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Comment by elisharobinson | Hacker News Reader

Really though how realistic is your business model ... if you wanted a autonomous network to replace Uber Currently 30 million cars on road . you would atleast need 10 million cars assuming each car costs 100k ( optimistically with lidar tech factoring in capex for factories and you dont have major product revisions ) thats 1 trillion in capex ... now you if you had the revenue of apple in 2020 ~ 0.25T$ you could expect to be cashflow positive in 7~8 years (assuming exponential ramp up of production and 0 competition) ... all of these thing need to happen for this taxi service X to succeed ,i think to get all these things right is highly unlikely and i feel Elon knows this aswell so he took the path of simpler tech and trying a software service model which is infinitely more scale-able .

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Uber 2019 revenue $14.15 billion, divided by your estimate of 10 million cars is $1415 per car per year. I would suggest you're estimating at least an order of magnitude too high for the car count, since they can more or less operate 24x7.

That would bring the capex down below $100 billion - less than Google's cash on hand. And you'd be starting with the most lucrative cities while staggering it out, and have a very good idea of your payback by the time you've spent serious cash.

Technology and regulatory risks are high for Waymo, but capex is very manageable.

Yes i think i over inflated the number of cars required . https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#4 going through the data there are about 5 million drivers in Uber in 2019 . i will admit 100B$ in capex is a reasonable assumption But I cant imagine for practical reasons google , apple , Amazon putting a large % of their savings into still unproven tech with regulatory risk. Keep in mind that they would still have to compete with Tesla at somepoint which has a best car platform vs < X car company> in the market. Not to mention they already have close to 1 million cars with all the hardware(their claim, i still feel tesla TPU v2 with TSMC 7nm is a must have) and they are on track to producing 500k cars in US with these capabilities. while no other car company is even trying to integrate < X lidar autonomy startup> in mass production Today . Not to mention that currently the primary hindrance for Tesla is software which can scale much better in comparison to a ground up redesign of a car plant to accommodate lidar based systems .

I don't think $100bn is reasonable - that's a million cars!

There are only 13k taxi medallions in NYC, which is a good point of reference as the limited supply means they are efficiently utilized.

Extrapolating that out to the general US population yields just over 500k taxis, and that's to completely replace every single taxi in the country.

1. You don't need all of that capital in a first year.

2. If you acheive L5 close to flawless system, you'd have investors bursting in through you doors, windows and any other opening in your house. Imagine, if you could do uber without drivers you could conquere the world.

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