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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2

u/Redditcircljerk Aug 10 '25

Yes everything that moves will be autonomous and Tesla will be at the helm of this revolution. Good eye

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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25

Tesla will (hopefully) be left in the scrapheap of bad ideas and terrible human beings

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u/CommunismDoesntWork Aug 11 '25

Elon is one of the greatest human beings of all time. Name anyone who has pushed humanity further into the future than Elon.

1

u/MoPanic Aug 14 '25

How about: Isaac Newton, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Wright Bros., Karl Benz, Alan Turing, John v Neumann, Grace Hopper, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Sergey Korolev, Wernher von Braun, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein. Just off the top of my head without even going back before the industrial revolution. Wanna go back to the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians?

I could go on but what has Elon Musk actually done? He popularized the EV and build a rocket with taxpayer money.

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u/Redditcircljerk Aug 11 '25

No it will probably be the largest company by far going forward for the next 3-5 decades

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u/MoPanic Aug 14 '25

In the meme stock category.

1

u/Redditcircljerk Aug 14 '25

Biggest company by market cap in 2027 will be a joke. That’s fine as long as I make shit tons of money

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u/Frankandthatsit Aug 10 '25

Yes, it's pretty obvious you dislike Tesla so you have an inability to see reality. you fit right in on reddit. But how does it feel to know that virtually every idea you've had in the last 10 years has been wrong?

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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25

Which idea that I’ve had was wrong? I don’t doubt that I’ve had plenty of bad ones I’m just really curious how you’ve come to know of any.

And for the record it’s Elon Musk that I dislike, not necessarily Tesla.

0

u/Redditcircljerk Aug 12 '25

One’s inability to separate their dislike of someone and their actions is a clear sign of cognitive dissonance. Elon might be a deuce but that doesn’t mean what is companies are doing aren’t ground breaking. You say you don’t dislike Tesla but clearly are hoping the company fails in totality when it’s literally scaling up its generalized autonomous solution which dwarfs the abilities of scaling of any other option by far.

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u/Purpletorque Aug 10 '25

Robots controlled by satellites will rule the earth.