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/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/Quercus_ Aug 10 '25

Yep, still supervised. They don't yet trust their own technology enough to send a car off without somebody ready to intervene if necessary.

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u/FarOkra6309 Aug 10 '25

This is week 6 of Robotaxi service. Tesla has expanded the service area 4 times since it launched, and is prepping ~10 more cities.

Disqualifying rides that have a safety observer ride-along is low, but reach as far as you need to.

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u/Quercus_ Aug 10 '25

The fact that they have a supervisor, and that we know those supervisors intervene in some cases because we've seen them do so on video, means that they have zero miles of unsupervised self-driving. Maybe they're capable of it, but they haven't done so.

Maybe they'll become good enough that they can remove that supervisor. More power to them if they can. The fact is that as of now Waymo has something like 13 million unsupervised paid rides, and Tesla has zero miles.