No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.
Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet.
I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself.
I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career.
I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.
Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.
The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.
Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit.
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
>I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?
> I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs.
Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
Plenty of people from the third world are interested in moving, trying something new. We should all be free to try new things, but of course you he world isn't set up that way. Seems like we could match up dual needs. The western developed world is in the midst of a racist and fascist period, so not the best time to try this. We have competing changes, shortage of workers in many job areas in the West like the trades in the US, also shortage of jobs for young people in the west.
I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).
I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included
Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.
Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today
I figure that’s the way of the world. We’ve gone from a majority low skill economy to a much more complex one over the decades. It will probably continue.
try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer.
the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app.
Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.
these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train.
why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.
As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.
Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?
Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.
I like humor, however, for the peanut gallery who might not get sarcasm:
Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.
More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.
> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
The Uber Driver who told me all about his Glock in the glove box was pretty off putting.
Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.
I always (as soon as I could) owned a car, first on independence, but soon that became on price. A car costs between $350 and $500 per month, plus about 2 gas tanks, let's say $600. That's only 10-15 short taxi rides and two long taxi rides at best.
And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person).
I hate traffic, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month. If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
There's no shot that number isn't being driven up by people purchasing more car than they need. You can get a used car for $10,000 or less, there's no reason one needs to pay $500/mo.
You sure about that? A $7k car expensed over 18 months plus insurance and road tax is ballpark $450 /mo. That omits maintenance and fuel but conversely also underestimates how long the vehicle will be kept on average. Depending on where you live parking will range from free to potentially more than $100 /mo.
If you manage to stretch $10k cars out to 5 years on average with zero maintenance it's less than $200 /mo but ... no maintenance in 5 years?
I think $300 /mo plus fuel and parking is probably a reasonable estimate for frugal behavior.
6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.
Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.
> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
You're not including an amortized cost of maintenance, registration fees, etc. Adding in tires alone ($720 for a set, 50k/1200 ~=41 months, ~$17.50/mo) brings it to almost $290/mo. Oil change every 6 months or so, add another $10/mo or so. Now we're at $300/mo and hoping nothing in the car breaks and needs repairs on a car that's already paid off, and we still haven't paid our taxes and registration fees.
Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.
I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.
The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.
Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
> Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Yep, that describes cars. High up front cost that barely goes up when you need more done (meaning: family of 5? Car beats even the bus fare for a 3km ride to school). In trade for independence, cheap groceries, cheaper travel (at least in opportunity cost), cheap days out with the family, bigger house is realistic, ability to go work in not so well connected places (I'm a consultant), capacity to actually get heavy things, collect people, not waiting/dragging things around in cold/rain/...
Oh and these DON'T add up. Bring the kids to school AND drive to work AND get groceries by car? You don't pay 3 times like you do with any other means of transport, you pay 1.2 times what you pay when doing only one.
With 2 people in the car it easily matches public transport costs if you use it enough. Oh and even by yourself it's like half taxi/uber fares, a third or less of waymo fares (though at least those don't charge per person).
huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(
The cost is a factor -- and something that I think policy makers should very much push to change.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.
The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it. And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them. Street parking matters in almost every neighborhood in Seattle now...since parking on its own is expensive, and you will also have to pay for a few busted windows on your car for the pleasure of free street parking.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
If you have a driveway. I had to look around hard for a house with a car port that wasn't just a slot in a crowded alley, heck, I saw some beautiful houses that had no effective parking at all (maybe they had sunk garages built in 1920 that were not usable by modern cars).
> And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
The driver of housing cost in US cities is lack of supply. Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing. The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
That was 2022, $56k is probably about 10% of a one or two bedroom condo price.
> The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
Tokyo is, as I understand it, the libertarian ideal for a city that doesn't let zoning get in the way of a good time, and parking space prices are still expensive there:
> Monthly rental rates for spots in the 23 Wards range from ¥30,000 to over ¥80,000, which reflects high underlying property value.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I'm not claiming that parking space if charged at the market rate for an unimproved cement room in a high rise is particularly cheap. You can only fit so many cars within the footprint of a typical condo after all.
I'm claiming that removing parking (ie converting the raw sq footage over to living space) would not meaningfully impact housing prices. The existence of parking, free or otherwise, is not a significant contributor to the housing shortage. The issue is one of scale. That's what my "drop in the bucket" comment is referring to.
You specifically said "American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them". That is technically correct but in context it is blatantly wrong. The price increase as it stands is approximately zero.
The error is failing to differentiate between cost due to construction and maintenance versus cost due to land value. The latter is linked to total supply and thus height restrictions. The former is not the primary component in HCoL cities. You can easily verify this by checking the cost to purchase an apartment building in say San Francisco versus a small town in the midwest. (I refer to the cost to purchase the entire building there, not the cost to rent a single unit.)
Parking garages in HCOLs are expensive, they definitely aren’t free. You can’t build a new multi family without planning for one or two levels of garage underneath. But you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
Right, I specifically called out that I agree with you on that. They aren't cheap. But then most places around here charge $50 or even $150 per month per parking space so it's not like the spots are being given away either.
> you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game. The shortage is far larger than all of the current parking combined. We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market? Even at the scale of the entire market it would still be well under 10%, probably under 5%. The typical apartment in the US is definitely larger than a 5x2 grid of parking spaces. Meanwhile most HCoL cities could do with double the housing inventory at absolute minimum. Probably substantially more.
This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
We are suffocating under our own political dysfunction.
Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now.
I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win.
There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.
I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well.
My anecdote: My wife had to literally have two drinks before here first Waymo ride. Now she doesn't want to use anything else other that Waymo when we can't drive ourselves, and totally agree with her
Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.
> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again".
I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.
I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but compared to a world of robots driving us with relaxing music in a clean and safe space i know what future I want.
Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit?
Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit.
I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
It wouldn't take much to have more violent crime in Seattle, according to my gut (yeah, I know, "show me the numbers"). Granted, it's probably gotten worse since we moved here 25 some years ago, but coming from places like my old hometown of Indianapolis, Seattle didn't have any place I wouldn't feel comfortable walking at night. Again, it's changed a lot since (there are some areas I would avoid at 2 a. m. now), but I still feel much safer in Seattle than other large cities.
I’d put Berlin ubahn halfway between nyc and japan in terms of cleanliness and orderly behavior, the bigger problem is that there’s no ac in the summer
> have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines?
Yes, I have. I never drove a car myself and maybe used a taxi 10 times in the last 30 years.
Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas? It seems more reasonable for them to go for dense places instead and leave the unprofitable regions for someone else.
> Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas?
Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"
But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.
Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.
I mean, I can understand wanting to start in dense places. But those are also the places where public transit is a viable existing solution.
Personal transit just looks incredible inefficient and unscalable if everyone would use it. I could totally see it as a last resort solution for situations where nothing else is available, but that's an unattractive market that isn't going to make anyone rich.
In an urban area the "last resort" cases add up. The last time I was in a taxi it was the middle of the night, and I'd just smashed my head open, so I had concluded that I must not trust my own judgement and should seek immediate medical attention, buses don't run in the middle of the night (on that route)
Ambulances are for emergencies. An ambulance could be dispatched depending on availability, but the dispatch team has more experience with this than I do and so they - like the hospital's initial triage team - would put me in the "injured but not dying" category and maybe I get an ambulance in an hour or two depending on other priorities.
They don't want me to go home and fall asleep, because it is possible that I have a brain injury and will never wake up, but their advice is going to be "Can you get somebody else to drive, or maybe call a taxi?" not "We will Blue Light an ambulance to you ASAP".
Everyone has the "fear" of being near other people, regardless of their affluence. That's why apartments are not built for 20 but got 2-5 people and doors exist. I don't see why it must be a rich people thing when it comes to self driving cars. Could also become super interesting by making remoter areas more serviceable.
I literally got a taxi today in Berlin because the trains were on strike, and the other day because the trains and trams were broken due to ice.
You really can’t think of valid uses for a taxi?
Taxis are also public transport and so their provision in cities is in fact part of the transport fabric. Since there must be taxis, why not improve them?
This isn't about poor people, at least for me, I'd much rather be alone than with Elon fucking Musk. If I want to hang out with people I will choose when and who. The least good bit of being in a taxi is small talk with the driver.
Waymo is not solving driving, it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- HD pre-mapped roads
- Curated infrastructure
- Remote ops fallback
This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve.
It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.
If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily.
If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.
It may not scale easily but it is scaling. Waymo (Alphabet) has access to essentially infinite capital to make that happen. I predict that within 10 years the majority of the US population will have access to their rides.
Im not because the statement you wrote is too generic, « not solving driving » … solving driving could mean many different things. It’s the classic rage bait one liners you see on Reddit from Tesla bag holders. It’s funny because everything you’ve described IS solving « driving » from my perspective. I sit in the back and go read hacker news without having to drive.
Roads are not solving transportation, they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.
I am pretty sure you are underestimating how important it is for them.
But we can look at their own scientific publications.[1]
No maps no driving....carnival ride...
"High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios..."
Most of this comment was written by an LLM. There are certain tells, such as the tone, as well as usage of “ for quotations instead of the much more common ". I think you added the last couple of sentences.
It's a very capital intensive operation given the amount of vehicles that need to be carried on the balance sheet.
There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet, which is why Waymo is run as a subsidiary with its own sources of capital.
When I was at Uber 10 plus years ago and we were ideating autonomous vehicles. The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Waymo has concluded either we are too early in the journey to decouple the tight vertical integration or they want to go very big and own all of the capital expenditure for what will presumably be a global rollout ultimately.
For anyone like me with a finance and technology crossover interest I actually think this is as interesting, maybe more interesting, than the private equity play around data centers at the moment because all of that is constrained against chip delivery and power constraints.
"Tech" was incredible light on CapExp compared with everything else (until AI hit, that is). That is what allowed its explosive growth. On the one hand alphabet is not used to that. On the other hand it is turning into a more normal business with more CapExp, and like other more "normal" business it uses more external investment. As a general rule of thumb: The more capex, the more leverage; for example commodity extraction, infrastructure or power generation are very capex heavy, and heavily leveraged.
I disagree with their reasoning and would say it's more for strategic benefits.
Giving firms that they get along well with (like Sequoia) allocation feels like a mix between a favor and possibly a way to signal that the valuation has some external buy-in too.
> The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Private equity, or private capital (debt investors)? Although I guess PC was less of a thing 10 years ago.
What I'm talking about is that is still considered an external capital raise for the purpose of the markets and where those assets sit on the balance sheet.
Also, keep in mind the Alphabet doesn't fully own Waymo. I don't know the percentage ownership of hand, but that also feels like it's probably a prorated investment based on ownership so Alphabet doesn't reduce its voting control.
Yes and what matters the most is what Waymo has been signaling for years. They don’t want the capex (owning and running the physical cars). I don’t know the intent of this raise but you have to realize companies may have a good asset but they don’t want to own it 100% for a multitude of reasons. Some of them could be as simple as wanting to get other investors involved and comfortable with the asset to maybe take on larger roles in future rounds. Or in this case potentially running the car part of the business.
If they truly wanted the capex, this would not be a mixed round
A fully internal recap would have been simpler. The presence of outside capital, even minority, is consistent with a gradual transition toward shared ownership, asset light structures, or operator partners.
They have made many comments over the years about this too.
Notice I left a list of potential reasons. Not that ownership has changed. Just pointing out for folks like yourself that Google has made commentary about this exploring the idea of partnering with companies that operate the physical fleet. $3bn even if chump change for you is still a larger placement and has some level of signaling indicating the want to get other folks involved at some level.
I didn't ask for potential reasons. You're talking about the "reasons" for a "gradual transition," and I am telling you that this investment isn't transitioning anything. Everyone is keeping their equal share of the company. So, I don't understand why you are giving reasons for something that isn't currently happening.
I think the words are going over your head sorry. I will try one more time but realize now it might be too much especially see some of your dead comments here.
I am not claiming a transition is happening in this round, so asking for evidence of one misses the point. Transition here means enabling future shifts in who owns and operates the capex, not changing the cap table today. If Alphabet wanted permanent full-stack ownership, an entirely internal recap would have been cleaner. Bringing in outside capital, even minority, is about signaling and optionality, not dilution.
I understand everything you have said. The D-K of you WSB transplants is wildly frustrating.
If you'll notice, all I am doing is asking the brigade of snarky know-nothings to stop talking. I'm not pretentiously claiming to know, unlike all of you. You clearly aren't in any position to understand the internal working of Google, and it's unfortunate that HN used to be a place where a question like the original one would have been answered by a person who does, but is now flooded with people like you. I will gladly take the downvotes if they're from a bunch of garage band stock pickers.
Go take a breath and stop digging a hole. Nobody is being rude to you but you are highly inflammatory and honestly a real lowering of quality. Take a bit of your medicine and step away. I am sorry you feel the need to be so rude back to everyone.
You are not “just asking questions.” You are dismissing any analysis that is not insider gossip as illegitimate, which is a convenient way to avoid engaging with the substance. No one claimed NDA level insight. We are talking about incentives, capital structure, and signaling, which is literally what outsiders analyze. If only Googlers are allowed to reason about Google, then HN has no purpose beyond rumor laundering.
I definitely modulated my tone to match yours and some of your killed comments. Sorry you don’t like what you see. Happy to have a discussion but not be told I am someone from Reddit. Low effort and low class. You are consistently being rude and you just need to reflect on some of your comments. Your right my comment back to you was definitely not nice but look at some of your killed comments. Ick.
Sure thing boss. What other advice stemming from your vast experience, wealth, and psychological heath do you have for me? I'd love to improve my image to you... the "ick" police.
My finance people care about the cents, a ROI of 7% is average but at 8.5% and now you are a world class asset of that inventory type. That’s sometimes the difference of a few hundred k out of 20m but they would not take the deal if it is slightly over due to their risk appetite.
The 3b external either matters a ton to fit their risk models OR they are doing a favor to an outside party. Probably a bit of both.
Well, given that it is an equity sale, split still feels like it is the prorated amount so that alphabet continues to own its percentage - not more not less.
Obviously you're entitled to your view, but I don't think it's that kind of finance model right now - it's far too speculative and the upside too unknown to be adjusting for small amounts on risk models.
> why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google
This lets them validate their valuation and build a base of investors who could play a bigger role in writing chequew in the future. When IPO comes, those factors make the sell simpler.
a deliberate strategy to establish market-validated pricing, prepare for eventual independence, and impose governance discipline on what has been a protected moonshot project. The move signals that Alphabet is transforming Waymo from an “Other Bets” science experiment into a standalone asset with credible external valuation—likely positioning for an IPO within 2-4 years once profitability arrives.
I'm not sure how useful this pricing is for the future, as waymo is currently operating on semi-infinite Google money. If that stops, no doubt the price would change too.
The counterargument would be that the external investors (Sequoia, Andreessen, Fidelity, etc.) presumably priced in this exact risk when they agreed to pay $110B. They're not naive about Alphabet's role as backstop. The question is whether they believe the "semi-infinite money" assumption is durable enough over their investment horizon.
Money from Google internally might be subject to internal power dynamics and come with strings attached. Having reliable outside funding from people who don't get a say in things might be a better alternative for a project that doesn't want to end up as Stadia 2.0 .
I think some of the external investors have board seats, so the outside people do get a (small) say in things. And to your point, that's probably also a good thing for avoiding another Stadia mistake.
Yes, it provides external validation for the valuation. Otherwise, Alphabet can simply "self value" Waymo at a funny amount like $1T.
There's also a strategic partnership angle in these rounds. For example, Magna and Autonation were early investors in Waymo. Magna operates Waymo's factory in Arizona to upfit their vehicles with sensors, Autonation (the huge dealership/service network) is the maintenance partner.
In general, the Alphabet playbook is that projects "graduate" out of Google X, and are expected to operate as a standalone company, including being responsible for raising funds.
>I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.
Why not 100% internal funding, not sure, but the reason why companies don't always IPO is because taking on debt is more efficient (i.e. it's cheaper in terms of cost of capital) than equity, because of the "tax shield" effect, debt can be raised in a non dilutive manner, and a few other (less important) game-theoretic reasons.
a little kid is inevitably going to get killed by a waymo.
institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
so to me, aside from making money, making money this way, for a lot of people, protects them from the political grandstanding and their fast demise in their absence.
> a little kid is inevitably going to get killed by a waymo.
And it will be 100% the kids fault, but the headlines will look terrible.
Kids can be naive and reckless, and the result makes them look downright suicidal with the things they do. They will dart into traffic, and even if the Waymo has single-digit millisecond reaction times, people will still blame the Waymo.
They need at least one fatality before you can start going down that slope, but probably true comparing how many kids get killed by human drivers, Waymo can’t be so safe as to avoid these incidents if they scale up in numbers.
>institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
This. They're letting wall street in on it so wall street goes to bat for it. It's the big boy version of how some widget manufacturer will revise a product to necessitate or cut out a trade lobby depending on whether they want those people to go to bat for it, or make all the people who don't wanna pay rent to those people go to bat for it.
He's talking specifically about Waymo's situation. Alplabet, a company who has $75bn of FCF, owns 80% of Waymo. A $16bn capital injection is meaningless to Alphabet, so he's wondering why they're going through the trouble.
He raises a good point, and the answer is likely that they can run into legal issues by either under or overvaluing the company in a capital raise where they're the controlling shareholder, then the IRS or existing investors have grounds for a lawsuit (or audit). They likely just want to bring the capital raise out in the open to get a fair market value, and then they will be 90% of the capital in the raise.
I love, love, love Waymo and am so excited about their success. Uber and Lyft were the heroes for a while, but became the villains. If Waymo is available anywhere I need a cab, that is absolutely my first choice, even for the premium cost.
It seems like a fair valuation to me. I can see a path for them to approach or surpass Uber's revenue (~$50B) in the future, and I think their technology and brand are actual moats in comparison to all other driverless systems out there.
I'm in the opposite camp. Waymo has neat tech, yes, but already valuing it on par with Uber is absurd considering the sheer scale at which Uber operates. 70 countries, 15K cities, 36 million daily trips. And this isn't counting Uber Eats and other side businesses. Waymo will have to accelerate its operations to the max for the next decade just to catch up. And that's assuming operating at such a scale is even possible considering they have to provide and maintain their own (very expensive) fleet. And this isn't a brand new market - Uber + local taxi companies have already set a hard cap on prices that Waymo cannot cross.
Waymo as a business has higher operating margins. I'd suppose that has to compensate for the lower scale. Having said that, Waymo likely needs more time to onbard cities than Uber so growth might be jerky.
No doubt there are significant challenges along the way, but waymo has a real product powered by tech that actually works which could massively change a huge industry. They're also notably more mature than competitors, and have track record of successfully rolling out in a safe way.
There is no doubt they have a lot of catching up to do, but you have to consider their advantages.
If Uber goes away, Lyft or others can take over the entire market overnight, precisely because they don't have their own fleet or unique technology. Waymo is placing itself as first mover into a completely new category of transportation which will require capital investment and new tech, so it will be much harder to displace once it gets going. It could target automated cargo transport in the future too.
Unlike Uber which has drivers buying, fixing, and fueling their own cars, Waymo will have to build large fleets and a huge car/computer/LIDAR production/repair pipeline. It will be interesting to hear how they plan to do this at Ubers scale. It's much higher risk, asset and logistics wise.
I don't think there's ever been a giant centralized global taxi fleet.
Waymo needs $16B to build what Tesla already has: manufacturing capacity. Without that, there are only so many cars they can put on the road. They've proven they can do the rides. But they haven't proven they can do it cost effectively. To scale up and start making a profit, they'll need to start building/buying lots of Waymo cars. That's not going to be cheap or fast. That's going to involve a lot of capital expenses.
Tesla is the other way around. They can definitely make lots of cars and make a profit. But they haven't quite gotten FSD to the stage where it can do rides properly. Supposing they at some point figure that one out, they are very well positioned to start producing vehicles by the hundreds of thousands pretty soon after. That's indeed the premise for their valuation. It's risky but not completely without merit.
Another point to make is that Waymo and Tesla are not going to have this market to themselves for very long. There are quite a few autonomous ride hailing companies serving rides at this point. And while the attention is often on the US, China is moving pretty quickly as well. Several companies competing there in several huge Chinese cities, for example.
On the US side, I think there are a few players that might become competitive soon. Zoox is looking pretty solid. And Rivian is rumored to be pushing autonomy as well. There are a few more players in various stages of technical readiness.
The real battle will be in a few years when we are past the basic "does it work", "is it safe" questions and legal approvals all over the world become more routine. Then it will be all about volume and scaling. That's going to take probably at least until 2030.
Based on the news, I think Waymo will import base vehicle builds from China and then adding the control systems and software to those. So it’s not like they will start making cars.
That sounds right. Unless Waymo considers car manufacturers to be its competition and therefore something to commoditize, it wouldn't make sense for them to get involved in ground-up manufacturing.
And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another.
They probably see the electronics and software as their product, hopefully they will license it to someone so my next car will have it :). Lidar prices are cheap enough these days (but coming out of China, so who knows with Trump if that will apply to us).
Another approach is Waymo acquires Tesla's auto technology. Tesla sloughs off its dinosaur car business to focus on its new robot mission, and Waymo detoxifies the Tesla auto brand.
Aside from destroying about $1.25 trillion of market cap, this would leave everyone better off.
You don't really maintain electronics, you swap them out when they are detected to be bad. Electric vehicles don't need tune ups or overhauls, it is light maintenance and full on component swaps. Send the defective components back to the factory for refurbishment and/or recycling.
Nah. The local car dealerships and Tesla service centers seem to be pretty busy doing heavy maintenance on electric vehicles. The drive train might be marginally simpler but there are still a lot of moving parts that break or corrode just like any other vehicle.
Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract.
No, you're missing the point. Collision damage repair is farmed out to separate body shops. But Teslas are mechanically very unreliable and break down a lot even without collisions. Ironically, more mechanically complex vehicles like the Toyota Prius hybrid are more durable and reliable.
I don't think $50k LIDAR sensor suites are disposable like that and the computer integrations is pretty sophisticated I'd imagine. These cars will take a beating.
> In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robotaxi-grade sensors—similar to those used by Waymo—still command higher prices of approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit, the total cost of a comprehensive autonomous sensor suite in China has fallen to roughly $2,100, compared to the tens of thousands required just a few years ago. This rapid price erosion has enabled LiDAR to become a standard feature in Chinese electric vehicles priced as low as $25,000, far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets.
I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs.
Waymo has 0 need for manufacturing capacity. There are dozens of companies that do that really well at a low margin already that'll be happy for the business. They made a timing mistake by choosing Zeekr for it, which is limiting their expansion at the moment. That's a lot easier/cheaper/quicker to fix by choosing a different partner than by building their own.
Making a driverless car "driver" is clearly much harder than manufacturing cars though. Many companies manufacture cars and have done for decades. On the other hand Waymo is the only company that has actual driverless cars on the road. It took them a very long time. Tesla have been trying for a very long time too and still have a long way to go.
So IMO Waymo has something far more valuable than Tesla.
(Obviously the market isn't rational though so I wouldn't necessarily invest based on that.)
Tesla has geofenced self-driving taxis operating in Austin as of Jan 2026. I wouldn't say they have a long way to go to achieve functional parity with Waymo. They do, however, need to prove reliability and safety, which comes with time and rides.
I don’t even think that’s rational, but it may be what’s propping them up.
Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their Atlas humanoid robots.
I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general. They only really make sense in a scenario where you’re back porting robotics to factories built for humans. That has value but feels temporary; factories designed to be robotic feel like the future, and there’s no need for them to do the job the same way a human would.
Our world is adapted for humans, so humanoid robots will fit in most places. They might not be the best choice, but the universality has a good chance of making it worth it through economies of scale.
Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work. Find a couple hundred tasks like this (including household use), and that platform now has huge economies of scale.
Now, when you're starting a small factory, using the existing humanoids might make more sense than getting custom tooling, at least for some tasks. You'll often see factories where some tasks that could, in theory, be automated are left to humans because they're relatively small tasks and not worth automating with a custom machine. Humanoids could fill that gap.
>I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general.
I want one personally, so it can rake the leaves, mow the lawn, tend the garden, do the laundry and dishes, replace the roof, etc., when I'm old. But they should also be used to pick up litter along the highway, paint over graffiti, etc..
I feel like the humanoid form is getting in the way for that, and that a "Spot" like design with a hand on top is better suited for that. Also i think laundry and dishes are already 95% automated since about 50 years.
this is something that also never made sense to me - it felt like star wars got it right - for repairs and remedial tasks a trash can (rs-d2) or all the little service droids are more appropriate, but c3p0 or other nurse and protocol droids makes sense to look more humanistic since they serve functions to facilitate human activitiy - but there is no way those functions are numerous enough to be priofitable.
I _think_ these are meant to replace humans working alongside the industrial robots rather than the big industrial robots themselves. I don’t work in manufacturing though, and the press releases are too buzzword-y for me to grasp the actual tasks they’re going to do.
I would guess the long term strategy is to do this for economies of scale and then push into new markets opened up by the lower price point. I would guess these are horribly expensive right now, given something like Spot is way simpler and still like $40k
Probably because Tesla sells about a million cars a year, including the worlds best selling car (Model Y) since 2023. The stock consistently performs well as well, I know they outperformed estimates for last quarter. Being positioned well for autonomous driving presumably helps hold the stock up, but I don't think that's the core of the valuation, and Waymo does a fraction of what Tesla does. Waymo is impressive, but their 2025 revenue was ~350 million.
Just don’t take one if another one is operating nearby. If they see another waymo, having passed the insecure emotional Turing test, they get self-conscious and wander the neighborhood backstreets until the other one has dropped off its passengers.
(Just experienced this multiple times in Phoenix. It’s impressive at navigating and braking, but not rational planning or flocking.)
This has not been my experience at all and I take Waymos pretty frequently, especially at popular areas like concerts or airports you'll see a bunch of them dropping off/picking up people without issues.
I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic?
Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
Fair, though my guess is that the growth rate of Waymo's market cap will far exceed Google's as Waymo scales. I wish I could invest in Waymo, so I'll take that 2.7% exposure.
> I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
Oh ye of little faith! Here are some ideas off the top of my head, I am sure the suits at Google already have a bigger list.
* Ads in vehicle
* Adjust route so you see partner companies or billboards
* Offering alternative destinations (I see you are going to Burger King, would you rather go to our partner McDonalds?)
* Listening to conversations in car
* Selling ride data.
Ads in vehicles are a sure thing. Also a sure thing you'll be able to pay a little extra to turn them off, which is basically just the full price of the trip unsubsidized by ads.
It'll be up to you, just like whether you want your Netflix cheaper with ads, or more expensive but without.
I see that choice as a good thing.
The rest of your suggestions are incredibly unlikely. Google doesn't even scan your Gmail anymore, you think they're going to create a privacy scandal by listening to your conversations? And they certainly don't sell your Maps timeline which is far more valuable than just a few car trips, so why on earth would they do that with Waymo? Nor does Google Maps offer to send you to Burger King when you hit directions for McDonald's. And taking a longer route that wastes time, battery and money, on the chance you'll be looking out the window to see a billboard rather than looking at your phone, doesn't make sense at all.
They already will be selling your ride data and there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries).
Ads in cars, partnerships with alternative destinations, etc. definitely would feel like enshitification for a demographic comparable to the hacker news one here. But these are all per session/user settings just like most of us have a paid Spotify account and never see advertising and those who don't get a very different monetized experience.
What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
> If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
That's actually a really interesting angle. The same way businesses often provide free parking now... what if they start providing free self-driving round trips?
E.g. spend $75 or more at Whole Foods, and get free round-trip up to 20 miles or something. Especially for bulky items like groceries where a car makes a big difference, I can totally see that becoming standard. Home Depot too. Plus entertainment like amusement parks, movie theaters, spas...
It makes particular sense for vertically integrated conglomerates like Amazon-Whole Foods which owns Zoox.
I buy Whole Foods French fries shipped to the store via Amazon logistics and purchase those at Amazon owned Whole Foods, at a discount via my Prime membership on my Amazon credit card which is processed on AWS infrastructure and I ride home on an Amazon owned Zoox that also runs on AWS infrastructure.
Amazon owns so much of the profit margin across that stack that they can afford to give rides away for example.
> there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries)
people used to feel that way about search queries, email (gmail) and IP laws (LLM training).
> What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
this won't happen. alphabet will collect on both ends.
> and there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries).
Why not? You can consent to having your audio recorded. They can even offer a higher “private” price and a lower “ad supported” price. I write “private” because I assume the microphones will always be listening no matter which price you pay.
I guess that's semantics. If you opt in then yes I guess they could do anything. I think the point was that enshitification would occur if they forced you to do that.
You could opt in to have blood or plasma taken on every ride if you so wanted I guess.
As a plasma donor you can earn $30-$70 per session for 800 ml. Let's call it $50. A session takes about 90 minutes, or 533 ml/hour, and you make $33/hour
Waymo charges $0.50 - $1.00 per mile. Let's use the high end.
To break even, your Waymo will need to consume < $33/hour, or < 33 mph. That's not bad!
If you go any faster, you won't be able to extract enough plasma in the same amount of time.
You really think ads in vehicle are not coming? You’re being naive if you think that.
Also, cheap rides cut into stocks margins. That won’t fly by investors either. These companies are not charities. They are in the business of maximizing profits. We lost “don’t be evil” over a decade ago.
It appears that enshittification has joined exponential and literally as words that used to mean specific things but are now just generic intensifiers.
The obvious way such services enshittify is to become a monopoly by pushing everyone else out, then cranking up the prices (and lowering quality, e.g. by not cleaning the vehicles, longer wait times for better utilization, etc.)
"Please watch these ads before we start the ride. Any attempt to not look at the ads by looking away from the screen or closing your eyes will automatically cancel the ride."
> but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified
My guess is that once Waymo starts to extremely take off, law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen. It will disproportionately impact an entire segment of the population and will put them out of work.
No they won't. The product is so outrageously superior on every dimension to the status quo that municipalities will figure out whatever they need to in order to accommodate them.
You think the folks on City Council enjoy chauffeuring their own children around and will block a solution to it?
> The bill prohibits the use of autonomous vehicles as motor carriers of passengers or property without a human operator who (i) meets any state and federal qualifications for the operation of an autonomous vehicle; (ii) is physically present in such autonomous vehicle; and (iii) has the ability to monitor the performance of such vehicle and intervene in the operation of such vehicle, including operating such vehicle without the use of the automated driving system and stopping and turning off such vehicle if necessary.
If they prohibit autonomous vehicles, eventually their constituencies will be screaming for it.
It seems that many people, after trying out the service for themselves first hand, in a locale that has it available today, are very eager to have the service available to them in their home locale.
Maybe, although stupid laws can become heavily entrenched and surprisingly hard to change. Like in New Jersey I think you still can't pump your own gas, and some idiots actually defend that crazy policy for the sake of saving jobs.
But this is a great example: the reality is that pumping your own gas is simply not even a 10x better product than having it pumped for you.
If NJ consumers (and politicians) had a 10x better product dangled in front of them every day, then the regulation side would solve itself.
Waymo is truly just such a vastly superior product that consumers will get exposed enough to it to care, and when they care, they will solve the regulation side.
I didn't say people won't try. Obviously there will be resistance. I am saying that the resistance will not be successful for any significant amount of time for any significant jurisdiction.
Uber and Lyft operated partially or outright illegally in many places while negotiating with governments. They also had a far superior product. Just like they fought the existing taxi companies, Waymo will have to fight against Uber and Lyft's lawyers, who are probably better funded and have learned to become better entrenched in governments.
> Uber and Lyft will survive exactly to the extent they successfully adopt self-driving.
I think this is correct and I want to point out something that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
If and when Uber/Lyft move heavily in this direction, the cost/operational benefits of having their "fleet" of vehicles be privately owned-vehicles will almost certainly disappear.
What's everyone's hate with uber and lyft rides? Over the past 10 years, I've had maybe one ride that was a 1/5. Most drivers either don't talk or are actually very pleasant conversations
I will take whichever one is cheaper. Just like now I open up both uber and lyft to see which costs less, I'll open up waymo as well
I travel a fair amount, and Uber and Lyft service quality has become noticeably worse in the last few years. The apps lie to you about pickup times. Drivers will accept a ride but then never actually head towards your location. A significant fraction of the vehicles are showing some sort of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, overdue maintenance, low tire pressure, etc.
Wait till you see the showdown that's building up in NYC.
Mamdani, the new nyc mayor, has been a long time friend and advocate for NYC taxi workers alliance. He even participated in a hunger strike with them in 2021.
Waymo is right now starting the wheels turning on getting NYC permits, but taxi workers have already made their (obvious) stance clear: No Waymos.
Yeah, but they will lose. Certainly in the long run (10 year horizon, almost certainly in the medium term (5 year horizon), and very likely even in the short term under the auspices of "limited experiments" while constituents and stakeholders get hooked.
This video is very apt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjZchYXMmA Australian Taxpayers' Alliance - "ALL Obsolete Industries Deserve The Taxi Bailout!" (1m38s) [2015-12-13]
> law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen
No they won’t. And Waymo’s playbook would be Uber’s if they did: preëmpt at the state and federal levels.
I do not think driverless will solve the main transportation problem we are dealing with as a society: we are giving up more space for cars, space that humans cannot use. We build more highways, widen roads, increase speed limits, and expect humans to stay out of this space. I live in a 100+ year old neighborhood. The roads were built for horse and buggy and streetcars. Now I have to beg to cross the road. My neighborhood has been effectively chopped up. I question whether I should walk to another block because I'll have to deal with crossing the street. Quiet houses now have the constant buzz of cars either from the ever-present highways or from the 40+ mph traffic right outside their doors. Driverless cars will not solve these problems. Fewer kids will die, partially from safe software, but mostly because they won't be able to leave their bubble without being strapped down into a car.
No one here should realistically think that Waymo can solve the main transportation problem. It will just (partially) replace Uber, Lyft, and taxis. And it will have a better passenger experience and it will also be safer. It’s obvious that cars, autonomous or not, can’t replace rail, bicycles, and walking.
I think it could solve a lot of transportation problems though. In theory if driverless vehicles were ubiquitous you'd have no on-street parking, no commercial transport in the day (do it all at night), much less traffic (just wait until your slot; maybe with peak time pricing), fewer delays due to crashes, etc.
When nobody drives manually you could even do things like getting rid of traffic lights.
But then you get into a world where people can’t cross the street (moreso than what’s already available). I recall seeing a video on YouTube that explores your suggestion to its inevitable conclusion. Additionally, this could exacerbate suburban sprawl
In my experience if I want to living in a bikable/walkable/transit oriented area, I have to move there. I think expecting this sort of stuff to come to you is too much, especially since most city centers have good transit options.
That said this is a tech forum, and while I don't think Waymo will be the only solution the tech is quite impressive and it's likely going to change how society works. Most people don't want to take public transit, they want to take a car and this is a much better solution for them. Forcing people to bike when they don't want to seems like bad form imo.
Forcing people to take and buy and own and maintain a car since hundreds of billions have been spent on that mode of transit, but near zero (in comparison) on any other seems like bad form imo
As someone who lives in a city with a lot of Waymos (Atlanta), I do not understand why anyone considers these things more than an early test or a novelty.
From an outside perspective, they're constantly obstructing traffic and driving in erratic and confusing ways. It's gotten to a point that if I see one ahead of me, I'll turn down the next block and change my route to avoid being behind it and dealing with whatever slowdown its about to cause.
I took one once via Uber with some coworkers and it was also jarring to ride in. I'd rather take my chances with a random human.
I must follow this up with today’s anecdote - heading home far later than usual from Midtown, stuck behind a Waymo in light traffic, inexplicably going 20 in a 35 with no one in front of it for nearly a mile. I loathe these things, they’re like automated drunk drivers.
HN in a bit odd when it comes to paywells. You're not allowed to complain about them and everyone reading is individually expected to figure out how to access the content (which usually involves finding a top comment linking to a workaround for everyone or the usual users all going with their preferred tools silently).
https://archive.is/asQ2x
No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.
Im fortunate to live in an area dense with traditional taxis and Ubers, no Waymo yet.
I rarely take taxis, the exception is when I have to haul my gear to the studio for a jam session. I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
On 80% of the trips, I end up having a nice chat with the driver and learn something new about humanity or myself.
I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs. There is not much dignity in the job. I feel a negligible segment enjoy it as a reliable career.
I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.
Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.
The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.
Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.
Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?
Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
not everywhere in the US except NYC. People take trains in Chicago, for example.
They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)
San Francisco's connection to Caltrain is deplorable, but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation.
> but as far as US cities go
That the load bearing part right there. SF's transportation is pretty piss poor
> but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation
Damning with extremely faint praise there...
According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make
As a former Lyft driver in SF I felt kinda weird when saw the bit about urination. Like, that's just not a problem. As a driver you just plan ahead as in any other job out there where you're not allowed to disengage at a whim. Pilots and surgeons don't pee in bottles, why would drivers? It's kinda funny when people try to empathize but come up with these creative scenarios of what's challenging. The parts that are bad are same as any other thing done for a living: money and dealing with other people. The job was shit when people were shit and/or when the money was shit.
I enjoyed it as a job, not a career. But that was in 2015.
Pilots and surgeons surely have easily accessible bathrooms as a part of their workplace, no? They’re also compensated significantly more and (IMHO) given a lot more dignity
In my city public bathrooms are extremely rare and it’s not trivial to find one. I’m sure taxi drivers are a bit more in tune with where they are out of necessity but even then it’s no guarantee they can find convenient parking/be in the right place/etc.
No. Not for some surgeons at least. Once you start cutting you may have to stay until the job is done so get good at holding it. In the The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast episode Dr. Rahul Seth talks about doing 12 hour surgeries. No breaks, no bathroom, constantly on his feet working.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-the-way-i-heard-it-with-m...
Commercial pilots flying airliners generally have it a bit easier. As for military pilots flying tactical aircraft, well this song might give you an idea of what they face.
https://genius.com/Dos-gringos-12-inch-penis-lyrics
Yep. This is a really weird thread. The no bathroom piss in bottle thing is not a thing I encountered in my IRL XP. Never felt this imaginary problem, never affected my dignity.
Funny enough, I did later work on surgical training tech and went into O.R.'s. And yeah, everyone in the room stays until the work is done, no easy pee pee breaks. Back to back procedures. But then also nobody ever complained about that there either. It's a fun job.
Idk. I'd reiterate a point I was getting at: what makes any job less dignified is dealing with shit people and/or shit pay. Fwiw Bathrooms you can plan for same as you plan for getting hungry by packing a lunch.
It sounds that I'm joking, but I'm not -- would it be so weird if those surgeons wore diapers?
Some probably do. External catheders are also an option.
>I wonder what will happen to the drivers if a large representation of the 1 million+ daily trips are displaced by automation?
If it happens gradually enough, they will just find other jobs. After the transition, society will be producing more with the same labor force, and thus the aggregate utility will increase.
In the past when automation displaced many jobs, we did things like raise the age kids could stay in school. There used to be huge numbers of e.g. 14 year olds who previously would be expected to go to work that would now have the opportunity to stay in school. Kind of like a mini UBI as in the transition period they would usually get given food, healthcare etc at least minimally. What’s the equivalent now?
And homo economist lived happy ever after with his field of spherical cows.
And the median wage will continue to decline, as the productivity gains are scooped up by fewer and fewer.
US median household income is at an all time high.[1] The pandemic caused a decline for a few years but it's recovered now.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...
> I always take a taxi, because it’s cheaper and faster than using an app to call an uber.
I'm really surprised to hear that. Are you in a large city where taxies are common? Or do you have a local taxi service and app that is very good?
> I really enjoy these interactions, but I feel for the drivers, it’s a very tough job where most taxi drivers have to scramble to find places to urinate or do so in an empty bottle between their legs.
Public toilets, their condition and their non-existence are an often-overlooked issue! It's not just highly problematic for taxi drivers, but also for parcel and postal delivery people... and it's not just relevant for workers either, it's also (IMHO) a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
Imagine you're old and don't have much bladder control or volume, or you're a woman who recently has given birth, or you got one of the variety of bowel related diseases, or you've got a child who is still dependent on diapers. Your range of free unimpeded movement is basically limited to where you have easy and fast access to a toilet or at the very least a place to take care of yourself/a child.
God, yes, and someone think of the gong farmers and pole men.
That's a pretty dismissive attitude for ~100 million professional drivers worldwide, making a living doing actual useful work on a forum where the vast majority of users do not do any useful work.
There is also a demographic cliff most of the world is currently going off, declining birth rates and labor shortages. Would you rather have a human nurse in your very old age retirement, or a human driver. Because we don’t have enough young people now for both.
There are not labor shortages. Instead we see massive youth unemployment.
Maybe the better option is to not be so anti immigration
So let's poach these people from the third world and...what about the third world? People can't just be made in factories like robots and self driving cars can. It seems inevitable that either we will have really sucky retirements (please die early grandpa, we can't take care of you!) OR (hopefully) automation will come to the rescue despite luddite protests.
Plenty of people from the third world are interested in moving, trying something new. We should all be free to try new things, but of course you he world isn't set up that way. Seems like we could match up dual needs. The western developed world is in the midst of a racist and fascist period, so not the best time to try this. We have competing changes, shortage of workers in many job areas in the West like the trades in the US, also shortage of jobs for young people in the west.
I'm all for immigration, but the world isn't producing enough people to make that a very viable long term solution. Eventually we have to reduce our demand for labor, especially when our civilization is lopsided for awhile with older people and not enough young people (a problem that will fix itself eventually as the old people die off, I guess).
I'm OK with robots driving cars like I'm ok with not needing an elevator operator anymore to use an elevator.
Birth rate is declining almost everywhere
Well, the point is that if we reach a point in which a robot can do it better and cheaper, it's no longer useful work.
I personally find that fighting dismissive attitudes is better done by not being dismissive towards other things (or people in this case)
It’s healthier for the discussion culture here as well.
I wont really miss taxi drivers. I guess that says a lot about them.
I've taken taxis in the US, and i can understand why people wouldn't want to. Taxis in other countries are a different experience.
Huh? how can one possibly generalize whatever experience they have not only to one country but to “other countries”, i.e. to the world. I’ve taken taxi in many countries, in all continents, and my experience have been that the drivers are generally helpful. There are scams and bad experience, but that’s minority. That applies to any country, the US included
Artificially protecting jobs by holding back technology is terrible form. At best it’s short term before the economics become an order of magnitude cheap and at worst it’s hamstringing your economy so you’re left behind.
Be that as it may, I would argue there's a straight line from "it's okay to destroy this fairly-low-skill-career for the good of the economy" to the overall situation the US finds itself in today
I figure that’s the way of the world. We’ve gone from a majority low skill economy to a much more complex one over the decades. It will probably continue.
I think the word "professional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
My experience with taxis has been almost universally negative.
try talking to young attractive women on their experiences and you'll maybe appreciate this somewhat forced interaction less. my partner has been literally kidnapped multiple times (refused to take her to her destination and refused to let her out for over an hour), had drivers refuse to unlock doors until she gave them her number at least once every two months, and constantly has drivers take detours and longer routes to force conversation for longer.
the sooner we can stop subjecting people to having to interact with strangers in a semi-private setting just for basic needs like getting around, the better off vulnerable people will be
Honestly same thing, taxis seem to be polite and up to have a chat about anything here. So, not that hyped about these things really.
I think there will still be delivery services where you need someone to go into the restaurant and then up to the customers door. That’s going to stick around unless we get to a point where the restaurant is responsible to load up the Waymo and the customer is responsible for getting it out which probably won’t happen anytime soon. The whole delivery market was also mostly created overnight from something that didn’t exist before.
In Miami, there are several competing companies like Coco Robotics which employ human "pilots" to monitor a small fleet of robot delivery boxes where the restaurant deposits the food in the box and the box unlocks with integration into the app.
Just figured you'd want to know anytime soon was at least a year ago.
I’m aware of those but those only go 2-3 miles so they don’t work for the majority of suburban and rural Americans. Also they don’t have the convenience of delivery to your door unless they can start using elevators.
these things are all over the city i live in, too. absolute menace and an abuse of the commons. i've had them literally run into me more than once and i've started physically moving them out of my way when they stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
I’m surprised they don’t have opt-in LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice while riding. Obviously shouldn’t be the same AI that’s deciding whether to run over the child or crash into the oncoming train.
[edit: riding not driving]
> LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice
I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.
I've been mercilessly downvoted for the suggestion, so at least on HN we can assume it's not what people want. :-)
Some people, not me, just can't go a second without conversation.
This sounds like something from The Good Place, tbh.
why would anyone need this when then can pull out their phone and use their LLM of choice, if they wanted. I expect some large percentage of social users will just facetime chat with their friends during the ride
Jhonny Cab from Total Recall
I just want a fucking bus with a professional driver in it. Or even better, a subway
For me, this is the major selling point to own a car. I may drive a few times a week, and taxis might be much cheaper, but no way I'm going to deal with human taxi drivers if I have a choice.
This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.
As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.
Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?
Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"
Absolutely would choose the robot.
Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.
This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.
I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.
the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.
Erm, what would you propose as an alternative answer?
Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.
Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.
So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.
Or, a woman can take a Waymo.
I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.
arm all women :)
I like humor, however, for the peanut gallery who might not get sarcasm:
Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.
More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.
> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?
Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.
Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.
Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.
But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.
One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.
Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.
The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.
I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.
"Yes it is that bad" - every woman I've ever talked to.
I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.
Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.
The Uber Driver who told me all about his Glock in the glove box was pretty off putting.
Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.
I always (as soon as I could) owned a car, first on independence, but soon that became on price. A car costs between $350 and $500 per month, plus about 2 gas tanks, let's say $600. That's only 10-15 short taxi rides and two long taxi rides at best.
And now I have a family, there's 5 of us. A car is easily less than half the price of public transport for what I need to do (because you pay per person).
I hate traffic, and I don't really like driving, but since a car is easily 30 minutes faster than public transport to drive in to work, sadly 30 minutes of traffic in the morning is still faster than public transport, no matter how annoying it is. Oh and no waiting in the rain/cold is a nice bonus.
A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month. If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a nicer more luxurious car for yourself. But it’s just ingenious to compare that against taxis with beaten-up and spartan but reliable cars.
That's not outrageous as a car price once you add insurance, maintenance, taxes, parking, license fee, cleaning, etc
Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.
https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...
The average monthly payment for a used car in the US in 2025 was $532, according to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-car-paym.... This does not count insurance, taxes, parking, or gas.
A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.
There's no shot that number isn't being driven up by people purchasing more car than they need. You can get a used car for $10,000 or less, there's no reason one needs to pay $500/mo.
You sure about that? A $7k car expensed over 18 months plus insurance and road tax is ballpark $450 /mo. That omits maintenance and fuel but conversely also underestimates how long the vehicle will be kept on average. Depending on where you live parking will range from free to potentially more than $100 /mo.
If you manage to stretch $10k cars out to 5 years on average with zero maintenance it's less than $200 /mo but ... no maintenance in 5 years?
I think $300 /mo plus fuel and parking is probably a reasonable estimate for frugal behavior.
> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.
This can vary a lot.
6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.
Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.
> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.
$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.
You're not including an amortized cost of maintenance, registration fees, etc. Adding in tires alone ($720 for a set, 50k/1200 ~=41 months, ~$17.50/mo) brings it to almost $290/mo. Oil change every 6 months or so, add another $10/mo or so. Now we're at $300/mo and hoping nothing in the car breaks and needs repairs on a car that's already paid off, and we still haven't paid our taxes and registration fees.
Now figure in the fact you've got several thousand dollars in a car instead of even something like a high-yield savings account. At even 4% APY, if you had just $8k tied up in that car that's another ~$27/mo of income you're missing out on.
I'm not making the argument riding a taxi for every trip is cheaper than this. Just pointing out there's a lot of things people don't think about when they think of the cost of car ownership.
The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.
There is no tax deduction (in the US) for vehicle use that is non-business related.
Correct, the person you are responding to is using it as a benchmark for the all-in cost of driving a vehicle on a per-mile basis.
You are ridiculous. The all in cost is easily that. Cars don't run on air. Insurance costs money.
And you don't use "ingenious" there.
Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of
- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up
- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns
Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.
Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything
Hyundai Ioniq 5, backing into the garage next to the RV, and at "backing into the garage" speed ran into the RV. The fiberglass body of the RV suffered a 3 inch diameter break in the fiberglass that I could have fixed myself. The Hyundai? 17,000 American dollars. The rear quarter panel took a dent, and (IIRC) the bumper might have had some damage. Part of the problem was that there really isn't a "rear quarter panel" anymore. No, as I looked at it, that piece of sheet metal goes all the way from the rear bumper to the front of the passenger compartment. The shop didn't replace that piece, but rather cut the dented piece out and welded in new sheet metal.
Between that, and all the sensors, etc., $17K for backing into a piece of fiberglass at not even a walking pace. Now that the car has some years on it, if I do that again they'll probably total it.
> I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month
What an absurd statement. Mine has gone down in the past several years, and I pay around that per 6 months.
> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.
Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.
That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.
And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.
Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
> Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.
Yep, that describes cars. High up front cost that barely goes up when you need more done (meaning: family of 5? Car beats even the bus fare for a 3km ride to school). In trade for independence, cheap groceries, cheaper travel (at least in opportunity cost), cheap days out with the family, bigger house is realistic, ability to go work in not so well connected places (I'm a consultant), capacity to actually get heavy things, collect people, not waiting/dragging things around in cold/rain/...
Oh and these DON'T add up. Bring the kids to school AND drive to work AND get groceries by car? You don't pay 3 times like you do with any other means of transport, you pay 1.2 times what you pay when doing only one.
With 2 people in the car it easily matches public transport costs if you use it enough. Oh and even by yourself it's like half taxi/uber fares, a third or less of waymo fares (though at least those don't charge per person).
huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(
The cost is a factor -- and something that I think policy makers should very much push to change.
For our family of four, two of us pay for public transport as of now. That adds up to $12 round trip; which is often more expensive than parking in the even in a high density area. Once we have to start paying for the kids too, that would add up to $24 for a round trip, which ends up being more expensive than driving. I get that public transportation is expensive to operate; maybe that alone is the root of the problem here.
Yes, all those things. Except on cost, at least in SF, MUNI is free for children.
We mostly drive wherever we need to go, especially when it's all of us. But if we're going to a Warriors game, we always take Muni, at it's more convenient (and free for adults too if you show your ticket).
Also, it's generally faster and more convenient (and fun) to get to Chase Center via Muni than driving. Getting back is tough both because this is peak Lyft/Waymo demand as well as peak Muni demand.
I’m guessing you live in America where car ownership is heavily subsidized? Many places you would spend $500/month just to park your car, maybe more.
In most of America there is abundant free parking on private property including homes, stores, and workplaces. That is hardly a subsidy. I understand the argument that dense cities shouldn't have so much free public street parking but there are only a handful of neighborhoods where that even matters.
The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it. And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them. Street parking matters in almost every neighborhood in Seattle now...since parking on its own is expensive, and you will also have to pay for a few busted windows on your car for the pleasure of free street parking.
The highways are heavily subsidized by general funds these days since raising the gas tax outside of a few states isn't very popular.
I'm American but in the other countries I lived in (Switzerland and China) and the many countries I've visited, private car ownership is always a luxury, not a cheap necessety attainable by everyone.
> The "free parking" isn't really free, you just have land that is really cheap devoted to it.
When I can park my car in my driveway at no marginal cost to myself, most people (including me) would call that free.
If you have a driveway. I had to look around hard for a house with a car port that wasn't just a slot in a crowded alley, heck, I saw some beautiful houses that had no effective parking at all (maybe they had sunk garages built in 1920 that were not usable by modern cars).
> And where it isn't...well, American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
The driver of housing cost in US cities is lack of supply. Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing. The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
> Parking spaces are a drop in the bucket versus what is missing.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattle-parking-spot-sells-...
That was 2022, $56k is probably about 10% of a one or two bedroom condo price.
> The root cause is zoning laws; particularly the height restrictions as they currently stand.
Tokyo is, as I understand it, the libertarian ideal for a city that doesn't let zoning get in the way of a good time, and parking space prices are still expensive there:
> Monthly rental rates for spots in the 23 Wards range from ¥30,000 to over ¥80,000, which reflects high underlying property value.
That's $200 to $500 a month.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I'm not claiming that parking space if charged at the market rate for an unimproved cement room in a high rise is particularly cheap. You can only fit so many cars within the footprint of a typical condo after all.
I'm claiming that removing parking (ie converting the raw sq footage over to living space) would not meaningfully impact housing prices. The existence of parking, free or otherwise, is not a significant contributor to the housing shortage. The issue is one of scale. That's what my "drop in the bucket" comment is referring to.
You specifically said "American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them". That is technically correct but in context it is blatantly wrong. The price increase as it stands is approximately zero.
The error is failing to differentiate between cost due to construction and maintenance versus cost due to land value. The latter is linked to total supply and thus height restrictions. The former is not the primary component in HCoL cities. You can easily verify this by checking the cost to purchase an apartment building in say San Francisco versus a small town in the midwest. (I refer to the cost to purchase the entire building there, not the cost to rent a single unit.)
Parking garages in HCOLs are expensive, they definitely aren’t free. You can’t build a new multi family without planning for one or two levels of garage underneath. But you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
Right, I specifically called out that I agree with you on that. They aren't cheap. But then most places around here charge $50 or even $150 per month per parking space so it's not like the spots are being given away either.
> you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game. The shortage is far larger than all of the current parking combined. We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market? Even at the scale of the entire market it would still be well under 10%, probably under 5%. The typical apartment in the US is definitely larger than a 5x2 grid of parking spaces. Meanwhile most HCoL cities could do with double the housing inventory at absolute minimum. Probably substantially more.
This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
We are suffocating under our own political dysfunction.
> American housing prices and rents are increased to pay for them.
Which means people were willing to pay to have a place to park. WAI
Taxis are not a replacement for having a car for commuting for like 99% of people
Yeah, this is one of my guilty automation pleasures alongside self-checkout. I hate that I am displacing a human, and I mourn for the handful of really pleasant taxi / Uber experiences I’ve had over the years, but damn is Waymo such a better default experience right now.
I really hope there’s enough viable competition over time to keep costs down or I worry this will evolve into robo-limos rather than a nice cheap default option for areas without good public transit infrastructure. The DUI prevention alone is such a huge win.
There is the matter of surveillance though. I don’t love that I have to take their word on not abusing the cabin recordings, but I guess that’s pretty much all modern vehicles (via onStar and the like) not just robo-taxis. Pretty much every Sci-fi dystopian with urban infrastructure has that scene where the corrupt authorities have someone’s self-driving car pulled over remotely, that seems important as well given the state of things lately.
>We need this in europe.
I'm not against automated driving at all, but in my experience we actually don't have that much use for stuff like this in most (big) European cities, since almost all of them have good public transport options already. I think trams especially fill the hole of "low-friction transport in a city" perfectly. I think having less vehicles on the road is a benefit to us all, but I understand some cities are not as tightly packed for public transport to work that well.
Either way, less human drivers is better.
My anecdote: My wife had to literally have two drinks before here first Waymo ride. Now she doesn't want to use anything else other that Waymo when we can't drive ourselves, and totally agree with her
Having said that, Uber was amazing experience when it started too, now it's on par with cabs.
> No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again".
I still recall when taxi services were the only offering, and Uber et al were marketed as ride sharing services instead of ride hailing services. It's hard to put into words the transformative effect that ride hailing services had throughout the world. Overall rides are now far safer and more reliable, to the point where the old days feel like the dark ages.
I do too, except for the fact that Waymos constantly break traffic laws.
> We need this in europe.
No we don't. Your github says you're from Berlin, why the hell would you ever need a taxi in your life?
Someone should just find a cure for for the fear techbros have of being near poor people.
I don't live in Berlin, but even if: have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines? Apart from nothing working and connections taking forever and operations stopping at night, horrible signage that lets you stress even more, you sit next to human excrements, hooligans coming from football games, nazis wanting to beat you up, stink, rude music and beggers. I sometimes miss it for sentimental value, but compared to a world of robots driving us with relaxing music in a clean and safe space i know what future I want.
Is there really that much poop on Berlin public transit?
Seattle has some of the highest per capital homeless in the US, and a dearth of public toilets, and yet there's not that much poop on our public transit.
I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Granted I haven't taken Berlin public transit in 20 yrs, so I don't know.
> I am also skeptical that y'all's violent crime rate is higher than ours.
Ok well I am wrong. Berlin's violent crime rate is 2-4x higher than Seattle? Huh. The homicide rate is within touching distance.
That was not what I expected, ok.
It wouldn't take much to have more violent crime in Seattle, according to my gut (yeah, I know, "show me the numbers"). Granted, it's probably gotten worse since we moved here 25 some years ago, but coming from places like my old hometown of Indianapolis, Seattle didn't have any place I wouldn't feel comfortable walking at night. Again, it's changed a lot since (there are some areas I would avoid at 2 a. m. now), but I still feel much safer in Seattle than other large cities.
Yea I agree it's not like Seattle is St Louis or anything.
Still, I just naively assumed that major German cities would be even better. Guess not though.
And yet : https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/citing-safety-concerns-amaz...
I’d put Berlin ubahn halfway between nyc and japan in terms of cleanliness and orderly behavior, the bigger problem is that there’s no ac in the summer
its mostly pee and vomit, poo is indeed rare.
Didn't see any poop in berlin, but did see it in Shibuya station, spread out by hundreds of people.
> have you ever taken public transport in less mainstream lines?
Yes, I have. I never drove a car myself and maybe used a taxi 10 times in the last 30 years.
Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas? It seems more reasonable for them to go for dense places instead and leave the unprofitable regions for someone else.
> Will waymo even be available in less mainstream areas?
Ever is a long time. It's not reasonable to predict beyond a decade or so. It's easily possible that this becomes huge and in the 2040s people are astonished that "driving yourself" was a thing, the same way it's hard to comprehend now that most people weren't literate. Not "Couldn't write an essay / read a newspaper" but "Couldn't sign their name / read a postal address"
But it's also possible that this goes nowhere, and outside of a few large cities there is never a robot taxi market, it just doesn't exist. Waymo is, among other things, a bet that there is a large market.
Dense places are where it starts, but that was also true for the telephone. Bell didn't provide service to tiny rural settlements, they wired places like Boston and New York, AIUI the general service provision was a government initiative even in the US, it was never strictly profitable enough for huge corporations to spend their own money making it universal.
I mean, I can understand wanting to start in dense places. But those are also the places where public transit is a viable existing solution.
Personal transit just looks incredible inefficient and unscalable if everyone would use it. I could totally see it as a last resort solution for situations where nothing else is available, but that's an unattractive market that isn't going to make anyone rich.
In an urban area the "last resort" cases add up. The last time I was in a taxi it was the middle of the night, and I'd just smashed my head open, so I had concluded that I must not trust my own judgement and should seek immediate medical attention, buses don't run in the middle of the night (on that route)
I think ambulances were invented for this use case.
Ambulances are for emergencies. An ambulance could be dispatched depending on availability, but the dispatch team has more experience with this than I do and so they - like the hospital's initial triage team - would put me in the "injured but not dying" category and maybe I get an ambulance in an hour or two depending on other priorities.
They don't want me to go home and fall asleep, because it is possible that I have a brain injury and will never wake up, but their advice is going to be "Can you get somebody else to drive, or maybe call a taxi?" not "We will Blue Light an ambulance to you ASAP".
Everyone has the "fear" of being near other people, regardless of their affluence. That's why apartments are not built for 20 but got 2-5 people and doors exist. I don't see why it must be a rich people thing when it comes to self driving cars. Could also become super interesting by making remoter areas more serviceable.
I literally got a taxi today in Berlin because the trains were on strike, and the other day because the trains and trams were broken due to ice. You really can’t think of valid uses for a taxi?
Taxis are also public transport and so their provision in cities is in fact part of the transport fabric. Since there must be taxis, why not improve them?
This isn't about poor people, at least for me, I'd much rather be alone than with Elon fucking Musk. If I want to hang out with people I will choose when and who. The least good bit of being in a taxi is small talk with the driver.
Waymo is not solving driving, it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- HD pre-mapped roads
- Curated infrastructure
- Remote ops fallback
This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Am I in the Tesla stock subreddit?
"Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem." If you consider SF and LA suburbs, than Europe is a suburb.
Well, not all of LA is Waymo accessible. Suburbs of LA IIRC in-fact are no accessible. Only dense LA areas are covered and no freeways.
Would you address my other technical comments on what Waymo really is?
From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.
If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily.
If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.
It may not scale easily but it is scaling. Waymo (Alphabet) has access to essentially infinite capital to make that happen. I predict that within 10 years the majority of the US population will have access to their rides.
Im not because the statement you wrote is too generic, « not solving driving » … solving driving could mean many different things. It’s the classic rage bait one liners you see on Reddit from Tesla bag holders. It’s funny because everything you’ve described IS solving « driving » from my perspective. I sit in the back and go read hacker news without having to drive.
They’re currently testing them in weird ass tiny streets here in Tokyo. I have a feeling you haven’t been in a Waymo?
>> They’re currently testing them in weird ass tiny streets here in Tokyo.
With real drivers mapping the roads. [1]
If you rent a car in Madrid or Paris, do you spend years "mapping" the towns before you are able to drive safely from A to B?
Waymo is nothing more than a geofenced Disney ride.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/partnering-with-nihon-kotsu-a...
Roads are not solving transportation, they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.
See you at the next construction zone...
I’m pretty sure people vastly overstate how important “HD pre-mapped roads” are to Waymo.
I am pretty sure you are underestimating how important it is for them. But we can look at their own scientific publications.[1]
No maps no driving....carnival ride...
"High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios..."
[1] - https://waymo.com/research/hdmapgen-a-hierarchical-graph-gen...
Most of this comment was written by an LLM. There are certain tells, such as the tone, as well as usage of “ for quotations instead of the much more common ". I think you added the last couple of sentences.
Why does Google need outside investors? Is it a play to get a “serious” valuation since it would be vetted by outside parties?
I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.
It's a very capital intensive operation given the amount of vehicles that need to be carried on the balance sheet.
There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet, which is why Waymo is run as a subsidiary with its own sources of capital.
When I was at Uber 10 plus years ago and we were ideating autonomous vehicles. The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Waymo has concluded either we are too early in the journey to decouple the tight vertical integration or they want to go very big and own all of the capital expenditure for what will presumably be a global rollout ultimately.
For anyone like me with a finance and technology crossover interest I actually think this is as interesting, maybe more interesting, than the private equity play around data centers at the moment because all of that is constrained against chip delivery and power constraints.
> There are many reasons why a conglomerate like Alphabet doesn't want to hold all of that directly on the balance sheet
Can you tell us those reasons? I think this is basically _the_ question.
"Tech" was incredible light on CapExp compared with everything else (until AI hit, that is). That is what allowed its explosive growth. On the one hand alphabet is not used to that. On the other hand it is turning into a more normal business with more CapExp, and like other more "normal" business it uses more external investment. As a general rule of thumb: The more capex, the more leverage; for example commodity extraction, infrastructure or power generation are very capex heavy, and heavily leveraged.
Right but thats usually debt, not equity financing.
I disagree with their reasoning and would say it's more for strategic benefits.
Giving firms that they get along well with (like Sequoia) allocation feels like a mix between a favor and possibly a way to signal that the valuation has some external buy-in too.
> The general consensus was that we would run the technology platform and private equity would own fleets of cars built and operated to our specification.
Private equity, or private capital (debt investors)? Although I guess PC was less of a thing 10 years ago.
Alphabet is providing $13bn of the $16bn raise. What are you talking about? Do you really think that $3bn matters in the slightest?
What I'm talking about is that is still considered an external capital raise for the purpose of the markets and where those assets sit on the balance sheet.
Also, keep in mind the Alphabet doesn't fully own Waymo. I don't know the percentage ownership of hand, but that also feels like it's probably a prorated investment based on ownership so Alphabet doesn't reduce its voting control.
That's what I'm talking about.
Yes and what matters the most is what Waymo has been signaling for years. They don’t want the capex (owning and running the physical cars). I don’t know the intent of this raise but you have to realize companies may have a good asset but they don’t want to own it 100% for a multitude of reasons. Some of them could be as simple as wanting to get other investors involved and comfortable with the asset to maybe take on larger roles in future rounds. Or in this case potentially running the car part of the business.
By investing $13B of the $16B they're signalling they do want the capex, at least for now.
If they truly wanted the capex, this would not be a mixed round A fully internal recap would have been simpler. The presence of outside capital, even minority, is consistent with a gradual transition toward shared ownership, asset light structures, or operator partners.
They have made many comments over the years about this too.
What gradual transition? Alphabet's ownership percentage is unchanged.
Notice I left a list of potential reasons. Not that ownership has changed. Just pointing out for folks like yourself that Google has made commentary about this exploring the idea of partnering with companies that operate the physical fleet. $3bn even if chump change for you is still a larger placement and has some level of signaling indicating the want to get other folks involved at some level.
I didn't ask for potential reasons. You're talking about the "reasons" for a "gradual transition," and I am telling you that this investment isn't transitioning anything. Everyone is keeping their equal share of the company. So, I don't understand why you are giving reasons for something that isn't currently happening.
I think the words are going over your head sorry. I will try one more time but realize now it might be too much especially see some of your dead comments here.
I am not claiming a transition is happening in this round, so asking for evidence of one misses the point. Transition here means enabling future shifts in who owns and operates the capex, not changing the cap table today. If Alphabet wanted permanent full-stack ownership, an entirely internal recap would have been cleaner. Bringing in outside capital, even minority, is about signaling and optionality, not dilution.
I understand everything you have said. The D-K of you WSB transplants is wildly frustrating.
If you'll notice, all I am doing is asking the brigade of snarky know-nothings to stop talking. I'm not pretentiously claiming to know, unlike all of you. You clearly aren't in any position to understand the internal working of Google, and it's unfortunate that HN used to be a place where a question like the original one would have been answered by a person who does, but is now flooded with people like you. I will gladly take the downvotes if they're from a bunch of garage band stock pickers.
Go take a breath and stop digging a hole. Nobody is being rude to you but you are highly inflammatory and honestly a real lowering of quality. Take a bit of your medicine and step away. I am sorry you feel the need to be so rude back to everyone.
You are not “just asking questions.” You are dismissing any analysis that is not insider gossip as illegitimate, which is a convenient way to avoid engaging with the substance. No one claimed NDA level insight. We are talking about incentives, capital structure, and signaling, which is literally what outsiders analyze. If only Googlers are allowed to reason about Google, then HN has no purpose beyond rumor laundering.
> I think the words are going over your head sorry.
(You)
> Nobody is being rude to you
(Also you)
I guess things are only rude if they're said to you, and not by you? Seems logically consistent with all your other takes.
I definitely modulated my tone to match yours and some of your killed comments. Sorry you don’t like what you see. Happy to have a discussion but not be told I am someone from Reddit. Low effort and low class. You are consistently being rude and you just need to reflect on some of your comments. Your right my comment back to you was definitely not nice but look at some of your killed comments. Ick.
Sure thing boss. What other advice stemming from your vast experience, wealth, and psychological heath do you have for me? I'd love to improve my image to you... the "ick" police.
What are we arguing about here? My point was $3bn is minority to the total investment but it does signal some intent. It’s also no chump change.
Sorry no advice for you but relax and step back!
This is why you are not the finance guy.
My finance people care about the cents, a ROI of 7% is average but at 8.5% and now you are a world class asset of that inventory type. That’s sometimes the difference of a few hundred k out of 20m but they would not take the deal if it is slightly over due to their risk appetite.
The 3b external either matters a ton to fit their risk models OR they are doing a favor to an outside party. Probably a bit of both.
Well, given that it is an equity sale, split still feels like it is the prorated amount so that alphabet continues to own its percentage - not more not less.
Obviously you're entitled to your view, but I don't think it's that kind of finance model right now - it's far too speculative and the upside too unknown to be adjusting for small amounts on risk models.
three billion here, three billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money
> why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google
This lets them validate their valuation and build a base of investors who could play a bigger role in writing chequew in the future. When IPO comes, those factors make the sell simpler.
a deliberate strategy to establish market-validated pricing, prepare for eventual independence, and impose governance discipline on what has been a protected moonshot project. The move signals that Alphabet is transforming Waymo from an “Other Bets” science experiment into a standalone asset with credible external valuation—likely positioning for an IPO within 2-4 years once profitability arrives.
I'm not sure how useful this pricing is for the future, as waymo is currently operating on semi-infinite Google money. If that stops, no doubt the price would change too.
The counterargument would be that the external investors (Sequoia, Andreessen, Fidelity, etc.) presumably priced in this exact risk when they agreed to pay $110B. They're not naive about Alphabet's role as backstop. The question is whether they believe the "semi-infinite money" assumption is durable enough over their investment horizon.
Money from Google internally might be subject to internal power dynamics and come with strings attached. Having reliable outside funding from people who don't get a say in things might be a better alternative for a project that doesn't want to end up as Stadia 2.0 .
I think some of the external investors have board seats, so the outside people do get a (small) say in things. And to your point, that's probably also a good thing for avoiding another Stadia mistake.
Google Genie would have disrupted Stadia anyway, fwiw.
I think it will be quite some time before you can prompt Genie for the next GTA, Skyrim or Call of Duty.
Yes, it provides external validation for the valuation. Otherwise, Alphabet can simply "self value" Waymo at a funny amount like $1T.
There's also a strategic partnership angle in these rounds. For example, Magna and Autonation were early investors in Waymo. Magna operates Waymo's factory in Arizona to upfit their vehicles with sensors, Autonation (the huge dealership/service network) is the maintenance partner.
In general, the Alphabet playbook is that projects "graduate" out of Google X, and are expected to operate as a standalone company, including being responsible for raising funds.
>> or raise 100% private by Google?
Isn't that what they are kinda doing? 13bn out of the 16bn is coming from Google itself.
I think the reason they are taking 3bn from outside high-profile investors is to validate the valuation, for legal or accounting reasons.
I also wonder this - my best theory is getting institutional buy-in from all corners will help with the regulation going forward.
Why would you bet your own money when you could bet someone else’s?
Alphabet is only giving up around a 3% stake. They continue to own most of it, and mostly bet their own money.
If you are betting on a winner why split with others?
If you know the winner, it’s not gambling. Self-driving cars are still a gamble.
risk management. Even sure thing bets lose money once in a while, so it is a good idea to spread the risk of that around.
Rich people and big companies buy insurance too.
Why risk your own money, when you can risk others'?
>I guess Im questioning why Waymo doesn’t just IPO, or raise 100% private raise by Google.
Why not 100% internal funding, not sure, but the reason why companies don't always IPO is because taking on debt is more efficient (i.e. it's cheaper in terms of cost of capital) than equity, because of the "tax shield" effect, debt can be raised in a non dilutive manner, and a few other (less important) game-theoretic reasons.
a little kid is inevitably going to get killed by a waymo.
institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
so to me, aside from making money, making money this way, for a lot of people, protects them from the political grandstanding and their fast demise in their absence.
> a little kid is inevitably going to get killed by a waymo.
And it will be 100% the kids fault, but the headlines will look terrible.
Kids can be naive and reckless, and the result makes them look downright suicidal with the things they do. They will dart into traffic, and even if the Waymo has single-digit millisecond reaction times, people will still blame the Waymo.
> And it will be 100% the kids fault, but the headlines will look terrible.
I wouldn't be so certain on the fault front. I share the SF streets with Waymos on the daily, and they are extremely far from perfect drivers.
They need at least one fatality before you can start going down that slope, but probably true comparing how many kids get killed by human drivers, Waymo can’t be so safe as to avoid these incidents if they scale up in numbers.
Unfortunate but true. Just as true as human drivers doing the same. No technical system guarantees a failure rate of zero.
>institutional finance is america's most powerful lobbyist. in the sense of the fund managers, the little RIAs, the grandmas holding SPY. they ARE the voters.
This. They're letting wall street in on it so wall street goes to bat for it. It's the big boy version of how some widget manufacturer will revise a product to necessitate or cut out a trade lobby depending on whether they want those people to go to bat for it, or make all the people who don't wanna pay rent to those people go to bat for it.
> Why does Google need outside investors?
i.e. why should I use my money if I can use someone elses'?
If you use someone else’s money you have to pay him back with interest or equity.
> you have to pay him back with interest or equity
That's the price for infinite scaling. If a business can't make more than that it should be shut down.
i.e. do you want to make 25% of 1 billion or 5% of 1000 billion?
The point the great-grandparent is making is that Google could comfortably finance the project itself and make 100% of the upside, not 25% or 5%.
And the point here is borrowing more money increases available funds for bigger rewards. Google can fund 1 Waymo but not an infinite amount of them.
Companies raise money for big projects all the time. From issuing debt, to issuing equity.
He's talking specifically about Waymo's situation. Alplabet, a company who has $75bn of FCF, owns 80% of Waymo. A $16bn capital injection is meaningless to Alphabet, so he's wondering why they're going through the trouble.
He raises a good point, and the answer is likely that they can run into legal issues by either under or overvaluing the company in a capital raise where they're the controlling shareholder, then the IRS or existing investors have grounds for a lawsuit (or audit). They likely just want to bring the capital raise out in the open to get a fair market value, and then they will be 90% of the capital in the raise.
I love, love, love Waymo and am so excited about their success. Uber and Lyft were the heroes for a while, but became the villains. If Waymo is available anywhere I need a cab, that is absolutely my first choice, even for the premium cost.
Same. I can't wait for Waymo to reach Fremont; the thought of going to and from SFO in a Waymo that doesn't tip guilt me would be wild.
I can't wait to subscribe to Waymo (or any reasonable provider) for personal cars.
It's one thing to call an Uber. It's another to pack your car for a road trip to the beach or mountains.
Waymo is going to make vacationing even bigger than it already is. It'll be easy, especially for remote workers.
Van life with a Waymo is a whole new thing.
I'm pretty sure this is the first big post about Waymo on HN, the comments are fun to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168888 :)
It seems like a fair valuation to me. I can see a path for them to approach or surpass Uber's revenue (~$50B) in the future, and I think their technology and brand are actual moats in comparison to all other driverless systems out there.
I'm in the opposite camp. Waymo has neat tech, yes, but already valuing it on par with Uber is absurd considering the sheer scale at which Uber operates. 70 countries, 15K cities, 36 million daily trips. And this isn't counting Uber Eats and other side businesses. Waymo will have to accelerate its operations to the max for the next decade just to catch up. And that's assuming operating at such a scale is even possible considering they have to provide and maintain their own (very expensive) fleet. And this isn't a brand new market - Uber + local taxi companies have already set a hard cap on prices that Waymo cannot cross.
Waymo as a business has higher operating margins. I'd suppose that has to compensate for the lower scale. Having said that, Waymo likely needs more time to onbard cities than Uber so growth might be jerky.
No doubt there are significant challenges along the way, but waymo has a real product powered by tech that actually works which could massively change a huge industry. They're also notably more mature than competitors, and have track record of successfully rolling out in a safe way.
There is no doubt they have a lot of catching up to do, but you have to consider their advantages.
If Uber goes away, Lyft or others can take over the entire market overnight, precisely because they don't have their own fleet or unique technology. Waymo is placing itself as first mover into a completely new category of transportation which will require capital investment and new tech, so it will be much harder to displace once it gets going. It could target automated cargo transport in the future too.
Unlike Uber which has drivers buying, fixing, and fueling their own cars, Waymo will have to build large fleets and a huge car/computer/LIDAR production/repair pipeline. It will be interesting to hear how they plan to do this at Ubers scale. It's much higher risk, asset and logistics wise.
I don't think there's ever been a giant centralized global taxi fleet.
Sure, but not for a while since there is a lot of hardware to pay for and maintain.
Left pocket valuing the right pocket.
why is Tesla much higher? I thought Tesla's market cap was because of the self driving feature.
Waymo needs $16B to build what Tesla already has: manufacturing capacity. Without that, there are only so many cars they can put on the road. They've proven they can do the rides. But they haven't proven they can do it cost effectively. To scale up and start making a profit, they'll need to start building/buying lots of Waymo cars. That's not going to be cheap or fast. That's going to involve a lot of capital expenses.
Tesla is the other way around. They can definitely make lots of cars and make a profit. But they haven't quite gotten FSD to the stage where it can do rides properly. Supposing they at some point figure that one out, they are very well positioned to start producing vehicles by the hundreds of thousands pretty soon after. That's indeed the premise for their valuation. It's risky but not completely without merit.
Another point to make is that Waymo and Tesla are not going to have this market to themselves for very long. There are quite a few autonomous ride hailing companies serving rides at this point. And while the attention is often on the US, China is moving pretty quickly as well. Several companies competing there in several huge Chinese cities, for example.
On the US side, I think there are a few players that might become competitive soon. Zoox is looking pretty solid. And Rivian is rumored to be pushing autonomy as well. There are a few more players in various stages of technical readiness.
The real battle will be in a few years when we are past the basic "does it work", "is it safe" questions and legal approvals all over the world become more routine. Then it will be all about volume and scaling. That's going to take probably at least until 2030.
Based on the news, I think Waymo will import base vehicle builds from China and then adding the control systems and software to those. So it’s not like they will start making cars.
That sounds right. Unless Waymo considers car manufacturers to be its competition and therefore something to commoditize, it wouldn't make sense for them to get involved in ground-up manufacturing.
And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another.
They probably see the electronics and software as their product, hopefully they will license it to someone so my next car will have it :). Lidar prices are cheap enough these days (but coming out of China, so who knows with Trump if that will apply to us).
Another approach is Waymo acquires Tesla's auto technology. Tesla sloughs off its dinosaur car business to focus on its new robot mission, and Waymo detoxifies the Tesla auto brand.
Aside from destroying about $1.25 trillion of market cap, this would leave everyone better off.
Who will repair them and maintain all of the electronics? Even if you buy cars that's a giant operation.
You don't really maintain electronics, you swap them out when they are detected to be bad. Electric vehicles don't need tune ups or overhauls, it is light maintenance and full on component swaps. Send the defective components back to the factory for refurbishment and/or recycling.
Nah. The local car dealerships and Tesla service centers seem to be pretty busy doing heavy maintenance on electric vehicles. The drive train might be marginally simpler but there are still a lot of moving parts that break or corrode just like any other vehicle.
Body work, misaligned panels, I mean surely there is a lot of work to do on Teslas. But you don't need to build out for that, you could just get repair shops to do it under contract.
No, you're missing the point. Collision damage repair is farmed out to separate body shops. But Teslas are mechanically very unreliable and break down a lot even without collisions. Ironically, more mechanically complex vehicles like the Toyota Prius hybrid are more durable and reliable.
That has more to do with Tesla being incompetent than with EVs being intrinsically more complex vehicles that cannot be durable and reliable.
I don't think $50k LIDAR sensor suites are disposable like that and the computer integrations is pretty sophisticated I'd imagine. These cars will take a beating.
> In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robotaxi-grade sensors—similar to those used by Waymo—still command higher prices of approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit, the total cost of a comprehensive autonomous sensor suite in China has fallen to roughly $2,100, compared to the tens of thousands required just a few years ago. This rapid price erosion has enabled LiDAR to become a standard feature in Chinese electric vehicles priced as low as $25,000, far outpacing adoption rates in Western markets.
I'm not sure how much google is spending today ATM, but it is probably nowhere near $50k even with 100% tariffs.
Waymo has 0 need for manufacturing capacity. There are dozens of companies that do that really well at a low margin already that'll be happy for the business. They made a timing mistake by choosing Zeekr for it, which is limiting their expansion at the moment. That's a lot easier/cheaper/quicker to fix by choosing a different partner than by building their own.
Waymo also chose more conventional auto makers such as Hyundai. The Zeekr partnership is not an exclusive. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...
zeeker ? Wow that is news.
thought Waymo was partnered with Jaguar-LandRover ?
Waymo is getting the I-Pace from Steyr, the contract manufacture who makes them for Jaguar.
Making a driverless car "driver" is clearly much harder than manufacturing cars though. Many companies manufacture cars and have done for decades. On the other hand Waymo is the only company that has actual driverless cars on the road. It took them a very long time. Tesla have been trying for a very long time too and still have a long way to go.
So IMO Waymo has something far more valuable than Tesla. (Obviously the market isn't rational though so I wouldn't necessarily invest based on that.)
Tesla has geofenced self-driving taxis operating in Austin as of Jan 2026. I wouldn't say they have a long way to go to achieve functional parity with Waymo. They do, however, need to prove reliability and safety, which comes with time and rides.
It's a meme stock. There's nothing rational about Teslas valuation.
The only semi rational thing that could explain it is the robots.
I don’t even think that’s rational, but it may be what’s propping them up.
Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their Atlas humanoid robots.
I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general. They only really make sense in a scenario where you’re back porting robotics to factories built for humans. That has value but feels temporary; factories designed to be robotic feel like the future, and there’s no need for them to do the job the same way a human would.
Our world is adapted for humans, so humanoid robots will fit in most places. They might not be the best choice, but the universality has a good chance of making it worth it through economies of scale.
Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work. Find a couple hundred tasks like this (including household use), and that platform now has huge economies of scale.
Now, when you're starting a small factory, using the existing humanoids might make more sense than getting custom tooling, at least for some tasks. You'll often see factories where some tasks that could, in theory, be automated are left to humans because they're relatively small tasks and not worth automating with a custom machine. Humanoids could fill that gap.
>I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general.
I want one personally, so it can rake the leaves, mow the lawn, tend the garden, do the laundry and dishes, replace the roof, etc., when I'm old. But they should also be used to pick up litter along the highway, paint over graffiti, etc..
I feel like the humanoid form is getting in the way for that, and that a "Spot" like design with a hand on top is better suited for that. Also i think laundry and dishes are already 95% automated since about 50 years.
It'd almost certainly need at least two hands, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who would pay to automate the remaining 5% of the dishes.
And the two-handed spot will have a hard time grabbing something under the sofa.
this is something that also never made sense to me - it felt like star wars got it right - for repairs and remedial tasks a trash can (rs-d2) or all the little service droids are more appropriate, but c3p0 or other nurse and protocol droids makes sense to look more humanistic since they serve functions to facilitate human activitiy - but there is no way those functions are numerous enough to be priofitable.
> Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their Atlas humanoid robots
Slightly depressing that we're back to replacing the big industrial robots rather than new markets.
I _think_ these are meant to replace humans working alongside the industrial robots rather than the big industrial robots themselves. I don’t work in manufacturing though, and the press releases are too buzzword-y for me to grasp the actual tasks they’re going to do.
I would guess the long term strategy is to do this for economies of scale and then push into new markets opened up by the lower price point. I would guess these are horribly expensive right now, given something like Spot is way simpler and still like $40k
It's always the next big thing. It used to be self driving, now it's AI and robots.
Probably because Tesla sells about a million cars a year, including the worlds best selling car (Model Y) since 2023. The stock consistently performs well as well, I know they outperformed estimates for last quarter. Being positioned well for autonomous driving presumably helps hold the stock up, but I don't think that's the core of the valuation, and Waymo does a fraction of what Tesla does. Waymo is impressive, but their 2025 revenue was ~350 million.
Tesla valuation prices in the minuscule but real chance that Elon is able to pull a unicorn[0] out of his ass at some point in the future.
0: The magical creature, not a 1bn company
Just don’t take one if another one is operating nearby. If they see another waymo, having passed the insecure emotional Turing test, they get self-conscious and wander the neighborhood backstreets until the other one has dropped off its passengers.
(Just experienced this multiple times in Phoenix. It’s impressive at navigating and braking, but not rational planning or flocking.)
This has not been my experience at all and I take Waymos pretty frequently, especially at popular areas like concerts or airports you'll see a bunch of them dropping off/picking up people without issues.
I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic?
Waymo is the best service I've used in many, many years. The jump from Uber->Waymo is similar to the quality jump from Taxi->Uber 12 years ago, but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
Google's marketcap moves by Waymo's entire marketcap in a single day.
Google has a $4.1T market cap.
So a $110B valuation is not currently that significant in terms of exposure. It's only 2.7% of it overall.
Fair, though my guess is that the growth rate of Waymo's market cap will far exceed Google's as Waymo scales. I wish I could invest in Waymo, so I'll take that 2.7% exposure.
> I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
Oh ye of little faith! Here are some ideas off the top of my head, I am sure the suits at Google already have a bigger list.
The ads will be awful, because you’re effectively captive. You only control the volume and screen if they let you.
Finally, a justification for owning an Apple Vision Pro.
Ads in vehicles are a sure thing. Also a sure thing you'll be able to pay a little extra to turn them off, which is basically just the full price of the trip unsubsidized by ads.
It'll be up to you, just like whether you want your Netflix cheaper with ads, or more expensive but without.
I see that choice as a good thing.
The rest of your suggestions are incredibly unlikely. Google doesn't even scan your Gmail anymore, you think they're going to create a privacy scandal by listening to your conversations? And they certainly don't sell your Maps timeline which is far more valuable than just a few car trips, so why on earth would they do that with Waymo? Nor does Google Maps offer to send you to Burger King when you hit directions for McDonald's. And taking a longer route that wastes time, battery and money, on the chance you'll be looking out the window to see a billboard rather than looking at your phone, doesn't make sense at all.
There's all that, but you can just look at Uber for the classic model of how a company like this enshittifies, which is:
- offer a service well below market rate, gain dependent customers
- crank up the price
No need to do much of the other stuff
Don't forget:
* Stop doing any meaningful in-person inspection of the vehicle to ensure that it is in good condition before joining the network
* Stop requiring cars to be <= 4 years old
* (Seemingly) stop requiring drivers to maintain trunk space free for passengers' luggage
They already will be selling your ride data and there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries).
Ads in cars, partnerships with alternative destinations, etc. definitely would feel like enshitification for a demographic comparable to the hacker news one here. But these are all per session/user settings just like most of us have a paid Spotify account and never see advertising and those who don't get a very different monetized experience.
What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
> If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
That's actually a really interesting angle. The same way businesses often provide free parking now... what if they start providing free self-driving round trips?
E.g. spend $75 or more at Whole Foods, and get free round-trip up to 20 miles or something. Especially for bulky items like groceries where a car makes a big difference, I can totally see that becoming standard. Home Depot too. Plus entertainment like amusement parks, movie theaters, spas...
It makes particular sense for vertically integrated conglomerates like Amazon-Whole Foods which owns Zoox.
I buy Whole Foods French fries shipped to the store via Amazon logistics and purchase those at Amazon owned Whole Foods, at a discount via my Prime membership on my Amazon credit card which is processed on AWS infrastructure and I ride home on an Amazon owned Zoox that also runs on AWS infrastructure.
Amazon owns so much of the profit margin across that stack that they can afford to give rides away for example.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/google-voice-assistant-laws...
> there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries)
Oh, you'll agree to that when you accept the terms of service.
Can't wait for the "This ride with ads: $17. Ad free: $26" choice.
> there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries)
people used to feel that way about search queries, email (gmail) and IP laws (LLM training).
> What is exciting about monetization like this is the possibility for rides to become very cheap or even free. If my dentist offers free rides to the office in return for my loyalty, I'm quite happy to take that.
this won't happen. alphabet will collect on both ends.
Couldn't Uber do that today?
/cries into my Uber shares and the deletion of the Uber ATG repos when the parts were sold to Aurora.
> and there is no way they could monitor conversations in the car for commercial purposes (at least in Western countries).
Why not? You can consent to having your audio recorded. They can even offer a higher “private” price and a lower “ad supported” price. I write “private” because I assume the microphones will always be listening no matter which price you pay.
I guess that's semantics. If you opt in then yes I guess they could do anything. I think the point was that enshitification would occur if they forced you to do that.
You could opt in to have blood or plasma taken on every ride if you so wanted I guess.
Rough figures:
As a plasma donor you can earn $30-$70 per session for 800 ml. Let's call it $50. A session takes about 90 minutes, or 533 ml/hour, and you make $33/hour
Waymo charges $0.50 - $1.00 per mile. Let's use the high end.
To break even, your Waymo will need to consume < $33/hour, or < 33 mph. That's not bad!
If you go any faster, you won't be able to extract enough plasma in the same amount of time.
You really think ads in vehicle are not coming? You’re being naive if you think that.
Also, cheap rides cut into stocks margins. That won’t fly by investors either. These companies are not charities. They are in the business of maximizing profits. We lost “don’t be evil” over a decade ago.
We already have ads in vehicles.
If you fly United, the in-flight entertainment has pre-roll ads.
I can't say how well that model translates to car rides.
I see you haven’t seen or heard of cabs’ in-car ad screens we’ve had for close to two decades, if you have to point to airplanes as an example.
I haven't been in a cab in 2 decades, so that tracks.
> I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified.
Raise the price?
Enshittification is a technique to make more money _without_ raising the price by simply making the product worse.
Self-driving taxis have a high floor for 'making the product worse' because the car fundamentally has to drive itself.
It appears that enshittification has joined exponential and literally as words that used to mean specific things but are now just generic intensifiers.
> I presume if you invest in Google you are indirectly (but significantly) invested in Waymo, like it is with Anthropic?
You also get some Starlink.
The obvious way such services enshittify is to become a monopoly by pushing everyone else out, then cranking up the prices (and lowering quality, e.g. by not cleaning the vehicles, longer wait times for better utilization, etc.)
This is Google you're talking about. They're an ads+AI company. They'll figure out a way to enshittify, even if it's not obvious.
"Please watch these ads before we start the ride. Any attempt to not look at the ads by looking away from the screen or closing your eyes will automatically cancel the ride."
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Ft...
> but I don't see an obvious way for Waymo to get enshittified
My guess is that once Waymo starts to extremely take off, law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen. It will disproportionately impact an entire segment of the population and will put them out of work.
No they won't. The product is so outrageously superior on every dimension to the status quo that municipalities will figure out whatever they need to in order to accommodate them.
You think the folks on City Council enjoy chauffeuring their own children around and will block a solution to it?
Yes. It's already happening
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1pdzd2f/some_m...
In Virginia too, proposed in HB1124:
> The bill prohibits the use of autonomous vehicles as motor carriers of passengers or property without a human operator who (i) meets any state and federal qualifications for the operation of an autonomous vehicle; (ii) is physically present in such autonomous vehicle; and (iii) has the ability to monitor the performance of such vehicle and intervene in the operation of such vehicle, including operating such vehicle without the use of the automated driving system and stopping and turning off such vehicle if necessary.
https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20261/HB1124
If they prohibit autonomous vehicles, eventually their constituencies will be screaming for it.
It seems that many people, after trying out the service for themselves first hand, in a locale that has it available today, are very eager to have the service available to them in their home locale.
Maybe, although stupid laws can become heavily entrenched and surprisingly hard to change. Like in New Jersey I think you still can't pump your own gas, and some idiots actually defend that crazy policy for the sake of saving jobs.
But this is a great example: the reality is that pumping your own gas is simply not even a 10x better product than having it pumped for you.
If NJ consumers (and politicians) had a 10x better product dangled in front of them every day, then the regulation side would solve itself.
Waymo is truly just such a vastly superior product that consumers will get exposed enough to it to care, and when they care, they will solve the regulation side.
I didn't say people won't try. Obviously there will be resistance. I am saying that the resistance will not be successful for any significant amount of time for any significant jurisdiction.
Uber and Lyft operated partially or outright illegally in many places while negotiating with governments. They also had a far superior product. Just like they fought the existing taxi companies, Waymo will have to fight against Uber and Lyft's lawyers, who are probably better funded and have learned to become better entrenched in governments.
Uber and Lyft are goners, their customers don't care about them and will take Waymos the second they're available.
Uber and Lyft will survive exactly to the extent they successfully adopt self-driving.
> Uber and Lyft will survive exactly to the extent they successfully adopt self-driving.
I think this is correct and I want to point out something that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
If and when Uber/Lyft move heavily in this direction, the cost/operational benefits of having their "fleet" of vehicles be privately owned-vehicles will almost certainly disappear.
What's everyone's hate with uber and lyft rides? Over the past 10 years, I've had maybe one ride that was a 1/5. Most drivers either don't talk or are actually very pleasant conversations
I will take whichever one is cheaper. Just like now I open up both uber and lyft to see which costs less, I'll open up waymo as well
I travel a fair amount, and Uber and Lyft service quality has become noticeably worse in the last few years. The apps lie to you about pickup times. Drivers will accept a ride but then never actually head towards your location. A significant fraction of the vehicles are showing some sort of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, overdue maintenance, low tire pressure, etc.
Have you taken a Waymo?
I don't hate Uber/Lyft (though many in NYC are legitimately horrible, just like taxis)
Waymo is simply an order of magnitude better than the best Uber ride I've ever had
I've had some great conversations with uber drivers. Most don't talk, but I've had some memorable ones for sure.
Sure, yeah, same here. Waymo is still an order of magnitude better.
Lyft + Uber market cap is under 200B Alphabet 4T+ I think they will manage
Wait till you see the showdown that's building up in NYC.
Mamdani, the new nyc mayor, has been a long time friend and advocate for NYC taxi workers alliance. He even participated in a hunger strike with them in 2021.
Waymo is right now starting the wheels turning on getting NYC permits, but taxi workers have already made their (obvious) stance clear: No Waymos.
Yeah, but they will lose. Certainly in the long run (10 year horizon, almost certainly in the medium term (5 year horizon), and very likely even in the short term under the auspices of "limited experiments" while constituents and stakeholders get hooked.
The NY Governor's office has always been pro-SDC's, the Mayor's office has always been against them.
This video is very apt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjZchYXMmA Australian Taxpayers' Alliance - "ALL Obsolete Industries Deserve The Taxi Bailout!" (1m38s) [2015-12-13]
> law makers in various cities will start to pass laws to ban them or the number of regulations will make it impossible to run at a profit. This will almost certainly happen
No they won’t. And Waymo’s playbook would be Uber’s if they did: preëmpt at the state and federal levels.
FWIW Waymo may have been "seeking" this deal when Bloomberg wrote that article but FT reports that it's already closed.
I do not think driverless will solve the main transportation problem we are dealing with as a society: we are giving up more space for cars, space that humans cannot use. We build more highways, widen roads, increase speed limits, and expect humans to stay out of this space. I live in a 100+ year old neighborhood. The roads were built for horse and buggy and streetcars. Now I have to beg to cross the road. My neighborhood has been effectively chopped up. I question whether I should walk to another block because I'll have to deal with crossing the street. Quiet houses now have the constant buzz of cars either from the ever-present highways or from the 40+ mph traffic right outside their doors. Driverless cars will not solve these problems. Fewer kids will die, partially from safe software, but mostly because they won't be able to leave their bubble without being strapped down into a car.
No one here should realistically think that Waymo can solve the main transportation problem. It will just (partially) replace Uber, Lyft, and taxis. And it will have a better passenger experience and it will also be safer. It’s obvious that cars, autonomous or not, can’t replace rail, bicycles, and walking.
I think it could solve a lot of transportation problems though. In theory if driverless vehicles were ubiquitous you'd have no on-street parking, no commercial transport in the day (do it all at night), much less traffic (just wait until your slot; maybe with peak time pricing), fewer delays due to crashes, etc.
When nobody drives manually you could even do things like getting rid of traffic lights.
But then you get into a world where people can’t cross the street (moreso than what’s already available). I recall seeing a video on YouTube that explores your suggestion to its inevitable conclusion. Additionally, this could exacerbate suburban sprawl
I don't think so - you could still have pedestrian controlled crossings - press a button and the cars will stop. You just don't need any lights.
You might not even need buttons - driverless cars are already going to have to handle zebra crossings somehow.
In my experience if I want to living in a bikable/walkable/transit oriented area, I have to move there. I think expecting this sort of stuff to come to you is too much, especially since most city centers have good transit options.
That said this is a tech forum, and while I don't think Waymo will be the only solution the tech is quite impressive and it's likely going to change how society works. Most people don't want to take public transit, they want to take a car and this is a much better solution for them. Forcing people to bike when they don't want to seems like bad form imo.
Forcing people to take and buy and own and maintain a car since hundreds of billions have been spent on that mode of transit, but near zero (in comparison) on any other seems like bad form imo
> The parent company would provide about $13 billion to the robotaxi firm, while the rest would come from others, including new investors ...
No IPO for us little people
Alphabet is already a publicly listed company. Just buy more Alphabet shares if you want to invest in Waymo.
What would you add to the company as an investor?
Probably money
As someone who lives in a city with a lot of Waymos (Atlanta), I do not understand why anyone considers these things more than an early test or a novelty.
From an outside perspective, they're constantly obstructing traffic and driving in erratic and confusing ways. It's gotten to a point that if I see one ahead of me, I'll turn down the next block and change my route to avoid being behind it and dealing with whatever slowdown its about to cause.
I took one once via Uber with some coworkers and it was also jarring to ride in. I'd rather take my chances with a random human.
I must follow this up with today’s anecdote - heading home far later than usual from Midtown, stuck behind a Waymo in light traffic, inexplicably going 20 in a 35 with no one in front of it for nearly a mile. I loathe these things, they’re like automated drunk drivers.
Wow that is headline carnage. What does it mean?
Edit: there is a paywall in my country. Why downvotes? I’m just curious.
HN in a bit odd when it comes to paywells. You're not allowed to complain about them and everyone reading is individually expected to figure out how to access the content (which usually involves finding a top comment linking to a workaround for everyone or the usual users all going with their preferred tools silently).
https://archive.is/Lh2QY