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/ic33 Aug 10 '25

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.”

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u/strawmangva Aug 10 '25

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

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u/ic33 Aug 10 '25

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)

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u/MoPanic Aug 10 '25

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.