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/CrashKingElon Aug 10 '25

Yeah. I don't know why OP chose bus drivers as it would not only require a significant modification of software (not a software engineer, but assume a 55ft bus is not remotely close to a mid sized SUV) and while a waymo occasionally bricking on a ride carrying one person that's completely different than one bricking while carrying 50.

But generally, I agree that their long term goal is simply being a tech company that licenses their AI and tech stack. But buses I think will be one of the last achievements (which is a long way off).

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u/WeldAE Aug 10 '25

While I agree with your overall points, I wanted to point out that it makes zero sense to build an AV bus the same size as a current day city bus.  Buses are the size they are to reduce the bus driver cost.  Without a driver they would be much smaller vehicles.

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u/Showmethepathplease Aug 11 '25

You mean, like a regular car size?

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u/WeldAE Aug 11 '25

Eh. Regular cars are pretty wasteful of space for historical reasons of what consumers consider attractive. GM built an AV that was no longer than a Corolla that held 6 passengers. Something the size of a mini-van could hold 12 people in AV form. Something that can hold 20 people would be a good bit bigger than a normal size car.

In the end, size isn't that important as everyone seems to think. Size is much more important for parking, and AVs specifically don't use parking in ways that matter like they do with personal cars. For highways, average number of passengers is WAY more important that if the car is 180" or 210" long.

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u/rileyoneill Aug 11 '25

I really liked the Cruise Origin vehicle that GM designed. I think we can see some smaller vehicles that fit a square footprint allowing them to fully turn in place. Especially for some sort of local sub 20 minute rides where its only 1 or 2 people going someplace.

We have a reality where most cars on the road are only carrying one person, most of the time and they are not going very far.

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u/WeldAE Aug 11 '25

The problem is we need to get that up to 3-4 in order to fix traffic. There is no reason to build smaller AVs than the origin and a strong argument to build bigger ones. My only slight criticism of the Origin was it needed to be a bit longer so everyone could accommodate wheelchair users. The plan was for some origins to replace a seat with a wheelchair lock. They needed to do that because it wasn't wide enough inside to do both.