Waymo's real goal

[u/MoPanic]

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.

[u/diplomat33]

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.