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Comment by babelfish | Hacker News Reader

What does 'win' mean here? It seems like being able to pass on the costs of fleet management, insurance, gas, parking/storage, etc to drivers (the way taxis/ride sharing apps currently do) will always be cheaper than maintaining it yourself, even if you save on the driver fees.

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At the rate things are going right now, Waymo will win when Tesla throws in the towel on developing in-house and licenses Waymo's tech in order to finally deliver on full self-driving.

Tesla already sold self driving for years - waymo uses way more sensors than a camera from what I can tell - not only would that bump unit cost they would probably have to upgrade previous customers due to their marketing.

> not only would that bump unit cost they would probably have to upgrade previous customers due to their marketing.

Only if they don't change they name. They can call it an upgraded RealDrive™ QuantumSense™ feature that no longer requires having your hands on the wheel.

and fuck with the aerodynamics - causing drag on the cars, decreasing range.

LIDR isnt an option.

That highly depends on the lidar system. All players are working a lot on minaturizing LIDAR systems and they fundamentally don't have to be as big as the waymo systems.

They are also Chinese solutions in that space like Baidu Apollo.

How things are going right now, I'd be surprised if anyone will be willing to license Tesla's tech.

This would imply that Uber/Lyft drivers on average are losing money by being on the service, which is obviously not the case. Having a large fleet of driverless taxis, even if you have to maintain them yourself, will be a very profitable business. There are other potential revenue sources as well, like licensing the tech to car manufacturers.

> obviously not the case

This is a strong claim. I thought there was a decent body of evidence that suggested most drivers make much less money than they think, when you take depreciation/repairs/etc. into account?

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