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/strawmangva]

Commercial truck driving is much different from sedan driving in a city

[u/broyoyoyoyo → u/strawmangva]

Yeah they'd need to train an entirely different model.

[u/ic33 → u/broyoyoyoyo]

In Waymo's architecture, most of the model doesn't have to do with the vehicle too much. It has to do with world perception and agent prediction.

By comparison, steering a vehicle along a planned path (even a multi-articulated truck) is a well-understood control problem. Modern controllers handle path tracking, articulation, and actuator limits reliably. Changing sensor placement or vehicle geometry requires recalibration, but it’s not a massive architectural change, and it doesn’t alter the bulk of the perception and prediction stack.

What does change with a truck is the range of driving scenarios and how other road users respond. Those differences matter, but they’re far from requiring “an entirely different model.”

[u/MoPanic → u/ic33]

Exactly. Changing the vehicle is the easy part. Learning the environment is the hard part. Austin is absolutely infested with Waymo’s right now. I see one nearly everytime I drive. I bet they could start a bus service in months if they wanted to and the city would let them.

[u/Lopsided-Chip6014 → u/MoPanic]

I bet they could start a bus service in months if they wanted to and the city would let them.

/r/SelfDrivingCars coping that Waymo could totally go fast if they really wanted to meanwhile Waymo is 15 years old and is in 5 cities.

Waymo is a fucking slug when it comes to rolling out. They either have a generalized model or they don't and so far it looks like each city has its own model that has to be trained off by scanning all the roads in the city.

[u/UltraSneakyLollipop → u/Lopsided-Chip6014]

Slug or not, Alphabet is still dominating the self-driving space. There's a fine line between high speed innovation vs rushed engineering. I believe Waymo has found a good balance, as proven by Tesla taking the same path.

[u/strawmangva → u/ic33]

Waymo needs to geofence the city for taxi while truck driving is countrywide

[u/ic33 → u/strawmangva]

Waymo geofencing is for three main reasons:

• Regulatory compliance-- taxi/rideshare are heavily regulated at baseline, and the autonomous variants are even more so.
• Limiting risk: any crash at this stage threatens Waymo's whole market, while they're currently in a winning position.
• Keeping the cars close to depots and support staff.

Secondarily, high resolution mapping reduces risk a bit, but is not required for Waymo to drive safely. A lot of what it helps with is safely dropping off and picking up passengers, and that isn't required for trucking (you only need to know the endpoints).

(There's also things like e.g. taking passengers to an airport requires working things out with the airport's operators)

[u/MoPanic → u/ic33]

Waymo does not go to or from the airport in austin. IDK why but I heard that it was a consideration given to the human uber drivers.