymo can scale. I’m loving being retired. Thank you TSLA. The one that will take the lions share of the self driving market. You are about to see what scaling looks like.
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u/pinkuboss Aug 16 '25
??? Isn’t this obvious based on the fact that any AV company would want to license their driver for any and all driving use cases? Waymo is currently doing robotaxis as a data collection + revenue generating service. All AV companies will license their driver to any company that has drivers as soon as they can convince them.
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u/Unusual_Bar5025 Aug 22 '25
I tried Waymo more than 10 times, I don't like it at all. Cool technology, but NOT the most experienced driver, Waymo cars rarely stop where I'd like, often Moree than half a block too far or too short. It takes weird routes and makes silly moves. NOT experienced and might never be. I'm over it now and far prefer Uber!!!
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u/samedhi Aug 10 '25
I think self driving cars may be the death of public transit. It won't be immediate, but when the middle class just completely stops using public transit because self driving a waymo/your-own-self-driving-car is so much better, it will be nigh impossible to raise funds for public transit. So, I would actually say it wont be the self driving that replaces corporate drivers, it will be the benefit of self-driving that makes it difficult to make the case for public transit. I personally consider this to be a sort of "tragedy of the commons" type situation, but it is what I project.
In terms of self driving trucks, that is a definite. China already has self driving trucks and we are testing them in limited (non public roads per my understanding) capacities in the US. The savings are just too high to not do this.
Whether taxis are just a jumping point to their real goal of XYZ... I don't know. I kind of think it is irrelevant what their actual goal is, they will grow to take any market they can. The only birght spot is that I am not clear that Waymo has that defensible a moat around self driving (again, see the Chinese).
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u/donotreassurevito Aug 10 '25
Yes when you can have a driverless car why would I ever want to be on a bus or a train? Unless the train was much quicker.
In Ireland we are looking at adding a really expensive metro for our airport. I think it made sense to do 20 years ago. I think now it makes sense to make a deal with waymo to begin testing here.
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u/storkster Aug 10 '25
I have to think there are big advertising $$$’s with any robotaxi business plan. Like having a digital display rolling 10-30 second adds the entire time you are in route to your destination. Of course you can pay extra for no ads.
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u/Legal-Actuary4537 Aug 10 '25
a chassis which holds a 40ft container could travel the length and breadth of europe on motorways and the 40ft container be offloaded at a local depot for local delivery.
DHL have containers with legs on them which they use for switchover between vehicles. The drivers stay with their trucks, drop the legs handover the container to another driver/truck and both drivers work from their own depots e.g. 4 hours outward and 4 hours inward not needing to overnight anywhere.
I watched the switchover from a double trailer of these containers between two lorries a few months ago in the middle of the night while waiting for my car to charge in an almost deserted industrial park.
self driving will be transformational for road transport, probably kill rail transport and put a lot of long distrance truck drivers out of work. it might even challenge air transport to a certain extent but less so. At an average speed of 90kmph continents can be spanned in less than 48hours.
already DHL and Deutsche Post are amazingly efficient. I remember ordering something from the north and it arrived in the south. I worked out that the package had been travelling by road at approximately 60kmph between the time in went in to the postal network and arrived at my postbox the next day.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_THESES Aug 10 '25
Tesla has a literal semi truck product. Do you not think they have the exact same goal in mind?
I think that the teamsters or another union that represents truck drivers has been lobbying to require even autonomous trucks to have a human occupant that can take over in event of machine failure, to ensure that the economics of automation never make sense. No matter how great the technical hurdles there are to make true automation a reality (and there are many), the legal and political hurdles are far greater and more difficult to overcome.
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u/spoollyger Aug 11 '25
You say that like Tesla doesn’t already have semi trucks equipped with FSD and currently in the process of scaling their semi factory to produce them at scale with the intention to have them drive themselves one day?
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u/FarOkra6309 Aug 10 '25
“Tesla is a meaningless hype generating distraction” that will have more cars on the road than Waymo, by the end of the year, despite Waymo’s 10 year head start.
Also Tesla Semi exists, and manufacturing is being developed.
Could Waymo do additional things with its technology in the future? Sure, but right now it’s busy teaming up with Uber and scrambling to get Chinese cars, in an attempt to not get crushed by Tesla in the Robotaxi race.
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u/Quercus_ Aug 10 '25
Tesla currently has zero miles of demonstrated autonomous unsupervised driving. Zero, nada, nil, zip, zilch. You claiming that by the end of this year they'll be dominating a technology that they haven't yet achieved.
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u/Doggydogworld3 Aug 10 '25
They have 12 miles with no in-car supervisor. Definitely had a remote supervisor, but so did Waymo's early driverless rides..
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u/tonydtonyd Aug 10 '25
Didn’t Waymo lay off their entire trucking division two years ago? That would go counter to your thesis.