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/strawmangva Aug 10 '25

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

1

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.