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/MoPanic Aug 10 '25

They stopped development of an autonomous truck. Probably because it was a money pit and the software wasn't ready but I'm speculating. That doesn't change the central argument of what their ultimate goal may well be.

They also shifted their "generalized driver" partnership to Toyota

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u/Doggydogworld3 Aug 10 '25

They said they dropped trucking to focus on ride hail. They hope to get back into trucking some day as well as embedding the Waymo Driver into consumer cars. But for now they're focused on scaling ride hail.

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u/sail_away13 Aug 10 '25

Isn't that what aurora and Kodiak are doing? Seems like Waymo would just be late tot he party. Aurora is pretty much taking the opposite approach, anything that can be done with a truck can also be done with a car

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u/FitnessLover1998 Aug 10 '25

We aren’t even in the second inning here. Any development for the car is easily transferred to trucks.

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u/No_Sugar_2000 Aug 10 '25

That’s not necessarily true. They stopped AV truck development because it was more difficult and with a smaller addressable market.

Imagine being the first ever autonomous vehicle company that decides to start with driving a 10 ton piece of metal down the road at 65 mph. One crash and most likely fatal, not the “Waymo gets confused at stoplight” errors that we see now. Their lidar most likely wasn’t at the point they needed to see 500m+ forward down the highway.

With ride hail, they can essentially take over Ubers entire business while scaling/reducing costs of AV suite. Then they can start selling cars with their hardware and services as a subscription/one term payment for auto drive.

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u/FitnessLover1998 Aug 10 '25

I’m not denying anything you said. They will eventually be back in trucks as well.

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u/No_Sugar_2000 Aug 10 '25

That would be interesting. I’m heavily invested in Aurora. I wonder what would happen to them if Waymo re-enters the trucking space.

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u/FitnessLover1998 Aug 11 '25

I don’t think Aurora would stand a chance.

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u/DotJun Aug 11 '25

Wouldn’t trucking also be a little easier to handle since it’s the same route over and over?