I asked a friend who works at waymo why it's taking forever to build up a critical mass of vehicles to get the wait times down to a more reasonable level.
He said the issue was cost. I guess all those sensors are actually more expensive than the cost of a human driver at this point?
Waymo inhoused their sensors and claimed a 90% cost reduction, but before that they were at $200k+.
Still, even at $200k+ that's not terribly high compared to a human driver once you amortize it over 8+ years. Higher than minimum wage, but really it's probably a matter of the upfront cost more than anything.
I'll also point out that even if they 100% solved self driving... somebody has to fill the things up with gas in most states, lol.
https://www.oregon.gov/osp/programs/sfm/Pages/Self-Service-R...
It really only has anything to offer to individual consumers, specifically saving the seconds it takes to just plug in your car. That seems like an insane trade to make, to me. Maybe in theory some city could invest in embedding them into street parking, but I just don't think that will happen. Even if vandals started cutting plugs or something, you can buy a LOT of replacement cables for the price of one wireless charging pad.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/china-ev-infrastructure-charging...
It has to be deeper. Google has deep pockets. Even it doesn’t want to touch them, one could sell interests in individual cars’ cash flows, a quasi-debt which neither dilutes the company’s equity nor puts its survival at risk.
It makes a lot of sense to roll something like this out slowly. Taxi service is a commodity, putting out a bunch of cars that are have negative ROI doesn't get you much over having a few cars.
I find resource planning to be difficult and frustrating here at Google, despite billions and billions in the bank.
You don't want huge numbers of cars on the road until you're sure they're incredibly safe.
An improperly-rolled-out software update could kill a lot of people, including people not riding in Waymo vehicles. That bug could be in every Waymo vehicle on the road right now, waiting for the environmental conditions that make it turn deadly.
Slow is safe, safe is smooth, smooth is fast.
Perhaps the expense he was talking about is that it would be super expensive to create a factory to be able to increase the volume whilst the vehicles are still rather custom built.
I will say that I have very little knowledge about anything here, just that Google has already spent billions on this effort and it would seem strange that they are shying away from spending a few hundred thousand per vehicle.