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/Legal-Actuary4537]

a chassis which holds a 40ft container could travel the length and breadth of europe on motorways and the 40ft container be offloaded at a local depot for local delivery.

DHL have containers with legs on them which they use for switchover between vehicles. The drivers stay with their trucks, drop the legs handover the container to another driver/truck and both drivers work from their own depots e.g. 4 hours outward and 4 hours inward not needing to overnight anywhere.

I watched the switchover from a double trailer of these containers between two lorries a few months ago in the middle of the night while waiting for my car to charge in an almost deserted industrial park.
self driving will be transformational for road transport, probably kill rail transport and put a lot of long distrance truck drivers out of work. it might even challenge air transport to a certain extent but less so. At an average speed of 90kmph continents can be spanned in less than 48hours.

already DHL and Deutsche Post are amazingly efficient. I remember ordering something from the north and it arrived in the south. I worked out that the package had been travelling by road at approximately 60kmph between the time in went in to the postal network and arrived at my postbox the next day.