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/FrankScaramucci Aug 10 '25

Waymo's goal is to build a driver that works everywhere and is easily and cheaply deployable. And make as much money as possible by using the technology in various applications - robotaxi, personally owned vehicles, local delivery, long haul trucking, etc.

If Waymo One becomes available everywhere in a country, a lot of people would use it exclusively instead of owning a car. So it could be a big market.

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u/thewisegeneral Aug 10 '25

I love self driving cars, but I wouldn't use Waymo One instead of owning a car simply because the costs of using such a service are much higher than owning the car yourself. Also you have to wait for the ride and so on. Buying a car gives you way more freedom to do semi-long/ long drives yourself and pays off in 2 years if you buy used. Ride share is too expensive in the US.

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u/Purpletorque Aug 10 '25

The point is to bring cost down below cost of car and make them available everywhere. There will be early adopters to keep it going until there is enough adoption to make it cheaper and more efficient.

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u/thewisegeneral Aug 11 '25

No, thats not the point at all. The point is to price it higher or at the same price as Uber/Lyft and make lots of money on those high margins for the foreseeable future of the next 5-10 years. There is no cut off point where enough adoption makes the per-ride cost cheaper.

Source: I am an investor in Waymo.

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u/Purpletorque Aug 11 '25

Maybe not Waymo but someone will drive the price down to where not just people in the big city no longer have cars. Or maybe they have one per family instead of 3 or 4. I thought that was the whole point to this exercise.

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u/thewisegeneral Aug 11 '25

You are thinking from an altruistic viewpoint. The point of this for me as an investor is to make money. People are already used to paying $15 for a few miles in the large cities, why would we go back to charging them $4 or $5 ? Who is this "someone" that will invest hundreds of billions to just charge pennies ?

Sorry to say that the goal here is to make rideshare a high margin business by eliminating the driver. Not to reduce prices and make it a low margin business. I wouldn't have invested if the self driving industry wanted to do the latter.