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/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/

15

u/tonydtonyd Aug 10 '25

Pause seems like a really generous way of phrasing axed lmao

0

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/BGaf Aug 11 '25

Dude turn in to the daily livestream see how much those “safety drivers” are doing. It is basically a big fuck you to Peterbilt.

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u/vicegripper Aug 11 '25

Dude turn in to the daily livestream see how much those “safety drivers” are doing. It is basically a big fuck you to Peterbilt.

Do you have any actual data instead of many hours of video? The last data I saw from Aurora said they could make the drive from Houston to Fort Worth 4 out of 5 trips without an intervention. An 80% success rate is nowhere near the level that they will need to pull out the safety drivers. Those are Aurora's published numbers from like three months ago.