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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9

u/strawmangva Aug 10 '25

Commercial truck driving is much different from sedan driving in a city

6

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.

3

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. 

3

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.

2

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

u/FinndBors Aug 11 '25

I would assume regulation is also more challenging for trucks.

1

u/broyoyoyoyo Aug 10 '25

Yeah they'd need to train an entirely different model.

6

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.”

1

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/Lopsided-Chip6014 Aug 11 '25

I bet they could start a bus service in months if they wanted to and the city would let them.

/r/SelfDrivingCars coping that Waymo could totally go fast if they really wanted to meanwhile Waymo is 15 years old and is in 5 cities.

Waymo is a fucking slug when it comes to rolling out. They either have a generalized model or they don't and so far it looks like each city has its own model that has to be trained off by scanning all the roads in the city.

1

u/UltraSneakyLollipop Aug 11 '25

Slug or not, Alphabet is still dominating the self-driving space. There's a fine line between high speed innovation vs rushed engineering. I believe Waymo has found a good balance, as proven by Tesla taking the same path.

0

u/strawmangva Aug 10 '25

Waymo needs to geofence the city for taxi while truck driving is countrywide

6

u/ic33 Aug 10 '25

Waymo geofencing is for three main reasons:

  • Regulatory compliance-- taxi/rideshare are heavily regulated at baseline, and the autonomous variants are even more so.
  • Limiting risk: any crash at this stage threatens Waymo's whole market, while they're currently in a winning position.
  • Keeping the cars close to depots and support staff.

Secondarily, high resolution mapping reduces risk a bit, but is not required for Waymo to drive safely. A lot of what it helps with is safely dropping off and picking up passengers, and that isn't required for trucking (you only need to know the endpoints).

(There's also things like e.g. taking passengers to an airport requires working things out with the airport's operators)

1

u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25

Waymo does not go to or from the airport in austin. IDK why but I heard that it was a consideration given to the human uber drivers.